After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Dark Side of Ancient Egypt

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

When people talk about Ancient Egypt, they often focus on the amazing pyramids, mummies, and the advanced civilisation.At After Dark, we love to explore the grim reality of all of this: what was life like for the people who built those pyramids? What happened if you stole from the Valley of the Kings? And how common were dark arts and sorcery?Today Anthony and Maddy are joined by Egyptologist Campbell Price, to uncover the dark side of Ancient Egypt.You can now watch After Dark, including this episode, on Youtube: www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitThis episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.

Hi, we're your hosts, Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like after dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello there. Now before we dive into today's episode about the dark side of ancient Egypt, my producer

Freddie has sent me a message to say I need to give you a warning that this episode contains some gory details and sexual references. I'm going to be honest, I can't for the life of me remember why there are sexual references in an episode about the dark side of ancient Egypt. But Freddie says there are, and I trust him. So you are now warned. Warning now in place. Let's get on with the show.

He was a farmer once. His mind wonders, remembering the feeling of warm soil between his fingers, the scent of fresh grain after the harvest. The memory is pierced by shouting, heaving, groaning. Now his hands are blistered and cracked. They smell of crushed limestone and blood. At night, under the thin cover of stars in a makeshift encampment he lies beside other conscripts. Farmers who are forced to

trade seasons of planting for seasons of pain. During the long days a misstep here means a crushed limb or a crushed man No one stops. There's no time Khufu's vision the Great Pyramid must rise The priests say Khufu is divine that building the pyramid is a sacred duty To question it is to question the will of the gods But he wonders if the gods are watching why do they allow this suffering? He's witnessed a friend be

crushed to death beneath a block that slipped from the sled. The overseer didn't stop. The Sun kept beating down, the pyramid continued to rise. Some nights he thinks of running, but his family is back home. If he flees, they will suffer. So he stays. He hauls the ropes. He bleeds into the stone, knowing the cost he might have to pay. Whilst the unlucky get crushed beneath the monument they'll never live to see completed, their bones will forever be a part of the foundation. This is not just a tomb for a the grim histories that we'll be exploring

today and probably one you weren't too familiar with. I didn't know some of this. And to help us of course is our returning guest after dark and that is Egyptologist Dr. Campbell Price and Campbell last came on after dark to talk to us about the untimely deaths and suppose a curse that followed the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb after it was sealed shut some 3000 years ago. Now, Campbell is an Egyptologist at University of Liverpool and curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, University of Manchester, and of course has one of the UK's most significant Egyptology collections. After that lengthy introduction, Campbell, you are very welcome

back to After Dark. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be back on After Dark. We have an upfront question which actually comes via my nephew Danny who is obsessed as I was saying to you before we started. Shout out to Danny. There's Danny getting all his shout outs on After Dark. One time are we talking about here? So he sent me a voice note the other day saying when we're talking about ancient Egypt, what else is happening in the world? And it's a good question actually, because you hear ancient Egypt and you're like, well,

actually, what is the time period? How does it relate to stone ages and bronze ages and all that kind of thing? So enlighten, enlighten Danny and enlighten all of us. Well, Danny, hello. This is a really good question. We get it a lot at Manchester Museum and in the galleries of Manchester Museum, the Egypt and Sudan gallery, we try and suggest it with dates above the cases. But it's always an issue when you're talking about the past. When are you talking about? If you talk about the Georgians, who do you mean?

If you talk about the ancient Egyptians, you're talking about 3,000 years of history. So we talk about ancient Egypt between 3000 BCE, that's 5000 years ago, and Cleopatra popping her clogs. 30 BCE, so that's three millennia, 3000 years. The pyramids are relatively near the beginning of this span, and they're probably earlier than Stonehenge. So you're talking about what archaeologists in Europe might call the Stone Age into the Bronze Age, the Iron Age. And then along come the Romans around the time Jesus is around. So basically you're talking about 3000 years before then, but trying and maybe we'll come back to this point, trying to say what the ancient Egyptians

believed is tough. What did one of our ancestors believe 3000 years ago? Probably very different to what we believe today. It's such a huge amount of time to get your head around and to even begin to think about how those beliefs might have changed, how those people might have changed, how they perceive themselves, the world around them, all of that. And we're going to unpack some of that. But first of all, I want to ask a very academic question Campbell, which is, I have seen a popular internet meme that says that Cleopatra is closer to the iPhone than she is to the pyramids. Is that true? Absolutely true. I've used that in my book, Brief History's Ancient Egypt, available in all good book stores.

