There is no feminism to speak of at this point in history: no preserved understanding on the part of any of these women that their rule could potentially change the patriarchal system going forward.
In the long run, ancient Egypt was no less cruel and oppressive to women than every other complex society on Earth – but, here, they snatched the gift away after graciously bestowing it. So even ancient Egypt – the only state that consistently allowed female rule – suffered a woman leader only when it had to, expunging her from the eyes of her people as soon as possible.
When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt – Kara Cooney
Listen my dudes Ancient Egypt existed for a really fuckass long time. Literally just Pharaonic civilization lasted 3,000 years. That’s not even including predynastic civilization and Roman rule. If you lump that in you’re looking at more like… 5,000 years.
Like. If you want a comparison of how long that is: THE YEAR IS CURRENTLY 2018. TWO THOUSAND. TWO-THIRDS OF ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PHARAONIC CIVILIZATION HAVE HAPPENED SINCE THE ‘BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST’
We comparatively just entered the Third Intermediate Period. The Greeks will not take over for another 700~ years. Cleopatra will not be born until the year 2931.
It’s a really long time guys.
Anyway look. Listen. I sat my ass down and wrote out a timeline of “when shit happened if you started at 1AD” because I know backwards numbers are hard to process but here’s an abridged version.
If the first Egyptian Pharaoh came to power in 1AD then…
300: step pyramid built
450: Great Pyramid at Giza built
815: Pepi II dies and civil war breaks out
950: Egypt re-unified
1350: Middle Kingdom ends
1450: New Kingdom begins
1520: Hatshepsut is on the throne
1650: Ahkenaten switches to monotheistic religion and builds a new city
1680: Tutankhamun dies
1720: Ramesses II ‘the great’ ascends to the throne
1740: World’s first peace treaty signed 1790: Ramesses II dies leaving way too many children
1920: Egypt breaks into 2 states again
And now we get to ~~~~the future~~~~. If we started at 1AD all of this stuff hasn’t happened yet
2050: Briefly re-united as a single state
2180: Civil war 2250: Nubian kings take over
2335: Assyrian conquest
2665: Alexander the Great conquers Egypt
2930: Cleopatra VII born
2970: Cleopatra VII dies. Egypt falls to Rome. Fin.
And that’s just starting with the Pharaohs. If you wanted to start with Predynastic Egypt, you can go ahead and ADD ONE THOUSAND YEARS to all of those dates
I hate that this is still getting notes but that it’s getting notes *without the timeline addition* like c’mon, man. I had to do MATHS for this. I DID MATHS FOR YOU PEOPLE AND ALL I GOT WAS A BUNCH OF RACISTS
Many people like to assume that all of history has been a progression from “it sucked back then because people were ignorant savages” to “everything’s great now!”
But honestly, that’s not how it works.
I mean, take Egypt. For many thousands of years, Egypt was…actually a pretty great place to live, and TBH women there had better rights than we enjoy in many parts of the world today. The medical care? They used techniques in Egypt 3,000 years ago that we’re looking at now and going “Okay so that actually has some legitimate points, maybe they knew what they were doing.”
(I mean, sure, they also used crocodile dung as a contraceptive, but hey, the Pill hadn’t been invented yet.)
The Scythians…again. Life with them? I’d be okay with it.
I mean, if you get salmonella, trichinosis and infection from C. pneumonia at once- all three of which Nile Crocodiles carry -you’re probably not gonna stay pregnant. This could potentially be because you are dead, but it does count.
True.
(They used it to make a pessiary, btw. They dried it, powdered it, and mixed it with honey and sodium carbonate, or what is now known as washing soda. Now, the honey and washing soda probably DID kill sperm, much like a modern spermicide, but the dung???? Yeah that didn’t do much.)
Other methods of Egyptian birth control involved condoms made of animal intestines (which were used more because they protected from VD’s, to be fair)
If you couldn’t get crocodile dung, ground unripe acacia fruit and honey could be used to make the spermicide. Unripe acacia fruit is acidic, (as is honey) and sperm are killed in acidic environments, so it probably did help.
Egypt was LEGENDARY for its advancement during that period of history! And compared to many other civilizations at the time, women were indeed in a very good place! I think they could even own property, own and run businesses, and divorce their husbands but I’m not sure. As a man you were expected to keep your wife happy and provide for her, I know that much.
But it’s even wilder. Get this: they had a pregnancy test. They would have a woman urinate on a handful of grain. If it sprouted, she was pregnant. If it didn’t, she wasn’t.
It was 70% accurate.
