In turbulent times, let Egyptology be your resistance. That’s the spirit in which we (Kara and Amber) sat down for this episode — and if that sounds like an unusual rallying cry, well, you’ve come to the right place.

Today’s topic is the Ren: the name. And before you go, I know what a name is, you don’t. Because the ancient Egyptians understood something about names that we’ve spent the last several thousand years forgetting (and that the modern American government is actively exploiting right now; yes, I know, we make everything political and history is now and all that…).

What Is the Ren?

In Faulkner’s Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian, the entry for rn (ren as we would say it in an Egyptian reading class) is almost insultingly short. Two phonetic characters, the mouth hieroglyph (r) and a single water sign (n). No dramatic determinative. No elaborate sign to illustrate it. Compare this to the Ba — the human-headed bird that flutters, moves and exists visually in the world — or the Ka, with its famous outstretched arms, intimate and embodied, ready to embrace. The Ren just sits there with no explanatory symbolism whatsoever. The writing of the word betrays the secrecy surrounding the name itself.

But that spareness is the point. The Ren’s power is its abstraction. It is not a thing you can see or touch. It is a sound, an utterance, a vibration shaped by lips and tongue and the specific quality of a human mind. And this is where things get interesting: the hieroglyphic word rn begins with the mouth sign, because of course it does. The name lives in speech. It is born from the human body in the most literal sense possible. The name is utterance incarnate, which takes us to the Egyptian understanding of creation.

In the Beginning Was the Name

The Memphite Theology is an inscription said to be copied from an ancient, worm-eaten papyrus, even though this particular version comes to us as the so-called Shabaka Stone of the 25th Dynasty Kushite kings, and it describes the god Ptah creating the world through utterance. Ptah conceives (sia, abstract thought) of things with his heart (ib) and then brings them into material existence through his mouth (r) using the force of heka (magic). He speaks the name of something, and it becomes real by passing through the lips, tongue, and teeth.

In the beginning was the word, as we know from the Bible. The idea that spoken language is a creative force, that naming something is a form of making it, runs through ancient Egyptian creation theology, including the Memphite Theology, through the Hebrew Bible, through Neoplatonic philosophy, and straight into the digital age, where the naming of things (brands, identities) still confers power. The ancient Egyptians were not doing something primitive or naive when they enshrined this idea. They were identifying something true. A name captures the essence of something.

And crucially, in this theology, the name is not just descriptive. It doesn’t label something that already exists. It creates the thing. Which means that whoever speaks the name first, whoever utters it properly, with the right cadence and pronunciation, has a claim on the essence of the thing named. They hold a piece of it. And this is where the Ren gets genuinely dangerous.

Isis and the Secret Name of the Sun God

The most famous story about the power of the Ren comes from Papyrus Turin 1993, a 20th Dynasty text currently in the Egyptian Museum in Turin. It tells the story of Isis and Re.

Re, the sun god, is old. He is aging and drooling—both poignant and humanizing for the head of the Egyptian pantheon—and Isis, the Mistress of Magic, decides to use the moment to her advantage. She collects his spittle and uses it to fashion a clay snake, which she places in his path. Re is bitten by this snake made from his own essence. He cannot heal himself: you cannot cure a wound that comes from within your own body, apparently. And so he has to call upon Isis.

She shows up, calm and helpful, and says: I can heal you. But first, I need to know your secret name. She doesn’t want the name that priests chant in temples, or the name carved onto obelisks. She wants his other name, the real name, the one that encapsulates his true essence, the name that, if you knew it, would give you power over the sun god himself.

Re, who is dying, tells it to her. She heals him. And the text informs us he passes the name to her with the stipulation that she share it only with her son Horus, who can use it only for healing.

There is so much to unpack here. Isis is conniving—she engineers the crisis herself, lest we forget—and yet she is also the indispensable linchpin of the entire solar cycle, the one who heals the sun and ensures that he can rise again. She is the mother of god. She has to be duplicitous to get what she needs, because that’s what women in patriarchal systems have to do: they work around the system, not through it. And her workaround gives her—and by extension Horus—genuine, permanent power over the most important force in the cosmos. (Just note that she has to use her son as the formal mechanism to take that power. She can’t wield that power herself within patriarchy.)

It’s also worth noting that this story has a very familiar ring. Isis creates a crisis so that a god can be healed and reborn, and that power is then passed to her son. The pattern is ancient. Judas. Jesus. Mary knowing her son was doomed to die for the sins of all humankind. It did not begin in Galilee.

The Name Is a Tool of Power (And Someone Else Usually Wields It)

Here’s what the ancient Egyptians knew, and what we mostly pretend not to know: we do not name ourselves.

We are named by others. By parents, by institutions, by the state. And when someone in society decides to choose their own name—through transition, through divorce, through reclaiming ancestry—it is, as I put it, “rather an F you to society at large, and people don’t take it well.”

Enslaved people in America were stripped of their names and given the names of their enslavers. This is not a metaphor. It was a deliberate act of erasure—an understanding, conscious or not, that to take someone’s name is to take their identity, their lineage, their claim on their own essence, to make them legible in the system of power. Formerly enslaved people who took new names after emancipation were not just making an administrative change. They were performing an act of profound self-creation.

Women who change their names at marriage, and then change them back, sometimes can’t produce the right documents to satisfy a bureaucracy. This is also not a metaphor. The SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act), just recently killed by Congress, would have required voters to produce documentary proof of citizenship that matches their current legal name. Since approximately 69 million American women have changed their surnames at marriage—with their birth certificates unchanged, of course—this provision creates an enormous paperwork burden that falls almost entirely on women. The name you were given, the name you choose, the name on your passport, the name on your birth certificate: suddenly, these mismatches become mechanisms of legal disenfranchisement.

The ancient Egyptians would have recognized this—the name as a tool of ownership—immediately. My own name is a good illustration of the principle: my formal given name is Kathlyn Mary Cooney. That’s on my passport and driver’s license. My mother preemptively nicknamed me Kara to prevent anyone from calling me Kathy (!), and it’s been Kara ever since — appearing on no official document anywhere. When someone calls and asks for Kathleen (because who knows how to pronounce the Anglican Irish Kathlyn?), I know immediately: they don’t know me. They don’t have my secret name.

(My publisher, American University Press, later asked me to use Kara Cooney on my Recycling for Death book cover — which crossed the streams rather dramatically and left my actual secret name thoroughly scrambled. Very Isis. Very Re.)

Names in the Pyramid Texts: 45 Ways to Protect, Weaponize, and Transform

For this podcast, I did a search of the Pyramid Texts of Unas—the oldest religious corpus in the world, inscribed on the walls of his burial chamber at Saqqara—and found 45 mentions of rn, for “name.” And, of course, a quick glance at the text shows Unas’ name in cartouche visible everywhere on the walls. The magical spells had to name him repeatedly to have any effect.

In Utterance 137, there is a curse against anyone who “shall speak evil against the name of Unas.” Slander. Gossip. Misusing a name in speech. The ancient Egyptians understood that once a name is out in the world—written on a wall, spoken aloud—it can be turned against you. You can be libeled. You can be slandered. You can have your reputation destroyed through the same medium that keeps you alive. The name is vulnerability as much as it is power.

Utterance 143 is wild. Unas takes on the name of Horus: “You are born, O Horus, as the one whose name is he before whom the earth quakes,“ and then we read Seth’s epithet: he before whom the sky shakes. These are primeval names, Ur-names, that predate even the physical world. By speaking them, by claiming them, Unas is not just identifying himself as divine. He is reshaping the form of that divinity. The name does that: it transforms. It is not merely descriptive. It is constitutive.

Utterance 147 goes further still: lift yourself up, so said they, in your name: God. The king is given a new name in the afterlife. He is addressed as God—netjer—and this address is not flattery. It is installation. The name confers the identity it declares.

A Brief Taxonomy: Name vs. Title vs. Epithet

Before we go further, it’s worth distinguishing between three things that are often lumped together:

The name (rn) is your personal, individual designation. It belongs to you alone; or rather, it is you alone. Other people share your title. No one else has your specific name in full, with the monikers of your parents.

The titulary is a rank. It tells you where someone sits in the social and cosmic hierarchy. Scribe of the mat is different from king’s scribe. Every woman could be a nebet per (Mistress of the House) in theory — but no two people had the same personal name attached to it. The titulary situates you. The name individualizes you.

The epithet is affiliation and protection. Beloved of Amun. Daughter of Thutmose. Epithets connect you to your tribe, your protectors, your people. They are the shields that surround a name. When Nefertiti receives the epithet meret Nefer-kheperu-Re—beloved of Akhenaten—it does not describe her. It marks her as his protected wife.

Put them all together on a coffin, as Egyptians regularly did: Osiris-Scribe-Amenemhat-beloved of his father, and you become ranked. You are loved. You are protected. You can even be divinized. Your name sits at the center of all of it.

Akhenaten and the Obsessive Naming of God

No discussion of names in ancient Egypt can avoid Akhenaten’s relationship with the name of the Aten. It is, in many ways, the theological center of his entire religious experiment.

The early name of the Aten—Ra-Horakhty who rejoices in the horizon, in his name Shu who is Aten—is complex, syncretic, a nest of allusions and connections to older solar traditions. Akhenaten, characteristically, found this unsatisfying. He revised the name later in his reign. He excised the Horakhty element because it was connected to an actual god. He created something cleaner, more abstract, more fully intellectualized.

For Akhenaten, the name was his theology, and he was the one who formulated the name. The way you named the god determined what kind of god you had. And a sun that is pure light, pure warmth, pure creative energy, without the old hawk-headed body, without the accumulated mythology, required a name that held none of those ancillary things. The Aten’s name was Akhenaten’s project. It was also, as scholar James Hoffmeier has argued, the most concise expression of Atenist philosophy available to us.

What’s equally interesting is what Akhenaten withheld. KV35’s so-called Younger Lady mummy has been genetically confirmed as a sister of Akhenaten, but in the texts of his reign, no woman is ever called king’s sister. That title disappears during his reign. Daughters were named because that title controlled, keeping them hierarchically below the king, their father. A sister implies a peer. A peer implies a claim. So the title was simply removed from the monumental record. Royal women were present. Their bodies were needed for procreation and succession. But their names and titles were selectively granted, withheld, or redefined according to what was politically useful.

Book of the Dead: The Name as Passport, Password, and Prayer

The Book of the Dead is, in many ways, was a manual for navigating the afterlife using names.

Chapter 43 is a spell to retain your head—a real concern, apparently, for the recently deceased. The declarant announces: I am the great one, son of the great one, the fiery one, son of the fiery one, to whom his head was given after having been cut off. I am Osiris. No one is calling themselves by their birth name here. They are claiming divine names as armor, as transformation, as protection. If your name is now Osiris, your head cannot be taken. The name is not a label; it is a force field.

