"'Exquisite is Her Splendor': Women in Ancient Egypt"—Week 1, Video 1: Introductions! #Blast24

Ajouté : 2026-05-05

[00:00:02]hello hello hello and welcome to Exquisite is her Splendor women in ancient Egypt I'm your instructor Tori fin L you can just call me feel free to call me Tori in the in our interactions in the emails and whatnot thank you so much for joining me I can't wait to dive into this topic with you all we have quite a range of uh people joining us from participants from some people know a nothing about ancient Egypt whatsoever some people are quite Adept in ancient Egyptian study so I will try to keep the class as accessible to all as I can um but please if you if I say something that you don't understand it's a word you've never heard before if I you know along the third cataract then you have no idea what a cataract is please reach out to me for clarification because I'm sure there will be others in the same boat that are going to be um equally as lost um and I will try to keep the course as interesting as possible for those of you um that it might just be a refresher for um the title of this class is from one of my favorite ancient Egyptian love poems um in case you were Wonder so let's go ahead and get started today we are going to be just doing a brief introduction into quite a bit of things we'll do we'll jump in and get started right away and start looking at some ancient Egyptian um women and and things of that nature but um first we'll do a brief introduction to myself and this course um a quick introduction to studying ancient Egypt in general and the chronology that I'll expect people to know I'm hoping um just to get the basics so that if I say the New Kingdom you know that that is later in time than the Old Kingdom but we'll get there we'll get there um then we're going to do a brief thing on ancient Egyptian women and the study of ancient Egyptian women and sort of looking at that uh before we get into this week's Q&A so who am I and what do I know about ancient Egyptian women uh so I am an archaeologist and an egyptologist I'm a doctoral candidate at John's Hopkins University and I've worked on several field projects many of which are centered around ancient Egyptian women so I've sort of naturally fallen into the study of this topic uh and I think that we'll have quite a good time together working on it um for this summer session the um I'll give you a brief intro into some of the some of the projects that I've worked on I worked at the T Temple Project with the University of Arizona Egyptian Expedition this was in what is modern day Luxor it was ancient thieves down in southern Egypt um and that was the temple site of T werit who was the last she ruled as a king um at the end of the 19th Dynasty she was likely the great granddaughter of rames the great this is what her Temple looks like today um as you can see it's a little bit in a sari State of Affairs compared to other ancient Egyptian temples it was likely raised to the ground unfortunately by the dynasty that came after her um and in fact some people at the University of Chicago have found a few of the blocks in their blockyard that are from her Temple so we know that um at Med at Habu which is the Temple of Ramsey III just a few just a little ways down the road um we know that he used some of her block so probably had a hand in taking down her Temple um I've also worked at the moot Temple at Carnac that is also in modern Luxor ancient thieves in southern Egypt I worked there with the with John's Hopkins University and that is a Temple dedicated to the goddess moot um it is just off of is a subsection of the greater carac Temple complex which um is dedicated to the god Almon as a whole but she is um in Egyptian theology she is his wife and therefore um has her own section in his Precinct um near and she has her own sacred Lake I've also worked briefly at two sites in ancient Nubia which is um modern day Sudan um very briefly at the defoy tomb project and um the first season of the Nuri excavation um which is the burial site for some of the 25th Dynasty Kings I have also worked on numerous projects with former minister of Antiquities and something of a celebrity archaeologist zahi haah um sites such as the Lost Golden City in Luxor and an Old Kingdom Cemetery at Sakara among several others right now I am currently directing my own project called the Middle Kingdom Royal women project which studies as you might have guessed um Royal women from a period of Egyptian history called the Middle Kingdom um and as part of that project I am Excavating a tomb in uh in Luxor actually at Daryl bakry um this behind me is a picture of Daryl Bak which is more um more famous for the Temple of a different Egyptian queen um who later became king and built this beautiful Monument um which we will talk about later um but the temp the tomb where I work is is right about over here in any case uh and here is neph in the center picture getting her hair done so I work um in theman Tomb 319 which is the tomb of Queen nephu she was one of the wives of um the the Pharaoh mentu hotep II who is a pharaoh uh the first pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom he's part of the 11th Dynasty that's a lot of terminology coming at you very quickly but I promise I'm going to break it down slowly throughout um throughout the class and and and whatnot anyway so this is just a quick look this is the entrance of her burial chamber this is her burial chamber um I'm currently trying to translate all of these texts which is taking me quite some time but we're getting there we're getting there slowly um I can talk a bit more about the project and the work in her tomb if you'd like if you if someone asked me in the Q&A um and we can throw that into one of the Q&A sessions just let me know um we will be going back this fall in October most likely to do another field season which I'm pretty excited for okay so um here we go let's dive into the course