If mummy unwrapping parties impresses you, then prepare to have your mind blown.
I don’t know how reliable that is, considering the stories about mummies being burned as fuel was a joke by Mark Twain and that they were used to make paper is also bogus. The Master Speaks.
Are you saying a BBC reporter made up the invitation to a mummy unwrapping party? I can say for a fact that she didn’t (I’ve seen the invitation in question) and there are photos online:
RE: Missing noses
I suspect most of them were pinched off between the fingers of a corny uncle.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the Muslims were to blame for the defacement (literally) and the modern guides simply choose to blame the Christians, as they tend to do a lot in Egypt. The damage is very explicit - the facial areas and often the hands are chipped away in the plaster and stone reliefs on many of the temples and other monuments.
Yes, a number of pieces and even whole edifices of the ancients were “recycled” over the centuries - after all, quarrying, transporting and finishing stone is expensive, and this perfectly good stuff is just lying around unguarded. In fact sometimes even entire statues were “repurposed”, a few alterations made and the name recarved to create a statue of a different pharaoh, for example.
But recycling s nothing new. There’s an underground reservoir in Istanbul where the bases of some pillars are recognizable pieces of an old Roman temple. Glastonbury abbey pieces apparently can be seen in the walls of several local buildings around the town. Everyone did this.
I don’t know if they were or not, but it seems more than a bit tangential to the question you are actually asking. No doubt in the past archaeologists didn’t take the mummies all the seriously. Carter certainly didn’t, as they were more interested in what Tut was buried with than in the actual body (IIRC, they snapped off the legs). But wrt some sort of systematic attempt by ‘western’ archaeologists or just westerners to suppress ‘African’ features on statues or mummies? :dubious: Like I said, the only thing that comes close as far as I can recall is the 25th dynasty, and that was mainly the Egyptians themselves (though I think a case can be made that westerner types also downplayed the dynasty even into more modern times). But it wasn’t because they had ‘African’ features, more it was a period that later Egyptian dynasties wanted to simply erase from their history.
WRT mummy noses, I think that is probably something that was simply part of the Egyptian mummification process, since they basically shoved a hot poker up the nose and through the bone into the brain, scrambled said brains and then poured the contents out through the hole…then repaired the damage as best they could and went on with the mummification process. It wasn’t to disguise ‘African’ features, especially since the only dynasty that would have had those kinds of features were the 25th when the Nubian kings took control of upper and lower Egypt for about 150 years.
And my quote said "When mummies were unwrapped, it was done by a researcher in an academic setting, such as a university lecture hall.”
Which is exactly what that cite says happen.
The BBC article merely repeats the popular myth.
The Lord Landesborough “party invitation” is interesting, certainly. I’ve checked a dozen online sites that mention it and every single one does nothing more than reference the ad. No follow-up, no mention of what actually happened at the event, no mention of whether it was a serious scholarly occasion merely held in his house rather than in public. Wealthy people did such science lectures regularly. They were not intended as festive occasions. Calling them “parties” completely misrepresents their function and atmosphere. And I can’t find a single other reference to a similar private event.
By doing some scholarly digging of my own I found that Landesborough was a wealthy patron of archaeology. He got Samuel Birch, curator of oriental antiquities at the British Museum, to do the unwrapping. Birch was the successor to Thomas Pettigrew, the man who did the public unwrappings the articles were referring to. In short, this was simply a private version of the public lectures, not a “party” and certainly not something that Victorians did regularly for fun at home. Equally, many in that segment of the British upper-crust would not be seen at such a public demonstration and the only way to reach them was with a peer hosting one.
And I still am damned if I can figure out how mummy unwrappings are meaningful in any way in a thread about racist nose-removal.
I’m saying that using the BBC as an appeal to authority when a couple of the things in that article are blatantly false doesn’t enhance confidence in the credibility of the other claims. The reporter may not have “made up” the invitation, but they didn’t make up the tall tales about using mummies in paper making and for fuel either, and those stories could have been debunked with a simple Google search. There’s no reason to think that they did any fact checking regarding the authenticity of the invitation either.
