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 [Music] support at FH Huntress 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 3,000 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 we could say you know Cleopatra is really close to that so the py

ramids at Giza are about 2400 BC not only are we closer in time to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to the beginning of ancient Egyptian veronic 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 atsun naaz asks seriously how did the Sphinx 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 ac

tually 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 NOS is already missing thein depicts the king hafra hafra a king of the fourth

Dynasty built the second largest pyramid at Giza at silent USI asks so what did ancient Egyptians talk like like what did it sound like hieroglyphic Saints 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 lurgical language of the Coptic church and so if you go watch The Mummy you can hear much of what ancient Egypt sounded like we

are able to phonetically reconstruct what it sounded like all mummy movies have somebody named imotep imotep was the architect responsible for Designing the first pyramid built in Egypt at wide youth Styles asks what are some ancient Egyptian medicine and tools they created that are used to this day ancient Egyptian medicine was pretty Advan 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 going to sprout and which one Sprouts first is going to tell her whether she's going to 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 women does have an effect on the germination of grain at P Puffin stuff asks did ancient Egypt have bars in no ancie

nt 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 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 ance

stors 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 at Princesa de New York 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 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 a funny shaped top that's what we call the bent pyramid at a site called dashore that pyramid is actually built by the father of hufu 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 at redim asks how did King Tutt 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 tutt's tomb was one of the archaeological 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 w

ho'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 B King tat 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 aanan who introduced a monotheistic religion in ancient Egypt and tan was one of the Kings who returned ancient Egypt to its original polytheisti

c religion and opened the temples again the fact that he was shortlived not well known in later Egypt probably contributed to the fact that his tomb was preserved nobody thought to look for it at K Bronx 2 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 of 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 have required in 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 plum Bob which is a weight on a string and with the w

eighted 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 plum Bob next to it and you just correct you keep chiseling away at that stone until it is perfectly straight so it would have 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 chain 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 at se vanford asks who is the best Pharaoh many people might say that hfu the builder of the Great Pyramid was the best Pharaoh but my personal fa

vorite Pharaoh would probably be hot shepit chepet 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 at 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 those in me 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 have 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 w

ould have been not something you could climb ancient 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 there'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 ston

e 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 at Beto 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 thron

e at Lambe Turing asks did you know that Cleopatra the last queen of EGP 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 Julia Caesar she also had children with Mark Anthony she was definitely playing to keep her kingdom at Paul a 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 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 somethin

g 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 at Andy doodle 56 asks will someone ever deafer 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 hup D nessu and nen for the C of ammot the name of this guy so n ammot mess and for the C of ammot born of Eep his father's name at Roxy b1994 asks does anybody know why the ancient Egyptians never painted people front on but only sideways on let's take a look look at an illust

rated 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 persp

ec persectives 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 ad haara salisu 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 So

cial relations with the people they had known in life most people in ancient Egypt weren't mummified it was an 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 have included oils and resins and we also know that they used forms of salt that were naturally occur

ring in the desert to dry the body we know for instance that they would remove the internal organs internal organs are mushy if you're going to rot it's going to 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 often times the heart is protected by the placement of 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 a

nd often the brain was in fact removed from the skull cavity before a mummy was interred at Miss Jenny 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 bones scramble the brain so that it's more or less liquid and then with a combination of gravity and the hook on That M

etal 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 at rafab 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 diet this is in fac

t a Consolidated lump of the stratag graphic layers this section represents probably between 30 and 5050 Years of Living you can see pot CHS here 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 aphrodesiac in ancient Egypt at she wrot murder asks wh

o the deciphered hieroglyphics and how did they do it hieroglyphs were deciphered by a French scholar named shampo yan shampo yan was one of a group of European scholars who was working on 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 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 t

he middle is in demoic 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 shampo Yong was aided by a 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 champon 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 at George Styles 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 g

ods 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 this was something that everybody who could afford one wanted a copy of because it's 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 at just talking too asks what were ancient Egyptians scarabs actually used for most Egyptian scarabs were ring bezels so they were on a piece of metal that would have been on a ring and they had an inscribed bit on the flat bottom that was used as a seal seals like this 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 at ducky Aisha asks what's your favorite thing you've learned about women in ancient Egypt from your archaeological finds women in 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 then got off work when their women in their household had their periods so when women had their period they could expect th

at their husbands had to do the housework for them at black Jess rabbit asks I wonder what the ancient Egyptians view on sex was the ancient Egyptians really liked sex and they were not prud about it and they weren't shy about it they actually did have a euphemism for 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 wa

y 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 didn't really liked at Alex yacht 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 de we have the god Horus 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 at mazam Mara asks y'all ancient Egypt is wild to me how did they just discover a new Queen and over a hundred 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 t

hings that are not visible when you walk on the ground we use X-ray fluoresence and we point an xrf x-ray fluoresence 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 TTS team probably but we have a ton left to uncover so those are all the questions for today thanks for watching egyptology [Music] support