let me just briefly discuss some of the logistics before we dive in um we are really what I would love is that you take away from this class just a little bit of knowledge either about the study of women in general or the study of ancient Egyptian women um I just want us all to sort of have fun it's a public course after all so I'm not going to be assigning any homework I don't want anyone stressed I'll be posting some um suggested readings if you're interested but it's really as much or as little as you want to take away from the course you can do the readings and participate in the online discussion there's going to be there's the discussion group which is a Google Docs um file that you can add on to um I'll post some questions and people feel free to put up their questions and um you can sort of jump in in that way and participate with other participants um yeah so that's what I'm I think we're all just here sort of to learn and to have um a good time over the summer and think about some some interesting questions uh the course format I think you know for the most part I mean you're here watching this first video so I will be pre-recording the lectures um for the beginning of the week and then posting the uh Q&A I'll then you should send me your Q&A questions via email or you can post them in the discussion group and I can Circle those back in um am I missing something yeah and then and then we'll and then I'll post the Q&A and you can watch that um I do have to pre-record it so if you could get your Q&A questions to me as early as possible throughout the weekend um that would be ideal but I know everyone has a job and a life so you can send me the Q&A questions for any of the topics any of the week's topics at any point so the q&as will be a little bit more mixed up than the lectures the lectures will stick to our strict schedule but the Q&A questions might come from any topic that we are discussing and if I don't get to your Q&A question right away I'll I'll I'll get to it in the next one probably and if I really don't if if I really don't get to your Q&A question in this one or the next one then shoot me an email and I will either just reply to your email with the topic or uh or discuss it in the next week okay this is a big brief look at the schedule um it was in also the introduction introductory um email but uh for the first week introduction just going over ancient Egypt and the study of ancient Egyptian women and and bringing up some things to keep um to keep sort of chewing on as we as we dive into the rest of uh the rest of the session then week two we're going to do goddesses myth and religion so women's participation in religion and myth um the third week uh a look at women power and the state sort of a top down approach um into Royal women uh the fourth week we are doing sort of more of a bottom up look what we can learn from objects etc etc and we're going to look at house birth house house birth we're going to look at household child birth fertility and sexuality um and then finally week five wrapping up we're going to look at uh how are women represented how are they represented in the afterlife how are they represented image and text and things of that nature uh just sorry circling back the Q&A if I don't get enough questions because people can participate as they like as they like uh more or as as much or as little if I have plenty of questions then I'll just do that right of course I'll just answer questions um but if I don't get enough questions then you are all at my Mercy um and are subject to just whatever tangent I felt like talking about most likely I will just probably be going through and reading primary sources um you know maybe we'll just recite some love poems together or uh read some letters or some literature um and that's how and that's how we'll spend the q&as I'll I'll bring them into the discussion in the lectures um but in the q&as I'll probably just be going through some of those in addition to answering questions okay so let's dive in introduction to studying ancient Egypt I'm going to do a bit of an intro um it's going to be very brief because um you know time is short and and we have to live our lives um so I'm just going to do a very brief overview of chronology some of you will already have this so take what is useful to you leave what isn't um some of you will have no idea what we're talking about and for those of you who have no idea I really just want to do the Bare Bones um so that if I say one of the time periods and it has a word in it Kingdom or if I say a dynasty number then you know basically what's going on that's the ideal so what do you think about when studying ancient Egypt what comes to mind go ahead and think for yourself for a moment what are some of the things you think about when you start think about ancient Egypt for a lot of people it's probably something like this I actually love this image of Eevee uh from The Mummy I wish I could spend all of my time in libraries um like this sometimes if I'm not in the field right so we have pyramids Nat Geo Stargate maybe the mummy movies um maybe a Nat uh a documentary of some kind Tut of course right um yeah things like that maybe Ancient Aliens comes to mind I spoiler alert I don't believe aliens built the pyramids so if you're going to ask me that in the questions uh me personally not a Believer but um for a whole host of reasons but we can get that later um okay so what studying ancient Egypt really looks more like this it's a a whole archaeological excavation in the field translation publication the work of many institutes um a deep history of colonialism museums research international cooperation um it's um really closer to this in in in actuality than it is to The Mummy or you know Stargate okay so here here is a look at ancient Egyptian chronology um for our purposes I am just going to be talking about what is generally considered fonic Egypt from the Old Kingdom through the New Kingdom