Egyptologist Answers Ancient Egypt Questions From Twitter

I'm Professor Laurel Bestock.

Let's answer some questions from the internet.

This is Egyptology Support.

[light upbeat music]

@FHHuntress asks,

When did Ancient Egypt begin exactly according to you?

Ancient Egypt's really old.

If we talk about when the first king of Egypt

actually became king,

we're talking about 3000 BC.

And then we put ourselves on this timeline,

that would be an even 5,000 years.

So this then would be when we change from BC to AD,

and we could say,

you know, Cleopatra's really close to that.

So the pyramids at Giza are about 2400 BC.

Not only are we closer in time to Cleopatra

than Cleopatra is to the beginning

of ancient Egyptian Pharaonic history,

there's even more time

between Cleopatra and the pyramids

than there is between Cleopatra and us.

Ancient Egypt was already ancient in ancient Egypt.

@Tsunaze asks, Seriously, how did the Sphinx's nose break?

Our best evidence for how the nose of the Sphinx got broken

comes from a 15th-century Arabic historian,

and he explains that someone who was angry

actually deliberately shot the nose off the Sphinx

because he was upset

that people were revering this monument from ancient Egypt.

This person was subsequently lynched by other local people

who revered the Sphinx.

So there are also stories

that Napoleon's army shot the nose off the Sphinx.

We think that one's probably not right,

in part because we have drawings of the Sphinx

from earlier than Napoleon's expedition,

and the nose is already missing.

The Sphinx depicts the King Khafre.

Khafre, a king of the Fourth Dynasty,

built the second largest pyramid at Giza.

@SilentUschi asks,

So what did ancient Egyptians talk like?

Like, what did it sound like?

Hieroglyphics ain't speech.

We know a great deal

about what Egyptian sounded like

in part because the last stage

of the ancient Egyptian language, Coptic,

was both written in Greek letters

which we can still read,

and in fact it's still the liturgical language

of the Coptic Church.

And so if you can go watch The Mummy,

you can hear much of what ancient Egypt sounded like.

[speaking Egyptian]

We are able to phonetically reconstruct

what it sounded like.

[sword unsheathes]

Imhotep?

All mummy movies have somebody named Imhotep.

Imhotep was the architect

responsible for designing the first pyramid built in Egypt.

@wildyouthstyles asks,

What are some ancient Egyptian medicine and tools

they created that are used to this day?

Ancient Egyptian medicine was pretty advanced.

We know, for instance,

that they performed surgery

to relieve pressure on the brain.

We have things, for instance,

like pregnancy tests in ancient Egypt.

A woman who wants to know if she's pregnant

and wants to know what the sex of the baby will be

should pee on both barley and wheat seeds.

If she's pregnant, these are gonna sprout,

and which one sprouts first

is gonna tell her whether she's gonna have a girl or a boy.

And modern tests on this

have suggested that in fact the human growth hormone

that is so increased in pregnant women

does have an effect on the germination of grain.

@PPufnstuf asks, Did ancient Egypt have bars and [beep]?

No, ancient Egypt didn't have bars,

but the Egyptians were definitely very social,

and alcohol was part of their social lives.

We know that the Egyptians drank a ton of beer

and quite a bit of wine as well.

This was mostly done in homes and even in tombs.

The underground part of the tomb

might be where your burial chamber is,

but the above ground part of the tomb is a party palace.

There's a festival called the Beautiful Feast of the Valley

where the whole point was to go get drunk in the tombs

with your ancestors.

In order to make beer and wine,

we have large scale breweries in towns

from even before the first king of Egypt

was present in 3000 BC.

@Princesa_de_NY asks,

Watching this video in class

about what did ancient Egypt look like,

and I'm pretty sure it's just scene clips

from Assassin's Creed: Origins.

So when we check out the Assassin's Creed: Origins trailer,

there's a lot in there that's accurate

from the landscape itself.

This sort of green strip around the Nile,

then cliffs and desert a little bit farther away.

And the monuments are very accurately reconstructed.

You can see the pyramid with a funny-shaped top.

That's what we call the Bent Pyramid

at a site called Dahshur.

That pyramid is actually built by the father of Khufu,

the guy who built the Great Pyramid.

The reason that is bent is because this is very early

in the history of constructing pyramids.

They were still figuring out how to build perfect pyramids,

and we think that this one cracked

while it was under construction,

and they changed the angle

so that the weight at the top would not be as great.

@rednym asks, How did King Tut manage to be so popular

even though he lived such a short life?

King Tut is super popular with us

because his tomb was found intact.

The discovery of King Tut's tomb

was one of the archeological wonders of the world.