Yeah, Cleopatra lives closer in time to us today. So we're in 2025. She died in 30 BCE than the pyramids. So the great pyramids are the 2600s. So yeah, she's less closer to us. I need a moment to sit with that. It does take, because it makes your brain do these kind of strange gymnastics. We're like, that's a long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Since Cleopatra. So if you were Cleopatra, and we know she visited the pyramids, she knew perfectly well what the pyramids were. Indeed, she, and this is the scary thing, probably knew more about the pyramids than we do.

Oh, I've got chills. You know what's weird as well? That when we're talking about, oh well, we're Georgian historians or whatever, you know, obviously we're generalists as well, but that was our PhD thing, whatever. Then when people are Egyptologists, they're expected to cover 3,000 years. We have like a hundred, 150 year thingy. So that's kind of daunting as an Egyptologist surely. Do you get that when you say to someone, oh, I'm a historian in the broadest sense and people say, what happened on the 25th of November 1942? And you think that's not how being a historian works. Do people do that to you, Campbell?

Yes. For the entire three times, it's really a problem. But as you say, even characterizing what people thought about Brexit in the UK, try finding people that have exactly the same opinion. And we lived through that, asking an ancient Egyptian what they thought about the building of the Great Pyramid. Yeah. Well, let's think a little bit then about that, the distance between the people themselves and how we perceive them now, how we understand that big period and some of the assumptions that we've maybe layered onto that and simplified, shall we say. I think, you know, when we think of ancient Egypt, obviously, there's the mummified people, there are the

pyramids, we have quite a set sort of stock image in our minds. And I would say, the general perception, certainly my perception, is that this was quite a peaceful era. It's a very sort of aesthetic one. It's all about building things, it's about creating things. I don't necessarily think of it as being especially violent. Am I right to think that or have I made a horrible assumption? This is a great point to discuss. And as you both know, you know, any point in history can be polarizing. Some people think it was great back when, other people think it was terrible back then, back in the olden days. So I think the problem with Egypt, ancient Egypt, as an idea in people's heads, is that it tends

generally to exist as a utopia. Luxury, colourful, glamorous, sunny, wealthy, civilised. But then there is another angle, the opposite extreme you have may be influenced by scripture. The idea of the Egyptians are slave drivers for the wrong type of people. There's tyranny, the Pharaoh is a tyrannical figure. And indeed in Arabic writing in the Middle Ages onwards, you know, you talk about Pharaoh and that's not a compliment, you're talking about a tyrant. I think generally this is partly the fault of museums and books and TV shows and exhibitions. It's all your fault Campbell. Yeah, I'll take it. I'll take it personally, but I'm trying to unpack it myself, so I'm

really glad to have the chance to talk about it here. We would rather have a simplified ancient Egypt was like this. The ancient Egyptians believed this. They had these ideals and the darker side is ignored. Yeah. I mean, we're going to look at some of those darker facets today. Okay. And the first one I want to start with is crime and punishment because my perception and tell me if I'm wrong here, but my perception is that the criminal justice system essentially is King and court and then punishment will be met accordingly depending on what's happening there. How true is that? And what does crime and punishment look like during this entire

3000 year period? What was happening on the 24th of June? Great point. So one problem we have generally and we should acknowledge it is in reconstructing ancient Egypt over the last 200 years, the length of time Egyptology has been happening and you find this with other parts of history, we impose or layer over our perceptions of the world onto people in the past. So you see a successful civilized state like the Egyptians of the New Kingdom, so 1200 BCE,

and you think, well, that must have been like the British Empire, because this is what the first interpreters, who were a lot of them British, knew. So how else could you produce these massive monuments? Oh, there must have been colonies and they must have had viceroys and the king must have operated as the head of a bureaucracy. You're quite right, I think in practical terms government, that we would call call government was the king in the court which was tiny the elite was 1% 2% of people in Egypt and the reality of crime and punishment we know because throughout that 3,000 year period we