um there are of course pharaohs and Kings before and after that period of time but for our purposes this is more or less where we're going to Nest our um study in for this summer um some terminology that you're going to need to know if you don't already is the kingdoms um terminology the old middle and the new king om those are going to be a period of uh unification so both North and South Egypt is Unified under one pharaoh and one Central Administration and then you have the something that we egyptologists refer to as the intermediate periods um the first second and third intermediate period specifically and that's sort of when the wheels have come off and Egypt is divided in some way it's no longer one Unified no longer unified under one state um right so so our chunk of time old middle new and the two intermediate periods in between we might get a little bit to the third intermediate period in the late period and the Greco Roman period but probably we're going to situate ourselves in the old middle and new kingdoms this graphic uh you will have it's it's in the Google Drive so you can download it and refer back to it if I say you know if I mentioned the 12th Dynasty and you don't remember where that is you can you can go ahead and look on this graphic what do I mean by Dynasty Dynasty is sort of an arbitrary grouping not entirely arbitrary but the ancient Egyptians never thought of themselves in terms of dynasties it's something that we have done um as a result of an ancient historian named Mano who did a lot of the histories for ancient Egypt that early archaeologists and egyptologists looked into so we've sort of divided Egyptian history based on you know the first dynasty third Dynasty fourth Dynasty onwards um in more or less familiar familial groupings but um that's obviously not always the case and it's actually not even a designation that the ancient Egyptians would have made so um it's important to keep in mind that we have done that to their period to when referring to ancient Egyptian history and that it's not something that they would have they wouldn't have said oh I'm a king of the 10th Dynasty they just would have said I'm a king um so that's what dynasty means uh we're going to be working old middle New Kingdom what does any of that mean all I want you to know is that these are the periods we're studying you can look at the dates relatively but really what I want from you is just to be able to know if I say Ramsey the Great was in the New Kingdom to know that that happened um thousands of years after the pyramids were built okay so uh yeah so we'll so we'll dive into it a little bit well I'll give you a brief overview just now but I really you don't have to be panicking looking at oh I need to know that the Old Kingdom is 2160 and blah blah blah blah blah we don't need to do that okay all I want from you to know generally where things are in time and space um and and you don't have to study anything of course um okay so the pre-dynastic period had a lot going on sadly we are not going to talk about it too much um but if you are interested we can we can dive into it I don't know if anyone is um a preist um then we have the early dynastic period where things sort of come together this encompasses dynasties 0 through two um okay so looking at the Old Kingdom this is dynasties 3 through six um more or less um this is generally considered the pyramid age there are pyramids throughout ancient Egyptian history of course after this period um all the way through to the Greco Roman era honestly but this is when we're thinking when you're thinking of the Great Pyramids at Giza this is when they're Built Well the step pyramid the first pyramid ever created in Egypt was um was during the Old Kingdom as well this um they're having they had trade networks they have um a centralized government at this time and if you think of the administration and the bureaucracy that would have had to have been in place to do something as Monumental as building the pyramids it must have been incredible um so that's what we have going on for the Old Kingdom then the wheels sort of come off and Things Fall Apart there is no longer a centralized government um we move into the first intermediate period bear in mind the Egyptians wouldn't have referred to it that way in fact once we get back into a time of um unification they refer to the intermediate this this period as a time where everything was upside down um cats were ruling mice or mice were ruling cats and and and the entire world was on its head um that's how the Egyptians refer to this period but um there was likely a famine and some other um perhaps environmental factors that went into this particular um intermediate period we also get a lot of different changes in art because they're not centralized under one um Metropolis in the capital at Memphis um the art style changes quite a bit um and we have the first intermediate period then um along at the end of the first intermediate period Along Comes a pharaoh a a ruler named menu hotep II he is this obviously the second um in in line after some of the ingv Kings um I'm realizing none of this is really useful for you um in any case there is a ruler m to the II who reunify Egypt and ushers in the Middle Kingdom the Middle Kingdom is where we have most of our literature from um that survives to us we have later copies of texts that likely were derived in the middle King there's also a period of uh or a class of literature that we refer to as pessimistic literature which is TR Lally talking about how bad it was in the first intermediate period like I just mentioned um yeah anyway the Middle Kingdom so you have some great things it's a little bit underst studied and we don't have the capital the capital in um more or less the middle of the Middle Kingdom is moved North from it used to be it was at EES when motep unifies it in in in southern Egypt and it moves North to the fum region which I will show you a picture of