The Litany of Ra, a New Kingdom royal funerary text, lists 75 names of the sun god, 75 attempts by initiated priests to map the full complexity of solar divinity, some of the names masculine, some feminine, all of them strange, many of them untranslatable. It is one of the most extraordinary intellectual exercises in the ancient world: an effort to comprehend infinity by cataloguing its identities.

And then there is the Declaration to the 42 Gods, the negative confession of Chapter 125, which we’ve discussed in a previous episode. What I point out this time around is something slightly different: it’s not just that you declare your innocence before these gods. You name them first. Oh, Wide-of-Stride, who comes from Iunu, I have not done evil. Oh Flame-Grasper, who comes from Kheraha, I have not robbed. You have to know who you’re talking to first. And knowing their names gives you a form of power over them; you can face them without flinching. The anxiety of ancient Egyptians about this moment was so real that they wrote the whole thing down and put it into papyrus form, so the dead could, essentially, cheat by reading off their notes. The magic still works. The name spoken is the name spoken, regardless of whether you memorized it or looked it up.

There is also a wonderful interrogation sequence in the Book of the Dead in which the deceased is asked: Who are you? What is your name? And the answer is not a name as we’d recognize it. It is something like: I am the stock of the papyrus. He who is in the moringa tree is my name. A mythological riddle. Your secret name in the afterlife is not Amenhotep or Nefertari, but rather a description of your place in the universe, something that encodes your essence in a way that only the initiated can decode.

The Dead Can Forget Their Own Names

At the Getty Villa, there is a mummy from the late Roman period—Heraclides, son of Thermuthis—wrapped in a red shroud and dated to around the 2nd century CE. His name is written on his linen wrappings, near his feet, in Greek. If you imagine Heraclides standing upright, the inscription is oriented correctly for him to read. It is written so that the dead man can look down and see his own name, because the dead might forget.

Death scrambles the circuits, apparently, and the Egyptians, even in the Roman period, even with Greek names on their mummies, retained this deep anxiety: what if you get to the other side and can’t remember who you are? The name written on the body is a reminder, a tether to identity across the most disorienting transition imaginable. It is, as Amber put it, like a phone number to yourself.

And if the name is written on the linen, and you bring it with you through death, and the coffin text spells reunite you with your family members whose names you’ve memorized and included with your burial goods, then the name is how you find the people you love in whatever comes next.

That’s not primitive belief but profound human connection.

What We Know, What We Don’t

The Ren is the most human of the soul’s components. A bull has a Ka. A sacred bull has a Ba. But only a named being—named by language, by society, by the specific human act of utterance—truly has a Ren. It is what separates us from the rest of the created world: not consciousness, not feeling, but the ability to speak names and be spoken of. To be called into existence by a word, and to persist in existence as long as that word is uttered.

Which is why erasing a name is so devastating and why the damnatio memoriae of the ancient world—chiseling out names, defacing inscriptions, removing someone from every monument—was understood as a kind of killing. This is why enslaved people were renamed. This is why women are still expected to give up their surnames in patriarchy, why their children carry their father’s name only. This is why transgender people choosing their own names are met with such hostility.

The Ren, the ancient Egyptians believed, lives as long as it is spoken. Causing his name to live — sankh rn.f — was the highest act of memorial, the deepest form of love. It shows us to whom we belong.

Next time on the Anatomy of the Ancient Egyptian Soul: the Akh — the transfigured, luminous dead, the superhero ancestor spirit, and how the living called on them for help.

Show Notes & Further Reading

Primary Texts & Online Resources

• Pyramid Texts Online — searchable translations of the Pyramid Texts of Unas and others. Highly recommended for the curious.

• The Isis and Re story: Papyrus Turin 1993 (Museo Egizio, Turin), 20th Dynasty.

• The Great Hymn to the Aten: Tomb of Ay, Amarna. Translation discussed in this episode from Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. II: The New Kingdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 93.

• Book of the Dead Chapter 43 (retaining one’s head), Chapter 125 (Declaration to the 42 Gods) — standard translations in R.O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, revised edition (British Museum Press).

• The Litany of Ra — see Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, trans. David Lorton (Cornell University Press, 1999).

The Shabaka Stone / Memphite Theology

• British Museum, EA 498. 25th Dynasty copy of a text claiming to derive from an Old Kingdom original. The standard scholarly discussion is in Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

On the Egyptian Soul and the Concept of the Person

• Jan Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, trans. David Lorton (Cornell University Press, 2005). Essential reading on the Ba, Ka, Ren, and Akh.

The Herakleides Mummy

• Getty Villa, Malibu, California. Accession no. 83.AP.42. Roman period, Egypt, c. 100–150 CE.

The SAVE Act

• The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (H.R. 22), currently being debated in the U.S. Senate. For a nonpartisan overview of its provisions and their impact on women who have changed their names, see the Brennan Center for Justice and Vote.org’s SAVE Act explainer.

Kara’s Work

• For more on sex, economics, and social organization in ancient Egypt, see Kara Cooney, Ancient Egyptian Society: Challenging Assumptions, Exploring Approaches (Routledge, 2021).

• The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt (Crown, 2014).

• When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt (National Geographic, 2018).

• The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World (National Geographic, 2021).

• Nefertiti — forthcoming, National Geographic.

Kara and Jordan welcome Griffith Institute staff Daniela Rosenow and Lara Bampfield to discuss the new Tutankhamun Spatial Archive, a searchable, metadata-driven platform that reconnects Carter’s excavation records to the tomb spaces, seasons, people, and objects. We learn about the trials and tribulations behind such an endevour, future plans for the project, and some of the fabulous stories behind lesser-known pieces in Tut’s tomb.

Tutankhamun Spatial Archive

Guest Bios:

Lara Bampfield has recently submitted her DPhil in Assyriology at the University of Oxford. Her research investigates change and continuity in the motifs of Old Babylonian and Kassite cylinder seals, applying advanced digital methods such as 2D and 3D modelling, image-annotation software, and machine learning to analyse these transformations. In 2025 Lara joined the Griffith team as research assistant for the Tutankhamun Spatial Archive project focusing on the digital and metadata components.

Daniela Rosenow studied Egyptology and Classics at the Humboldt University Berlin where she obtained her PhD on Late Period sacred architecture. She has worked at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology, the British Museum, the University of Munich and the German Archaeological Institute Cairo. In February 2021 Daniela joined the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford, where she co-curated the exhibition “Tutankhamun – Excavating the Archive“, and she is now the Manager of the Griffith Institute.

Show Notes:

Griffith Institute Main Website

Tutankhamun Spatial Archive

The latest story on the Egyptian Workforce

Cast of Characters

• Francis Llewellyn Griffith

• Kate Bradbury

• Nora MacDonald

• Howard Carter

• Harry Burton

• Phyllis Carter

OEB- Online Egyptological Bibliography

TOB- Topographical Bibliography

Middle Coffin (Compare)

• Tutankhamun’s Floral Wreath

  • Hamza, N. M. (2020) Study and Investigations of Archaeobotanical Remains From Tutankhamun Tomb. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

• For more information about the Egyptian workers – Quirke, S. (2010) Hidden hands : Egyptian workforces in Petrie excavation archives 1880-1924 / Stephen Quirke. London: Duckworth.

• Smithsonian Magazine, “Remembering the Unsung Egyptians Who Helped Discover King Tut’s Tomb”

• 1939 BBC Radio: playing of Tut’s trumpet with modern mouthpiece

• Minnie Burton’s Diary

CW— mature themes; sex; sexuality; sexual assault

What does it mean to look for queer lives in the ancient world? We don’t want to impose today’s freedoms onto a patriarchal past, but we also don’t want to erase the biological reality that queer people have always existed in the world. That tension—generative, unresolved, and genuinely fun to argue about—animated our latest live conversation, and we’re thrilled so many of you joined us for it.

Two Women, Arms Entwined

We kicked things off with a pair statue currently held at the Museo Egizio in Turin. Amber had shared it earlier in the week and it immediately sparked debate among the three of us. Dating to the Thutmosid period and likely from a tomb in the Theban necropolis, it shows two women — Idu and Rui — seated side by side in white linen shifts and elegant bipartite wigs, arms wrapped around each other in precisely the embrace you’d expect to see between a husband and wife. The museum’s own description calls the relationship between them “unclear.”

Which is, of course, the perennial problem.

Are they friends? Sisters? Mother and daughter? Could they be something more? Kara was the self-described cynical voice in the room, skeptical that ancient Egyptian society would have allowed a formally commemorated queer female relationship — while also being completely open to the possibility that a very real relationship could have existed behind the scenes, just one that could and would never be named outright. Jordan pointed out something quietly fascinating: Idu holds the title nebet per — Mistress of the House — while Rui carries no title at all, no indication of kinship or any named social role. That asymmetry suggests a dependent relationship, but of what kind, we simply can’t say. They seem to have wanted to show themselves as the core of their household.

What we can say is that someone commissioned this statue, paid for it, and had it placed in a tomb context so that both women would receive offerings in the afterlife. That’s not nothing. Whatever Idu and Rui were to each other, there was care—plus money, and intention—and a desire to keep this person in one’s eternal company.

The group also floated an intriguing hypothesis: what if Idu had outlived her husband, inherited his property, and then got to live exactly as she chose? Two women, a shared household, just friends, obviously. Roommates even. The ancient world’s version of companions traveling down the Nile together — who, as Jordan noted, everyone quietly understood were probably lovers, but who would never in a thousand years have said so in a formal inscription.

The Notorious Tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep

From there we moved to the far more famous case of the two manicurists of the Old Kingdom royal court: Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, buried together at Saqqara in a shared tomb decorated with images of the two men nose-to-nose, embracing in ways typically reserved for married couples. Scholars have argued they were brothers, conjoined twins, or colleagues — with Kara noting, drily, that “conjoined twins” seems like a remarkable amount of effort just to avoid the word gay. But who knows? This scene is unique and perplexing. We should not try to flatten the complexity of the image: we can acknowledge that queer people existed in the ancient world without pretending they enjoyed anything like modern queer freedom or visibility in society.

What the Texts Actually Say (or Don’t)

So what does the written record give us? Rather less than you might hope, and rather more ambiguous than anyone would like.

Jordan pulled up Book of the Dead 125—the famous Negative Confession—the list of sins the deceased declares they have not committed before the scales of Ma’at. One entry reads something like: I have not copulated with a catamite — or, depending on your translation, I have not copulated with a boy, or I have not laid with a man. The Egyptian word in question, Kara noted, is a hapax legomenon: it appears nowhere else in the corpus, which makes translation genuinely treacherous. The word catamite, the group agreed, implies pederasty — a prohibition against the sexual exploitation of a prepubescent boy — which is something categorically different from a prohibition against adult same-sex desire. The distinction matters. More investigation (after the podcast!) revealed the phrase to translate into something like “I did not fuck a fucker of fuckers,” which implies a refusal to have slept with someone who is already sleeping with others. But who knows? You decide; see the Egyptian below!

