Egyptologist Answers Ancient Egypt Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

I'm Professor Laurel Bestock, let's answer some

questions

from the Internet. This is Egyptology

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in FH. Huntress asks when exactly

ancient

Egypt began according to you. Ancient Egypt is really

ancient

if we talk about when the first king of Egypt actually became king. speaking of 3,000 B.C. and then we put ourselves on this timeline that would be even 5,000 years, so this would be when we change from B.C. ad, we could say you know Cleopatra is very close to that, so the pyramids of Giza are about 2400 BC not only are we closer in time to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to the beginning of the Veronica story of ancient Egypt, there is even more time between Cleopatra and the pyramids than between Cleopatra and us ancient Egypt was already ancient in ancient Egypt atsun naaz seriously asks how did the Sphinx's nose break?

Our best evidence for how the Sphinx's nose was broken comes from a 15th century Arab historian explaining that someone who was angry actually deliberately shot the Sphinx's nose because he was upset that people revered this Monument. from ancient Egypt, this person was later lynched by another local population who worshiped the Sphinx, so there are also stories of the Sphinx's nose being shot by Napoleon's army. We think we are probably wrong in part because we have drawings of the Sphinx that predate Napoleon's. The expedition and the NOS are already missing, it depicts King Hafra Hafra, a king of the fourth dynasty built the second largest pyramid in Giza in silence.

USI asks how the ancient Egyptians spoke, what did it sound like the hieroglyphic speech of the saints, we know a great treatise on what Egyptian sounded in part because the last stage of the Coptic language of ancient Egypt was written in Greek letters that we can still read and, In fact, it is still the Lurgic language of the Coptic church, so if you go to see The Mummy, we can hear a lot of what ancient Egypt sounded like. We can phonetically reconstruct what it sounded like. Every mummy movie has someone named Imotep. Imotep was the architect responsible for designing the first pyramid built in Egypt when he was very young.

Styles asks what some ancient Egyptian medicines are. and the tools that they created and that are used to this day ancient Egyptian medicine was quite advanced. We know, for example, that they performed surgery to relieve pressure on the brain. We have things, for example, like pregnancy tests in ancient Egypt, a woman wanting to know if she is pregnant. and you want to know what the sex of the baby will be, you should urinate on both barley and wheat seeds, if you are pregnant, they are going to sprout and which one sprouts first will tell you if you are going to have a girl or a boy and modern The evidence on this has suggested that , in fact, the human growth hormone that is so increased in pregnant women has an effect on grain germination in P Puffin things

questions

whether ancient Egypt had rods in any ancient Egypt did not have rods, but the Egyptians were definitely very sociable and alcohol was part of their social life.

We know that the Egyptians drank a ton of beer and quite a bit of wine, and this was done mainly in homes and even in tombs, the underground part of the Tomb could be where your burial chamber is nothing more than the aerial part of the Tomb is a Festival Palace. There is a festival called the beautiful Valley Festival where the goal was to go get drunk at the graves with your ancestors to make beer and wine. large-scale breweries in cities even before the first king of Egypt was present in 3000 BC. C. in Princess of New York asks when watching this video in class about what ancient Egypt was like and I'm pretty sure it's just clips of scenes from Assassin's Creed Origins So when we watch the trailer for Assassin's Creed Origins, there's a lot of things that They are accurate to the landscape itself, this kind of green strip around the Nile, then cliffs and desert a little further away and the monuments are reconstructed very accurately, you can see the pyramid with a funny shaped top, that's what we call the folded pyramid at a site called dashore, that pyramid was actually built by hufu's father, the guy who built the Great Pyramid, the reason it's folded is because it's very early in the history of building pyramids they were still discovering how to build perfect pyramids and we think this one broke while it was being built and they changed the angle so the weight on the top wasn't as great.

Redim asks how King Tutt managed to be so popular even though he lived such a short life, King Tut is super popular among us because his tomb was found intact. The discovery of King Tutt's tomb was one of the archaeological wonders of the world. If you are going to see these things in Cairo, it will take up a lot of time. so many rooms, you have chariots, you have shrines after shrines, nested shrines built around the body of the king who is buried not just in one gold coffin but in multiple gold coffins, the beautiful face mask also in gold inlaid with precious stones that is above King B was not that popular in ancient Egypt;

He lived at a time when later Egyptians did, in fact, write out of history, so he was the successor of a king sometimes referred to as the heretic king Aanan, who introduced a monotheistic religion to ancient Egypt. and Tan was 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 was not well known in later Egypt, probably contributed to the fact that his tomb was preserved and no one thought to look for it. in K Bronx 2 asks did you know that we can't recreate the Egyptian pyramids with modern

tech

nology?

I guess that means maybe we weren't the most advanced the human species has ever been. We absolutely have the

tech

nology to recreate the pyramids. The tools that the Egyptians were using to create these large blocks of stone to make the pyramid were of two types: rough stone balls of very hard stone that fell repeatedly and wore down the stone to make the largest quarry. With the fine chiseling of these blocks it was being done. copper tools, these copper tools would have required a large workforce just to keep the copper tools sharp, so how do you get a straight vertical side on a piece of stone?