later but in general if you think about Egypt and you see the Nile as a lotus flower it's the it's the little leaf part that sticks out um anyway that's the fom region and the capital would have been called ich but it's likely now under the river and we've never discovered it um but that's what's going on in the middle King okay then we have the second intermediate period this is again a period of time where Egypt is no longer unified under one central government um it is sort of broken up um and especially in the second intermediate period there's a foreign ruler who has come down and is ruling most of Egypt from the north which um in ancient Egyptian religion is it's just unheard of it can't really happen um that the king could be not an Egyptian so um anyway it's it's it just doesn't really work with uh ancient Egyptian ideology so in any case uh we have a foreign foreign rulers known as the hickoff um in ancient Egyptian but that literally just means foreign ruler um they're ruling in the north the kingdom of kush is sort of pushing Up From Below in Nubia and you have this abidos dynasty in the center that's generally um what we think of as like keep maintaining Egyptian culture um and they eventually uh duke it out with the hickoff and win um then this brings into to this brings us to the New Kingdom the new kingdom is generally what people who visit Egypt see the most of and therefore what people think of when they think of ancient Egypt they generally thinking of the pyramids so the Old Kingdom or they're thinking of um Ramsey the Great or the Valley of the Kings or King Tut which is which are all coming from the New Kingdom so um the New Kingdom Egypt expands to the largest that it gets um and sort of is the early workings of an Empire although not quite um there is at this time a great um sense of interconnectedness between um ancient Egypt and several other nations um or city states and and things of that nature that are happening up in Mesopotamia at that time um and this is when you get carac thieves is making is um the religious Capital the capital is again moved to Memphis for the most part Ramsey moves it again but um for the most part of the New Kingdom the capital is in Memphis up in the north um I will also post a map in the in the Google drive as I keep referring to places and some of you might not know um so there'll be a map in the Google Drive uh as well and I'll post a brief Chron chronological um synopsis in the in the in the Google drive as well then you have the third intermediate period so again Egypt is no longer unified um you for a period of time you get some Libyan rulers there are some seite rulers and the famous 25th Dynasty Kings um who are coming up from Nubia um and ruling a kingdom larger than Egypt ever did because they have all of Egypt's territory and um all of kush way down into the South so um it's actually very impressive then we have the late period it's generally characterized there's some uh Persian rule right before the Macedonian Dynasty Dynasty it's Alexander the Great comes and conquers Persia and then eventually Egypt um although if you ask the Egyptians he didn't oh if you ask him he didn't conquer Egypt he was just granted Egyptian king Ship by an Oracle in um in one of the oases siwa anyway um then we have the toic dynasty or the toic period or sometimes referred to as the Greco Roman period um and of course um you have the tmes and then uh and then you have Cleopatra the 7th um which we just refer to as Cleopatra of course normally um and you have the dealings with Mark Anthony and Caesar and Augustus and and finally the death and Roman conqueror of Egypt then uh you are ushered into the Roman period um but anyway as I mentioned for the purpose of this class will largely stay in Old Middle and New Kingdom um and the in between intermediate periods but as chronology is not going to be hugely important I just want you to have the general Basics so here is a quick look right like um greatest greatest sits greatest features of each period of History um and I will put that graphic up on the Google Doc as well okay so moving out of chronology and um listening to me talk about dates and things let's now move into the study of ancient Egyptian women um so what do you think of when you think of women in ancient Egypt um I'll let you spend some time to gather your thoughts maybe or write something down and send it for the Q&A what are some of the things that come to mind I think it's generally right a bit mysterious we think of some orientalizing and things right um topics we have maybe you're thinking of Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra or um one of the others maybe you are thinking of an ancient Egyptian woman maybe you're thinking of Nefertiti maybe you're actually thinking of the bust of Neti or her relationship with the heretic king aanan um then we have a chipsu some people are thinking of for instance we'll talk more about her when we talk about Royal women um she's a woman who was Queen and became king and ruled the dynasty over later if a chapit is too foreign of a name I've heard people um memorize it by thinking hot chicken soup um so next time you hear me say a word that sounds like hot chicken soup you'll know who I'm talking about um for those of you who cannot for the life of you remember these complex ancient Egyptian names they roll off my tongue but I know that they don't uh come easily to all people right if you're hearing them for the first time um maybe you've been to Egypt and you had the experience of going into the tomb of nefari she has one of the best um preserved tombs in ancient Egypt of any of the ancient Egyptian tombs uh it's really gorgeous she also has a temple that her husband Ramsey the Great um built for her in southern Egypt but I would love it if you can walk away from this class with some idea of other ancient Egyptian women um even if they're still Royal for this for instance this um uh this is an