• “I have not penetrated the penetrater of a penetrater (Variant: “I have not copulated with a boy”); I have not masturbated” (n nk.i nkk nkk n dAdA.i)

  • nkk [nkk] = 𓈖𓎡𓎡𓂺𓀀 (Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae); lit. the one who fucks; male sex worker; homosexual?

    • We presume they are attaching the male gender to this noun because of the presence of a penis in the word, but Book of the Dead 125 is the only use of this word!

    • Also see Betwixt the Sheets, “History of Homophobia”

Contending of Horus and Seth gave us rather more vivid primary source material. The story is, to put it mildly, a lot: Seth attempts to assault Horus in their sleep; Horus outsmarts him by catching the semen in his hand; his mother Isis disposes of the evidence—by cutting Horus’s hand off and growing him a new one as one does—and fashions a trap, placing Horus’s semen into the lettuce Seth habitually eats; and when Seth boasts of his conquest before the gods, the divine tribunal calls the semen forth — whereupon it emerges from Seth’s own head like a crown, to the hilarity of everyone assembled. The story is funny, and also pointed: what makes Seth’s act monstrous is not same-sex desire per se, but domination, humiliation, and the horror of being placed in the feminized, receptive position. As Kara observed, the ancient Egyptian antipathy here is not really about queerness. It’s about misogyny. To be penetrated is to be made a woman, and being made a woman is, within this patriarchal framework, a degradation. The female body’s hiddenness, Jordan added, made female queerness simultaneously the most subversive and the most invisible form of desire—something that likely happened constantly and simply never showed up in the legal or mortuary record because it threatened no man’s property and produced no illegitimate heirs.

A brief and gleeful tangent addressed the so-called “Hatshepsut graffito” at Deir el-Bahri — a piece of erotic wall art that scholars persistently attribute to the female pharaoh on no stronger grounds than that it’s located in a cliff above her mortuary temple at Deir el Bahari, a space that, Kara pointed out, was built up by approximately everyone. The figure is wearing something that might be a wig, might be a nemes headdress, but the group voted: no, It’s a wig. Moving on.

On Morality, Property, and Free Love

One of the conversation’s richest threads concerned why ancient Egyptian society seems, comparatively speaking, to have been rather relaxed about sexual transgression. No stoning for adultery. No virginity tests. Premarital sex left relatively unpoliced. Kara connected this to land ownership — or rather, the lack of it. In a society where the Nile flood periodically erased field boundaries and where the great institutions (the Temple of Amun, the royal palace) were the primary landowners, the tight relationship between sexual morality and property inheritance that drove so much ancient Mediterranean legislation simply didn’t apply in the same way. You couldn’t easily lose heritable land over a sexual scandal when most people didn’t own heritable land to begin with.

This also explains why female queerness, in particular, would have been almost entirely invisible to official record-keeping: no property changed hands, no paternity was threatened, no inheritance could be disputed. The patriarchal system cared deeply about women’s bodies as reproductive resources — but only insofar as those bodies produced legitimate heirs. What happened otherwise, behind closed doors or in a shared household, was simply not the law’s business.

The picture shifts, the group agreed, with the arrival of the Greeks. Ptolemaic Egypt imported stricter social structures around female bodies: veiling, endogamous marriage to keep property within families, the concept of illegitimacy as a barrier to succession. These were new ideas, and not Egyptian ones.

Priests, Priestesses, and the Gods’ Wives of Amun

A subscriber question about priestly celibacy sent us down another rewarding path. The short answer is: Egyptian priests were, for most of the pharaonic period, married members of elite society who served on a rotating schedule, and the prescriptions around ritual purity—no sex, no fish, no leather—applied only during their active service, much like a young man in Thailand entering a temple for a period of education and contemplation before returning to ordinary life. The longer and thornier answer involves the Divine Adoratrices of the Late Period, the so-called God’s Wives of Amun, who held extraordinary political and religious power, adopted their successors rather than bearing biological children, and named no husbands in their records. Were they celibate? Almost certainly not in any enforced sense. They were the most powerful women in Egypt. Whatever they did, they did as they chose. Lovers were not memorialized on stone monuments, after all, and we should not expect them to have been.

Closing with Psychedelics (As One Does)

We ended, naturally, on psychedelics. Kara had recently received word of a study on a Bes jar—those delightful vessels bearing the face of the apotropaic dwarf deity—owned by the Tampa Museum of Art, in which residue analysis revealed a cocktail of the blue lotus (Nymphaea caerulea), Syrian rue, and other psychoactive substances. The blue lotus, long associated with sensuality and altered states in Egyptian iconography, turns out to have been rather more than decorative. Whether mushrooms or other psychedelics made their way into the Egyptian ritual pharmacopeia remains an open question, one we’d love to dig into further.

Show Notes & Further Reading

• Homosexuality in Ancient Egypt — Wikipedia

• Pair statue of two women seated against a back slab — Museo Egizio

• Tomb of the Two Brothers Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep — Egyptian Monuments

• Evans & Woods 2016. Further evidence that Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were twins. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 102, 55–72.

• Reeder 2000. Same-sex desire, conjugal constructs, and the tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep. World Archaeology 32(2), 193–208.

• Reeder 2008. Queer Egyptologies of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep. In Graves-Brown (ed.), Sex and Gender in Ancient Egypt.

• Vasiljević 2008. Embracing his double. Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur 37, 363–372.

• Baines 1985. Egyptian twins. Orientalia 54(4), 461–482.

• The Contending of Horus and Seth — Wikipedia

• Book of the Dead 125, Negative Confession — UCL Digital Egypt

• Betwixt the Sheets: “A History of Homophobia”

• Tanasi et al. 2024. Multianalytical investigation reveals psychotropic substances in a Ptolemaic Egyptian vase. Scientific Reports 14. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-78721-8

• Greco, van Oppen, Samorini, Tanasi & Tykot 2024. A Bes mug in Tampa. In van Oppen de Ruiter & Bianchi (eds.), Under the Spell of Bes, 105–116. Abercromby Press.

• Tanasi, Davide, Branko F. van Oppen de Ruiter, Fiorella Florian, Radmila Pavlovic, Luca Maria Chiesa, Igor Fochi, Chiaramaria Stani, Lisa Vaccari, Dale Chaput, Giorgio Samorini, Alberto Pallavicini, Sabrina Semerano, Anastasia Serena Gaetano, Sabina Licen, Pierluigi Barbieri, and Enrico Greco 2024. Multianalytical investigation reveals psychotropic substances in a Ptolemaic Egyptian vase. Scientific Reports 14 (article no. 27891). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-78721-8.

• Greco, Enrico, Branko van Oppen, Giorgio Samorini, Davide Tanasi, and Robert H. Tykot 2024. A Bes mug in Tampa. In Oppen de Ruiter, Branko F. van and Robert Steven Bianchi (eds), Under the spell of Bes, 105-116. Wallasey: Abercromby Press.

The latest drama involves the female king Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut seems to enjoy popping back into our news cycles since early 20th-century excavations by Herbert Winlock and the Metropolitan Museum of Art catapulted her image back into public view. Sometimes we love her, viewing Hatshepsut’s kingship as the very thing that saved her Thutmoside lineage; other times she is considered the greedy bitch who stole a young man’s rightful place on the throne. Her nephew and co-king Thutmose III seems to have been ambivalent about his own conflicting perception of Hatshepsut’s kingship, finishing her temples when she died but then erasing her images in those same temples a few decades later.1

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that this time around Hatshepsut has cannonballed into our news cycle as a female king who was hardly erased by her nephew, at least not with malice, as a female king who was wronged by no one, as a female king whose oversize reputation was cut down to size by necessary temple clearance and the natural movements of time. From where does this Hatshepsut reboot come?

It all started with an article by NY Times archaeology writer Franz Lidz about new research on Hatshepsut published in the journal Antiquity in 2025 by Toronto PhD candidate Jun Wong. Wong has done deep analysis of Hatshepsut’s statues for his dissertation at the University of Toronto, determining that they were all systematically unalived—cut at the neck, waist, and feet—some reused in other buildings, some thrown into a series of pits. Wong concludes that Hatshepsut’s nephew didn’t destroy her memory as much as benignly neglect her. His work catapulted Hatshepsut’s reign back into the pages of the New York Times and on to the air waves of Public Radio International—for our perusal and judgement, reflecting our own conflicting and complicit understandings of women as powerbrokers and caregivers of society.

Wong’s careful and systematic work was able to prove that almost all of Hatshepsut’s statues were carefully decommissioned by Hatshepsut’s nephew, some a few years after her death, some after more time had passed. For me, this confirms that Thutmose III wanted and needed to ideologically remove his aunt and erstwhile co-king from her perch of power, even in death. He wanted to do this because a woman’s rule sullied the reputation of his own rule, yes, but probably also so that he could bypass her genetic line and focus on the younger son who would be king after him, whom Egyptologists call Amenhotep II. But that’s not what Wong extrapolated from his research. Wong’s abstract from Antiquity tells us we should look to the practical, not the political reasons for Hatshepsut’s removal:

The statuary of Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt during the Eighteenth Dynasty, is believed to have been targeted for violent destruction by Thutmose III, her successor. Yet the condition of the statues recovered in the vicinity of Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri varies considerably and many survive with their faces virtually intact. Through the examination of archival material from the original excavations, the author offers an alternative, more utilitarian, explanation of the treatment of these statues. Rather than outright hostility, much of the damage may instead derive from the ‘deactivation’ of the statues and their reuse as raw material.

The intact nature of Hatshepsut’s statue faces is essential to Wong’s argument because he thinks the lack of face-hacking means Thutmose III did not try to harm her memory after her death. Because so many of Hatshepsut’s statue faces were not smashed outright, Wong recognizes an unemotional and clinical reuse of her statues, rather than a political destruction of her legacy. It also allows Wong to deny any distasteful emotions like hate or anger from Thutmose III against his aunt Hatshepsut. He argues:

Indeed, Hatshepsut’s damaged visage is so striking that it is easier to associate it with a deliberate attack, rather than mundane processes such as reuse or decay.

Wong sees an apolitical repurposing of her materials at worst, or the disintegration of her objects over the millennia, at best.

