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Pyramids Are Just Really Elaborate Jenga

@thatlittleegyptologist / thatlittleegyptologist.tumblr.com

| UK | Egyptologist (PhD) | She/Her | 30s | Please check out my FAQ before asking an Ancient Egypt or Egyptology related question! (FAQ linked in pinned post)| Icon by @23-tinywishes! | This is a Trans supportive space. TERFs using my words about Hatshepsut to harm Trans people will be blocked on sight. | Blogs with no content will be blocked

Hi, welcome to this blog! Here’s a few things you should know:

  • I’m from the UK, and have only experienced the UK education/University system. I can’t help you with getting into College/University in the US or any other country. 
  • I’m over 18 (in my 30s), so if that makes you uncomfortable then don’t follow. In fact, I'd strongly advise you didn't if you're under 18
  • Yes I am aware of and have watched/played: The Mummy/The Mummy Returns/Stargate/Stargate SG-1/Night at the Museum/Assassin's Creed Origins. No, I don't really want to give you my opinion on them.
  • I don't follow Kemeticism, and thus know nothing about Kemetic religious practices. Please direct your asks to someone better suited to help you with those, as I'd rather you got advice from the right people. There are plenty of lovely Kemetics out there willing to help though!
  • I block blogs that have no title/default avatar or pfp/no content/no likes/no explanation for why the blog is blank like 'this is my main but I use my secondary blog mostly'. This site has too much of a problem with Pr0n bots for me to allow random no content blogs to follow that later use my content as a way to legitimise themselves.
  • My knowledge base is pretty secure up until the end of the New Kingdom and some of the Late Period. Don't ask about anything after 500BCE because there's a higher chance of me being wrong.
  • That being said: Don't use the answers you find here as answers to essays or arguments with teachers/professors. Not only could I very well be wrong (so potential for you to look silly), but I'm also not a legitimate academic source. This is a tumblr blog not an academic journal. If you want to use the academic sources provided to then write your own essay, go ahead. Source analysis is key, and this blog is not a good source.
  • No, the search function isn't broken I just don't have that function turned on for my blog.
  • This is a personal blog, not a pure Egyptology blog. I will just reblog whatever amuses me, and it won’t always be about Ancient Egypt. 
  • I don’t work in Egyptology currently...or maybe I do? You'll never know! That's the beauty of me not telling you. I do have a working background in the field, but this gives me no power or influence. I won't tell you what I do for work, regardless of what it is I actually do, because I value my privacy. So if you want to think of me as working in Egyptology, cool. If you want to think of me as having an office job, also cool.
  • I will get things wrong because I don’t know everything. If you've got some helpful information please share! If me being wrong somehow upsets you, just block and move on.
  • If you’re here due to the Animal Headed Gods post here’s a link to an ask explaining it. Hint: they’re not furries. That post was originally made in 2017, and I deleted the original to save myself from the notes.
  • If you’re here because of the Pub Quiz post. Please know that it took place in 2016 and I am very much done talking about it. I don’t care if you believe it happened or not, and I’m aware it was posted to multiple ‘Tumblr Lies’ instagram/reddit accounts. Save your breath because I got enough ‘and the whole bus clapped’ comments and anon hate at the time simply for drunk posting what happened to me. Please know that I thought I was relaying a story of something that happened to me, to the friends and the 200ish people who followed me at the time, and never anticipated it was going to go viral. I’d also appreciate people not posting it off this site as I get a lot of grief for it.
  • Yes I am aware my posts are on reddit/instagram/facebook etc etc. No I don't want to be made aware of where they are.

As for the FAQ,

In the interests of preserving my sanity, and now providing a response to ‘I can’t get your FAQ on mobile’ you absolutely can here’s a nice big ol’ link to my FAQ that’s now a pinned post at the top of my blog (iOS users only- Android users see below).

For Android users, you might want to copy the following url

 thatlittleegyptologist.tumblr.com/FAQ 

and paste it into your Chrome browser and then select ‘request desktop site’ from the meatball menu (the three dots) as the above link only works for those on iOS and there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s a tumblr issue, not a me issue. If you don’t know how to ‘request desktop site’ in Android, here’s a link to a tutorial.

Finally!