image of soc nephu who ruled at the end of the 12th Dynasty as king um and whom hu got a lot of her ideas about iconography from I'd also like you to walk away with basic understandings of things concerning ancient Egyptian women like the Kenner or the reason that we have the term Haram when it comes to ancient Egypt and whether or not that really applies to what's going on with the King and his multiple wives um I'd like us to start thinking critically about some of the ways we as Outsiders to the ancient Egyptian culture and Society have come to know what we know about ancient Egyptian culture right things that are taught about ancient Egyptian women and whether they are true or just those are the things we have been taught right um for instance the Harum and where we got that terminology and whether it's accurate um but also other things um like their participation in religion and and whether they are separate but equal or whether they're actually separate at all um anyway we'll we'll dive into that a little bit a little bit later okay so let's take a look at what some of the sources are for the study of women in ancient Egypt and ancient history in general so our picture of ancient Egyptian culture is based on what has survived over the 3,000 years um and it's always going to be filtered through our own ethnocentric lens lens right meaning that we always that although we have found an object and we can guess what it was used for we'll never actually be able to be sure and that we understand everything regarding the context symbolism and use or the connotation of something that we've found right um although we do have a text from ancient Egypt they don't write everything down um things things that are given right like even we we do the same thing even today um for instance they don't the ancient Egyptians didn't write down a lot of um technical technical documents so we don't know how they're building things we have to like look in iconography and we can see them an image of them making pottery and we can see that they're using a a bow drill to drill into stone but they're never writing us manuals on this is how you do this and this is how you do that this is how you do this and and honestly tragically if they did they were probably in the Library of Alexandria that got burnt right so how do we know what we know um much of what we have assumes prior knowledge right they're they're writing about their culture to their culture they're not writing for us thousands of years later with our iPhones right um so there that that can definitely be difficult I I digress let's I'll get into this a little bit later um so let's take a look at what we do have right so we have artifacts of course artifacts being the objects um that women owned and before you say Tory but both men and women could own and wear jewelry in ancient Egypt yes of course of course but this is from the tomb of a Middle Kingdom princess the haor unit so uh so so we know it belong to a woman in any case um so we have the objects we have um things that they would have used in their life and things that they used in rituals and ceremonies and things that they wanted to bring with them into the Afterlife um so when we're thinking when I'm if we're discussing artifacts know that I'm talking about things here are three images of ancient Egyptian wigs and giving our limited knowledge what can we say about them right what information can we glean from them apart from some Egyptians wore wigs maybe we can test if they're human hair or they're synthetic uh we can test if they've been treated with any other Sur uh s maybe we can test if they've been treated with any other substances um or we can note changes in style over different periods of time so think of some things that we can uh that a wig might tell us information we might be able to glean from a wig and and send that into me um and I'll discuss it in the Q&A what about which wig is modern is a modern replica and which is ancient um so take your guess so for those of you who guess the one in the center is the modern replica you would be right and both of these other are actually ancient if you couldn't believe that um especially this one on the right it's very strange looking in any case um can you tell me which of these three wigs belong to a man best guess I'll Circle back to this one at the end take a look take your guess wel come back so moving on with objects um we also have objects that depict women for instance the famous bust of Nefertiti is an image of a woman herself and an object we have in the center a h what is probably a haor figurine this is a predynastic object um probably associated with haor although we're unclear but this can show you the ways in which just finding an object doesn't always tell us everything that we need to know about the object right or what it was used for and then another great example of that is the female figurine that we have on the right hand side on the far right um it is made out of a substance sort of a Amic substance um that was fired in ail um and is what we call fance they these figurines have been referred to in um scholarly Publications as fertility figurines concubines for the dead and offerings to haor um we know for certain that they were probably associated with female fertility or female um sexuality at the very least as they um are wearing cowry shells across their midwaist which has a sexual connotation and um you have a very well- defined pubic triangle but as far as I think we've more or less gotten rid of this concubine for the dead um theory in that we find them in tombs but we also find them in temples um so it's more likely that they were dedicated to um haor in the hopes of um perhaps f but of course this is just getting into it we can't say for certain what any of these objects really mean because we are not a part of the culture that we're studying um and turns out no one is because it um uh has died out okay then we have objects