If you go see this stuff in Cairo,

it takes up so many rooms.

You have chariots,

you have shrines after shrines after shrines,

nested shrines built around the body of the king

who's buried not just in one gold coffin

but in multiple gold coffins.

The beautiful face mask, also in gold,

inlaid with precious stones that's on top of him.

But King Tut wasn't that popular in ancient Egypt.

He lived at a time

that later Egyptians, in fact, wrote out of history.

So he was the successor of a king

who is sometimes referred to as the heretic king Akhenaten,

who introduced a monotheistic religion in ancient Egypt.

And Tutankhamen as one of the kings

who returned ancient Egypt

to its original polytheistic religion

and opened the temples again.

The fact that he was short-lived,

not well-known in later Egypt,

probably contributed to the fact

that his tomb was preserved.

Nobody thought to look for it.

@KBrownks2 asks,

Did you know that we can't recreate the Egyptian pyramids

with modern-day technology?

Well guess that means,

maybe we weren't the most advanced

the human species has ever been.

We absolutely have the technology to recreate the pyramids.

The tools that the Egyptians were using

to create these big stone blocks to make the pyramid

were of two types.

Rough stone balls,

a very hard stone, which dropped repeatedly,

wear away the stone to do the major quarrying.

The fine chiseling on these blocks

is being done with copper tools.

These copper tools would've required a huge workforce

just to keep the copper tools sharp.

So how do you get a straight vertical side

on a piece of stone?

Here, you use gravity

and a tool that engineers still use, a plumb bob,

which is a weight on a string.

And with a weighted string just hung,

you just hold it in your hand,

you know that that string is absolutely vertical.

So if you're trying to get the side

of a piece of stone vertical,

you hold a plumb bob next to it,

and you just correct,

you keep chiseling away at that stone

until it is perfectly straight.

So it would've taken decades

to build the Great Pyramid at Giza.

The stone was mostly quarried locally.

You need the stones themselves to be squared,

and you need the ground to be level.

How do you get the ground level?

You carve a channel in the ground

and fill it with water,

and the water itself, again, gravity, will level,

and you can mark that water level across your entire site.

So in the end, it's not impossible technologically

to build pyramids any longer.

It's a social choice.

We choose not to build pyramids any longer.

It's not that we've lost the ability.

@cvanderford asks, Who was the best Pharaoh?

Many people might say that Khufu,

the builder of the Great Pyramid,

was the best pharaoh,

but my personal favorite pharaoh

would probably be Hatshepsut.

Hatshepsut was a woman.

She reigned as a king, not as a queen.

That's not so much, we think,

because she was trying to pretend that she was a man

as because this was a role usually played by men.

In her inscriptions, for instance,

she is still using feminine forms

of the verbs of words to refer to herself.

But she's shown just like a male pharaoh.

@salma_khan asks,

Watching this show called Ancient Aliens on Netflix.

Um, yeah, so I can't sleep now.

Why do the pyramids of Egypt match those in Mexico?

The pyramids in Egypt

don't actually match the pyramids in Mexico.

They are different in substantial ways.

The king is buried in a small chamber

underneath the pyramid in Egypt.

The pyramids, as you see them today,

look like giant staircases.

They're a little bit rough.

And that's not how they would've looked anciently.

So the final step in making a pyramid

would have been to clad it in very fine limestone

and then to shave the sides to make it perfectly smooth.

So this would've been not something

you could climb anciently.

The pyramids in Mexico are not tombs at all.

These are bases for temples,

and the temples are approached by going up the pyramid.

That said, why do they look similar?

Why is this basic form of a pyramid

found in multiple so different places of the ancient world?

And there the answer is pretty simple,

and it's that it's not that much

you can build of that size

without modern technology and without steel.

So to get a really tall structure out of stone,

it needs to be smaller at the top than it is at the bottom.

So there's not all that many things you can build

that would get that tall using this technology.

And that's really, we think,

why we see what looks superficially similar

in such different places in the ancient world.

@_bechiro asks,

Why did ancient Egypt fall?

So the fall of ancient Egypt,

from a royal perspective,

when do there stop being kings of Egypt,

is really when Egypt gets incorporated

into the Roman Empire

when Cleopatra loses the throne.

@lambe_turing asks,

Did you know that Cleopatra,

the last queen of Egypt, was actually Greek?

Yes, I did know that Cleopatra of Egypt was actually Greek.

She was the descendant of a Greek family

that had been ruling Egypt for about 300 years

when Alexander the Great in 332 BC conquered Egypt.

Egypt then became part of empires

elsewhere in the Mediterranean.

