Can you name seven different African countries?
Controversial Truths About Ancient Egypt Masterpost
- The pyramids were built by contemporary workers who received wages and were fed and taken care of during construction
- The Dendera “lightbulb” is a representation of the creation myth and has nothing to do with electricity
- We didn’t find “““copper wiring””” in the great pyramid either
- Hatshepsut wasn’t transgender
- The gods didn’t actually have animal heads
- Hieroglyphs aren’t mysteriously magical; they’re just a language (seriously we have shopping lists and work rosters and even ancient erotica)
- The ancient Egyptian ethnicity wasn’t homogeneous
- Noses (and ears, and arms) broke off statues and reliefs for a variety of reasons, none of which are “there is a widespread archaeological conspiracy to hide the Egyptian ethnicity”
- The carvings at Abydos aren’t modern machines but recarvings over old carvings. Sure they look like them but if you can read hieroglyphs and know that Ramesses II will even usurp the carvings of his own father just to be a little shit
- ‘No soot on the ceilings and walls of the Dendera temple!’ is actually because of extensive restoration works and not because Egyptians were in on shit like Baghdad “batteries”
- While the Egyptians were fine-ass astronomers they didn’t align any of their enormous and/or important buildings to modern star constellations, because constellations look very different now than they did ~5000 years ago
- The pyramid is the simplest, sturdiest shape with which to build and many different cultures discovered this in their own time. There were never any weird fish humans/aliens involved
- The sphinx of Gizah is only an approximate 5000 years old; the 10,000 year/rain erosion nonsense is proven hokum
- Speaking of that particular sphinx, the Napoleonic expedition is not responsible for its missing nose
- Akhenaten was not a “heretic” by contemporary standards
- Ramses II appropriated a lot of his predecessors’ buildings/reliefs and isn’t really deserving of the epithet “the Great”
- The Battle of Kadesh ended in a stalemate (twice)
- While they had feline deities throughout their history, Egyptians didn’t actually worship cats themselves. This was a later Greek/Ptolemaeic addition
- It was not, in fact, practice to shave off eyebrows after cats died; Herodotus lied about that
- Herodotus lied about a lot of things and many misconceptions about ancient Egypt can be traced back to his Greek ass
I can’t believe I forgot my favourite Hill to Die On
- Seth was not the god of “evil”, and despite his chaos providing a foil to order, he wasn’t completely villified until very late in Egyptian history, when he became associated with despised foreign enemies
Hats off to the few of you who’re reblogging this with tags saying you’re going to check my claims later. You make me not entirely despair of this hellhole.
Here are some vetted Egyptological books/sources (that are by and large appropriate for a lay-audience) you can find most, if not all of the above:
- Lehner, M., The Complete Pyramids
- Wilkinson, R. H., The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt
- Hornung, E., The One and the Many: Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt
- Dunand, F. & Zivie-Coche, C., Gods and Men in Egypt
- Kemp, B., Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization
- Bard, K., An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt
- Stevenson Smith, W., The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt
- Kitchen, K. A., The Life and Times of Ramesses II, King of Egypt
- Sweeney, D., Sex and Gender (in Ancient Egypt)
- McDowell, A. G., Village Life in Ancient Egypt: Laundry Lists and Love Songs
- Te Velde, H., Seth, God of Confusion
Guys do me a solid and reblog this version instead of continuously asking for sources on the other versions thanks
You’re doing the good work, friend.
ok but can we go back to the ancient erotica pls
is there a version of this post where y'all talk about how the ancient Egyptians had advanced technology (that is lost and unknown to us) that allowed them to cut multiple ton granite stone to such precision that if you were to try to slide a human hair between the cuts, the hair wouldn’t fit? and if you try to take a photo of the cut from a few inches over head that you can’t even tell the cut line is there? unless the ancients were some sort of advanced earth benders, how do y'all explain that???
Yeah it’s called “the ancient Egyptians were skilled stone workers with the attested tools at their disposal and we didn’t lose that knowledge actually” and you can find all the pertinent evidence in The Complete Pyramids, run along now.
i made a great response to this but then i realized your complete and utter rudeness is not worth it at all. i had a genuine question and there was no need to respond like that. and no, my “earthbender” comparison wasn’t serious.