that were used probably by a man perhaps by a man but anyway objects that were used for women and or pregnant people um this is a birthing Tusk or an approach Ric wand which was found um all over ancient Egypt it's made of um bone or Tusk and has these sort of monstrous um animals across it some of them are fertility deities like best the forward- facing um figure here um a one of these um wands or birthing tusks was found in the Tomb of who what was likely a lecor priest um alongside uh a lot of gynecological texts and we know that they were used in um preg during pregnancy okay so uh in addition to artifacts we also have architecture and physical space so we're thinking T temples homes administrative space um palaces tombs um structures that women built for instance this structure here built by chup suit um in luxur we have places that we know that they that women lived this is uh Daryl Medina an an ancient city um this is actually a two for one image because right next to the um village if you can see the the houses um or the outlines of the houses of course uh over to the left is actually a haor temple so um likely a place where women would have been employed as well okay then we have spaces where they were laid to rest of course when you think of ancient Egypt you think of tombs um because we have so many of them that are so beautifully preserved like this one um of Queen uh nefari we have spaces where they were depicted places where they were worshiped places where they were employed um so we have these remaining to us uh then you also have representational evidence so we have relief images and statuary um let's look at relief images to start so you have women depicted on temples as goddesses or otherwise um you have women depicted in tombs this is a group of morning women um uh who sometimes were employed during um New Kingdom um burial ceremonies in addition to the MERS that would have been there in any case um we have women depicted on ustria and ustria is a piece of um rock or a pottery shirt a broken piece of pottery that um ancient Egyptians used to write down um smaller smaller things right like common common things um but they also used it to draw um as well right they're not uh Papyrus is more costly so um generally when you're just writing but Pottery is everywhere if you walk across any ancient Egyptian site you can still see that there is so much Pottery on the ground um even today after we've studied so much of it um so they're using scrap pieces of pottery or scrap pieces of rock to make drawings and to write letters and and um things of that nature so just your everyday writing tasks if you were doing something more important or more official it would be done on Papi um maybe something you were going to take with you in the afterlife um things of that nature but but your common everyday writing is going to be written down on an ostrica or drawing so in this case we have images of women um also depicted she's dancing by the way in case you're wondering what she's doing um then we have uh yeah a women depicted on py for papy for example this um Book of the Dead of an ancient Egyptian woman she was a chant of Almon in the late period um yeah this is an example from the Egyptian Museum we have women depicted on statuary you have Royal women and you have uh the wives of high officials and some other higher status women depicted in statuary um is some Royal women some Queens princesses this is a uit um this is a princess princesses princesses Middle Kingdom princesses um you have women depicted with the king in this instance always Royal women depicted with the king or goddesses um here's a couple examples of menu hotep depicted with some of his wives on his uh Mortuary Temple that we've been seeing at darl B it's actually right over here in my image um in my background um uh amenhotep III one of the great Kings of ancient Egypt depicts both his mother and his wife um alongside him on what is now known as the closi of mnon but were just Monumental statues of him at his Mortuary Temple um in southern Egypt here's some am thei and two women um one of them is probably a goddess in this instance but unclear um then you have women depicted you have depictions of women in mortuary contexts um we've seen the morning women before but you also have women depicted within their own tombs or within the tombs of their husbands we also have women depicted in the banqueting scenes um especially in the New Kingdom that you will have seen on the poster for my class and whatnot and the earlier slides [Music] um and books of the Dead papy you have these offering bearers this is the godesses Isis and um nepsis uh you have mummies of women um and coffins of women and for instance this example from the Brooklyn Museum we also study the human remains um so women themselves and what that can tell us about what is going on with their life how they live did they have arthritis you know did they have a hard life did they have an easy life you can tell from um some of things in their skeletons um things of that nature we have textual evidence for ancient Egyptian women these are letters literature administrative documents official decrees um the titles women held in their life we have uh dactic literature that talks about women um this is wisdom literature you know it's usually these instructions tell things to tell your son or something um we have legal documents uh the language of the letters the language of the text itself can help us out you know are they speaking to a woman and are they speaking very formally um is has the letter been written by a woman or not has she dedic dictated it to a scribe and he has written it um that we can sort of get hset through the texts but it's a little bit more difficult as for historical evidence we have um of course the works of Mano an ancient traveler in ancient Egypt supposedly um who uh wrote his egyptica which is a history of Egypt in three volumes um and so we have what