Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can’t argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.
In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.
i hate when people in movies/tv are reading ancient languages and they translate everything really smoothly and poetically, as if when people who study ancient languages aren’t consulting three different commentaries and sobbing profusely when we read
ok so like…. it says
“come you all into the deepest cavern, or maybe that’s fireplace, depends on usage, and having come may you give your…. treasures? Skin? Pants? I don’t know, something…. to the….. about-to-be-adored guy, that one who…. okay, he either causes earthquakes or sleeps a lot, I think this might be an idiom….”
“ok, sorry that took so long and i hate to disappoint but i’m still not entirely sure what it means, like, it could be something about a religious ceremony or it could be a dick joke. leaning towards dick joke, might be both. knowing the ancients, probably both. this could very well be an ancient dick temple and we should probably leave.”
Funnest part is when you get shit like this:
Why yes that is a text comprised of almost exclusively crocodile hieroglyphs.
We also can’t get a coherent translation because the grammar makes absolutely no sense. Participles and Participial statements all the way. Sobek who is Crocodile of Crocodopolis who advances the Crocodile for the Crocodiles….
The crocodile hieroglyph is also used to write sovereign and an adjective meaning power…so the text is suuuuuuuper confusing.
I can’t help but wonder if the crocodile hieroglyph text (which I never knew about, that is AMAZING) is the ancient equivalent of a sestina or another complex poem form. With the crocodile symbol meaning so many different things, and the result being so difficult to translate, it might make more sense as a poem or some other stylistically rigid text.
Either that, or it was the Egyptian equivalent of a student being made to write lines on the chalkboard.
I will not take the name of Lord Sobek in vain
I will not take the name of Lord Sobek in vain
I will not take the name of Lord Sobek in vain
I will not…“Shakes out chiseling hand” Take the name of Lord Sobek in vain….
Looks like an ancient shitpost to me.
mai nayme is hep and wen i wryt upon the wal so smooth and wite i bless the kynnge commend his akh but then get tyred and carve the croc
It’s the equivalent of “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”
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
Who needs Atlantis when Ancient Egypt was basically the Precursor Civilization the Greeks and Romans lived in the shadow of?
name a more iconic civilization i’ll wait
You wanna know how much older Ancient Egypt was than Ancient Greece? To the Ancient Greeks, the events of the Iliad were back in the dim reaches of antiquity, so far back nobody really knew if they ever even happened.
To the Ancient Egyptians, the most likely timeframe for the events of the Iliad happened during a time period known as the “New Kingdom,” because it came after the Old and Middle Kingoms and the first two Intermediate Periods. That’s right: Back when the Greeks were having their foundational myths of heroes and gods, the Egyptians were in the middle of a “New Kingdom” and the pyramids were so old everyone had forgotten what they were even built for.
Now that we’re on this spree of heartwarming or -breaking ancient Egyptian stuff, do you guys want to see a few Egyptian dog names? The internet cast the Egyptians as cat people pur sang, but the fact that crown prince Thutmose named his cat is actually a rare thing. Cats were kept mostly as pest control and, despite occassionally being portrayed on stelae and reliefs, didn’t often seem to be considered companian animals. But dogs? Dogs were, and they always had names.
bhkAi, “Gazelle”
AbAqr, “Hound” (Old Berber)
phts, “Black one”
tqrw, “Khenfet-kettle”
tknrw (?)
Hmw-m-mA, “The-tail-is-as-a-lion’s”
djw-nw, “The fifth”
n-mr.n=i, “I don’t like”
anx.w, “Living one”
TAw-n-anx-n-snbi, “Breath-of-life-for-Senebi”
mniw-pw, “He is a shepherd”
aia, “Woofer”
I can’t get over the lion’s tail one!
Unlike a lot of civilizations who used lions as symbols of power without actually knowing what they looked like (*cough cough* Europe), ancient Egypt had a small local lion population, (with a larger population living in the nearby Sub-Saharan). They also had the world’s first zoo! (They even occasionally mummified lions.) Ancient Egyptians had contact with real living lions, which is reflected in their art…
compared to say, the accuracy of European artwork 2 thousand years later:
Point is, Egyptians actually knew what lions looked liked! Which makes me super curious about what ancient Egyptian dog breeds were out there walking around with tails that reasonably well-informed people felt able to compare to a lion’s.