You know why I was harsh? Because you coached your question in the exact same terms every single conspiracy theorist uses to deny ancient Egyptians their agency when it comes to their stone working. Your reply had the exact same tone of many, many people who tried to play gotcha with me in 119k+ notes, and I’m just not here for that. There is a need to respond like that, actually, because conspiracists will take a mile if you give them an inch on their barely disguised racist beliefs that the Egyptians couldn’t have built their monuments themselves. You either shut it down immediately or you give them ammo. If you got caught in the crossfire of that, that’s regrettable but there is a reason for it.
And why am I making that “dumb comment”? Because I’m an Egyptologist. I have studied this, reviewed the evidence, read all the theories. And as I stated, we do have proof. We do have evidence that metal tools and harder stones can, in fact, cut stone. The same tools can, in fact, create a level surface on a quarried block because the Egyptians, like many contemporary civilisations, knew how to use things like measures and plumb lines.
There is, again, nothing lost or too-advanced about it. It’s technology that is actually still in use today in various fields and quarries together with more modern techniques. If you look through the recent reblogs you’ll find one that attaches many different videos showing exactly what I’m talking about.
And to reiterate, if you’re genuinely interested you can find all of this info in Mark Lehner’s The Complete Pyramids, which is relatively easily accessed online. Barring that, you can look at his website or any of the freely accessible articles by the same and also read up on this. It’s no skin off my nose if you don’t want to take my word for it, but that is why I added sources.
Fun fact! Water actually turns “blood red” when it is contaminated by sulfur creating sulfuric acid. And scientists have discovered that around the time of the plagues a volcano went off that disturbed Egypt’s environment. So the plagues are scientifically proven. The other parts of the plagues are explained by the sulfuric acid river making the animals leave the river and escaping into the human population.
WHY DIDNT ANYONE TELL ME THE PLAGUES WERE PROVEN
if anyone wants a full list heres how they happened:
basically they all stem from a massive eruption of a volcano on the island of santorini off the coast of greece. the ash then floated over to egypt which kickstarted the plagues
1) blood: the ash carried the mineral cinnabar, which has the capability of turning water red
2) frogs: the ash also had many toxic and acidic substances so naturally, all the frogs are gonna flee the river
3) lice: given what was going on insects would have burrowed into dead animals/peoples skin and laid eggs, which then hatched
4) beasts: everything is getting poisoned from the ash and toxins, causing animals to freak the fuck out/die
5) pestilence: toxins again
6) boils: the ash would have caused storms that carried acid rain which when it fell, would irritate peoples skin causing boils
7) hail: the storm again
8) locusts: again with the insects and the amount of dead bodies and such which attract more insects. a lotta insects basically.
9) darkness: the ash covered the sky, blocking out the sun
10) slaying of the first born: given that children’s bodies were found in higher numbers than others, some archeologists think they may have been sacrificed to stop all the destruction, but they aren’t 100% sure about that. this is just me but I would say another possibility is that babies/kids are a lot more susceptible to toxins and shit, so while an adult may have been fine or gotten a bit sick, it might have been very dangerous/deadly for kids or babies
the volcano would also attest for the parting of the sea weirdly enough. the red sea was in fact the ‘reed’ sea, and was very shallow, probably waist deep or so. given the amount of shit dumped into the ocean from the volcano, this wouldve caused a tsunami to head towards egypt. the water would get sucked out from the reed sea right before the tsunami hit, letting people pass it easily, then the actual tsunami would hit, fuckin up anyone who tried to follow.
another theory is that the red water was caused by algae, which would cause the frogs and stuff to jump out as well. the algae also carried substances toxic to animals so if they ingested any they’d get sick and die, so more insects. in this theory there was a sand storm coincidentally that caused the rest
The volcano wasn’t ON Santorini - it WAS Santorini, then called Thera. It completely blew away the Minoan settlements on the island and was one of the largest eruptions in human history.
- The tsunamis from the Theran eruption devastated Crete, weakening the then-powerful Minoan civilization, leaving them open to being invaded by the Mycenaeans.
- The volcanic winter it created devastated crops in China leading to the fall of the Xia Dynasty.