Wong’s argument uses materiality to source human emotions—to read emotionality into the destruction of Hatshepsut’s statuary and, ultimately, into the relationship between Hatshepsut and Thutmose III. But I would argue that certain emotions—like familial love, hate, or indifference—were not a part of the Egyptian monumental temple record at all, as opposed to the accepted and depicted forms of divine love explicit in the embrace between a king and god carved onto a temple wall or the righteous hate of one’s enemies as shown in the gargantuan smiting scenes that fronted temple pylons.

It was almost certain that neither Thutmose III nor Hatshepsut felt the freedom to exhibit any such wild human emotions—not in stone statue creation or destruction, not at court, and perhaps not even in their private dealings with one another—because royal people were and are not allowed such human frailties as figures representative of the state.

If a king like Thutmose III showed wild emotion, it was rage at his west Asian neighbors, which he unleashed with tact and precision in the battle of Megiddo fought immediately after his aunt Hatshepsut’s death and recorded in his annals at Karnak temple. Nowhere do we read of any emotionality between the two co-kings. Shattered statue faces or not, we simply cannot know how Hatshepsut and Thutmose III regarded one another personally, how they spoke to one another, or how the nephew remembered his aunt after the elder woman’s death.

But Wong’s argument about emotionality translates into political expression, and his refusal to see that emotionality implies a refusal to admit that Hatshepsut’s destruction had anything to do with factions at all. For Wong, the destruction of her images was purely pragmatic, just a base removal of what was no longer needed in a given ritual space order to reuse the atea and the stone.

And yet we can clearly see Hatshepsut’s take-down in the archaeological record, the blocking up of certain temple areas as unusable and unseeable, and it was, as Wong admits, a massive campaign of destruction undertaken at great cost to the young solo monarch Thutmose III. In a few cases, colossal statues of Hatshepsut were renamed by Thutmose III just a few years after the female king’s entombment, an easy and quick claim of monumental kingship.2 In most other cases, however, the young king waited, biding his time, until 20 to 25 years had passed to destroy and dismantle the many hundreds of life-size statues and reliefs of his mistress.3 French archaeologists have proven the moments of Thutmose III’s most concerted destruction using architectural analysis and building stratigraphy at the temple of Karnak. That timing doesn’t necessarily mean such destruction happened at the exact same time at Deir el Bahari (or Memphis or Heliopolis or Assiut), but it does provide some understanding that Thutmose III waited for the more destructive aspects of his aunt’s removal from Egypt’s temples.

As Wong notes, the uraeus cobra on Hatshepsut’s head was always struck, whether it was carved in two- or three-dimensional form. This hooded viper was a key target, because it was this element that transformed her into a sovereign. Given this, I wonder whether Thutmose III’s craftsmen were ordered to strike Hatshepsut's face at all, when it was the uraeus that mattered. Indeed, Thutmose III only destroyed images of Hatshepsut as king, not attacking any scenes of her in queenly support of her husband. He didn’t harm her names, leaving those unscathed. Like every historical fact, various human agendas conflict with one another. Perhaps we have a young king who didn’t want to hurt his aunt’s person but needed all memory of her kingship erased.

Wong seems to take issue with words like “brutal” or “smashed” in reference to Hatshepsut’s statuary, because to him that is not what he identifies in the archaeological record. He notes no thorough and comprehensive smashing of faces, and thus only identifies a cold precision of deactivation—which to Wong somehow means that Thutmose III had no political issues with or emotional enmity against his aunt. I suppose a woman has to get hit in the face—hard—to prove the abuse the patriarchy has dealt her…

It’s important to ask what kind of labor such destruction actually demanded from Thutmose III’s workers. He asked his artisans to drag dozens—not one or two, but around 40—hard stone statues weighing multiple tons from Hatshepsut’s temple of millions of years, to be decommissioned and buried nearby. And this was just one of many temples created by the female king. Hard stone statues are not easily broken into pieces, not now and not then. Indeed, we still don’t even know how hard stone statues were cut by the ancient Egyptians because bronze tools cannot make a dent in red granite or granodiorite. The Egyptians had to use hard stone to cut hard stone. (The best explanations I have read recently are in Kristen Thompsen and Marsha Hill’s recent volumes on statuary from Amarna, so check those out).4 Thutmose III took on the laborious task of ordering dozens of hard stone statues systematically broken, as Wong proves, at the neck, waist, and feet, demanding great energy, time and skill in destruction.

Thutmose III also asked his craftsmen to remove dozens of colossal limestone statues of Hatshepsut as an Osirian king fronting the columns of her temple of millions of years at Deir el Bahari. He ordered his chisel bearers to go into all of Egypt’s state temples and remove this female king with a light scatter of chisel strikes that allowed reworking of the scenes, saving the relief and the temple walls for future use. Sometimes Hatshepsut’s figure was recarved into a strangely tall altar full of food offerings for the gods. Other times her image was reworked into that of her dead father Thutmose I or dead husband Thutmose II. Much of that reworking was done in plaster relief work, most of which has since fallen away, showing only the faint ghosts of Hatshepsut formed by a spray of chisel strokes into the stone that erased her once crisply cut and painted form.

Wong would have you believe that these modifications were done without politics in mind, that this was a kind of benign reuse and cheerful neglect thereafter, all because the craftsmen didn’t strike at her statuary faces. Such a view of benign reuse rescues Hatshepsut’s kingship from charges of greedy usurpation and baptizes Thutmose III’s benevolent treatment of his co-king’s memory in one stroke: Nothing to see here! There was nothing emotional or human or political meant by Hatshepsut’s removal, we are told, just the antiseptic cleansing of spaces that no longer needed her imagery. Such an interpretation implies justice and goodness in the actions of Thutmose III’s removal and that this woman—perhaps too full of emotions herself, the argument intimates—had it coming. This is also, of course, a comforting narrative in a world of angry feminists opting out of patriarchal structures like marriage and multiple childbirths and religious obedience.

But if these removals of relief and statuary represented apolitical reuse, then why didn’t Thutmose III recarve her many expensive and hard-won statues for himself? His portrait was very similar to Hatshepsut’s, after all. Most of Hatshepsut’s statuary depicted her as a man, not a woman, and the strong, masculine body shape in service to the gods would have suited the young king. Recarving would have been relatively easy, much easier than ritual cutting at the neck, the waist, and feet. But that’s not what Thutmose III ordered. He opted for the hard, laborious, painstaking work that likely took years, instead of moments. And he did it because he didn’t just want Hatshepsut out of sight; he needed her politically and ideologically purged.

Wong’s timing arguments are interesting. He argues that the erasures and dismantling started earlier and/or continued later than archaeologists thought. This is building on the work done by archaeologists at Karnak who have used architectural stratigraphy to demonstrate that colossal statuary of Hatshepsut at Karnak was renamed in the second year of Thutmose III’s sole reign. As for other architectural reasoning for the erasure later in the reign of Thutmose III and early Amenhotep II, that also comes from Karnak Temple on the east bank. Wong’s analysis of Hatshepsut’s statuary from Luxor’s west bank seems to show a different story in terms of timing dismantling and destruction. This is very interesting and could be used to complicate the story of Hatshepsut’s removal. But for Wong this timing differential somehow implies that Hatshepsut’s statues were not deconstructed for personal or political reasons.

Wong’s careful analysis reveals that some of Hatshepsut’s statues ended up being highly fragmented, while others were left untouched, that some were reused architecturally, others not, that some freestanding statues were buried virtually complete, while others were destroyed more completely. The problem lies not in Wong’s systematic evaluations, but in his conclusions and extrapolations about what he sees as the half-baked destruction of Hatshepsut. To him, the lack of total brutality disproves any overt political takedown of the female king and instead points to a benign removal and dismantling of her memory.

But think about these destructive actions a moment again: Each statue had to be dragged from its emplacement at great cost of labor and time. We’re talking dozens of freestanding statues, hundreds of architectural statues including the Osirian columnar statues and sphinxes at Deir el Bahari alone. It can’t have been easy to move them about in a temple space arguably constructed around them. Thutmose III needed massive work crews who could move heavy, unwieldy pieces with precision. The statues were dragged out of their temples—whether at Deir el Bahari or at Heliopolis or elsewhere—through narrow doorways and gateways, down hallways and ramps, until they could be brought to a place where they were they had their uraeus smashed, were broken across the feet, waist, and neck. Some were dragged to the quarry at Deir el Bahari, and if Wong is correct, many of these statues were then dragged to the so-called Hatshepsut Hole. Wong admits the extravagant expenditure of men and money to damage Hatshepsut’s statements of power, but he does not recognize how this focus on destruction pulled resources from Thutmose III’s creation of his own monuments of power and this was a necessary political show.

Reuse is an issue in his argument too. Anytime a statue of Hatshepsut was reused in a new building within the ramps and walls Wong sees such action as indicative of Thutmose III’s apolitical actions. He’s only reusing, not destroying, Wong is saying. But reuse is not mutually exclusive to destruction, or to politics. Human beings are always pragmatic; resources are always finite. To reuse the stones of a sacred space as temple fill or foundation can still be an activist statement.

Because Hatshepsut’s statues were not crushed into dust, Wong perceives the actions as easily done and neutral in their intent. But I would argue that outright, thorough and complete damage is rare among humans. It’s simply too demanding. A few slaps around the face, some open abuse of the statuary, and you’ve made your point. Anything else is much too expensive. Thutmose III likely did not want to put all his resources into the complete and total ruination of his aunt’s memory because he needed to build for his own. Even the Islamic State’s destruction of Assyrian palace reliefs was piecemeal, destroying some for the cameras and selling most on the antiquities market to raise money for arms sales.5

Wong doesn’t find any evidence that Hatshepsut’s statues were ever crushed to bits. But this seems an argument from silence. How can he say that if some statues are missing half or more of their structure? There are statues in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that show half the statue just gone, implying the fragments found by archaeologists were too small to be pieced together.6 That means significant portions of some statues were indeed crushed to tiny bits. I’m not saying Hatshepsut’s statues were ground into dust. I don’t think anyone has argued for this. Such expensive and extensive labor wouldn’t have been expedient for anyone, let alone Thutmose III who wanted to get started with the stagecraft for his own solo reign. But the fact remains: during the reign of Thutmose III craftsmen went to great lengths to remove Hatshepsut as king from public temple spaces and deactivate her images. Destruction like this is laborious! Cutting the neck and waist and feet of every freestanding piece as exhausting! However he felt about her, and we will never know, Thutmose III needed King Hatshepsut not just gone from his elite people’s view but cut down in their sight before her removal.