he said about that it's a period that was closer to ancient Egyptian history but not in ancient Egyptian history so even what he has written is outside of ancient Egyptian culture um yeah so you so you have to take what he said with a grain of salt um of course as well so we um so we have those accounts as well okay but let's talk about what we do not have for the study of ancient Egyptian women right um okay uh we don't have firsthand accounts right we can never actually we'll never talk to an ancient Egyptian woman sadly um we don't have an abundance of tombs owned by women we do have some of course plenty but not in the way that we have as many for men um we don't have these long tomb biographies of women in the abundance that we have them from men from all periods of time in all classes um not all classes but a wider range of classes we have um for men for women you really have to be um fairly high if you're going to have a tomb or a biography um women commonly and publicly holding High offices High the office of a high official um they we have some of course but we don't have it in the same again in the same way that we have um men holding offices of high officials we do have some female scrubs but I can there're less than 20 that I can think of um we do have some and and we know this because the the word SC gets the feminine t ending in the ancient Egyptian language um we don't have a lot there's one female vazer to the king like um person under the king that we that we know of in the Old Kingdom um so we just don't have it showing up um as as commonly as we have it for um men but they do exist right um female rulers as a standard practice we don't have we do have five or six female rulers but we that is not there is always a deviation from the norm that is always something it almost always happens at the end of a dynasty um or when the king is too young to rule and she rules in his stead until he comes of age um so while this is worked into Egyptian culture and is acceptable in Egyptian culture is outside of the Norm where um the the king is the embodiment of Horus and and has the Royal ca he has the Royal Soul within him um is it's a man the queen is also there and is important in Egypt and I think to a much greater extent than we give it credit for um I I'll dive into that when we talk about Royal women um but in any case in ancient Egypt you need both the the king and the queen to form um they're the both the heads of state and heads of religion um but in any case female rulers we don't have a standard practice it's always something slightly deviating from the norm um firm firm physical codes of law for all of ancient Egyptian history right um we don't have them writing down law codes we have some from later periods and we have hints at what was what laws were but we don't have like a physical copy this is the code book of the ancient Egyptian laws and from that we can't say women have rights for this and this and this and this because we have these law codes and it says so you know what I mean in the same way that we have um you know on the basis of sex anti-discrimination um in the US um yeah so those are things we don't have so those are things we're missing so we're also always going to be outside of ancient Egyptian culture um so we're never going to be able to say from firsthand experience that this is the way something was right and we're always outside of the context um and we're always looking at it from our own ethnocentric lens so it's very difficult to get away from um putting biases on on our own interpretations of what we're finding in the evidence okay so here are just some very cliche but true archaeological catch phrases that I will probably say at least 10 times during this class so I am um circling us back in um let's move on just a little bit but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence right so just because something didn't survive 3,000 years in the sand doesn't mean that it didn't exist at one point in time it doesn't mean that there isn't going to be a find you know in 10 years that completely changes our understanding of ancient Egyptian culture and things of that nature and then also pots do not equal people so you can't infer from the presence of a pot that those people were there for instance this is a Myan pot um that would have come that was found that was found at um a tomb within the Taos um Temple site the Tomb in it also had an Syrian helmet um and when Petri dug that tomb when or very early archaeologist dug that tomb he decided that this was evidence that the Assyrians had sacked thieves had made it all the way down to this far Southern Egypt and sacked the capital thieves at that time um which very much um is not there is no other evidence for that happening in thieves apart from this helmet that was in a tomb along with this um Myan pottery and several things from other cultures so in in fact this the person who owned this tomb was probably just a collector and not in fact an Assyrian who had sacked thieves um when there's no other evidence of that in at all um so just because you find you know um a female figurine doesn't mean a woman was there just because you find you know what I think like this um so pots do not equal people you can't make assumptions based on your findings um because humans are human and we and we travel around and we collect stuff and um you know things of that nature um okay so uh in fact I have now become the instructor who uses memes to become relatable but they're very accurate honestly um in any case um so what we have to keep in mind when studying ancient Egyptian women is the common fallacies of archaeologists so everything that you're hearing as archaeological fact is has been interpreted by someone who found it and wrote about it right because in even in Translation you can make little changes that will change the tone of a text so almost everything that we have has been interpreted by someone from a more