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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 the 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. So excited to be here with you today and continue the series we've been doing on a series of different types of artifacts and sort of the bigger picture behind them, right? We talked about recycling of royal statues a couple of weeks back before this, and we talked about medical texts and general medical practices and understanding of the body in the previous episode. In this episode, we're going to get into yet another type of artifact with different kinds of texts on it that tell us a completely different kind of story than we've talked about so far. And what you're about to hear is a great example of the work we do in my next level hieroglyphs program, Master Scribes. We get into reading higher-level texts like historical accounts, stories, the Book of the Dead, Heart Scarabs, Letters, Statues, and Steely, like the one or groups of ones that we're going to talk about today. And this program, Master Scribes, will take you from reading some of the most common texts from ancient Egypt to reading next level texts with confidence. It has an innovative curriculum and tons of support from me. It's like having an Egyptologist in your back pocket. And a small number of special bonus hieroglyphiday planners will be available to those who enroll first, just the first 15. So you'll want to jump on the wait list now at masterscribes.com to be ready when applications open soon. So I want to take you back in time a little bit to when I was in graduate school some years ago, and I at first struggled to decide on a topic for my dissertation. But when I found one, I really fell in love with this particular type of artifact we're gonna talk about today. And I remember when I really got into it just sitting there staring at all of these stele. And you might be wondering, what are stely? What's a stela? So it's stele is a plural. Stela is the singular for one. A stela is essentially a slab that's been decorated in some way. So typically we think of stone ones, but the ancient Egyptians sometimes made wood ones as well. And they might be carved and painted or simply painted. Oftentimes people think of them as looking like tombstones because many of them have a rectangular shape with a rounded top. However, they're really quite different from our modern Western tombstones. So just as a little aside there as to what I'm talking about, but I was looking at these stele and just blown away by the window that they give us into ancient Egyptian life and priorities. So when we think about ancient Egyptian life, we might think about, you know, their religion or rituals, or maybe what they did when they were sick in medicine, for example, like we talked about last week. We might think about various things. We might think about what was their real daily life like. And I find with these monuments, one of the things I love about them is while they are technically not an everyday item, you know, it's not a beauty tool they used at home or a papyrus receipt for renting a donkey, right? They are monumental in that they were really expensive. They were planned ahead. And it took a lot of resources to have somebody create one of these for you. However, even though they have that formal sense to them in that it's this very expensive planned item, they give this unique window into ancient Egyptian priorities, what was important to them. So we think about all these different things when we think about ancient Egyptian life, but one of the things that I find so fascinating to try to figure out, and we get a lot of clues, a lot, a lot of clues from what they've left behind, is what was actually important to them. Because that's such an enormous window into their beliefs, their thoughts, their everyday concerns. And these steely, because they were expensive and not everybody could have these made, only people with a fair amount of wealth could do this. But even those who are wealthy, you know, this was still a lot to spend. So they had to make choices about what were going to go on these. They're generally on the smaller side. When you think about ancient Egyptian monuments, you might think of pyramids or big temples and things like that. So, in that respect, these are really small in comparison to those kinds of really huge monumental things that we think of. But they were expensive. So, what are you gonna fit in this small space? It's really a small space, and there's so many things you might want to commemorate, so many things that you might want to communicate either to those who are gonna live on after you, or perhaps to the gods, or perhaps you might want to record things that are gonna help you get into the afterlife. There's a lot of different things you could put on this, right? And whatever you do, it's costing you a bundle of money. So you're only gonna put the most important stuff on there. You're not gonna just put any old thing. And so when I was looking at these for my research, I just fell in love with that unique window that they give you into life, particularly Steely from the period called the Middle Kingdom. So this is around the early part of the second millennium BCE. And this was my main focus, although I love materials from other time periods too. And in Master Scribes, we deal with stuff with all in lots and lots of different periods, including later ones like the New Kingdom and even third intermediate period and late period sometimes. Uh, but Middle Kingdom is still really very close to my heart, and I love it for a lot of reasons. There's a lot of very intriguing things about it, uh, some of which we don't fully understand, and that's actually honestly part of the draw to me because I want to figure it out, right? And I think probably many of you out there can relate to this uh this drive to want to figure things out, right? And I want to understand the ancient Egyptians on a greater level. But even without all of those mysteries solved, all of those questions answered, there's still so much that we can understand and we can learn from these. So on the Steely from this period, from the Middle Kingdom, there's something very different from other time periods. Well, there's multiple things. One is there's this really huge focus on showing your family members, particularly when you get to around the middle of the Middle Kingdom and later. The earlier