This blog is trans-supportive. Trans women are women and trans men are men. If you are straight trans you are as valid as queer trans folks, and you don’t need to be dysphoric to be trans. It’s likely that I may still make honest mistakes when talking about these things I am always open to be corrected politely. TERFs caught co-opting any of our explanations about Hatshepsut in order to invalidate the trans experience will be blocked and reported. I do not and will not tolerate hatred towards trans people, or the wider LGBTQIA+ community, in any shape or form.

Anonymous asked:

literally. i’m a bit too young for original x files but just old enough to have been WELL aware of shipping when i first got into fandom. being that the big non canon ships in the fandoms i was actually in tended to be “well they would work really well together, it’s not massively hinted at or anything though” i assumed x files would be similar. IMAGINE MY SURPRISE -

I was...erm...not able to read quite yet when it started airing, but when I got into fandom in 1999/2000(ish) it was one of the things people talked a lot about like 'at least your ship in canon, look what's happening on x files'. So I've known for a while that people shipped it, I've seen gifs, heard about the tension w/e, that when I started watching it I assumed they built to the tension, but nope there it was like right out the door in episode one. Apologies to everyone in the 90s who, unlike me, was old enough to watch it. You guys went through some shit.

Anonymous asked:

The pyramids caused the sexual tension

For many people something large, well built, and hard as rock will be very sexy

Me: my brain fucking sucks today so let's do something new and start watching the x-files

Me, 28 minutes into the pilot episode: oh so it was from episode one? cool...I can...they're definitely gonna...jesus

i mean watching a show about conspiracy theories and not expect the pyramids to be mentioned is a bit shortsighted, to be fair.

I was talking about Mulder/Scully sexual tension, but..erm...go off?

Oh wait I might be stupid.

Ehhh everyone gets one (per day)! dw about it

Me: my brain fucking sucks today so let's do something new and start watching the x-files

Me, 28 minutes into the pilot episode: oh so it was from episode one? cool...I can...they're definitely gonna...jesus

i mean watching a show about conspiracy theories and not expect the pyramids to be mentioned is a bit shortsighted, to be fair.

I was talking about Mulder/Scully sexual tension, but..erm...go off?

i think we should all go back to carrying cheap little plastic mp3 players that look strangely edible and only hold like 200 songs

listening to unwritten just as natasha bedingfield intended

Literally been planning to do this, it'll save my phone battery life and let me escape into music again without the chance of getting distracted by social media. I've honestly been reimplementing the tech behaviours of my childhood/teen years and it really has vastly improved my mental well-being

People on this website will really mock anti-vaxxers and flat earthers for ignoring scientists and getting their alternative facts from facebook, and then turn around and insist they know more history than historians and more archaeology than archaeologists because they read an unsourced tumblr post once

Is there a real life example of this?

It happens a lot.

I know it's bad but I kind of want to know more about the woman who thinks the Roman Empire never existed

Oh shit i believed the Leonardo Da Vinci one

Also why do people make these

What do you hope to gain

There are a lot of different misinformation dynamics at play here.  Only some are innocent, only some are malicious.  But that’s why it pays to fact-check things, because the innocent misunderstandings, the arrogant personal hypotheses stated as fact, and the malicious lies are all jumbled together.