We don't actually know all that much about Cleopatra.

We do know that she was bilingual

and spoke both Egyptian and Greek.

Cleopatra did hook up with Julius Caesar.

She also had children with Mark Antony.

She was definitely playing to keep her kingdom.

@Paul, long string of letters and numbers asks,

Egypt is overrated anyway, in my opinion.

What did they invent that was so transformative

on the modern world?

We could talk, for instance,

about the mobile writing platform of papyrus.

We write on paper, which is a Chinese invention,

but that writing should be done by a pen

and that you should be able to send it somewhere easily,

that is something the Egyptians absolutely pioneered.

Ancient Egyptian mud brick architecture was so amazing

that the ancient Egyptian word for brick

has actually made it into English.

That's our word, adobe,

comes from the ancient Egyptian, ultimately,

acknowledging how excellent their architecture was.

@Andydoodle56 asks,

Will someone ever decipher this ancient language?

Imagine the knowledge lost.

In fact, someone has deciphered

ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs,

and scholars can read virtually any inscription

that we find.

This is a very typical type of monument,

and what we see here is a dead guy and his wife,

and what they want is to receive offerings

for the rest of their afterlife.

And that's what the inscription tells us.

But we read this, htp-di-nsw.

And n ka n, for the ka of Amenemhat,

the name of this guy.

So n ka n Amenemhat, msj n Ip.

For the ka of Amenemhat, born of Ip,

his father's name.

@RoxyB1994 asks,

Does anybody know why the ancient Egyptians

never painted people front on but only sideways on?

Let's take a look at an illustrated copy

of the Book of the Dead.

So they chose the most typical,

the most perfect aspect of every part of the body.

The person is shown in profile

so that you get the nose in profile,

but the eye is always shown front on.

Shoulders are always shown front on

even though the arms and legs are twisted

in ways that are impossible.

You can't actually walk like an Egyptian.

In some ways,

you can think of ancient Egyptian art like cubism.

It's showing the same thing from different angles,

from different perspectives.

They wanted a picture of a person

to capture the essence of that person

in a way that was much more eternal.

Their art deliberately did not look like

anything you could see with your own eyes.

It's more of a god's-eye view.

@_hajarahsaleesu asks,

Why do Egyptians mummify their dead?

What's the point of preserving the dead?

And they did this because they believed

that in the afterlife people needed their body.

They continued to eat and to drink,

to speak and breathe,

and even to engage in social relations

with the people they had known in life.

Most people in ancient Egypt weren't mummified.

It was an expensive process.

In fact, it wasn't necessary

in order for bodies to be preserved.

The Egyptian desert itself

does a great job of preserving bodies.

But for those people who did,

who could afford mummification,

cloth was really expensive in the ancient world.

The linen that was used would've included oils and resins,

and we also know that they used forms of salt

that were naturally occurring in the desert

to dry the body out.

We know, for instance,

that they would remove the internal organs.

Internal organs are mushy.

If you're gonna rot,

it's gonna be because there's so much water

in your internal organs.

So you take those out and mummify them separately.

In some periods, they were placed in jars.

Oftentimes, the heart is protected

by the placement of an amulet in the form of a heart

that is placed over that part of the body.

Ancient Egyptians didn't care that much about the brain,

and often the brain was, in fact,

removed from the skull cavity

before a mummy was interred.

@missjenny asks,

How did the ancient Egyptians

get the brain out of the nose during embalming?

So this big wet thing in your head

that needs to come out during embalming

could be extracted through the nose.

And we have metal hooks that we think were used

by jamming them up to break the nose bone,

scramble the brain so that it's more or less liquid,

and then with a combination of gravity

and the hook on that metal,

you pull it out through the nose.

Because they thought the heart was the seat of intelligence,

not the brain,

removing it was a way to ensure

that the head would be preserved.

@rrofb asks, Did ancient Egypt have cookies?

Ancient Egyptians had bread.

They didn't have sugar,

so their baked goods probably weren't sweet and delicious.

Bread was the staple that was even used as wages,

as a kind of money.

So you would be paid in bread,

and that was probably the majority of most people's diets.

This is, in fact, a consolidated lump

of the stratographic layers.

This section represents

probably between 30 and 50 years of living.

You can see pot shards here,

but when we get it under the microscope,

we can also see things like the remains of the food.

We have fish bones, we have tiny bits of grain,

but we do know some about the legumes that they ate,

things like lentils.

We have onions and other vegetables that were eaten.

Lettuce was considered to be an aphrodisiac

in ancient Egypt.