modern culture and translate and given to us now right okay so in any case um these could not be more true and are such a good way of demonstrating some of the pitfalls in archaeology and in studying ancient Egyptian culture we will always only ever have an incomplete picture and we will always only ever be looking in from the outside right you have to be mindful of these pitfalls when hearing historical facts so we can remember um and use our critical thinking to examine a l examine the lens through which the information has come to us right um a good example of that is this uh little saying up here in the top left 2,000 years from now people will not understand the difference between a butt dial and a booty call and that's very important right um so in that same way even when we do have them writing things that we can translate and we can understand what they're saying there's always going to be these little subtexts that we will never be able to understand right um the other thing to know is that archaeologists when whenever we find something that we don't understand we're going to call it ceremonial or a ritual right like without without a doubt uh for instance this this um thing with you know Mrs Butterworth uh and the syrup bottles right is this this clearly had ritual significance my I had a professor that used to um hold up his travel coffee mug and say think about an archaeologist all of us have one of these and they would have thought we drank something ceremonially in the morning when in fact it's just a mundane glass of coffee so we have to be aware of that uh I'll do it too watch it watch me watch me call something religious in this class um but we we can never say that it wasn't and for honestly for ancient Egypt a lot of things have a religious significance and a lot of things are um the way that they practice religion is is quite different um but but keep in mind we have to be aware of the pitfalls right maybe something was a m mundane object that we're labeling ceremonial so coming back to this wig okay uh do we did anyone guess that this was the wig that was most likely that of a man um this is in the British Museum and I'll just read to you the catalog so you can see for yourself um this is a wig made from human hair impregnated with beeswax and resin this type of wig comprised of both curled strands and plates and would have been worn by a man of high status this wig is made of human hair and is said to have come from a tomb at thieves it was found in its original box made of reads now registration number 2561 an examination by a modern wig maker concluded that the standard of craftsmanship was high as high as in a good modern wig indeed the foundation was not unlike that of fashion wigs in the 1970s it is thought to be a man's wig and to get to my point about everything in archaeology being ceremonial ritual ritualistic or religious from the museum catalog they've also written wigs may also have had a symbolic purpose there are a number of literary Illusions in which wigs and hair are evoked in a sexual context one of the best known is the seduction scene in the literary text known as The Tale of Two Brothers in Egyptian thought sexual activity and rebirth after death were closely linked and the presence of a wig in a burial thus might be an illusion for hopes of rebirth as well as representing the inclusion of a precious possession in a tomb so that's a good way of them trying to hedge their bets at the end right it could just be a wig or it could be something they needed for rebirth in the afterlife um and in that way you find a lot of um archaeologists diving into both of these topics uh okay okay so let's wrap up here let's wrap up here um for today I will see you back with the Q&A send in your questions I'm going to ask you a few uh feel free to shoot me these answers in via email and we can I can discuss them anonymously anonymously in the Q&A section um or you can answer these in the Google Doc and everyone can sort of discuss so my envisioning of that is that I will put these questions in the Google Doc you can write down your answers and sign your name or sign Anonymous and I'm hoping that other people can interact with what you've answered and like you know comment underneath um unfortunately we don't have access to Canvas so I can't make a full discussion board in the way that we would and I'm not going to ask everyone to download Discord because that would be absurd um so I'm just going to do it in these Google doc and I think that that will work for our purposes um but again it's as much or as little participation as you'd like so um I'm asking these questions feel free to answer them or don't please go ahead and send me your questions um if you'd like me to discuss them in this next Q&A coming up um on Sunday I believe um do send those in early on over the weekend uh if I don't get to them in this class in this class I'll get to them in the next week's video um this week I think we'll probably read over a little bit of ancient Egyptian literature in the Q&A if I don't get a lot of questions um especially since it's the first week but maybe there'll be a flood of questions I'm not sure in any case uh stay tuned for that I will post these in the Google Doc for the discussion but just to briefly go over them what do you hope to get from this class you guys answered a lot of that in the registration but just in case you didn't get to that um what do you find most interesting about ancient Egypt who's your favorite ancient Egyptian woman do you know any um open-ended I'd love to hear any general questions you have about ancient Egypt um I give a fair number of public talks and I've and I noticed that sort of afterwards occasionally people have burning questions that they've always wanted to ask about ancient Egypt so uh here's your opportunity throw those over to me um and I think we'll call it a day thanks for watching this first week's video and I will see you all in the Q&A