  • Some of these are a misunderstanding or conflating of true facts.  The Da Vinci one goes here.  Many historians do believe that Leonardo da Vinci had a romantic/sexual relationship with his apprentice(s).  And it’s well-established that his apprentices modeled for some of his paintings.  But they did not model for any of his paintings of Jesus - which was the core point of the post that this fact came from, enjoying the irony.  So this isn’t true because it’s a conflation of several true facts into a false but understandable conclusion.
  • Some of these are just a victim of internet telephone.  The “Persephone’s daughter” and “fake Greek goddess” ones refer to Mespyrian, who was some teenager’s wattpad OC daughter of Persephone and Hades, that someone else on tumblr accidentally mistook as a real figure from Greek mythology.
  • Some of these come from people making their own conclusions about history, and then turning around and insisting that the experts therefore must be lying to you.  This is where it gets dangerous.  The “archaeologists broke the noses off Egyptian statues to hide the fact that they were African” one goes here.  Many Egyptian statues are missing their noses, so several years ago someone on the internet claimed that it was because archaeologists deliberately broke them off, and this gained a Lot of traction because it felt true and people wanted it to be true.  People overwhelmingly want to believe that they, ordinary citizens of the world with no special training, are actually smarter than the experts.  People love to believe that, so it’s very, very easy for people to decide the experts are stupid and clueless (the “History Hates Lovers” song, the thing about the dodecahedron or the Roman hairstyles or the leather burnishers) while salt-of-the-earth ordinary folk are smarter than those ivory-tower eggheads.  At worst, people decide the experts are maliciously hiding the truth about the world for their own gain (the Lovers of Valdaro one here is an example of this, but you also see this a lot regarding “all ancient cultures were feminist utopias until the Catholic Church invented misogyny and covered up the feminist past” type posts that are extremely popular with TERFs.)  This is the dynamic I’m comparing to anti-vaxxers and flat Earthers, and yes, this kind of anti-intellectualism is dangerous.
  • Some people are just trolls because they like lying on the internet and riling people up.  This cannot be discounted.  People do do this.  The tiktok woman who doesn’t believe in the Roman Empire and doesn’t believe that Vesuvius erupted is almost certainly a troll who likes the attention her wild false claims get.

It’s a combination of things, but it’s why you shouldn’t assume that historians are all old homophobic clueless idiots and only you, tumblr user persephonesmassivebadonkers or whatever, know the REAL truth.  Because that’s how you get Flat Earthers, but more pressingly, it’s how you get antisemitic conspiracy theories and transphobic radfem proclamations of We Need To Return To The Ancient Feminist Utopia (By Destroying All Trans People)(And, Usually, Abrahamic Religions). 

But also by believing easily-debunked falsehoods it makes genuinely well-meaning people easier to dismiss by bigots as Brainwashed By Those El Gee Bee Tees Who Will Lie Because They Want To Destroy Academia/Biological Sex/The Church.

Spreading misinformation on tumblr is an understandable consequence of the existence of the internet, but it’s not harmless and really ought to be challenged when it’s seen.

And it’s not remotely helped by the fact there’s plenty of similar true stories that can be pointed to. Like, here’s a list of things: Brits in the 1800s used to eat Egyptian mummies, numerous gay relationships in history were called “friendships” by Christian historians, the Vatican is hoarding almost all history ever written and refuses to let anyone access it, the original biographies of the Sons of Liberty were all works of fiction (like Washington and the apple tree), Greek and Roman statues were painted but the people who discovered them found it garish so they stripped the paint off, DaVinci invented a tank, Lancelot is a fanfiction OC, and the Catholic Church was founded after numerous other Christian churches and proceeded to burn the holy books that didn’t support their version (like the Gospel of Judas, which establishes that the “betrayal” was Jesus’s plan because how was he supposed to die as planned, and they plotted it together). It’s easy to believe bullshit when the truth is just as rank.

This is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about: confidently firing off a mix of half-remembered and out-of-context factoids with “lies and coverups in history!!!” to make them seem like they’re correcting the record rather than reducing a mix of truth, common misconceptions, conspiracy theories, misunderstandings, and poor reporting to pithy one-liners. Let’s go through them.

Brits in the 1800s used to eat Egyptian mummies,

It's complicated. There's definitely a grain of truth to this, but it's not quite what the common narratives suggest. For example, eating mummies was a Medieval thing more than it was a Victorian thing; Victorians did "Scientific" mummy-unwrapping parties, but they didn't then eat them - they were collectible antiquities. For another, the mummies used by Victorians for paint were rarely ancient Egyptian humans. I'll let @thatlittleegyptologist take this one because they've talked about it. A lot. Like a lot. So often.

numerous gay relationships in history were called “friendships” by Christian historians,