Wong argues against the succession argument—that destruction of Hatshepsut’s images was part of a larger campaign paving the path for an alternative and younger son, namely Amenhotep II, not of Hatshepsut’s direct lineage—saying that Hatshepsut’s daughter Nefrure had predeceased Hatshepsut and thus she could not have be a part of any succession plans. Nefrure may or may not have predeceased Hatshepsut, but that doesn’t necessarily matter. Nefrure’s male offspring were what mattered for succession. Nefrure’s images as Great Royal Wife were certainly erased from the third terrace of Deir el Bahari, among many other places, probably before Hatshepsut died, and so completely that we can hardly talk about Nefrure’s role alongside Thutmose III at all.7 Nefrure and Hatshepsut were both important enough to erase and quite thoroughly. Why? Just because? No because they were the powerbrokers and kingmakers. The dynasty passed through their bodies when they took on royal husbands and birthed royal babies. If an alternative succession plan bypassed Hatshepsut’s lineage, it would be expedient to remove any image of her from Egypt’s religious spaces. And those of her daughter too.

As for Wong’s argument that the destruction of Hatshepsut’s statuary was not violent and mindless, but strategic and careful, I would say that the destruction of statues or churches or Jim Crow created Civil War memorials or communist colossal statues or whatever other monument of power is not always mindless and violent. It is whatever the winners want to present to their elite public. When the Spanish took Templo Mayor in Mexico City they only partially destroyed the ritual place and then built their cathedral on top of it, using the mound and space to claim ideological power. The point was made, and archaeologists are still able to make astounding discoveries of the Aztec architecture in this space. William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea in the American south, on the other hand, was purposefully brutal, wantonly burning plantation homes and cities, butchering livestock and burning orchards, purposefully done to break the will of the southern people. Destruction is as destruction demands. We can imagine Thutmose III did not want to betray any feelings of personal vengeance against his aunt, and Hatshepsut’s removal was thus not an excessive and violenct conflagration of complete destruction. But she was removed nonetheless.

Destruction is usually well conceived, clever, and politically minded. It has a purpose. And that’s precisely because destruction is so costly. Destruction probably happened in fits and starts, likely as it suited an audience gathered for the occasion. Destruction is rarely thorough. Destruction demanded skill and labor from stone workers more accustomed to creating. Again, it would have been quite easy for Thutmose III to simply recut many of Hatshepsut’s statues for himself, as Ramses II did with so many Amenhotep III statues. But Thutmose III did not do this, at least not for the life-sized pieces. He instead deactivated and buried all of his aunt’s statues and at great expense. So we can’t argue that the Egyptians just reused these pieces and that pragmatism was the primary motivation. Read differently, the evidence shows Thutmose III didn’t believe he could reuse Hatshepsut’s statuary, for whatever reason, and that he had more to gain from the costly work of destruction. He had to chop them up and throw them away. Whether we call that “deactivation” or “brutal destruction” or “reuse” because it ended up used as fill somewhere else is where the arguments diverge because each scenario implies intent.

Wong sees disinterested reuse, while I see a destruction that was much deeper than innocent clearance. Other evidence—like the systematic constraint of the powerful God’s Wife of Amen priestess upon which Hatshepsut had relied after her reign—point to the court’s distrust of royal women and purposeful exclusion of them from institutional power. It would not be until the late 18th Dynasty and the queenships of Tiye and Nefertiti that women were able to build real factional power at court again.

I’m quite happy to read and learn about Wong’s more precise definition of statue deactivation. I find this work a real contribution to the field. The field needs archival research in combination with art historical analysis of statue fragments. It will add to the discourse immeasurably. But Wong’s conclusions about Thutmose III’s intent are not only incorrect, but a reflection of Egyptological discourse that erases any harm done to ancient women, whether they be mighty queens or harem wives of the king.

In the end, we come to the political point of Wong’s apolitical interpretation: it has now become fashionable for Egyptologists to view complicated gender factionalism at Egypt’s court through a neutral, unemotional, “scientific” lens, removing all the messy real-world, human actions of powerful men and women within patriarchal systems. Arguing that Hatshepsut and Nefrure were removed in an innocuous moment of clearance imposes a disinterested agency that denies any personal conflict or any political strategy on the part of Thutmose III, not to mention any change of that strategy through time (he had a long reign!). Such an argument also denies that there was factional pushback against female leaders during and after the reign of Hatshepsut.

It’s an interesting argument to claim that Thutmose III was never angry at his aunt. It’s as if she wasn’t worth his anger. And this is exactly what patriarchy does to women who reach too far, who climb too high. The discount them; they belittle them. It was the woman who got overly emotional, not the man; she is the one with the anger management problem. She’s out of control. Patriarchal society demands a woman subsume her rage or be removed. She must show empathy and care no matter what; she must prioritize the patriarch. And she is still considered over-emotional, hormonal, dangerous even, someone who cannot see the landscape of the problem with a clear and unjaundiced eye. Why? Perhaps because the sons are made by her, through her, and she is naturally full of bias on behalf of her offspring. Perhaps because she cares too much.

In the end, don’t let anyone tell you that the removal and destruction of a queen’s statues isn’t political, isn’t personal. Don’t believe it. Don’t be gaslit. Cutting statues at the neck and waist and feet is not sober reuse; it is systematic destruction of a woman’s political body of work with partisan intent.

And for another take on Hatshepsut’s story, see this story by Public Radio International’s The World: “The unmaking of a hugely successful female pharaoh”

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But one thing Jordan and I most surprisingly did not discuss in this podcast was the actual mechanism of mummification—which organs were removed, how they were taken out of the corpse, and what the embalmers did with them. To rectify this gap, I provide you with a few pages from my book about the female king Hatshepsut, The Woman Who Would Be King, published waaay back in 2014. It’s gruesome but to-the-point and provides a satisfactory run down of all the boxes that had to be ticked on the long checklist of elite mummification.

For those of you wondering, no, I do not believe the body identified by Zahi Hawass as Hatshepsut is indeed the great female king. I think that honor belongs to another mummified person. But, that’s a discussion for another time. For now, I present you the gory and stomach-turning details of mummification in 15th century BCE Egypt.

The Woman Who Would be King, pp. 183-187:

“And so, after almost twenty-two years as regent and then as king, ruling from approximately 1479 to 1458 BCE, the woman who started as a King’s Daughter and God’s Wife, who went on to become the greatest female ruler Egypt would ever see, who transformed mud-brick temples into sprawling complexes of stone, who professionalized the priesthood of her gods and the army of her people, was dead. All her plans, all her anxieties, her obsession with succession and political stability—it all was finally out of her hands, and in the firm control of another.

There is no record ofThutmose Ill’s emotions at the death of his aunt and co-king. Presumably he visited her on her deathbed, perhaps covering his nose with a linen cloth against the overwhelming stench of coming mortality. Throughout Thebes and beyond, to the priests and elites of Memphis and Heliopolis, word would have spread that Egypt’s mistress was near her end. All of Egypt would have waited until finally the air left her lungs and her body deflated, leaving her lying prone, not in the stillness of sleep but in death. Priests and servants would have chanted and wailed around her, aiding her passage into the beyond.

We can imagine Nefrure (if she was still alive) directing the servants to bathe Hatshepsut for the last time and to wash and plait her mother’s hair before the royal embalmers arrived to take her to the place of purity within the temple. Once in the house of embalming, Hatshepsut’s body (the extremities perhaps already turning black) would have been laid on a tall bed with legs fashioned to resemble a lion’s, a symbol of kingship, for a long night of incantations and spells. The priests likely chanted out the mechanisms for a successful journey through the heavens, intoning sacred words and phrases that would give her sustenance and strength for the long road ahead, protection against demons along the way, and transformation when she ultimately became an everlasting golden Osiris.

At one point in the ritual, Nefrure may have stood at her mother’s feet, in the place of the goddess Isis, through the long night, wailing and lamenting. During these rituals, Nefrure would have performed as a Daughter of Re, a ferocious protector against any who might do the king harm. And in her grief, Nefrure likely tore at her linen garments, baring her breasts, ripping and tangling her hair so that when daylight came and the embalmers readied themselves to carry away Hatshepsut’s corpse for mummification, Nefrure had to be restrained, still screaming and crying out for her dead mother. Such was the grief we see depicted in some Eighteenth Dynasty paintings of mourning. Or perhaps Nefrure stood there stoically, watching over her mother, knowing that her circumstances had instantly and irrevocably changed.

The royal place of embalming was likely filled with a haze of incense, a cacophony of priestly incantations and muttered orders among the mummifiers going about their business. The first incision into the royal corpse would have been made with a razor-sharp ritual knife of flaked obsidian-a cut just below the belly on the body’s left side, just long enough for the flesh to gape open and pull away from itself, creating a hole that likely released a puff of methane, hydrogen sulfide, and ammonia gases with a slow hiss. The other embalmers would then turn to the priest who had dared to cut the royal body, and, as was traditionally expected in the ritual, curse him with invectives and throw potsherds at the poor man, driving the priest out of the room under a hail of broken bits of crockery until he himself could undergo a purifying ritual.

Another embalmer would have then stepped forward and carefully fit his hand into the seam in Hatshepsut’s belly. He probably took his time feeling about until his fingers found the body part he wanted. Perhaps he started with the bowels, slowly pulling the length of Hatshepsut’s intestines out of the cavity, lest they break, snaking the shiny wet mass into a large bronze bowl held up by one of his colleagues. The work was likely slow and smelly. The putrid stench of death would have collided with the sweet, rich fragrance of incense in the room, probably produced from the very same pellets procured on her trading expedition to Punt more than ten years before. When the embalming priest inserted his hand into the cavity yet again, he would have reached farther into the corpse to pull out the king’s stomach. Hatshepsut’s last meal of gruel and broth may have still sloshed about inside.

When he reached into her abdomen again, he would have had to thrust his entire forearm inside the body of the king. Perhaps he closed his eyes to concentrate as he broke some of the tissue connections, and then, with one hand on top of her belly to guide his movement, the other still inside, he shifted the liver toward the incision. With great care and with the help of more colleagues, he must have stretched the incision by applying lubricating oils so that he could remove the quivering, dark brown-red mass without damage to the body or the organ. Only with skill and patience could the liver be removed in one piece.

The lungs were always tricky. The embalming priest’s arm would have been thrust beyond his elbow at this point, and maybe with intense concentration and incantations on his lips invoking the gods in protection of the lungs, he could carefully detach the right lung with his fingertips, never able to see what he was doing, but knowing the places where the organ might burst if prodded or where he might snap the tissue holding the mass to her body. The priest had to work around the heart muscle; it had to remain in the body undisturbed as the seat of the king’s soul, a measure of Hatshepsut’s goodness, and the physical tether holding her spirit to her corpse. Once the lobe was free, he could maneuver the lung around the heart with one hand inside the body, the other pressed against her breast, until the organ reached the mouth of the incision. With practiced skill, the organ was removed and placed in a bowl for curing in a dedicated room in the embalming house.