@shewrotemurder_ asks,

Who the [beep] deciphered hieroglyphics,

and how did they do it?

Hieroglyphs were deciphered

by a French scholar named Champollion.

Champollion was one of a group of European scholars

who was working on a document that had been discovered

when Napoleon invaded Egypt in the late 18th century.

The Rosetta Stone is a trilingual inscription

from the Ptolemaic period,

the late part of Egyptian history.

It's basically a legal document about taxes and the temple.

The top part of the inscription is in Egyptian hieroglyphs,

and the middle is in demotic script.

The bottom one is Greek.

We've never lost the ability to read Greek.

Now, it took more than 20 years

after this was discovered

for the decipherment to be finished.

Now, Champollion was aided by the guess that he had

that when he saw little circles around a set of hieroglyphs

in the hieroglyphic portion,

that that probably was a royal name.

And the very first thing he could read

was in fact the name of Cleopatra.

Once Champollion was able to read the Rosetta Stone,

this was really cracking the code of hieroglyphs.

And this led to the ability

to read increasingly large numbers of inscriptions.

@GeeorgeStyles asks,

Have you ever read the Egyptian Book of the Dead?

If so, what was interesting about it?

We have read the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

We have a piece of one copy here.

This is just a chunk of it.

This papyrus is many, many, many meters long.

And so the part that we see illustrated here, in fact,

is what we call the weighing of the heart.

This guy's heart is on a scale,

and the gods are weighing his heart against a feather.

If his heart is as light as a feather,

then his heart is pure,

and it will not speak against him,

and that means he can go into the afterlife.

This very long scroll of the Book of the Dead

would be rolled up

and tucked between the legs of the dead guy in his tomb.

So this was something

that everybody who could afford one wanted a copy of

because its spells that allow him

to get into the afterlife and be successful there.

That is like a cheat sheet

for getting into the afterlife successfully.

@Justustalking2 asks,

What were ancient Egyptian scarabs actually used for?

Most Egyptian scarabs were ring bezels.

So they were on a piece of metal

that would've been on a ring,

and they had an inscribed bit on the flat bottom

that was used as a seal, seals like this.

So a scarab beetle rolls a ball of dung up over a hill.

The Egyptians associated that image with the rising sun,

and they gave the scarab credit

for bringing the sun into being.

So in having a scarab as your seal,

you are linking yourself

to the rebirth of the sun every day.

@duckyaisha asks,

What's your favorite thing

you've learned about women in ancient Egypt

from your archeological finds?

Women in ancient Egypt had a status

that was really rare in the ancient world.

They could own things, own property.

They could decide which of their children

inherited their property.

Men got off work

when their women in their household had their periods.

So when women had their period,

they could expect that their husbands

had to do the housework for them.

@BlvckJessRabbit asks,

I wonder what the ancient Egyptians view on sex was.

The ancient Egyptians really liked sex,

and they were not prude about it,

and they weren't shy about it.

They actually did have a euphemism for it to have sex.

They would say, to spend a pleasant day.

It was just totally accepted

that sex was a normal and enjoyable part of life,

and it wasn't something that was stigmatized

in the same way it has been in many other cultures.

One way we can really see this,

the ancient Egyptian language did not have the word virgin.

There was no idea

that having sex changed your social position.

It was just something people then really liked.

@LXYacht asks,

Um, don't Egyptian deities all have animal heads?

Not all ancient Egyptian deities have animal heads,

but many of them do.

We have a bunch of gods here.

On this piece of the Book of the Dead,

we have the god Horace,

we can see here with a falcon head.

Particularly associated with kingship

in the scene is Anubis,

and he is shown with the jackal head

that is typical of gods

who are associated with cemeteries.

We think that's in part

because cemeteries in the desert

are places where jackals actually would have roamed.

@mozzamarwa asks,

Y'all ancient Egypt is [beep] wild to me.

How did they just discover a new queen

and over 100 new mummies?

From aerial photography

to now really high-tech satellites,

we're able to see from the air

and see patterns of difference on the ground

that can relate to things that are not visible

when you walk on the ground.

We use X-ray fluorescence,

and we point an XRF X-ray fluorescence gun

at a wall with pigments on it.

We can get the chemical signature of the pigments.

If they're using lapis as a pigment,

lapis is the most pure blue pigment that's available.

It's also really expensive,

and the only ancient source for lapis

is in what's modern Afghanistan.

That's really far away.

So questions about the interactions between Egypt

and its broader world

are new kinds of questions that technology opens up for us.

We will not find another King Tut's tomb probably,

but we have a ton left to uncover.

So those are all the questions for today.

Thanks for watching Egyptology Support.