Middle Kingdom, not quite as quite as much. They tend to focus more just on the main guy who paid for the monument, and then you might get a couple other family members in there, but it's really much more about him, about his biography. And those are interesting too. I do find the biographies interesting, even though they're, of course, very stylized and they choose very specific things to include. It's not like a tell-all biopic or something like that, like you might see today. But I find it much more interesting actually when you don't have those long biographical texts, and instead what you have is shorter bits of text, and you have a whole bunch of different people on the monument. And figuring out who the people are, what their relationships are with each other, tells you so much about what was important to the individual who paid for this monument, which is typically the main person who's shown on it. The you they're usually the largest shown on it. That's how the ancient Egyptians let you know who was most important in the art. And actually, as a little aside here, we actually have a whole workshop in Master Scribes about reading ancient Egyptian art and what it can tell you, not just in terms of the scale of the figures, but their poses, where they show up on a monument, whether they're sitting, standing, on what, what their hand gestures are doing, and so forth that really gives you that extra insight into what's going on, not just on stele, but you know, in tomb scenes and temple scenes and so on and so forth. So that's one of the wonderful things we got into that I saw a need for and I added, and I add these kinds of things when I see a need for them in the program. And in that, with that workshop, actually, we also worked on a couple of stele related to the things that we learned uh in that workshop. But getting back to Middle Kingdom Stele a little more generally. Usually that largest person is typically the one who's paid for the monument, but you might have other family members who actually dedicated it to that person. So there could be a variety of people, really. But whoever it was who was doing this and who was working with an artist or workshop, they had to make choices. And we don't know for certain how involved the purchaser was versus how much leeway the artists had in terms of what they included, right? And perhaps we don't know exactly how this process of buying one went down. Maybe they had preset sort of styles or models you had to choose from. And you could say, well, if you want to include eight people, this is a good one for that. And then you can provide us the names and we'll put them on there. Or, you know, if you have a larger family you want to include, if you have this other one that has more. Or was it completely unique to each person and they came in and said, look, I want something that's going to talk about this and that can include this many people, and, you know, give me some ideas, show me some examples, or maybe even the buyer dictated completely what they want. We don't know for certain because nobody talks about this sales and creation process. But in any case, the choices were clearly intentional. And even if the artist had a fair amount of leeway in terms of how they laid it out and how many figures were on there and how big they were, and like things like that, where they show up, the person who the monument was for clearly was making decisions about which people to name in it, right? Because the artist wouldn't know who to put on there, whose names to put on there, if you didn't tell them. So clearly the family is very heavily involved in planning this and telling them what to include. And again, this gives us such a gift of a window into what the ancient Egyptians really valued. And in the Middle Kingdom, one of the things they really valued, and I mean in ancient Egypt in general, they valued this also, which is family. But in the Middle Kingdom, they really have an especially strong emphasis on family in a variety of documents, not just on stele, but also in funerary texts. So you might have heard of the type of text that today we call coffin texts. These are sort of like a precursor to the Book of the Dead. And in the coffin text, they also have a greater emphasis on family and on being reunited with family in there that you don't necessarily see in funerary texts from other time periods. So there's clearly a greater emphasis in wanting to talk about the family and your wishes for the family and the people in your family who were important to you. And not only family, I'd say family a lot because a lot of the people on the Asteli are family, but sometimes they are other people too that we don't always know what the relationship was because they might have a bunch of family members on there, and then there's some people on there who don't have any labels that suggest they're family. So we don't know for certain exactly who they are. Maybe they're further extended family that they just didn't get labeled as. Maybe they're friends or colleagues of the person. Sometimes we can kind of figure that out. Sometimes we're just left sort of wondering. But clearly they were there for a reason. So one example is the stila of a man named Eao, who was from Thebes, who lived during the later Middle Kingdom. And on his stila, he's got a bunch of family members depicted. So he's got a whole bunch of them kind of each in their own box. This is a style that's somewhat common from the later Middle Kingdom. And so, in addition to himself, who's shown in the top right and the largest figure, as we often see, whoever is sort of the main person gets to be the largest figure on the monument. But in addition to that, he also has his children. He has two sons and a daughter in the first sort of row of people next to him. And then in another row below that, he has another three daughters as well. So he's depicting at least six children here. He also depicts some of his siblings. So he has his sister, Tanet Hetu, for example, who is shown on the right-hand side. And he also has a brother who's called Mentu Woser. And his parents feature on it as well. He has his father, Anku, and his mother, Deadet Nebu. And interestingly, in the Middle Kingdom, one of the things that's unique about this time period is that people are often named on monuments with their mother's name included. So for example, Ib Io's mother, who is named with his name, but also separately with her own