Throughout the process, men assisted with basins of water to allow the chief embalmer to wash his bloody hands. Priests would have chanted spells and kept the incense pellets burning until a new set of instruments was brought. At this point, the embalmer would have selected a long metal hooked tool and approached Hatshepsut’s head, leaning down so that he was face-to-face with the mighty king, his chin at her forehead, before carefully inserting the tool into the nose of the corpse. He likely reached for another tool from the tray-a small mallet, which he could use to smack the metal stick sharply until he heard the crunch of the ethmoid bone giving way. After repeating this gesture on the other nostril, he would have inserted a long-handled spoon into the skull cavity and scooped out bit after bit of brain through the nose, trying to remove large chunks to speed the work, but not so large that his actions would harm the nostrils, certainly knowing that any impatience would result in a dilated and deformed nose. When the spoon no longer pushed easily through soft, fatty brain matter but collided with the back of the skull, Hatshepsut’s corpse would have been turned face down and tilted feet up so that the rest of the brain matter could slide toward the nostrils for removal. With no way to take out the brain in one piece, its removal was laborious and time-consuming.

Hatshepsut’s brain tissue was thus not embalmed, but likely saved for burial in a mummification cache, a collection of used embalming materials and bits of human tissue. One did not just throw away the remnants of a pharaoh’s putrefaction; this was a god’s body, after all. The body cavity would then have been packed inside and out with natron salts to draw out the moisture, the salts either held in linen bags or left loose like sand. Hatshepsut’s naked body, rounded with middle age, was likely covered by these salts for weeks; when the natron became soaked with liquids after a few days, the embalming priests would apply a fresh salt treatment, slowly and carefully drawing all the moisture from Hatshepsut’s body. This curing process lasted for more than a month, during which time the corpse was never left unattended.

The king’s body was believed to be like the god’s statue in a sanctuary; it was meant to be safeguarded and cared for, while priests chanted spells, made offerings, and burned incense night and day. Hatshepsut herself was finally receiving the ritual attention that she had been trained to perform as a girl and had done for countless gods in countless sanctuaries as king. As a mummy, she was transformed into a god, clothed, anointed, and revered. When the body was finally cured, it would have appeared brittle and brown, with its hair and toenails in danger of falling away; Hatshepsut’s face contracted to the skull; her eye cavities sunken under closed eyelids; her body shed of its fat and lifelike fullness; and her ribs protruding through slack folds of grayish-brown skin. To rectify this, the embalmers would have dipped their hands into precious oils and fats, which they carefully poured over and massaged into the royal corpse, granting it pliability and flexibility. They used fatty unguents and fragrant tree resins to treat every part of the king’s body. A funnel was likely placed into the nostrils, and aromatic resins were even poured into the empty skull cavity.

When the body was ready for wrapping, embalmers would have worked closely with priests who chanted transformative spells while the first layers of sacred temple linens-specially woven for the occasionwere wound about the corpse. Necklaces and collars were placed around Hatshepsut’s neck, rings on fingers and toes, belts around her waist, and a golden diadem upon her head. Each finger and toe was likely individually wrapped over the jewelry, adding layer after layer of finely woven temple linen, restoring fullness to the corpse and lending sacred protection to the sanctity of this holy body. When the embalming was finally complete, after about two and a half months, the Egyptians believed the corpse of Hatshepsut had become Osiris, ready to be interred into his tomb.”

Naunakhte lived during the reign of Ramses V (20th dynasty). Things were not going so great then… see our episodes on the Late Bronze Age collapse, tomb robbery, and the first recorded strike. So essentially, it was kinda like 2026.

Naunakhte lived in the Workmen’s Village of Deir el-Medina (see Crash Course: Deir el-Medina), where she held the title of “citizeness.” (I love the “feminization” of nouns— lioness always comes to mind, and it makes boring titles way more badass for some reason, but I digress)

Now, as in most patriarchal societies, we know mostly about her life through her two husbands and her progeny. Her first husband was a fella by the name of Qenhirkhopshef, chief scribe. There are TONS of ostraca written by him found at Deir el-Medina, so we can speak a fair amount about him. BUT, this post isn’t about Qenhirkhopshef. It’s about Naunakhte! (To be fair, he deserves his own post, but it’s Women’s History Month, so we’re yeeting him to another time)

Donker van Heel, author of the major work on Naunakhte's life, records that she was around 12 years old when she married Qenhirkhopshef, who was… wait for it… 50 YEARS OLD. That’s some Epstein shit.

Yes, elite women in the ancient world tended to marry at a younger age, but this age difference is fairly drastic and would seem to indicate that Naunakhte was not Qenhirkhopshef’s first wife, or maybe even his second. His previous wives could have died from any imaginable issue, with the most likely being complications from pregnancy or childbirth. No children appear to accompany Qenhirkhopshef when he marries Naunakhte, so presumably any children, if there were any, also predeceased the marriage or were old enough to exist outside of his household, and probably even the craftsmen’s village.

Again, there is more we can say on the man (he is also accused of stealing a cultic statue with the infamous (read: sexual predator) Paneb), but suffice it to say, Qenhirkhopshef disappears from record between Seti II and Siptah’s reigns. Archaeologists believe that Qenhirkhopshef and Naunakhte lived in House N.E VIII at Deir el-Medina, which he inherited from his adopted father, Ramose. It’s hard to imagine a 12-year-old running the household for one of the senior scribes of the workmen’s village, but here we are.

Widowhood? Not for Long

When Qenhirkhopshef kicked the bucket, Naunakhte would have been in a fairly secure position. Women could and did inherit property, and from what we see in her will, it would indicate that most, if not all, of Qenhirkhopshef’s wealth was passed on to her. So why didn’t she live out her life as a rich widow, but instead marry someone whose title places her lower in the Egyptian hierarchy?

Enter Khaemnun. He was a workman at Deir el-Medina, which is typically regarded as lower on the Egyptian social ladder than her previous arrangement. Was this a true love match, or are modern scholars projecting their assumptions onto Naunakhte? He seems to have been closer in age to Naunakhte, so perhaps they had grown up together and knew each other well. Around Year 4 of Ramses V, Khaemnun also predeceased Naunakhte, leaving her with his property as well. Now she is an even richer widow!

The Kiddos

What about kids? We know Naunkahte had at least 8 children, with most Egyptologists assuming that most were with Qenhirkhopshef, given how long they were married and their respective ages, yet in later documents the children appear to be applied to her second marriage. Ultimately, we are not exactly sure who the baby daddy was.

We believe there were only 8 surviving children, since those are the 8 that are mentioned in her will. The children are:

• Maaninakhte

• Qenhirkhopshef

• Amunnakhte

• Wasetnakhte

• Menatnakhte

• Neferhotep

• Henutshenu

• Khatanub

These kids get into a lot of trouble in the village of Deir el-medina, hence the title of this post— there was so much drama happening in workmen’s desert colony.

When there is a Will, there is a Lawsuit

And at last, we come to the grand conclusion– Naunakhte’s last will and testament where she DISOWNS some of her spoiled children and tells the world how she really feels.

She said: “As for me, I am a free woman (citizeness!) of the land of Pharaoh. I raised these eight servants of yours, and I outfitted them with everything that is usual for people of their character. Now look, I have become old, and look, they do not care for me. As for those who put their hands in my hand, to them I will give my property; (but) as for those who gave me nothing, to them I will not give them anything.”

She specifically calls out Neferhotep, Henutsenu, and Khatabebu saying

“As for these three children of mine, they will not share in the division of all my property.”

What these three did (or didn’t) do to deserve being left out of the will is not clear besides her reference to “those who gave me nothing.” Presumably, they did not care or help Naunakhte as she aged.

All the more interesting, is that the will was read out Year 3, fourth month of Akhet, day 5 of Ramses V’s reign (c. 1142 BCE) in front of no less than fourteen men of the village. She was putting those kids on BLAST. We can assume that all her children and second husband were present at the reading , and now all the town knew their family drama as well. And the fact that this document was read out while Naunakhte was still alive mean that the family had to proceed with their lives knowing where they all stood— AWKWARD

The kids didn’t take this sitting down. There were further court proceedings seeming to indicate that one of the children, Neferhotep was fighting his disinheritance. An addendum was added one year later, reafforming Neferhotep’s status:

As far as the writings are concerned which the female citizen Naunakhte had made about her things, they were thus exactly, exactly. The workman Neferhotep will not share in them. He will take an oath of the Lord (lph), saying: “If I turn back on my word again, he (I) shall receive a hundred blows and be deprived of my things.

So here we have Neferhotep being forced to declare that he will cease and desist or get beaten by the courts. Hope Neferhotep has a good therapist— he definitely had some mommy issues.

Naunakhte couldn't control how her kids treated her, but she could make damn sure they knew there were consequences. Three thousand years later, we're still talking about it. More on the rest of the family soon– many of the children got into trouble in the craftsmen’s village, adding to this ancient Egyptian version of a telenovela.

Sources:

Donker van Heel, K. (2017). Mrs. Naunakhte & family : the women of Ramesside Deir al-Medina / Koenraad Donker van Heel. The American University in Cairo Press.

McDowell, A. G. (1999). Village life in ancient Egypt : laundry lists and love songs / A.G. McDowell. Oxford University Press.

Will of Naunakhte, Ashmolean Museum, AN1945.97.4. https://www.ashmolean.org/collections-online#/item/ash-object-754997

Show Notes

Allen, James P. 1988. Genesis in Egypt : The Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts. Yale Egyptological Seminar, Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Graduate School, Yale University.

Goebs, Katja. 2008. Crowns in Egyptian funerary literature: royalty, rebirth, and destruction. Griffith Institute Monographs. Oxford: Griffith Institute, Ashmolean Museum.

Lobban, Richard, “A Solution to the Mystery of Was Scepter of Ancient Egypt and Nubia,” KMT: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt (10/3), 1999, 68–77.

Lobban, R. A. and M. Sprague, “Bulls and the W3s Sceptre in Ancient Egypt and Sudan,” Anthrozoös 10, 1997, 14-22.

Schwabe, Calvin W., Joyce Adams, and Carleton T. Hodge, “Egyptian Beliefs about the Bull’s Spine: An Anatomical Origin for Ankh,” Anthropological Linguistics 24, no. 4 (1982): 445–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30027646.

What emerges is an understanding that the ancient Egyptians did not view the self as singular. They saw it as layered and multifaceted—existing everywhere all at once: still and enduring, yet constantly in motion.

This episode begins a multipart exploration of the ancient Egyptian individual—from the ba to the ka, the name, the heart, and beyond—asking how this ancient civilization imagined identity, survival, and how the Egyptians sought eternal existence in a world where death is inevitable.

Notes

Allen, James P. 2011. The debate between a man and his soul: a masterpiece of ancient Egyptian literature. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 44. Leiden: Brill.