have lots of evidence admittedly it's based out but we've got lots of evidence and that evidence relates to face-to-face individual social situations. So you do something wrong. There's a great piece of literature, kind of popular literature, known in English as the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, and it's about a peasant who comes a cropper because his donkey eats some of the crops of a rich man. How dare he. And this sets up this whole... it's about social inequality. And where is someone going to get redressed for an injustice? Well, it's not like a law court, as we would understand it,

it's probably a local important person who meets out the punishment or the reward or does justice. And there were more violent punishments as well weren't there for more serious crimes. I mean justice for the donkey but there were, if you committed maybe a brutal crime, a violent crime, maybe a sexual crime that met with more severe punishment didn't it? Yes I mean it's funny because it's true of lots of aspects of life. Things which were, to us, very interesting to an ancient Egyptian were par for the course. So that's just life. You know, someone does something bad, something bad is done to them and it's not recorded anywhere. But there are lights shone on certain parts of society, sure, where it concerns what we would

call the states, so remember the king, the court. Killing the king, we have evidence of that regicide. Purely punishment for that. Yeah, the highest of course, punishment. And so we have an extraordinary series of documents that talk about the other transcripts basically of the trial of these people who have been caught responsible for the assassination of King Ramesses III. So we're talking about the 12th century 1100s BCE and this is a list of the court people very close to the king. Spoiler it was one of

his lesser wives who wanted her son to become the next king and bump the crown prince. I too would kill my husband if I was the lesser wife. Well, if you have a perception you are the lesser wife, I'm sure there's lots of psychologising we could do. But the culprits seem ultimately to be tried by the next king, the legitimate king, Ramesses the fourth, son of Ramesses the third. And in these court documents, there's a whole thing about black magic, we'll maybe come back to that. And the punishment is of course death, because you've attempted and in fact succeeded in killing a god. For a long time it was not known if Ramses III had actually died in this harem conspiracy, it's called

this assassination attempt, but his body has been examined and his throat seems to have been cut. Enough of the flesh is preserved to show that. If you're doing well, you're allowed to commit suicide. That is merciful. If you have been executed in some fashion, probably by being put in a wooden stake until you die and then your body is burned, so not only have you died an excruciating death, you have no chance of an afterlife because you need a body for that. Right. You've been utterly eviscerated.

You've been literally eviscerated and not in a good way. In the standard elite way. After death, if someone dies a natural death then maybe evisceration helps in the transformation of the body. Oh yeah. That's a separate thing. But in these court documents, and this is really creepy, really dark, the guilty party's names are changed. So not even your name will survive. So you might be called Mary Ray. So Ray, the sun god loves him, loves you. Changed to Mess Jed Ray. Ray hates him. And that's just total complete obliteration. Wow. That's so powerful. It is powerful in a society which placed for the elite a great emphasis on writing. To

have your name inverted like that is really nasty. Yeah. So, I mean, if this is what the ancient Egyptians are doing to their own people, the people under their rule, what are they doing to their enemies? If we're thinking about warfare in this period, obviously, you made the comparison to the British Empire. Presumably Egypt at various points expands its borders. It is presumably coming into conflict with other people. How does it treat them? Ooh, so first of all, I'd say there are no borders, really. The ancient Egyptians don't think quite in terms of borders.

And that's fascinating. Yeah. So the concept, our modern concept of borders on a map is non-existent. There are frontiers and various kings talk about these frontiers, but that means if you have no borders, ancient Egypt never really tries to expand because Egypt itself is perfect.

The gods favor the land of Egypt, anywhere else is basically to be pitied or despised. But isn't part of the land of Egypt anywhere else is basically to be pitied or despised. But isn't part of the concept of Egypt in their mindset? Okay. They have the concept of Egypt as a land mass, but ask someone to draw a line, I think would be impossible because the borders are fuzzy. But they don't like non Egyptians basically. On a state level, the ideology is if you are not Egyptian, you are not good. Follow up question to that then. How are you identified as Egyptian? Because if Egypt is

a state of mind to a certain extent and an idea that you can buy into, who is allowed to be Egyptian and who is not? Well, so even though on a state level, some of the earliest images of royal iconography that clearly show a king, a pharaoh, show him beating up foreign people. They are bound, they are subdued, he's bashing them over the head doing some smiting. Very British empire. Doing some smiting. Well, this is what maybe the certain British colonial agents recognized in themselves. It says nothing of course about ancient ideas of empire.