depiction, Dead at Nebu, she is said to be born of Happy. So her mother's name was Happy, and his brother, for example, Mentu Woser, is also said to be born of Dead et Nebu, of course, their mother. Now, interestingly, there is another woman named Deadet Nebu on here also who has a different mother. So it's clearly not the same one as the woman we were just talking about. And there's another woman on here who also doesn't have a specific relationship expressed for how she's related to Abiow. So just like with that second Dead at Nebu. But she's said to be born of Dead et Nebu. So maybe she's the daughter of that second Debat Nebu. Sometimes we can't say for certain. That seems fairly likely, considering they didn't say that she's related to Ibeow. I mean, like she's not another sister, for example. You would expect they would say that if that was the case, although she might be. We can't be a hundred percent certain. And those were all the people that are pictured on here, but then interestingly, Ibeow wanted to make sure he could include more people. So he has a list of a bunch of people at the bottom of the Sila. These people don't have pictures with them, it's just the text in hieroglyphs. And this is one of the things that my students have been reading. I don't know if I mentioned that before, but this particular STIL of Ibeow is actually one of the texts that my students get into in the earlier levels of Master Scribes. And down at the bottom, he lists a whole bunch of other people who don't have a family relationship listed in relation to him, at least. Sometimes they have relationships that tell us that they're related to the other people who are named next to them, for example. So it's interesting to see all these people he includes who don't seem to be any kind of close family members. So clearly these people were all very important to Ibiao because why would he take up space on his monument with this? He could put other people there. He could put another text about how wonderful he was, like so many other ancient Egyptians did on their monuments, right? There's so many things he could include here, but instead he has chosen to include these particular people. And similarly, another stila we have in the program that is another favorite of mine actually belonged to a woman in this case, which is less common, but it does happen. So this woman named Hennet has a stila dedicated to her, and it also shows a bunch of her female family members. So, particularly her daughters, she had several daughters, and it also includes even some grandchildren as well. So interestingly, she includes these multiple generations, and it's all women who are shown depicted in the actual scenes where you see the people. But kind of like Ib Iao, she has an additional text at the bottom of her stila where she also has additional family members, including two grandchildren, one granddaughter and one grandson, who is named but not shown. And then it has a short text about her son. And it's about how her son is the one who said to cause her name to live upon Earth. And this suggests that the son, named Noxie, was probably the one who had this Stila dedicated. And it's really a fascinating piece because of how it does include so many family members mentioned and obviously ones that were important not just to the mother, but also to her son, because he seems to be the one who had this made and made these decisions. But you'll notice from what I said that it's only women who are actually shown in the pictures on the Stilo, right? So the grandson and son who are named on here are only named in the text at the bottom, where there aren't any depictions at all. And so this is something you see sometimes with monuments that are dedicated specifically to women. It's not a hard and fast rule, but it is a tendency where you'll see this a lot. And so it's fascinating to get these insights into these monuments that they had dedicated for their family members and not just for themselves, but maybe for a parent, like this man did for his mother, and see who it was who was important to them to include on it. And how it gives us this wider story of how the ancient Egyptians during the Middle Kingdom period really had this extra focus on family and wanting to make sure that the family would go with you to the afterlife, right? I mentioned how that's talked about in the coffin text, but this is likely also at least part of the reason why so many of them are depicted on these stele, these monuments, which I mentioned a little bit about what they look like and so forth, but I don't think I mentioned where they're used. They actually used in a variety of places. So they can show up in temples, for example, they can show up in tomb chapels, and sometimes also just sort of near those areas. So it might be like outside of a chapel. Maybe they weren't allowed to set it up inside, but they could be near the sacred area, or oftentimes right outside of a temple also is a very common place. So a lot of times these do have a sort of afterlife slash funerary kind of tone to them, right? They're not necessarily part of the tomb equipment per se, always, but they do have this emphasis where they're oftentimes, if they are by a temple, it might, it could be different temples, there's lots of different ones, but some of them, for example, are right by the Osiris temple at Abidos, where a lot of people set up chapels to be near the God who ruled the underworld, near where he had his annual festival. And so they wanted to be able to partake in being near those sacred spaces, being able to see the God process sort of through their monument and include their family members in that privilege, and hopefully also help them continue on into the afterlife with them so they could be reunited, just like we see in other texts. And if you like this episode, this is just a tiny taste of what we do in Master Scribes. There's so much more waiting for you in the program. And just one of the things in there is learning to read steely, like the ones I talked about today. Master Scribes applications are opening up really soon, so you'll want to jump on the wait list and get a chance to get the special bonus hieroglyph a day planner since they are very limited in number. And as a time of recording, actually, some of the early enrollments have already claimed almost half. So go ahead and go to masterscribes.com and hop on the wait list there. Until next time, stay curious.