NO BUT LISTEN
WHAT THEY DID??? They moistened a grain of barley and a grain of emmer wheat with the possibly pregnant person’s urine. If the emmer alone sprouted, it was positive. If the barley sprouted, it was negative.
NOW HERE’S THE WILD PART; certain hormones in the urine of a pregnant human inhibit germination in barley.
WE’VE JUST NOW FIGURED THAT PART OUT
In ancient Egypt? They didn’t know why it worked. They just knew it DID.
I KNOW IT’S SO COOL
People don’t seem to really grasp the fact that this one civilization existed for more than half of recorded human history. They had plenty of time to figure this shit out and become one of the greatest civilizations ever.
I love them so much ;u;
“Living in Egypt for most of history would have been pretty good actually.” -My history teacher during “History; ancient to early modern, part 1″ in college.
I learned something new and horrifying today which is… that… no submarine is ever considered “lost” … there is apparently a tradition in the U.S. Navy that no submarine is ever lost. Those that go to sea and do not return are considered to be “still on patrol.”
?????
There is a monument about this along a canal near here its… the worst thing I have ever seen. it says “STILL ON PATROL” in huge letters and then goes on to specify exactly how many WWII submarine ghosts are STILL OUT THERE, ON PATROL (it is almost 2000 WWII submarine ghosts, ftr). Here is the text from it:
“U.S. Navy Submarines paid heavily for their success in WWII. A total of 374 officers and 3131 men are still on board these 52 U.S. submarines still on patrol.”
THANKS A LOT, U.S. NAVY, FOR HAVING THIS TOTALLY NORMAL AND NOT AT ALL HORRIFYING TRADITION, AND TELLING ALL OF US ABOUT IT. THANKS. THANK YOU
anyway now my mother and I cannot stop saying STILL ON PATROL to each other in ominous tones of voice
There’s definitely something ominous about that—the implication that, one day, they will return from patrol.
Actually, it’s rather sweet. I don’t know if this is common across the board, but my dad’s friend is a radio op for subs launched off the east coast, and he always is excited for Christmas, because they go through the list of SoP subs and hail them, wishing them a merry Christmas and telling them they’re remembered.
Imagine a country whose seamen never die, and whose submarines can’t be destroyed…because no ones sure if they exist or not.
No but imagine. It’s Christmas. A black, rotting corridor in a forgotten submarine. The sound of dripping water echoes coldly through the hull. You can’t see very far down the corridor but then, a man appears, he’s running, in a panic, but his footsteps make no noise. The spectral seaman dashes around the corner and slips through a rusty wall. He finds himself at the back of a crowd of his cadaverous crew-mates. They part to let him through. He feels the weight of their hollow gaze as he reaches the coms station. Even after all these years a sickly green light glistens in the dark. The captain’s skeleton lays a sharp hand on his shoulder and nods at him encouragingly, the light sliding over the bones of his skull. The ghost of the seaman steadies himself and slips his fingers into the dials of the radio, possessing it. It wails and screeches. A bombardment of static. And then silence. The deathly crew mates look at each other with worry, with sadness; could this be the year where there is no voice in the dark? No memory of home? The phantasm of the sailor pushes his hand deeper into the workings of the radio, the signal clears, and then a strong voice, distant with the static but warm and kind, echoes from the darkness; “Merry Christmas boys, we’re all thinking of you here at home, have a good one.” A sepulchral tear wafts it’s way down the seaman’s face. The bony captain embraces him. The crew grin through rotten jaws, laughing silently in their joy. They haven’t forgotten us. They haven’t forgotten.
I am completely on board with this. It’s not horrifying, it’s heartwarming.
Personal story time: whenever I go to Field Museum’s Egypt exhibit, I stop by the plaque at the entrance to the underground rooms. It has an English translation of a prayer to feed the dead, and a list of all the names they know of the mummies on display there. I always recite the prayer and read aloud the list of names. They wanted to live forever, to always have their souls fed and their names spoken. How would they feel about being behind glass, among strangers? Every little thing you can do to give respect for the dead is warranted.
I love the idea of lost subs still being on patrol. Though if you really want something ominous, let me say that the superstitious part of me wonders: why are they still on patrol? If they haven’t been found, do they not consider their mission completed? What is it out there that they are protecting us from?
There’s been something in the water since we first learned to float on it. Not marine life, although there’s more of that than we’ll ever know. Not rocks and currents and sand bars and icebergs either, although they’ve all taken more than their share of human life.
But something deeper. Something Other. Something not natural.
Sailors have always been superstitious.
Not one of them described it right.
