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Welcome to Voices of Ancient Egypt, the podcast for people who don't just want to learn about ancient Egypt, but want to understand it on a deeper, more meaningful level. I'm Melinda Nelsonhurst, an Egyptologist with a PhD in the field and years of experience teaching at the university level, working in Egypt, and training students around the world to read real ancient Egyptian texts. I've spent decades studying this civilization in a traditional academic setting, so you don't have to. And so you can access knowledge that's usually locked behind academic walls. This podcast brings ancient Egyptian history, beliefs, and language to life and shows you that learning hieroglyphs is possible no matter your age, background, or schedule. So whether you want to read hieroglyphs in museums, on social media, or on your next trip to Egypt, you'll find the tools, stories, and encouragement to make it real right here. Let's hear the voices of the ancient world together. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Voices of Ancient Egypt podcast. Super excited today because I'm going to bring you an object that I think many of you will have seen a similar one of before, but maybe didn't really know what was going on with it. So we're going to get into that. It's something you could see in museums or when you go to Egypt. And what you're about to hear is a great example of the work we do in my next level hieroglyphs program, Master Scribes. And this episode is one of a series of episodes revolving around some of the amazing texts that we're reading in the program. We get into reading higher-level texts like historical accounts, stories, the book of the dead, hearts, scarabs, letters, and statues like the ones I'm going to talk about today. And Master Scribes is my six-month group program for learning to read next level hieroglyphic texts. It'll be opening for enrollment very soon, first to the wait list on August 17th. And this program will take you from reading some of the most common texts from ancient Egypt to reading next level text with confidence. With its innovative curriculum and tons of support from me, it's like having an Egyptologist in your back pocket. Now, a small number of special bonus hieroglyphaday planners will be available to those who enroll first. So you'll want to jump onto the wait list now at masterscribes.com to be ready for when applications opened the wait list on August 17th. So there I was in the Grand Egyptian museum looking at a statue. But something seemed off. I looked at it a little longer, I looked a little closer, but the face sort of looked a little like Ramses II, and the tag with it from the museum said it was Ramses II. But it didn't quite look right for the style of his time. Something seemed off. I walked around the statue and read the texts on all the various sides, and sure enough, it did have the name of Ramses II on it. But that's not the whole story. I noticed also that the throne that Ramses sits on, it's all made out of stone, of course, his body and his throne. The throne that he sits on seems very narrow, barely bigger than his own behind that sits on it. He also had unusually large ears, way too big for his head, which itself looks to be on the smaller side. So what's going on here? Why is this statue that says it's Ramses II and even the hieroglyphs say it's Ramses II, seem not quite right? Doesn't really look like him, the proportions of the throne and the parts of the body are a little bit weird. Well, it turns out that this statue, though it does have his names on it, did not originally belong to Ramses II, also often called Ramses the Great because of how many statues you see of him everywhere. And we'll talk about that a little bit more in a moment. So he, you could say, repurposed this from an earlier pharaoh. The ears and some other features belie that this statue actually originally came from what we call the 12th dynasty, which is within the larger time period that we call the Middle Kingdom. That's a good six to seven hundred years before Ramsay's time. So the face was remodeled, it was refinished basically to look like Ramsay's, or at least maybe not him in reality, but to look like the usual style that they used for his statues, which always look youthful, of course, even when he was 90. And he did live for a very long time and reigned for a super long time as well. And the throne, I mentioned how it was narrow, it was shaved down on all the sides, which made it thinner. That wasn't the purpose of doing so, it made it thinner, of course. But this was done so that the artists would have fresh surfaces to carve the new text on, including Ramses II's titulary. Now, over the years, this practice of sort of whatever you want to call it, recycling, reusing, usurping of statues has very often in scholarship been called usurping, though some would probably opt these days for recycling or repurposing or something along those lines. It's an interesting practice in and of itself because we know that ancient Egyptians did not want their name or image removed from their monuments. They even talk about this in some of their texts. But it was also not uncommon for monuments, both those of royals, like this statue that we're talking about, and those of non-royal elites, that oftentimes these were reused, whether it was a statue like I was talking about, or it could be a coffin or tomb walls or various things. In some time periods, for example, the third intermediate period, it even became a very common practice to reuse earlier items, and in the third intermediate period, in particular, reusing people's coffins, possibly even the coffins of your own relatives. So they must have had some kind of mental justification that made this seem okay, at least in that time period. It's hard to say what people really thought of kings reusing earlier king statues, right? But suffice it to say, this was still not like a slinking through the night, stealing objects kind of situation. It was clearly something that was known about, it would have been seen, it was out in the open. So they had to have some idea of how this was made okay. And perhaps this had to do with the idea of reusing something or revitalizing it, even if you