- The abrupt and catastrophic loss of the people of Thera may have also inspired the myths about Atlantis.
this is blowing my fucking mind
I love that if you really boil all this information down, what you get is something approximating “the sinking of Atlantis caused the 10 Biblical plagues of Egypt” which is, like, one of the greatest mythological mash-ups I have ever heard of.
wait i thought cleopatra seduced antony at cilicia not humiliated him?????? did hollywood lie
hahaha fuck
i love this story
so
first you have to know that antony and cleopatra had known each other at this point for like…. shit almost 15 years? and had had a correspondence on and off throughout that time. they’d known each other through her exile, through his campaigns, through her first child, through his (failed) interim consulship. it’s conjectural to say they were on good terms but… i don’t know why they wouldn’t be.
so when antony found out that cleopatra had funded cassius and brutus during the civil war? he was like, what the fuck. what theFUCK! (yells out window) OCTAVIAN DID YOU HEAR THIS! WHAT THE FUCK!
so antony issues a summons: cleopatra is to come to him so she can Explain Her Self. to this cleopatra replies: what the fuck did you just say to me?
(and you might be like, wait, why is that an issue? and i’ll tell you why, it’s because cleopatra, despite essentially being a (very tenuous) client king to rome at this point, vulnerable to invasion and just barely out of the woods re her connection with caesar, was a macedonian through and through: from language to looks to, you guessed it, ego. and she was fucking. insulted. HOW DARE HE! she probably yelled to charmian. I AM BLOOD! OF! PTOLEMY! NOBODY SUMMONS ME! charmian: i understand that your majesty can you please eat your dinner now)
antony summons her twice more. finally cleopatra, personification of the upside down smile emoji, says, okay! i’ll come. see you soon!! (:
now. cleopatra knew two things:
One: that she was richer than antony, and antony wouldn’t be able to afford a reciprocal feast if she went all out, which would be hugely embarrassing for him
and Two: that a lot of people liked to say antony was a dumb hoe, impressed only by material goods and lavishness, and that he didn’t like when people said this.
so naturally cleopatra proceeds to sail up the river to tarsus in an huge fuck-off ship, plus her entire waitstaff, 12 dining tables, a feast that was lavish beyond belief, entertainment, probably some peacocks or whatever, all decked out in pearls and jewels.
antony: wtf! why are you being so mean rn!cleopatra: mocking baby voice: why are you being so mean rn??? (normal voice) FUCK you
antony didn’t ask her why she had supported cassius ever again. and that was the beginning of the most famous love affair in history
no one ever says that Rome needed help from aliens to build their empire
#l laughed for days when i found out that #ancient egyptians used water to reduce friction and move blocks for distances #and that this was literally DEPICTED ON THEIR HIEROGLYPHICS #but ~western archaeologists~ #thought that the pouring of water depicted ~superstitious rituals~ #jfc
#cleopatra with the nose knocked off. I wonder if people still think she was European like the movies betray…
I still think it’s one of the most desperate things whites have done to blacks and to black history. The disrespect is outrageous. They came to our country and mentally could not fathom how these black civilizations could be so great. They literally rode through our lands and shot the noses off of our statues. Why? So that the statues would no longer resemble the African people and they could LIE about the origins of Egypt and countless other civilizations. It was a widespread practice. It’s why statues of Pharaoh’s and their wives have no noses. It’s why the Sphinx has no nose. When I was in middle and high school, we were taught that the noses had fell off due to time and poor craftsmanship! They have literally tried to teach us that our ancestors were shitty builders of noses just to hide their malicious destruction of our heritage. European fears of African peoples had to come from somewhere. I want to know what part of the history is missing. There’s something that they don’t want to be told.
The shade is real
i was taught that the noses fell off as well and actually continued to believe this. in retrospect this makes no sense, considering greek/roman statues pretty much always have intact noses whereas egyptian ones are always conveniently missing theirs. thank you for pointing this out to me, i hadn’t even made that connection until now.
The bolded was me too and I am seriously embarrassed that I never even thought about how that could be false.
Damnnn. I hate myself for not realizing this.
I hate myself even more, since I know the ancient Egyptians created their sculptural works with the idea of permanence in mind. They were literally built to last throughout the afterlife. Notice how the majority of their monumental sculpture is stone-bound, without any protruding elements or breakable appendages. That’s because many of these sculptures were intended to house the life-force (Ka) of those they portrayed. Of their favorite materials were basalt and diorite, both extremely hard stones that were incredibly difficult to carve. Meaning a nose just doesn’t “fall off” because of “poor craftsmanship,” you would literally have to take a hammer to it. Fuckers.
holy fuck I did not realize this until now too