Anyway, yeah, so the state level ideology is if you're not Egyptian, if you're not living the Egyptian life, and of course, Egypt itself then as now is a very diverse place between Alexandria and Aswan, North and South. If you're not living in an Egyptian way, the state says you can be beaten up, but in practical terms, people move, people migrate, people change their identities.

So we have evidence, written evidence, which is the best source for this, of non-Egyptians, people from the South of Egypt, what is now modern Sudan, or the Levant, for example, coming in and living in Egyptian society and being called the Syrian man or the Kushite, the Nubian woman. And that was tolerated. And this was, yeah. And they're merchants, they're living normal lives next to people. Although they are othered.

But they are othered in some settings and it's interesting, it does seem, and maybe it's not surprising given how popular ancient Egyptian imagery is today, that the way of depicting yourself as an elite Egyptian is taken on by non-Egyptian elites who moved to Egypt. They don't want to show themselves as Libyan or Nubian, they want to show themselves as Egyptian. They want to assimilate, yeah. So that's the wealthy people, of course. But then, as you said, on the battlefield, someone who's not Egyptian is not to be pitied. There is fairly good evidence again from foreign

names of lists of workers on for example the temple of Queen Hatshepsut. Fabulous building you know 1400 BCE we know Hatshepsut's father, Thutmose I, is a major warrior. King is going out beating up foreigners and he's bringing prisoners of war. So, you bring your prisoners of war and you say, we've got a temple that needs building, and there's a list for maybe the attendants on that day who's building today,

and the list lists these non-Egyptian names. So from that you can extrapolate, actually these are probably people working under duress, under conscription or compulsion. Now, we love an image here on After Dark. And in this vein, in terms of some of the punishment that is being inflicted on some of these people and particularly potentially in a war setting, I have a picture here of what says above it is severed penises being piled up as war trophies at Ramses the third's temple. Campbell, talk to me about this, please.

So how are you going to estimate your body count? Penises? Yes. So there's evidence of this from a few centuries prior to that image. So Ramses the third, again, 1100s BCE, of course Ramesses III himself becomes a cropper. So on the battlefield, we know a soldier in kind of hand-to-hand combat, in order to get a reward has to, or one of the methods of getting a reward is to take a hand.

Okay. And there is the pretty real implication. You're on the battlefield, you kill someone and you cut off the right hand and you present it to the trip commander and say, Hey, so. And he just puts it in the cupboard? What is he then doing with all these hands? Well, the really scary thing is not so long ago, this idea of the hands and as I'll come on to the penises, were just a fiction, they're just a visual way of showing how many people were killed in the battlefield and accounting for the number until we found a pile of severed hands

near a royal palace in the north of Egypt, in the Delta. So they seem genuinely to have been doing this. How recent was that find? Last 20 odd years. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah. Last couple of decades.

So I can understand taking the hand because it's on the one hand, evidence, evidence that you have defeated someone that you've killed them. Presumably it's symbolic as well. Yes. That they will not be able to fight in terms of thinking about an afterlife as well and the desecration of a body. I can see where this is going, but talk to me about the escalation of hands to penises, not a sentence I thought I'd be saying on a public podcast. So one interpretation, Egyptological interpretation is, as you've just alluded to, it's about

stopping any kind of regeneration in the afterlife. Not only are you killed on the battlefield, which is pretty terrible, but you have no chance of an afterlife. Your body probably won't be buried. But to add insult to injury, your right hand is taken away and your penis is taken away because it's men fighting on the battlefield. And so this may be an allusion to the primeval creation act where the creator god masturbates the world into existence. So if you have no right hand and no penis, it's also, it's just a way of checking, I guess, people don't count up too many people. So you can only have one penis and hence the emphasis on the right hand so you're not counting two hands. I will say this, there is no way I thought this is what I'd be discussing when I came to work today. No, no it's just. Well, there you go. That's just the gift that ancient

Egypt keeps giving. So the image you're seeing is this kind of accountancy scene in the temple of Ramesses the third. These are not the records I sent to my accountant. So you have hands, right hands, you have penises and I mean even if someone hadn't already died on the battlefield, oh no, right hand and genitals are probably gonna, you're gonna bleed out. Yeah that'll do it. Yeah not great but then there are also in that same, on that same wall, which I stood in front of last month, there are what seem to be tongues. Now, the idea that you then have no... Again, that could be an allusion to creation, where there's another version of the creation myth where the creator God speaks things into existence.

