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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. Super excited to have you here today to talk about a text that gets a lot of attention sometimes, at least from Egyptologists. And what you're about to hear is a great example of the work that 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 even other types of scarabs, some of which I'm going to talk about today that are not heart scarabs. So Master Scribes is my six-month group program for learning to read next level hieroglyphic texts like the ones I was just talking about. And it's going to be opening for enrollment very soon. This program will take you from reading some of the most common texts from ancient Egypt, like the things you're going to see in museums with confidence, and then reading next level texts like the ones I was talking about Book of the Dead, Heart Scarabs, Letters, Statues, Medical Texts, Stories, etc. And it does this through an innovative curriculum and tons of support from me. It's like having an Egyptologist in your back pocket. So a small number of special bonus hieroglyph a day planners will be available during early enrollment. Most of them got snagged, so there's just a few. So you'll want to be first to apply when applications open very soon. So you'll want to jump on the wait list at masterscribes.com and be ready when applications open September 17th. Have you ever heard of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III? You might have. He certainly left behind a lot of monuments, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that some more in just a moment. He also is known for being the father of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who then changed his name to Aknaten, the famous pharaoh who made a lot of changes to the religion and political landscape during his time. Amenhotep, though, is also well known because he actually commissioned the largest number of statues of any ancient Egyptian king ever. And if you listen to my recent episode on Ramses II and his statue recycling, that's episode 34, if you want to check it out, you might have already known this fact. Because most people don't know it because Ramses II took over many of these statues and put his own name on them. And also his son, actually Ramses' son Merepta, also did that to a bunch of statues as well. So it's not always immediately obvious that Amin Tobetep III had the most statues, but he did. And so you will see his name and his queen named T's name and monuments to him, texts to him in all kinds of different places. And so he's an important one to know for being able to recognize texts when you go to Egypt on a trip, for example, and you're visiting temples, or when you're in a museum, whether it's a museum in Cairo, which there are many statues of his there, and also in museums around the world, including statues of the goddess Sakhmet, which Amenhotep III commissioned a record number of, by the way. And I talk about that in that other episode if you want to check that out, also, and a little bit about why, why did he create all of those statues? But today, what I wanted to get into is a little bit more about Amenhotep III and his marriage to Queen Tea. And actually a little bit about him in some other ways, too. And I bring this up because one of the things that Amenhotep III did that was really different from other kings is he put out a set of what you might think of as sort of commemorative scarabs. So you've probably seen little scarabs before carved out of stone, typically a stone called steatite. And you might have, of course, heard of things like the heart scarab that was put on the body during rapping after mummification from around the second intermediate period on in Egyptian history. And um talked a little bit about that in the last uh maybe it wasn't the last episode, but a recent episode on the Book of the Dead, which you can check out too. I think it was two episodes back. And you may have seen small ones also that have like just little designs on the bottom or might have people's names on them on the bottom. Because these scarabs usually look like a scarab beetle on top, and then they're flat on the bottom, and that flat surface is used as a surface to carve text into. So Amenhotep, though, he does something a bit different. He doesn't just have scarabs with his name on them, like which usually are smaller kinds of ones, but instead he has larger scarabs commissioned. These are generally somewhere around like eight to ten centimeters long, and they have texts on them commemorating various activities. So he has some that commemorate his hunts, including lion hunts and bull hunts. He has ones also commemorating the arrival of a princess from a rival nation Mitanni, and he's talking about her and her joining the pharaoh's. Well, I wouldn't say harem because it's not a very fitting word, but she becomes one of his wives, let me put it that way. And it talks about all the things she came with, including her ladies in waiting and and other people who came with her. And then there's also two scarabs that relate pretty heavily to his wife, Queen T. And actually, Queen T is named in some of these other ones too, not just the two, these two that I'm going to talk about, but she's talked about more most directly in these two, particularly this first set of ones. Or when I say two, really, it's many scarabs, but I mean two types. Because there's multiples of each of these kinds that were made. Um, some of them, there's just a few that we've found and are in museum collections, like with the bull hunt ones. And then some of them we have dozens of, or sometimes even over a hundred, like the lion hunt scarabs. So in the case of what we often call marriage scarabs, there are dozens of those that we've found. So the ones that were originally made is probably much more. And they're called marriage scarabs by Egyptologists today, but they don't really commemorate Amenhotep's marriage because Amenhotep was married by year two of his reign, and these scarabs seem to have been commissioned probably in the 11th year of his reign. So it's not really an announcement of his marriage, but it is a really interesting declaration of who it is he's married to and who is his chief royal wife. He has a lot of wives, that's what the ancient Egyptian pharaohs did. They married many women, but they would designate one as sort of the main highest status royal wife. And so Queen T was that for Amenhotep III. And so interestingly, these scarabs name the queen and they also name who the queen's parents were, implying that this is a really purposeful choice to highlight who her parents were, which is interesting because her parents are not, as far as we can tell for certain, royal family members, at least not close family members. They might be part of the extended royal family, because the ancient Egyptians did not write down big family trees for us to figure out their whole royal family. So we don't know precise connections between some of these people, but they may have been related to the extended family of Amenhotep III. So perhaps Amenhotep III and Queen T might have been cousins, maybe? We can't be 100% certain. But in any case, they