Janák, Jiří. 2016. Ba. In Jacco Dieleman, Willeke Wendrich (eds.), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, Los Angeles. http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz002k7g85

Lichtheim, Miriam. 1973. Ancient Egyptian literature. A book of readings, volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

**Content and trigger warning: This episode contains images of sex and discussion of sexual themes, sexual abuse and exploitation, incest, and other related topics that might be inappropriate or upsetting to some listeners.

Kara and Amber discuss one of the most debated objects from ancient Egypt: the so-called Turin Erotic Papyrus (Turin P. 55001). Often viewed as an example of ancient Egyptian pornography or crass entertainment, this papyrus reveals far more about elite anxiety, dynastic survival, and the ideological machinery of patriarchy. Through close visual analysis and discussion, they explore what is behind the exaggerated and sexualized depictions of bodies and scenes of sexual dominance and performance—not simply as humor, but as expressions of a system of power struggling to reproduce itself and maintain dominance. These images expose an obsession with regeneration, haunted by aging and mortality, and shaped by fear of failing masculinity, in which an aging sun god—and an aging king—must be sexually reborn to keep the cosmos intact.

This episode connects sex, death, pornography, religion, ancient harems, and power structures both ancient and modern, asking why patriarchal societies so often turn to sexual control as ideology—and why these ancient images still feel disturbingly familiar today.

Show notes

More about the Turin Erotic Papyrus (Museo Egizio)

Selected Bibliography

Babcock, Jennifer Miyuki , Ancient Egyptian animal fables: tree climbing hippos and ennobled mice (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 128), Leiden; Boston 2022, p. 49–54, 107 e passim.

Bresciani, Edda, Sulle rive del Nilo : l’Egitto al tempo dei faraoni(Grandi Opere), Roma 2000, pp. 122–127, 139–141, fig. 13 p. 124-5; fig. 5-6 p. 140.

Flores Diane, “The topsy-turvy world”, in Egypt, Israel, and the ancient Mediterranean world. Studies in Honor of Donald B.Redford., 2004, pp. 234–235, 239, 246, 249, fig. pp. [21], [27], [37], [42].

Houlihan, Patrick F., Wit & humour in ancient Egypt, London 2001, pp. 67–72, 132–136, fig.. 57, 66, 67, 68, 136, 141-6.

Janák, J. And H. Navrátilová, 2008, “People v. P. Turin 55001,” in C. Graves-Brown (ed.) Sex and Gender in Ancient Egypt, ‘Don your wig for a joyful hour,’ The Classical Press of Wales.

Manniche, Lise, Sexual life in Ancient Egypt, in -, London 1997, pp. 106–115.

Omlin, Joseph A., Der Papyrus 55001 und seine satirisch-erotischen Zeichnungen und Inschriften (Catalogo del Museo Eg. di Torino - Serie I. - Monumenti e testi 3), Torino 1973.

Skumsnes, Reinert. 2025. A case study of the Turin Satirical-Erotic papyrus: historical bodies, mundane resistance, and alternative body worlds. In Pedersen, Unn, Marianne Moen, and Lisbeth Skogstrand (eds), Gendering the Nordic past: dialogues between perspectives, 235-250. Turnhout: Brepols. DOI: 10.1484/M.WOP-EB.5.144367.

Toivari-Viitala, Jaana-Toivari-Viitala, Jaana, Women at Deir el-Medina : a study of the status and roles of the female inhabitants in the workmen’s community during the Ramesside Period(Egyptologische Uitgaven 15), Leiden 2001, pp. 146–7.

About our Guest: Jason Silvestri

Jason Silvestri (BA ’19, Univ. of Toronto; MA ’21 UC Berkeley) is the Lady Wallis Budge Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge and PhD Candidate in Egyptian Archaeology at UC Berkeley’s Dept. of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (MELC), where he is writing a dissertation on the social and political history of the Libyan Period (Dyns. XXI-XXIV). He has also worked extensively on Libyan-Egyptian interconnections, and has published the earliest known evidence of an Ancient Libyan language, the Qeheq Papyrus. In addition to his textual work, he is also an archaeologist, and has worked for several projects in Italy, Greece, and Egypt.

Academia

https://elhibehproject.org/

Show Notes

• Check out Jason’s article on oldest extant text that possibly preserve the Berber language

• Third Intermediate Period

• Libyan Period

• Egyptian glyph rendering of the term “Libyans”- 𓍿𓅓𓎛𓌙𓀀 or 𓍿𓎛𓈖𓏌𓇋𓇋𓅱

• Candelora, Danielle 2019. The eastern Delta as a middle ground for Hyksos identity negotiation. Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Abteilung Kairo 75, 77-94.

• Hubschmann, C., (2010) “Who Inhabited Dakhleh Oasis? Searching for an Oasis Identity in Pharaonic Egypt”, Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 20(1), 51-66. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/pia.341

• Code Shifting

• Use of the term “tribe” within anthropological studies

• Banishment Stela

• The Amazigh Language Family

• Afroasiatic Language Family

• Cooper, Julien Charles 2021. Beja and Cushitic languages in Middle Egyptian texts: the etymologies of queen Aashayet and her retainers. Lingua Aegyptia 29, 13-36. DOI: 10.37011/lingaeg.29.02.

• Cooper, J. (2020). Egyptian Among Neighboring African Languages. UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 1(1). Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2fb8t2pz

• El Hibeh

Want to learn more about the Libyan Period? Suggested Readings:

• Ritner, R. K. (2009) The Libyan anarchy : inscriptions from Egypt’s Third Intermediate Period / translated with an introduction and notes by Robert K. Ritner ; edited by Edward Wente. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.

• Moreno García, J. C. (2014) Invaders or just herders? Libyans in Egypt in the third and second millennia bce. World archaeology. [Online] 46 (4), 610–623.

• Broekman, G. (2011) Theban Priestly and Governmental Offices and Titles in the Libyan Period. Zeitschrift für ägyptische sprache und altertumskunde. [Online] 138 (2), 93–115.

Dearest readers and listeners,

Thank you for your patience as I pour heart and soul into the Nefertiti book while trying to avoid checking the news that is so very very bad and polarizing, making me doubt humanity and even hate (some of) my fellow man, while simultaneously finding great courage and kindness and community in unexpected places. It’s been a very private, quiet (too quiet!) and rather soul-wrenching time as I stay home from work for a year of sabbatical. Since June I have been reading and note-taking on all the Amarna things—a messy, crazy process. Goddamn but have Egyptologists spilled some ink on this period of time!

I started writing in October, and I am thrilled to announce that I have almost completed the first draft. It’s like a childbirth really. This part of the writing is always the hardest for me—it’s downright painful—and there is no pain relief except drinking, which I’m not doing anymore. Composing the first blush of story for page after page is when I feel alone in the dark, full of shame about my inabilities, cognizant of how much I haven’t read, upset at my lack of discipline and low energy. And I have reason to be afraid: as usual I am walking the line between scholarly precision and blowing it all up with decolonial imagination. Let’s see how it turns out. At least I’m delivering chapters full of crazy shit. At least nothing like this has ever been written before.

I have really painted myself into a corner this year, I must say. I need to deliver on two book contracts—a biography about Nefertiti with Nat Geo Books and a book about the ancient Egyptian harem (yes, the harem existed and in the way you don’t want it to have existed!) with Routledge. We won’t talk about the second book. It will be late.

The state of the world is not helping at all but is also helping quite a bit. I am trying to write about a time when everything fell apart 3500 years ago just as everything falls apart now in real time. Paramilitaries roam the Los Angeles streets messing with people, and I realize what it was like to get recruited to build the city of Akhetaten. I also recognize that we will all have to learn to speak and write and read in code—using history and allegory to speak truth to power—because soon we might not be allowed to verbalize what is really happening. The ancients knew such power dynamics in their bones. These horrible realities help me to enter an authoritarian past cognitively and emotionally. So… hurrah?

Writing a first draft is terrifying, demoralizing, just all around scary AF. I’m probably two days away from completing that first draft and sending it away to be dissected and analyzed for further improvement. Wow am I glad this drafting process is almost over. The next part never seems quite as daunting to me. The chunking of labor happens through editorial decisions and deadlines, not from my own control on discipline or schedule. I also tend to get fired up and energized when editors criticize a particular opinion, making me back up a point with more evidence or a tighter argument. When editors critique my organization, I am usually nothing but grateful, happily moving things around so that they will make better sense to the reader. I’m much better at second and third and fourth drafts. I find the process meditative. It’s like embroidering. I can get lost in the crafting of words. I can’t get lost in the emotion of the story. Once someone else has read it, I’m not alone anymore.

But writing to the empty page? GAAAAH, bleh, yuck, vomit. I have to hide away in my hidey-hole. I can’t see other people. I can’t talk to other people. I need to have no appointments ever. I bite the shit out of my nails and cuticles. I’m an emotional mess. The loneliness is horrible. I take breaks watching Instagram recipes interspersed with videos of arrests and protests and bombings and dismemberment. How very strange.

So this is just to say thank you for your patience with me. Now that I am coming up for air, Amber and I will release another podcast. And we will do some more recordings too. I am so happy to be entering community again soon. Please hold the door for me… :)

Read more about Kara’s perspective on the death of Cleopatra in her book, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt.

Explore tombs in the Valley of the Kings via the Theban Mapping Project website!

Learn more about the Grand Egyptian Museum here. Someday we will visit, but not this day….

Along the way, Kara and Amber map the politics of reuse within the royal caches of KV35 (the tomb of Amenhotep II in the Valley of the Kings) and TT320 (a reused 18th Dynasty queens tomb at Deir el Bahari used to rebury “preferred” kings and queens and the final resting place of many of the Amen Priesthood). They discuss whether or not the coffin reused for Thutmose III was originally made for him, and consider the material record through feminist and new-materialist lenses, looking at how ritual tries to reconcile scarcity, power, and piety. It’s a practical guide to what Egyptians thought were the essential ritual elements for a king to transform—gold/solar, earth/Osiris, iconography/protection, kingship, and human agency—and why they were significant.

Show notes

For a discussion of the ritual repair of mummies from the Deir el Bahri 320 cache, check out Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, Episode #88.

For more about Thutmose III and the veneration of royal ancestors, check out Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, Episode #83.

Sources

Brown, Nicholas. 2020. “Raise Me Up and Repel My Weariness! A study of the coffin of Thutmose III (CG 61014).” MDAIK 76/77: 11-35.

Cooney, Kathlyn. “Surviving New Kingdom Kings’ Coffins: Restoring the Art That Was.” Arts 2025, 14(3), 57; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts14030057.

Cooney, Kara. 2024. Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches. Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press. [Buy it on Amazon or on the AUCP website.]