And you've kind of alluded already, Campbell, to the importance of language, particularly writing, but language in the Egyptian culture and speaking things into power, names have huge importance and sort of abusing someone's name or changing someone's name can have this real impact on them. I suppose when all the hands were found, there may very well have been penises with them, but of course there'd be no evidence of that. I literally thought that same thing on the train day in Madye. I thought, well, actually, let's think about this. Yeah. Yeah. It just would survive. Of course, it's the thing you should be thinking about on the train. Talk to me about magic. You mentioned dark magic,

possible sorcery in ancient Egypt. We've got these very physical punishments going on, these physical rituals and practices on the battlefield, off the battlefield. Where does magic and magical thinking come into this? Well, as you've just said, because those things we've just talked about have a physical representation on state temple walls, we know a bit about them. I suspect what we would call black magic was quite widespread. It just doesn't leave a material trace. So an example of this in, again, literature, we've got quite a lot of this in, again, literature, we've got quite a lot of surviving, you know, folktales basically from ancient Egypt.

There are allusions to magicians creating forms of people and animals from wax. And so if you create, for example, a wax crocodile, a crocodile could be commanded to snatch someone from the riverbank. Or if you create a wax image of someone and do something bad to the image, something bad correspondingly will happen through sympathetic magic. A basic way of thinking about it, and I'm sure it's more complicated,

through sympathetic magic, something bad will happen to the person. So this relates back to what evidence we have from Egyptian fortresses, especially to the south of Egypt into Nubia, big, big fortresses between maybe 1800, 1900, 1800, 1700 BCE, where the Egyptian military state, if we can call it that, is trying to control traffic on the Nile, further south in Africa into what is now Sudan. And there are lots of soldiers stationed there. So there's not just an imperial presence, of course, these have been interpreted as

all colonial bastions. And of course, it's the Egyptian colonial state. I sense rather that there's a feeling of anxiety and fear from the local population. So you need not only to have a big set of walls and weapons and soldiers, you need to use magic against, especially in the case of to the south of Egypt, the land of Nubia, Nubian magicians appear in literature. So the Nubian people are particularly associated maybe with this threat to the Egyptians. So again, objects which you could liken to voodoo dolls, I make that advisedly, you know, with all the cultural context that should be borne in mind. You have images of forms, people that have on

the really elaborate versions, text written on them with the names of all the groups that you're afraid of or you want to control, and including dead people. So there are the bad dead people that you don't want to do something to you living people. So you enact what we call in Egyptology execration where you do something bad to the figurine, you smash it, you break it, you burn it, you bury it and that will affect the punishment or the repulsion on the group. Again, this was thought to be a purely a magical thing that maybe just happened in object form until a decapitated body was found next to one of these deposits in one of the fortresses. So you could imagine a high pressure situation in a fortress where you catch one of the local people and

you think, okay we're gonna make an example of them and you decapitate them and then you bury the head upside down as a magical form of supporting what you've done with objects with real people. I don't know about you, Anthony, but when we started this conversation, we were talking at the beginning about the perceptions that we have of ancient Egypt and for me, it's very material based. It's these tactile objects that survive and we have incredible survivals of human bodies of buildings of all of that. But actually, it's this ephemeral element that's coming in now and you're talking about the sort of effect that they believed in that if you did something somewhere, it would manifest somewhere else. And whether that's naming someone,

whether it's writing something on an object that is going to have an effect on a living thing or indeed a dead thing somewhere else. Yes, yeah. That one act somewhere implicates a different person in a different place or a different time or a different realm. I'm curious about, I suppose, in your work studying this time period, is it difficult and frustrating to bridge that gap, I suppose? Because how do you access the ephemeral and the non-tangible? Because you've mentioned so many incredible discoveries where you come across something in the archaeological record