It's complicated. Have historians in the past denied that their favorite historical figures could possibly be gay? Absolutely. But people who were romantically and sexually involved with each other in the past very often did call each other "friend." (Or, in ancient Egypt, "brother"). Even husbands and wives would call each other "friend." (it's midnight and I am blanking on how to search for sources that show this but I have transcribed 18th century letters and diaries, I have seen this.) Like, while historical squeamishness and denial of gay relationships has been a thing... the modern assumption that friendship cannot possibly ever include any gay stuff is also not helping. And heteronormatively taking words at face value is somewhere in between. It's sometimes malicious, but you have to give space for simple hetero brain too. And give space for all the queer and queer-affirming historians working in the field. And for people like Oscar Wilde who were arrested for sodomy and the Ancient Greeks who were Ancient Greek so it's hardly like anyone's denying that, even if their interpretation was that it was Bad. It's not cut and dry.

the Vatican is hoarding almost all history ever written and refuses to let anyone access it,

This one isn't actually complicated, it's just a bizarre misunderstanding (generous interpretation) or an Evangelical conspiracy theory (less generous interpretation) of what the Vatican Apostolic Archive, formerly known as the Vatican Secret Archive, is. They're not "hoarding almost all history ever written" (how would that work?). It's an archive of the Church's and the Vatican's records, accounting, correspondence, declarations, decisions, and other various affairs. Over the past several hundred years of dutiful documentary-keeping, that does add up to a lot of history about the development of European politics, culture, and colonization! There are in fact two archives; one which has been accessible to scholars since 1881, and one which is owned unilaterally by the Pope and only extremely rarely opened for any sort of access to outsiders. John Paul II actually made it easier for researchers to access those archives, though "easier" does not mean "easy" and is still very much at the Pope's discretion. However, they are archives pertaining to the Pope's and Church's affairs, not all of human history.

the original biographies of the Sons of Liberty were all works of fiction (like Washington and the apple tree),

True! But also a little complicated. The story about Washington and the cherry tree is complete fiction, and we know who to blame for it: Mason Locke "Parson" Weems, who wrote his famous biography of Washington right after Washington died and the nation was clamoring for tributes to him. He was kind of shameless about writing for the masses things that would sell. But at the same time, it was part of the myth-making of the new nation, part of a very common process at the time of nearly deifying Washington. But it is also true that we do in fact have a lot of letters and diaries written directly by these guys. We don't need to rely on Weems for fanciful stories about them, even if they have entered into the mythology-building of the US as a nation.

Greek and Roman statues were painted but the people who discovered them found it garish so they stripped the paint off,

Have you ever seen what happens to painted stone when left out in the elements over time? The paint chips off. Being exposed to the elements or buried in the dirt for hundreds or thousands of years does a number on the painted exterior of a statue. Here's a Jesuit scholar from 1913 lamenting this: "It is a notorious fact that the remains of colour fade very fast from marbles that are exposed to the light after centuries of burial and concealment. It is the universal experience of classical archaeologists. A French explorer describes some colours vanishing from sarcophagi found at Carthage "comme de la fumée" [like smoke]. Add to this the perfectly intelligible cleaning consequent on first discovery in the earth, and the still more disastrous and less pardonable washings with acid that, until recent years, were the fate of all classical statues. Even still another risk has to be remembered, the taking of casts […] Add these fates together, and say whether their total does not offer an explanation for a prejudiced view." Honestly, as Gisela M. A. Richter (1944) says, "The fact that any color at all remains is really more remarkable than that it has disappeared in the majority of cases." Greek and Roman statues, probably even marble statues, were painted! Yes! But there was probably little paint remaining even when the Renaissance sculptors and art collectors got ahold of them. And while the discoverers deliberately stripping off the paint because they decided it should not have been there is one potential reason (note the reference to acid-washing), and the pure white marble was a very ideologically-loaded Enlightment-era aesthetic highlighting the purity of the form, and 1700s-1800s English archaeologists and antiquarians had vicious debates over whether the marble statues were painted like the fate of their cultural hegemony rested on it, "removing the paint for its garishness" was not even close to the primary reason the colored paint does not remain. These are some resources about the Gods in Color exhibition that did experimental reconstructions of the colors of some statues.

DaVinci invented a tank,

Leonardo da Vinci drew designs for many devices, including a war machine that does resemble a modern tank! It's frequently described (with hedging descriptions) like "has been seen as a prototype of a tank." But there's no evidence that it was ever built, and it's unclear if the wheels and gear system would have worked. Can he be said to have "invented a tank"? I guess it depends on your definition of "invented."