changed it, maybe in the way the person who originally made it didn't quite want it, still somehow was good for the original owner, too. We do have some tombs where people who redid the decoration in them and sort of spruced it up and put their own inscriptions on the walls actually refer to what they did. They talk about it in their text on the tomb wall, and they use words that we would associate with like refurbishing or revitalizing, not really, yeah, like a refurbishing and updating, that kind of thing, not taking over or repurposing or anything like that, right? Basically, they'll say that they fixed it up, like they found it in ruin, they fixed it up and made it great again. What they don't say quite so literally, but they seem to mean by what they're saying, is that really they redid the tomb for themselves. Um, and so you see this sometimes, and so perhaps the belief was that by doing this, you're sort of revitalizing the statue or tomb or whatever it might be, and it still benefits the original owner. It's also possible that perhaps they felt that after a certain amount of time, the person who was now long deceased really didn't need the object anymore, not even for afterlife-related needs. And therefore, it was okay to sort of reuse or repurpose it, whether it was a coffin or a royal statue. Now, either way, Ramses was the most prolific when it came to repurposing other kings' monuments. And this brings me to the next moment here in the Grand Egyptian Museum where I'm standing looking at this statue, and I'm like, oh, this is actually a 12th dynasty statue. This is why it looks so different, although it says Ramses all over it, which I can read. But my son comes up to me and I tell him who it is, and he says, Oh no, not him. He says, Now he was on his first trip to Egypt, and he already did not like Ramses. And this is because I had told him about how Ramses had repurposed so many earlier kings' statues. And of course, being a kid in elementary school age, later elementary school age, he had a strong sense of fairness and justice. And so this just did not sit right with him, right? And he disliked Ramses II ever since. Now, unfortunately for him, Ramses is everywhere. And so we saw him all over Egypt, not just in Cairo in the museum, but when we were in Luxor, it seemed like almost everywhere we went to all the various temples and stuff. Of course, not some of the smaller tombs, but a lot of the temples, you're gonna see Ramses everywhere around there, too. And it is true that the largest number of statues of any one king are those of Ramses II. But as you might have gotten an inkling of from what I've already said, he didn't actually have the largest number of statues created from scratch, just the largest number of completed ones that have his name on them still today. Now, the king who actually had the largest number of statues created during his reign, as far as we can tell from what remains, of course, was Amenhotep III, who lived, give or take, around a hundred years earlier. And many of his statues were reused by Ramses II, actually, and so you won't see all of them today, although many of them still do have his names on them, and you will see them in Egypt as well as in museum collections around the world, because he had so very many commissioned. He had many commissioned of himself, as the ancient Egyptian kings always did, but he also had a ton of statues commissioned of the goddess Moot or Sekhmet. They are kind of, in some ways, sort of interchangeable in some context. They both have the head of a lioness. And he had a lot of these statues made during his reign. And we think that this was actually because of a plague that was going around at the time. So Sekmet and Moot also by association was associated with illnesses, with disease, with pestilence, as well as with war and other things as well. And at the time, we also have records from neighboring lands of a kind of plague that was going around and people getting sick. Now, the ancient Egyptians didn't usually write about these things because they believe very much in the power of writing things down to make them more true and concrete and permanent. And so they didn't write down things like, wow, lots of people are dying and it's really bad right now. They just didn't write those things down in ways that we'll have that survive today, at least. They probably just generally didn't write them down for the most part. You occasionally get some trials of things that people did bad, of course, that's why they're on trial. Like that stuff sometimes will show up in writing for trial records. But outside of that, you really just don't get much that talks about negative things happening. So between the fact that we have this evidence, though, from neighboring lands and then the huge number of statues that Amenhotep III commissioned of Sekmet, this gives us the clues that kind of fill this in and show us that something was going on in Egypt at the time that was not good. And this is why it's so helpful to learn how to read what's on these statues, whether they are ones of Amenhotep III or Ramsey II, or perhaps they're both because they were Amenhotep III first and then they became Ramsey IIs, right? Is because you're going to see these not only in Egypt, not just in the museum there, but also at temples like Karnak Temple, for example, as many others as well, and in other parts of the country like Abu Simbel, for example, but also in museum collections around the world. And if you like this episode, this is just a tiny taste of artifacts that we talk about and we read the hieroglyphic texts on in Master Scribes. There's so much more waiting for you in the program. This is just one of the things that my students have learned how to read on statues like this, as well as on temple walls and so forth. And Master Scribes applications will be opening to the wait list on August 17th. And there will be a limited number of bonus hieroglyph a day planners available for those who sign up early. So you'll want to get on the wait list to have first crack on spots in the program and the special bonus. Head on over to masterscribes.com to grab your spot on the wait list. And you can also check the show notes for that link below. Until next time, stay curious.