Ancient Egyptian dog names! Some other cool facts, but dog names!
every emotion I have ever experienced exists on a spectrum that can be best and most concisely summarized by Ancient Egyptian Golden Death Masks
don’t know what this emotion is called, but I’ve felt it every forsaken minute of every accursed day ever since the miserable curse of Sentience was thrust onto my unwilling aching shoulders
May I present to you: the Ancient Egyptian Golden Death Mask Alignment Chart.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Who needs Atlantis when Ancient Egypt was basically the Precursor Civilization the Greeks and Romans lived in the shadow of?
name a more iconic civilization i’ll wait
You wanna know how much older Ancient Egypt was than Ancient Greece? To the Ancient Greeks, the events of the Iliad were back in the dim reaches of antiquity, so far back nobody really knew if they ever even happened.
To the Ancient Egyptians, the most likely timeframe for the events of the Iliad happened during a time period known as the “New Kingdom,” because it came after the Old and Middle Kingoms and the first two Intermediate Periods. That’s right: Back when the Greeks were having their foundational myths of heroes and gods, the Egyptians were in the middle of a “New Kingdom” and the pyramids were so old everyone had forgotten what they were even built for.
my internal monologue when Ancient Egypt is mentioned: [don’t talk about imhotep and the first codified diagnostic manual. the fact you know so much about it is deeply weird and nobody cares about medicine that much]
That sounds fascinating and I want to know. Please.
The year is 1862, and antiquities dealer (and forger) and self-made Egyptologist Edwin Smith steals a papyrus from an antiquities seller in Luxor. I could go on a whole separate rant about European colonialists treating culturally significant artifacts like grab ‘n go bags and have done so here.
Anyway, Edwin’s pilfered scroll gets translated in 1930, and it turns out have been a transcript from about the 17th century BCE of a papyrus written by a man named Imhotep, a vizier in the court of King Djozer who practiced neurosurgery, and made forays into astronomy and architecture too.
Now, Imhotep was wicked smart. As in “when the Greeks met him they incorporated him into the pantheon as a magician of Ascelpius because they couldn’t figure out how he had such a comprehensive understanding of the human body and treating it’s ills” smart. His scroll was a record of treatment of 48 cases, ranging from fractures of the hand to open abscessed wounds to trauma injuries to the skull. Side note: a lot of medicine during this period was considered to be the work of occult phenomena, and so a lot of treatments involved charms to ward off malignant spirits and incantations to aid in curing them.
What’s remarkable about the Edwin scroll is that it is the first recorded account of medicine without the attachment of spiritual or occult phenomena as the root cause or a means of treatment; it’s a purely scientific endeavour, complete with an anatomical glossary, diagnosis, summary, method of treatment and prognosis for each injury and illness.
It’s the first evidence-based, scientific diagnostic manual.
The most significant case is Case 45, concerning a patient with “bulging masses — they may be compared to the unripe hemat fruit which is cool, and hard to the touch” in the breast. These masses are malignant tumours, the manifestation of breast cancer, and provide us with the first ever recorded case of cancer.
Imhotep knew that a tumour that has hot to the touch was a sign of infection (the inflammatory immune response produces tumor (swelling), rubor (redness), dolor (pain), and significantly to this calor, or heat). Infected abscesses could be treated with draining and a topical poultice. In the section for therapy for Case 45, though, there’s one single, haunting line:
“There is none.”
In 2500BCE, well before germ theory, aseptic technique, chemotherapy and antibiotics, a surgeon picked up a scroll of fresh papyrus and provided us with the first ever codified, scientific diagnostic manual for injury and illness, and the first written record of the emperor of all maladies that we call cancer.
That’s pretty fucking dope.
(If the cancer aspect is something you’re interested in, I highly recommend The Emperor Of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It’s a record of the diagnosis and treatment of cancer from the days of Imhotep to the present day, and it’s a fascinating read)
A small fat bird, like the above, is the hieroglyph used in Ancient Egyptian to mean “wicked” or evil”.
The phrase above him (the inscription should be read from the top down) is “Nb s3″ or “Lord of the son of”. Genitive is usually implied in this sort of phrase without a connecting word, meaning:
This birb has literally created the sentence and declared himself “ Lord of the Son of Evil”
today i learnt that king tutankhamun made sure that he had a condom with him in his next life. i never want to hear a dude say he didn’t have the time to be prepared or didn’t remember to buy condoms. if king tut had the common decency of making sure someone put a condom in his resting place alongside one of the biggest treasures ever so he could practice safe sex in the afterlife no present day dude has an excuse for not wearing condoms.
here it is
it’s made of animal intestine
and they know it was his because they found residue inside that they were able to DNA-match to him
yes, that kind of residue
My mans Tutankhamun was already busting a nut when Osiris was measuring his soul to go see his ol man Ra like imagine having such guts.