Gravity is used here and a tool that engineers still use a bob plum which is a weight on a string and with the heavy string just hanging just hold it in your hand you know that string is absolutely vertical so if you're trying to put the side of a piece of stone upright, you hold a bob plum next to it. and just correct, you keep chiselling that stone until it's perfectly straight, which is why it would have taken decades to build the Great Pyramid of Giza. The stone was mostly quarried locally. You need the stones themselves to be square and the ground to be Level.

How do you get to ground level? You carve a chain channel into the ground and fill it with water and the water itself will again level the gravity and you can mark that water level all over the site, so in the end it's not technologically impossible to build. pyramids it is already a social choice we choose not to build more pyramids it is not that we have lost the ability in se vanford asks who is the best pharaoh many people could say that the builder of the Great Pyramid was the best pharaoh but My favorite pharaoh would probably be Hot Shepit Chepet was a woman who reigned as a king, not a queen.

That's not so much what we think because she was trying to pretend she was a man but because this was a role that men generally played in her inscriptions, for example, she still uses feminine forms of the verbs of the words to refer to herself. , but she is shown as a male pharaoh in salmaan asks watching this show called Ancient Aliens on Netflix um yeah so I can't sleep now why do the pyramids of Egypt match the ones in me Mexico the pyramids of Egypt don't actually They match the pyramids of Mexico They are different in substantial ways The king is buried in a small chamber beneath the pyramid in Egypt The pyramids as you see them today look gigantic The stairs are a little rough and that is not how they would have looked in ancient times, so the final step in making a pyramid would have been to line it with very fine limestone and then shave the sides to leave it perfectly smooth.

It has not been something that could be scaled in ancient times. The pyramids in Mexico are not tombs at all. These are bases for temples and the temples are accessed by climbing the pyramid which said why they look similar. Why is this basic pyramid shape found in multiple forms? different places in the ancient world and there the answer is quite simple and that is that you can't build much of that size without modern technology and without steel, so to get a really tall stone structure it has to be smaller at the top . than at the bottom, so there aren't many things you can build that reach that height using this technology and that's what we really think about why we see what looks superficially similar in such different places in the ancient world.

Beto asks why ancient Egypt falls, so the fall of Ancient Egypt from a real perspective, when do there stop being kings in Egypt? Actually, when Egypt joins the Roman Empire, when Cleopatra loses the throne at Lambe, Turing asks: did you know that Cleopatra was the last queen of EGP Egypt? she was actually Greek yes, she knew that Cleopatra of Egypt was actually Greek, she was descended from a Greek family that had been ruling Egypt for about 300 years when Alexander the Great in 332 BC. C. conquered Egypt. Egypt later became part of empires in other parts of the Mediterranean.

We don't actually know much about Cleopatra, we do know that she was bilingual and spoke Egyptian and Greek. Cleopatra was involved with Julia Caesar, she also had children with Mark Antony, she was definitely playing to keep her kingdom in Paul for a long time. a string of letters and numbers asks Egypt is overrated anyway, in my opinion, what did they invent that was so transformative in the modern world? We could talk, for example, about the Papyrus mobile writing platform, we write on paper, which is a Chinese invention, but that writing should be done with a pen and you should be able to send it somewhere easily, that's something in which Egyptians were absolute pioneers.

The adobe brick architecture of ancient Egypt was so amazing that the ancient Egyptian word for brick has been translated into English, which is where our word Adobe comes from. The ancient Egyptian finally recognizes how excellent his architecture was in Andy Doodle 56 Question: Will anyone ever be more deaf in this ancient language? Imagine the knowledge lost. In fact, someone has deciphered the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, and scholars can read virtually any inscription. We found this to be a very typical type. for 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 is what the inscription tells us but we read this hup D nessu and nen for the C for ammunition this guy's name so in a mess of ammo and for the C of ammo born from Eep his father's name in Roxy b1994 question does anyone know why the ancient Egyptians never painted people from the front but only from the side?

Let's take a look at an illustrated copy of the Book of the Dead so they chose the most typical appearance the most perfect for each part of the body the person is shown in profile so that you have the nose in profile but the eye is always shown from the front on The shoulders are always shown from the front in pairs. Although 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, showing the same thing from different angles and from different perspectives from which they wanted an image. a person to capture the essence of that person in a way that was much more eternal his art was deliberately unlike anything you could see with your own eyes it is rather the sight of God ad haara salisu asks why did the Egyptians mummify their dead what is The goal of preserving the dead and they did it because they believed that in the afterlife people needed their bodies, they continued to eat and drink, talk and breathe and even establish social relationships with the people they had known in life, most of people in ancient Egypt were not mummified, it was an expensive process, in fact, it was not necessary to preserve the bodies.

The Egyptian desert itself does a great job of preserving bodies, but for those people who did and could afford to use mummification cloth, it really was a big job. expensive in the ancient world the linen used would have included oils and resins and we also know that they used forms of salt found naturally in the desert to dry the body, we know for example that they removed the internal organs. They are soft. If you are going to rot, it will be because there is so much water.in your internal organs so you take them out and mummify them separately in some periods they were placed in jars many times the heart is protected by the placement of a heart-shaped amulet that is placed over that part of the body.