There are defaced statues all over the place in Egypt. People tried to wipe out the memory of a previous Pharaoh a lot.
How do this “experts” determine which statues were defaced due to ethnicity and which due to later people just getting revenge? It’s not like we have “before and after” pics of these.
Okay, that’s a question that is just loaded with bad assumptions and it’s unclear what exactly you mean. I am interpreting the question as: “How do experts determine the motive for why a particular statue was defaced?” (BTW: There’s no reason to put the word experts in sarcasm quotes. Egyptology is a real discipline with real experts.) Here’s a few points:
(1) If a ruler was unpopular or someone wanted to eliminate him from the record, they would often over-write all of his public works. This includes eliminating cartouches (ie any other mention of the ruler’s name). It’s pretty easy to tell when a cartouche as been eliminated or altered.
(2) We have no reason to believe that the ancient Egyptians were racist. The ancient world didn’t have the same racial hang-ups we have today, which are mostly the result of colonization and the slave trade. We have plenty of artifacts with accurate depictions of sub-Saharan Africans, so there’s no reason to believe this was a widespread policy.
(3) There’s just no positive evidence of it. One might expect to find a papyrus that says, “Pharoah ordered all Nubian artworks defaced because he didn’t like their race.” Or an eyewitness account that reads, “Shortly after we opened the tomb, I saw Lord Westinghamfordshirington chisel off the nose of the statue, in order to conceal that black people were accomplished rulers.” We just don’t have any such evidence, therefore the claim regarding motives is unsupported.
Pagan images. It is the Pagan gods images, that the early christians objected to, as was common with the destruction conversion of the pagan temples across the old roman world
What?
The native christians of the Egypt were the absolute majority of the population from the effective conversion of the majority of the population country no later the 300s until at least the 1100s and more likely the 1300s.
The were not the majority for a “very short period” they were the majority for about a thousand years plus or minus a couple centuries up or down and even after the muslims became a majority maybe in the 1300s, remained a huge minority.
it is not contoversial a majority of the defacing of the pharonic period temples was done in the period of the conversion from the paganism and the tension period of power struggle between the pagan elites and the new christians - not a pattern different than other parts of the eastern roman empire.
Most of the erasure of pharaonic images/names was more personal than racist. Two that come to mind were the attempted removal of any traces of Ankhaten and the removal of traces of Hatshepsut.
Ankhaten basically replaced the entire pantheon of Egyptian gods with the worship of the sun - founding a completely new religion. It also gave him an excuse - like Henry VIII and the monasteries - to take the property endowed to the assorted temples and their priesthood, a substantial amount of the kingdom’s wealth. Once he died, the old order reasserted itself and for revenge, razed aas much of his memory as they could - his statues, his new capital, his new temples… But, he was succeeded (except for a mystery pharaoh, who may have been Nefertiti) by his son, King Tut, who at age 18 was considered to a puppet of the religious establishment. So… no racism there; just your standard Game-of-Thrones personality clashes.
Hatshepsut was supposed to be the regent for her stepson (son by another mother, the sort of thing that happens when someone has dozens of wives). She liked ruling so much, she shuffled the heir off to a temple in the desert and made herself pharaoh. When she finally died, he tried to erase any trace of her rule; but there are still plenty of traces, including depictions of her as an ambiguously male-appearing pharaoh to justify her claim to rule.
There was at least one episode where the kingdom was conquered and ruled by Nubians form the south (as well as times when they were conquered from the Middle East by Assyrians, Greeks, etc. ) there’ no evidence that anyone went on a more determined effort to erase any images of previous rulers after the Nubian rule. Simply there was a general xenophobia and dislike of threatening foreigners, like the rest of the world.
It seems completely implausible to me. Remember that Victorian collectors thought that Monarchy and Government in general were completely natural things. Their working starting place was that everyone was like them, only inferior: the same starting place that people have today.
Their fiction reflects this: they imagine vast black African empires ruled by black African rulers, with attractive rather European-looking women.