In this first post, we look at Heqanakht— priest, farmer, and ladies’ man. Intrigued? Read on…

Heqanakht was a gentleman farmer and priest who lived around 1950 BCE, during the Middle Kingdom (probably during the reign of Senwosret I). Information about his life is preserved through a series of discarded letters found in the tomb of Meseh, who had a side passage and crypt in the tomb complex of the vizier Ipy, near the mortuary temple of Mentuhotep II in Thebes.

The letters, amazingly, were found still tied and sealed in the tomb passage, discovered almost 4000 years later by Herbert Winlock, archaeologist with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1921-1922 season. These letters provide a unique insight into the daily life of a lower elite during the Middle Kingdom.

What do the letters reveal?

Heqanakht served as a ka-priest, working in the tomb chapels of rich men making sure endowments paid out and that offerings were made on schedule, but also, given his elite status and his funerary role, he held land further north in Middle Egypt. Most of the letters show Heqanakht writing to his household about the functioning of his land holdings. He provides direction on how to cultivate the land after the inundation, which land to rent for cultivation, and how much the men should pay for that rent. He instructs his household to sell the linen sheet he presumably told them to weave in an earlier letter, or if they don’t have the sheet, to use the grain. We can see here that all commodities could be equated and exchanged for other commodities. Everyone knew the comparable value of grain, flax, woven linen, livestock, sandals, and so on.

Arrange to have Heti’s son Nakht and Sinebniut go down to Perhaa to cultivate for [us] an area of land on lease. They should take its lease from that sheet to be woven there (with you). If, however, they will have collected the equivalent value of that emmer that is (owed me) in Perhaa, they should use it there as well.

And like any good boss, he gets upset with his household staff, chastising them for sending poor-quality barley. Why bad barley was sent at all is unclear, but what the staff got from it was a mouthful about what they did wrong from Heqanakht.

Now, what is this, having Sihathor come to me with old, dried-up full barley that was in Djedsut, without giving me those 10 sacks of full barley as new, fresh full barley? Don’t you have it good, eating fresh full barley while I am outcast? Now, the barge is moored at your harbor, and you act in all kinds of bad ways. If you will have had old full barley brought to me in order to stockpile that new full barley, what can I say?

Besides all the business negotiations, which are interesting for their economic relevance, some of Heqanakht’s family drama is mentioned in the letters (which, let’s be real, is way more interesting than the prices of grain).

At the end of the first letter, Heqanakht references an incident involving his wife:

“Now, what is this, doing bad things to my wife? Have done with it. Have you been given equal rights with me? How good it would be for you to stop.”

To understand this situation better, we need to take a close look at Heqanakht’s household—because it’s way more interesting than you would expect.

Who’s in Heqanakht’s Household?

Households were composed not only of genetic family members but also household staff, and even the staff’s families and dependents. In some cases, the relationship of a particular person mentioned in the letters to Heqanakht himself is unclear, but this is who we’ve got:

• Mother- Ipi

• Sister, Aunt, or wife?- Hetepet

• Staff member- Heti’s son, Nakht, and his dependents

• Head of Staff; a younger brother perhaps?- Merisu and his dependents

• Staff member- Sihathor

• Staff member- Sinebinut

• Son?- Anubis

• Son?- Sneferu

• Sister or daughter- Sitinut

• Wife- May’s daughter Hetepet

• Sister or daughter- Nefret

• Sister or daughter- Sitwerut

Now, as quoted earlier, Heqankaht referenced mistreatment of his wife, who we believe is Hetepet, May’s daughter, by the household. And this is confusing, because we need to differentiate her from another woman named Hetepet, who, given the high grain rations, must be a widowed sister or aunt, OR Heqanakht’s first wife. WAIT WHAT? Now this is where it gets a bit complicated…

The term used to describe his “wife” is not the normal word (hmt), but another term, namely hbswt. This has led to speculation that either Heqanakht was a widower, divorced, or he took on another wife. Many scholars argue that this term hbswt should not be translated as ‘wife,’ but as ‘concubine.’ Now we understand that this word concubine is now considered problematic by scholars and is often avoided. But it’s a descriptive way of describing a lower-status wife, that is, a woman who lives with a man but without full legal status and without the same social and economic benefits as his legal wife.

Concubinage and polygamy in ancient Egypt were complicated. Besides the king, legal and social documents suggest it was exceedingly rare for a man to take another wife. Perhaps he and his first wife could not conceive children, or perhaps his first wife was not able to fulfill her duties as “mistress of the house” (nbt-pr) anymore for whatever reason. Who in the above list could be Heqanakht’s first wife then (assuming she was alive)? The other Hetepet? It would be extraordinary if both his wives shared the same name, but certainly easier for him to remember.

There is further evidence that the household did not welcome this woman into the house. Even the maidservant was mistreating her, and we read that Heqanakht had to fire the maid:

Now, get that housemaid, Senen put out of my house—mind you—on whatever day Sihathor reaches you. Look, if she spends a single day in my house, take action! You are the one who lets her do bad to my wife.

Apparently, Merisu was the staff member who is in charge while he was gone, and he was allowing said mistreatment to occur.

In another incident, the lower status wife in question is named Hetepet, nicknamed Iutenhab. Maidservants and hairdressers were being kept from her, and Heqankaht was pissed:

Now, before I came here, didn’t I tell you (all) “Don’t keep a friend of Hetepet from her, whether her hairdresser or her domestic”? Mind yourselves around her. If only you would be (as) firm in everything as (you are) in this. Now, if you (Merisu) don’t want her, you’ll have to have Iutenhab brought to me. As this man lives for me—I speak about lp—whoever shall make any affair about the wife on the battlefield, he is against me and I am against him. Look, that is my wife, and the way to behave to a man’s wife is known. Look, as for anyone who will act for her, the same is done for me. Furthermore, will any of you bear having his woman denounced to him? Then I would bear it. How can I be in one community with you (all)? Not when you won’t respect the wife for me!

Again, the staff member Merisu was implicated, given that he was the ‘man in charge’ while Heqanakht was away. Clearly, Heqanakht needed to return home and get things under control. But what about his poor Hetepet? It was a raw deal—joining a new household, probably being decades younger than your new husband who was away all the time, and now everyone in the household, even the servants, are treating you poorly.

Was all of this drama orchestrated by a bitter Mother-in-Law or the first wife, if she was somehow still around? Or was something else the cause of all this animosity? Was the maidservant Senen treating her poorly out of allegiance to the first wife?

As with all ancient evidence, the data is sadly incomplete. We have neither the responses to Heqanakht’s letter nor the greater context to which these letters refer. Yet the fundamental truth remains clear: Heqanakht and his relatives grappled with the same messy family dynamics we face today. While he never would imagine broadcasting his grievances on social media or reality television like families today—and would likely be mortified to discover that strangers four millennia later are poring over his private correspondence—his neighbors almost certainly still whispered about his family troubles anyway.

So the next time you fire off a cutting text or craft a pointed subtweet, consider the possibility that some future scholar, five thousand years in the future, might be equally fascinated by your drama.

Sources:

• Allen, James P. 2002. The Heqanakht papyri. Publications of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Egyptian Expedition 27. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art

• Heqankaht Letter I, Metropolitan Museum, 22.3.516

• Heqanakht Letter II, Metropolitan Museum, 22.3.517

• Heqanakht Letter III, Metropolitan Museum, 22.3.518

• Heqanakht Letter IV, Metropolitan Museum, 22.3.519

Use this Zoom link to join the discussion—where we can see each other’s faces and talk for a bit about all things ancient Egypt, human collapse, you know, the little things that matter in life. :)…

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Kara and Amber take on the most famous death in all of antiquity—Cleopatra VII’s—and ask what “honor” really means when the sources are Roman, i.e. biased AF, and the stakes are imperial, that is Octavian is using Cleopatra’s fall to condense all power into the hands of one person, his own.

Starting with a timeline of events, Kara and Amber unpack Octavian’s propaganda about Cleopatra’s death by suicide, and Kara argues that the suicide story serves Rome far more than it serves Egypt’s last queen. Using David Graeber’s Debt as a lens, they consider the ways in which honor, debt, and violence travel together in patriarchal systems—and how those rules are gendered. Antony’s suicide reads as “honorable,” while Cleopatra’s is framed as hysterical and selfish and maternal abandonment—all the worst things a woman within patriarchy could do. They probe the politics of narratives about “honor” that trap women who rule (with nods to Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, and Zenobia). The result is a sharp, feminist read of Cleopatra’s end.

Or, as Kara likes to say: Suicide my ass… he straight up killed her and lied about it.

Fight me. :)

Show notes

David Graeber’s Debt

Check out our other episodes on Cleopatra:

Episode #57 – Reception, Ownership, and Race: Netflix’s “Queen Cleopatra”

Episode #60 – Part II: Reception, Ownership, and Race: Netflix’s “Queen Cleopatra”

Episode #82 – The Death of Cleopatra: Murder or Suicide?

This coffin provides an excellent case study to help us understand how royal burials—and royal corpses—were manipulated, remade, and redeployed as tools that manufactured social power. Kara walks us through the forensic clues on the object itself—two uraeus holes (think vulture and cobra on the mask of Tutankhamun!), layers of plaster (that means redecoration!) tool marks (scraping away all that gilding!), traces of gilding (regilding a thin layer after taking a thick layer), and multiple sets of mortise-and-tenons (as the case and lid sides get thinner and thinner!)—to show at least two major interventions before the coffin was finally cached in Deir el-Bahri 320, stripped of just about all its precious materials.

During this discussion, Kara and Amber explore some of the reasons Thutmose III was resurrected as a divine ancestor by later generations of warlords (like Payankh and Herihor!), how “caretaking” and commodification coexisted, and what these acts can tell us about civil conflict, migration, and elite replacement in the late Bronze Age. This is a forensic case study that reveals object stratigraphy as power politics.

Show notes

For a discussion of the ritual repair of mummies from the Deir el Bahri 320 cache, check out Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, Episode #88.

For more about Thutmose III and the veneration of royal ancestors, check out Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, Episode #83.

Sources

Brown, Nicholas. 2020. “Raise Me Up and Repel My Weariness! A study of the coffin of Thutmose III (CG 61014).” MDAIK 76/77: 11-35.

Cooney, Kathlyn. “Surviving New Kingdom Kings’ Coffins: Restoring the Art That Was.” Arts 2025, 14(3), 57; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts14030057.

Cooney, Kara. 2024. Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches. Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press. [Buy it on Amazon or on the AUCP website.]

Use this Zoom link to join the discussion—where we can see each other’s faces and talk for a bit about all things ancient Egypt, human collapse, you know, the little things that matter in life. :) We c…

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