You don’t hear about it so much now that we don’t lose ships anymore, really, not like we did at the height of the sea trade when barely an inch of ocean floor didn’t bear some wreck or other. And better ships and GPS and weather satellites have all played their part in that.
But we have protection now that we didn’t before. They don’t interfere with war and battle, even on behalf of what used to be their country, or with rocks and weather and human stupidity. Those are concerns for the living.
But the Other Things, the Things that shouldn’t be there – They can’t get to us now without a fight. It’s a fight They haven’t won in a very long time.
As long as we remember them, as long as we call out to them – not very often, just once a year will do – they will keep protecting us from the Things that go bump in the deep.
History wants so badly for Cleopatra to be beautiful. Like they can’t conceive of Rome being intimidated by anything less
because being a linguist, fleet commander, and powerful ruler doesn’t matter, only her looks
Her Arab contemporaries raved about her being very interested and knowledgeable in the sciences.
She completely reformed the system in Alexandria, and Egypt at large; making it much more of a functional powerhouse.
She did what 300 years of her ancestors couldn’t: Managed to get the support of both the Greek AND Egyptian subjects she ruled.
There is a sculpture that has been identified as her, through comparisons to coins minted under her rule, that proves beyond a doubt that she wasn’t particularly beautiful.
It isn’t that people just happen to believe it by mistake. Rome was fucking terrified of her and painted her as a vapid, scheming, beautiful, sex obsessed queen to discredit her to their people. She was a threat, and that was how they handled it. The unfortunate thing is that that is the most surviving record of her. A smear campaign against one of the smartest, most powerful women in human history.
This is a woman who became her father’s co-ruler at nearly 14 years old in order to train for her actual ascension to the throne, who was forced to marry her own siblings in order to keep her power, and it’s widely believed that she poisoned them so she could rule alone. She’s a Pharaoh who led Egypt into a new era of wealth, who went fearlessly into war to protect her rule and Egypt’s independence from the Roman empire, a woman who took her own life rather than face being raped and tortured by her conquerors, knowing full well that she was leaving her surviving children in their uncertain mercy. Cleopatra is one of the most interesting, morally ambiguous, complexing historical figures we have and the media has turned her into a tantalizing sex object for the male gaze.
Even after Cleopatra died her influence on those around her lived on: her daughter, Cleopatra Selene, was the only child of Cleopatra’s to live to adulthood, and she became queen of Mauretania along with her husband Juba and it’s believed they married for love, which was extremely rare for that time period, especially among nobles/the upper class. Not only did she grow up in the house of her mother’s worst enemy and technical murderer, but she still went on to become a queen who possessed an equal amount of political power as her husband, even having her face minted on coins on the opposite side of his likeness, showing they were equal rulers.
Cleopatra and her influence on history, and her daughter’s legacy, have both been brushed aside in favour of the sexy Cleopatra visage. It’s bullshit. Egyptian mythology is interesting and vivid, and full of powerful women and it’s bullshit that we take some of the most powerful women in Africa’s history and try to turn them into fashion icons or sluts who only ruled through toying with men.
I LIVE FOR PEOPLE TO KNOW THIS, people still refuse to believe that a woman can/could have achieved anything without beauty or fucking magical powers
More. The fact that Cleopatra’s face appears on statues and coins in a way that doesn’t reflect the beauty standards of the time means she WANTED it that way. We know what they beauty standards were because every other fucker had statues made with very similar features. Not Cleopatra. She was like, this is MY face, you will love it as it is.
Ahh see the thing is you’re imagining that bodies in Ancient Egypt were left to decompose without care. There’s really no such thing. There’s also no concept of the ‘soul’ in Ancient Egypt either.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Most people believe that every Egyptian was mummified after death. This is simply not true. 99% of all Egyptians were never mummified, either because the practice was not yet invented (seriously, it took them a while to get it right), or because they simply could not afford it. It’s the age old adage of the 1% getting all the bells and whistles and the 99% getting nothing. Most of our surviving record is the burials of the elite, with little known about the regular citizens. It’s a bummer for Egyptologists.
What did happen was that when someone died they were placed in a dug out hole, given grave goods, and then re-covered. However, the body would not decompose but instead dry out, thus forming a natural mummy, leaving most organs intact. This was an acceptable form of burial for the Egyptians and they would still get into the afterlife even though they’ve been left to ‘decompose’.
Both manually mummified and naturally mummified individuals would be able to enter into the afterlife as they still had the one organ that mattered in all of this: the heart.