Lancelot is a fanfiction OC,

This is either a flippant or deeply disingenuous way to describe the origins, evolution, and recording of King Arthur mythology, its use in literature and nationalist propaganda, and the way this is different from the way fanfiction interacts with a canon. @chimaerakitten knows much more about this than I do.

and the Catholic Church was founded after numerous other Christian churches and proceeded to burn the holy books that didn’t support their version (like the Gospel of Judas, which establishes that the “betrayal” was Jesus’s plan because how was he supposed to die as planned, and they plotted it together).

Ohhhh boy it's complicated. I am out of energy and by god it is late but there is a reason that books and books and books have been written about the history of Christianity, the early schisms, the creation of the canon, Gnosticism, and the origins of the Catholic Church.

Basically: if it can be summed up in one sentence as a "gotcha!" it is probably More Complicated Than That.

I get variations on this comment on my post about history misinformation all the time: "why does it matter?" Why does it matter that people believe falsehoods about history? Why does it matter if people spread history misinformation? Why does it matter if people on tumblr believe that those bronze dodecahedra were used for knitting, or that Persephone had a daughter named Mespyrian? It's not the kind of misinformation that actually hurts people, like anti-vaxx propaganda or climate change denial. It doesn't hurt anyone to believe something false about the past.

Which, one, thanks for letting me know on my post that you think my job doesn't matter and what I do is pointless, if it doesn't really matter if we know the truth or make up lies about history because lies don't hurt anyone. But two, there are lots of reasons that it matters.