The ancient Egyptians did not care much for the brain, and the brain was often removed from the skull cavity before a mummy was buried. Miss Jenny asks how did the ancient Egyptians take the brain out of the nose during embalming so that this big wet thing on the head that needs to come out during embalming could be pulled out through the nose and we have metal hooks that we think were used jamming them to break them? the bones in the nose churn the brain to make it more or less liquid and then, with a combination of gravity and That Metal's hook, you pull it out through the nose because they thought the heart was the seat of intelligence, not the brain , removing it was a One way to ensure that the head would be preserved in Rafab asks: Did ancient Egypt have cookies?

The ancient Egyptians had bread and they didn't have sugar so their baked goods were probably not sweet and delicious, bread was the staple food that was even used as wages as a kind of money so they would pay you in bread and probably that was the majority of most people's diet. In fact, it is a Consolidated. piece of the graphic strata layers, this section probably represents between 30 and 5050 years of life. You can see the CHS here here, but when we put it under the microscope we can also see things like food debris, we have fish bones, we have tiny ones. pieces of grain, but we know something about the legumes that they ate, things like lentils, we have onions and other vegetables that they ate.

Lettuce was considered an aphrodisiac in ancient Egypt. She wrote down the murder and asks who deciphered the hieroglyphs and how they did it. The hieroglyphics were deciphered by a French scholar named Shampo Yan Shampo Yan was one of a group of European scholars who were 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 Toic period. the last part of Egyptian history is basically a legal document about taxes and the temple, the top part of the inscription is in Egyptian hieroglyphs and the middle one is in Demoic script, the bottom one is Greek, we have never lost the ability to read greek now.

It took more than 20 years after this was discovered for the decipherment to be completed. Now Champo Yong was helped by a guess he had when he saw small circles around a set of hieroglyphics in the hieroglyphic portion that it was probably a real name and the first thing he could read was, in fact, the name of Cleopatra. . Once Champon was able to read the Rosetta Stone, this was truly cracking the code of the hieroglyphics and this led to him being able to read an increasing number of inscriptions on George Styles. read the Egyptian Book of the Dead, if so what's interesting about it?

We have read the Egyptian Book of the Dead, we have a fragment of a copy here, this is only a part, this papyrus is many, many, many meters long, so the part What we see illustrated here is in fact what We call the weighing of the heart. This man'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 will be. Do not speak against him and that means he can go to the Hereafter. This very long scroll from the Book of the Dead would be rolled up and tucked between the dead man's legs in his tomb.

This was something that everyone who could afford it wanted. copy of because they are spells that allow you to enter the Afterlife and be successful there, that is like a cheat sheet to successfully reach the Afterlife just by talking. He also asks what the ancient Egyptians' scarabs were actually used for most Egyptian scarabs. They were ring bezels so they were on a piece of metal that would have been on a ring and they had a drill bit inscribed on the flat bottom that was used as a seal seals like this a scarab rolls a ball of dung down a hill the Egyptians They associated that image with the Rising Sun and credited the Beetle with creating the sun, so by having a Beetle as a stamp you are linking to the Sun's Rebirth every day in ducky.

Aisha asks you what is your favorite thing that you have learned about women in ancient Egypt from her archaeological finds. Women in ancient Egypt had a status that was really rare in the ancient world. They could own things, they could own property, they could decide which of their sons inherited their property and then left work when the women in their household had their periods, so when women had their periods they could expect their husbands to have to do housework for them in black Jess Rabbit asks. I wonder what the ancient Egyptians' opinion on sex was. The ancient Egyptians really liked sex and weren't prudish about it.

They weren't shy about it, they actually had a euphemism for having sex, they said they were having a nice day, it was just totally accepted that sex was a normal, pleasurable part of life and not something that was stigmatized in the same way that it has. been in many other cultures, one way we can really see this, the ancient Egyptian language didn't have the word virgin, there was no idea that having sex changed your social standing, it was just something that people didn't really like in the yacht Alex. Question: Don't all Egyptian deities have animal heads?

Not all ancient Egyptian deities have animal heads, but many of them do. We have a lot of gods here in this part of the book of We have the god Horus that we can see here. A falcon head particularly associated with royalty in the scene is Anubis and he is shown with the jackal head that is typical of gods associated with cemeteries. We think that's partly because cemeteries in the desert are places where jackals would have actually roamed in mazam. Mara asks all of you, ancient Egypt is crazy to me, how did they discover a new Queen and over a hundred new mummies, from aerial photographs to now very high tech satellites that we can look at from the air and see patterns of difference on the ground which can be related to things that are not visible when you walk on the ground we use x-ray fluorescence and we point an as pigment.

Lapis lazuli is the purest blue pigment available, it is also very expensive and the only ancient source of lapis lazuli is in what is modern Afghanistan, which is very far away, so questions about the interactions between Egypt and its world in general they're new. types of questions that technology opens up for us, we probably won't find another TTS king team, but we have a lot left to discover, so that's all the questions for today, thanks for watching Egyptology

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