really emphasize who her parents were on these scarabs. And this is one of the things that we read in Master Scribes. It's actually one of the things in our level two, fairly soon after getting into learning hieroglyphs with us, you get into these, and my students have read one of these so-called marriage scarabs as well as a lake scarab. So the lake scarabs, and I'll come back to the marriage scarab again in a minute, but the lake scarabs actually commemorate the construction of an artificial lake in honor of Queen T in the 11th regnal year of Amenhotep III. So on these they name, of course, the Pharaoh and his titles. They always do. That's something that's always in all of these, right? And then it also talks about Queen T, names her parents again, like with the so-called marriage scarabs, and then gives a description of the lake that was dug in her honor in her town. And it even lists the measurements of the lake and how big it was, and it talks about how they rode around on the lake. The royal couple rode in a boat on the lake. So for the marriage scarabs, though, one of the highlights in this text, of course, it starts with the king's own memes and titulary, all his titles and stuff, because they always do. It's about the king primarily, and he always wants to include all of that, right? But then it goes into saying who his wife is, and then it says, the wife of the king, T, may she live. The name of her father is Yuya, the name of her mother is Chuya. She is the wife of a strong king. His southern border is at Kari, and his northern at Naharin. And that concludes the text. So he had so many of these made, at the very minimum, dozens of them, right? Simply to say that. And while it does certainly tout his power and mentioning how big his territory is, from Nubia to the Near East, it frames it in relation to Queen T. So really the emphasis is around who his wife is and who her parents are. And this is interesting. It's led some scholars to suggest that maybe there was actually a love-based relationship here rather than it just being a political union, like you see so often, that really was the norm at the time. But this raises a lot of questions in and of itself, because, first of all, how would we know that, right? They didn't leave love letters to each other behind that we can find. So we don't have any real direct evidence for how they felt about each other. But we do have these scarabs, and it's interesting. So one wonders is it emphasizing who the queen is because Amanhoteb loved her so much? Or is it emphasizing this because her family was very influential? Maybe they were members of the extended royal family, and they wanted to have it announced who she was, who her parents were, and her family maybe wanted this to happen to emphasize their connections and the fact that their daughter was married to the king. And whether they really were in love or not, or if this was more of a political union, or maybe a combination of the two, they seem to have probably gotten married pretty young because Amanhotep III was likely a child when he came to the throne and they married within the first couple of years of his reign. So they were presumably both pretty young. So maybe not really a love match so much, although maybe they had a little young infatuation or crush or something like that. Who knows? But perhaps it is something that they developed over time. And in terms of the status of the queen, she's very prominent during Amenhotep III's reign. And while he was a child when he came to the throne, he had many, many years as king as an adult, also. So you can't explain all of it away by saying, like, oh, maybe it was like his advisory council when he was a child who made all these decisions, and they're the ones who were emphasizing Queen T because maybe her parents were somehow involved in this. That's that some people suggest. And that is a possibility, but it doesn't explain her prominence later on necessarily, because certainly by the time Amenhotep III is, you know, into say his 10th year out of almost 40 years of reign, so he had another third, almost 30 after that, he was old enough that he would have been making decisions about monuments and things all himself. So year 11, we think pretty certainly he would have been an adult by then, um, probably well into adulthood. And certainly later, with a lot of the monuments that they are on together, he would have been certainly the one in charge in terms of making decisions. Now, of course, he had officials who were making the day-to-day decisions on site when things were being made and things like that, but presumably approval for projects and plans would have gone through the king. So it would seem that he was involved, at least in these later years, in these last few decades, in deciding where Queen T was going to be mentioned or shown in statuary and things like that. So it would seem that there is at the very least a good level of esteem between the two. We may never know exactly how they felt about each other, but monuments like these and these small artifacts like these commemorative scarabs give us such an amazing window into the lives of the ancients. And we've talked about on the podcast many that had to do with non-royal people as well. And this one gives us a little glimpse into the royal family and raises some questions about really what was going on with these relationships and make us makes us think about things really in a different way. And if you enjoyed this episode and you want to read these kinds of texts for yourself, so you can look at ancient Egypt and its history and its people in an entirely different way. This is just a tiny taste of what we do in Master Scribes. There's so much waiting for you in the program. This that I talked about today is just one tiny bit of things that are in the curriculum, and we read so many others as well. Master Scribes applications will be opening up on September 17th, and there will be a limited number of bonus hieroglyph a day planners available to those who sign up early. There's only a few left at this point. So you will want to be there right when applications open. And you'll want to attend our special open house for Masterscribes that's happening on that day on September 17th. That's going to give you a full behind-the-scenes tour and show you how my students learn to read these kinds of texts and exactly like the kinds of processes that they go through. And you'll be the first then to know when applications open, so you can apply right away. And when you apply, you'll unlock the option to book a consultation call with me where we'll create a custom study plan for you right on the call. And this is something I have not done before, these consultation calls, I'm not sure if I will be doing it again in the future. So I would encourage you to get your application in and book your call while you have a chance and get that custom study plan built with me on your call. So make sure you're there at the open house to learn all about Master Scribes and get your application in first. You can save your spot for the open house at voices of ancientegypt.comslash open house, and we'll get you all up and running with your own study plan. I can't wait to see you there.