  • It encourages us to distrust historians when they talk about other aspects of history. You might think it's harmless to believe that Pharaoh Hatshepsut was trans. It's less harmless when you're espousing that the Holocaust wasn't really about Jews because the Nazis "came for trans people first." You might think it's harmless to believe that the French royalty of Versailles pooped and urinated on the floor of the palace all the time, because they were asshole rich people anyway, who cares, we hate the rich here; it's rather less harmless when you decide that the USSR was the communist ideal and Good, Actually, and that reports of its genocidal oppression are actually lies.
  • It encourages anti-intellectualism in other areas of scholarship. Deciding based on your own gut that the experts don't know what they're talking about and are either too stupid to realize the truth, or maliciously hiding the truth, is how you get to anti-vaxxers and climate change denial. It is also how you come to discount housing-first solutions for homelessness or the idea that long-term sustained weight loss is both biologically unlikely and health-wise unnecessary for the majority of fat people - because they conflict with what you feel should be true. Believing what you want to be true about history, because you want to believe it, and discounting fact-based corrections because you don't want them to be true, can then bleed over into how you approach other sociological and scientific topics.
  • How we think about history informs how we think about the present. A lot of people want certain things to be true - this famous person from history was gay or trans, this sexist story was actually feminist in its origin - because we want proof that gay people, trans people, and women deserve to be respected, and this gives evidence to prove we once were and deserve to be. But let me tell you a different story: on Thanksgiving of 2016, I was at a family friend's house and listening to their drunk conservative relative rant, and he told me, confidently, that the Roman Empire fell because they instituted universal healthcare, which was proof that Obama was destroying America. Of course that's nonsense. But projecting what we think is true about the world back onto history, and then using that as recursive proof that that is how the world is... is shoddy scholarship, and gets used for topics you don't agree with just as much as the ones you do. We should not be encouraging this, because our politics should be informed by the truth and material reality, not how we wish the past proved us right.
  • It frequently reinforces "Good vs. Bad" dichotomies that are at best unhelpful and at worst victim-blaming. A very common thread of historical misinformation on tumblr is about the innocence or benevolence of oppressed groups, slandered by oppressors who were far worse. This very frequently has truth to it - but makes the lies hard to separate out. It often simplifies the narrative, and implies that the reason that colonialism and oppression were bad was because the victims were Good and didn't deserve it... not because colonialism and oppression are bad. You see this sometimes with radical feminist mother goddess Neolithic feminist utopia stuff, but you also see it a lot regarding Native American and African history. I have seen people earnestly argue that Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice, that that was a lie made up by the Spanish to slander them. That is not true. Human sacrifice was part of Aztec, Maya, and many Central American war/religious practices. They are significantly more complex than often presented, and came from a captive-based system of warfare that significantly reduced the number of people who got killed in war compared to European styles of war that primarily killed people on the battlefield rather than taking them captive for sacrifice... but the human sacrifice was real and did happen. This can often come off with the implications of a 'noble savage' or an 'innocent victim' that implies that the bad things the Spanish conquistadors did were bad because the victims were innocent or good. This is a very easy trap to fall into; if the victims were good, they didn't deserve it. Right? This logic is dangerous when you are presented with a person or group who did something bad... you're caught in a bind. Did they deserve their injustice or oppression because they did something bad? This kind of logic drives a lot of transphobia, homophobia, racism, and defenses of Kyle Rittenhouse today. The answer to a colonialist logic of "The Aztecs deserved to be conquered because they did human sacrifice and that's bad" is not "The Aztecs didn't do human sacrifice actually, that's just Spanish propaganda" (which is a lie) it should be "We Americans do human sacrifice all the god damn time with our forever wars in the Middle East, we just don't call it that. We use bullets and bombs rather than obsidian knives but we kill way, way more people in the name of our country. What does that make us? Maybe genocide is not okay regardless of if you think the people are weird and scary." It becomes hard to square your ethics of the Innocent Victim and Lying Perpetrator when you see real, complicated, individual-level and group-level interactions, where no group is made up of members who are all completely pure and good, and they don't deserve to be oppressed anyway.
  • It makes you an unwitting tool of the oppressor. The favorite, favorite allegation transphobes level at trans people, and conservatives at queer people, is that we're lying to push the Gay Agenda. We're liars or deluded fools. If you say something about queer or trans history that's easy to debunk as false, you have permanently hurt your credibility - and the cause of queer history. It makes you easy to write off as a liar or a deluded fool who needs misinformation to make your case. If you say Louisa May Alcott was trans, that's easy to counter with "there is literally no evidence of that, and lots of evidence that she was fine being a woman," and instantly tanks your credibility going forward, so when you then say James Barry was trans and push back against a novel or biopic that treats James Barry as a woman, you get "you don't know what you're talking about, didn't you say Louisa May Alcott was trans too?" TERFs love to call trans people liars - do not hand them ammunition, not even a single bullet. Make sure you can back up what you say with facts and evidence. This is true of homophobes, of racists, of sexists. Be confident of your facts, and have facts to give to the hopeful and questioning learners who you are relating this story to, or the bigots who you are telling off, because misinformation can only hurt you and your cause.
  • It makes the queer, female, POC, or other marginalized listeners hurt, sad, and betrayed when something they thought was a reflection of their own experiences turns out not to be real. This is a good response to a performance art piece purporting to tell a real story of gay WWI soldiers, until the author revealed it as fiction. Why would you want to set yourself up for disappointment like that? Why would you want to risk inflicting that disappointment and betrayal on anyone else?
  • It makes it harder to learn the actual truth.

Historical misinformation has consequences, and those consequences are best avoided - by checking your facts, citing your sources, and taking the time and effort to make sure you are actually telling the truth.

ATTN Glasgow/Glasgow Area/Central Belt followers/anybody in the general vicinity over this weekend

Ya girl has a stall at Barras Market this weekend (10th/11th June) (possibly every weekend) (definitely this one) in the smaller london road market building

Come see me! Buy things maybe!

Avatar

Bitch what the fuck you have cute-ass pins and you didn't even tell me?

Please tell me you ship >:(

i will ship! i will eventually get my etsy shop back up and running for that but until then just tell me what you want

(the perler hearts and birds i can do any striped flag really but the safe space etc ones are just made from random stickers i have so there's just 1 of each. mounted on acetate and domed with resin)

It Was Once A Sticker pins/magnets/keychains £5

It Was Once A Sticker little wooden badge £2

Big perler hearts (pin, keychain) £6

medium perler hearts (chain, leather cord) £4

small hearts (phone charm) £2 or £3 for earring pair

birds £6 (pin) or £8 (dangly earring pair)

i also have these wooden heart ones i've not turned into anything yet.

all coated with UV resin so they're hard and shiny

potion of Be Gay £6 large £3 small (various shapes)

forbidden gay snack charms (also theoretically any flag) £3