You’ve probably heard of the ‘weighing of the heart’ whereby the heart was believed to be the seat of emotion and intelligence (as they hadn’t figured out what the brain did yet), and it was weighed against Ma’at (the feather of truth). Before this point the deceased had to go before 42 ‘judge’ gods and speak Negative Confessions to state they have not broken the laws of Ma’at. The heart is then weighed to make sure they’re telling the truth. Read more about the Judgement process here.
(Weighing of the Heart scene from Ani’s Book of the Dead – Source: British Museum)
If you balanced with Ma’at you could progress into the Field of Reeds; the Egyptian afterlife that is essentially just Egypt all over again, but this time with no manual labour. If you failed, and your heart was heavy with lies, then your heart was eaten by Ammit. Here she is looking as beautiful and as terrifying as all women wish to be when they enter a room. Get it girl:
(Thoth and Ammit from Ani’s Book of the Dead – Source: British Museum)
I’m gonna go on a slight detour before I explain Second Death, so I can address the concept of the ‘soul’ in Ancient Egypt.
There isn’t such a thing as a ‘soul’ in Ancient Egypt. Modern influence on the Ancient record has led us to impose the concept on the Egyptians as a way of explaining the religious implications of the Egyptian concept of self to the general public. Basically there are 5 parts to the Egyptian concept of self:
ib – (eeb) the heart – seat of knowledge and emotions
rn – (ren) the name – important for being remembered and accepted into the afterlife. No name, you don’t exist. This is why they scrubbed names off monuments of people like Akhenaten. Read more about Damnatio Memoriae. Oddly for the Egyptians, being on display in a museum wouldn’t be the worst thing as their name would continually be being said by visitors, thus causing them to live on forever. They even had inscriptions on their tomb walls asking visitors or passers by to say their name and say an offering of bread and beer to help them continue existing. Odd how that works out. Read more about the Egyptians and their interactions with the dead.
Swt – (sheut) the shadow – since it was always present the Egyptians believed is was an intrinsic part of the self.
bA – (bah) the personality –
comes into existence after death and is corporeal, eats, drinks and copulates. It can fly between the living world and the afterlife communicating with the gods and the living. It is thought that the Ba is not a part of the person but the person in their entirety, so very much unlike the Abrahamic religions concept of a soul.
kA – (kah) the vital spark – this is what distinguishes between a living and dead person. When a person died the Ka left the body and remained in the afterlife. It needed to be sustained by offerings of food and drink from the living otherwise it would die and go into ‘Second Death’. This could be worked around by having carvings or paintings of tables piled high with food on your tomb walls (because images were magic and came to life in perpetuity), or burying yourself with food.
So basically what you refer to in your ask is the Ka of the deceased dying if the body is left to decompose. As I’ve already stated, decomposition isn’t really a thing in Egypt if the body was buried, so the Ka of the deceased would live on as long as it was tended to. I’ll get on to what happens when it isn’t in just a bit.
The only way you could get a ‘decomposed’ body is through something catastrophic happening meaning that your family would be unable to retrieve it for burial. No body. No burial. No Afterlife. This is relatively rare, but would usually occur through things like drowning in the Nile and being swept away, being eaten by an animal (usually a Crocodile), or dying outside of Egypt. There’s a reason a lot of the curses you find in Ancient Egypt have to do with drowning or being eaten by Crocodiles, mainly because it was an excellent way of wiping the existence of a person from the face of the Earth. Read more about curses in this PhD thesis.
And finally back to Second Death…
So now we know that to achieve Second Death in Ancient Egypt was to either have no body or an abandoned Ka. What exactly was ‘Second Death’? It’s a bit of a tricky concept to get across, but essentially with second death the person dies again and falls into Nun. Nun (noon) is the deification of the primordial waters of chaos that the Egyptian’s believe the world originated from. So essentially, if a person is unfortunate enough to be subjected to ‘second death’ then their Ka falls into the waters of Nun and ceases to exist entirely. There is no comeback from this. When a person falls into Nun due to second death they can never comeback to the Afterlife and they are forgotten. That’s it. Gone. Kaput. It’s not Hell or Purgatory (there’s no such thing in Ancient Egypt), it’s just complete non existence. You either achieve the afterlife, and have used all within your power to maintain your Ka (family provides offerings/tomb wall carvings/heart scarab), or you get Second Death and cease to exist.
That, my friend, is what happens to an Egyptian when their body is lost and their Ka is not sustained.
The Dark Queen, statue probably depicting the Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra III (ruled 142–101 BC). Discovered in the lost, sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion
Steel Phoenix Studios 