that suggests some kind of magic, but how do you fine tune those assessments? Is that an issue in this field? Absolutely, because we've got so little in general. I mean, loads of amazing stuff, as you just said, has survived. But think about human occupation for three millennia that produces a lot of stuff, and we only have a fraction of what was originally produced and used. The main frustration is so little has survived as an archaeological subject, but then the other frustration is some of our predecessors maybe have read that evidence in a certain

way. So for example, oh, the ancient Egyptians were suspicious. Great builders, but they were suspicious and they worshipped animal headed. And of course it's all nonsense. And we have to fight against this default patronizing attitude which a lot of our predecessors and maybe some of our contemporary historians still have. This to me is a totally logical way of dealing with the world. You have a problem, someone, you can name them, you can figure them in some way, you can connect their identity with an object,

and you can do something and that affects the person. That's just a social response to life. To me it's not a sign of, oh, I roll, the ancient Egyptians are actually disappointingly quite superstitious. I mean, people do all around the world. So before we let you go, Campbell, I want to talk to you about probably one of the most iconic parts of ancient Egypt, and that is the pyramids. Now, we have this perception of these kind of glorious structures and there's Marvel or even you'll hear some people go aliens have built these structures. It's so unbelievable. But actually there is quite a grim reality to the way that these structures come about unbelievable. But actually there is quite a grim reality

to the way that these structures come about. Isn't that right? Yes. So again, it's polarized. You get the people who say it was aliens. And I mean, just in the news in the last month, a story about supposed... Yeah, I think I saw something going on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The second pyramid of Giza. Total claptrap, but especially on social media, on TikTok, Instagram, that just went wild. And you get your Graham Hancock cranks. Talking about that, so there's that extreme of the precision of the pyramids is preternaturally superhuman. Then there's the other, again, influenced by scripture idea. The Egyptian pharaoh was a tyrant

and of course the Egyptians were slave drivers. So the reality is, as you already alluded to in the introduction, that Egyptian people were paid farmers because the majority of people were farmers, to do things when they were not busy. So when the river rose every year in the inundation, the flood, for two or three months that meant that you could more easily float blocks from a quarry on the opposite side of the river to the site of the pyramid. And again, 20 years ago you

could have spoken to an Egyptologist who said, well we'll never find the diary of a pyramid builder. We did. A papyrus on the Red Sea coast has an account log book of this is how we moved the blocks. Oh. And the guy was called Merer who's in charge of this. So amazing discovery. I didn't even know that existed. And that's amazing to think this is contemporary with Stonehenge, right? And of course, how they moved those stones is endless debate around that and where they came from and how they got to the Salisbury Plain, etc. And like, the fact that we can point to this

in ancient Egypt and say, this, this is what they were doing. So there were people, and again, there is no social background really to them. So there's not the information a historian might want. But so you've got to nuance this idea of everyone was happy and joyful and were really happy to be part of this project. In a sense, from the evidence we have, it seems that the great success of the pyramids was not just the building the pyramid, but to gather people apparently from all over Egypt

to work on a national project. There'd be an ongoing crew of people, no doubt, working in the pyramids year round, but there would be an increase in concentration at the time of the flood, which incidentally is when it's hottest. So the majority of work was done in the Egyptian summer, which is not great. Anyway, so I could imagine being a farmer from the south of Egypt going, working for three months, being put up, being fed, having access to medical care, going back home with a feeling of pride. Being like, wow, I helped work and I saw these incredible things and,

wow, you know, the north of Egypt is totally different. All of that. Being paid, do we know? Or we don't know? Paid in kinds, or paid with rations. Sure. It was a non-monetary economy. But you're given shelter, you're given food. But even though we have some lovely suggestive bits of evidence like graffiti on some of the blocks in the pyramids, which of the names of the gangs that were responsible for the block dragging. So you have names like the

Friends of Khufu. Yeah, there's like nicknames. Yeah. Or the Drunkards of Mankowri. I love that one. I want to be on that team. It sounds like quite good. You wouldn't want to build a pyramid with a hangover. That sounds like the worst. In the heat as well. Yeah, that's true. Not good. But so there's this idea that it was great, but the reality, as your introduction suggested, must have been not great. It is

not easy to build a pyramid. So we don't have any direct evidence of this from the site of Giza, really. The cemetery that is sometimes said to be the cemetery of the workers probably relates to people who were servicing the cult of the pharaoh after his death, so after the pyramid was finished. So it's difficult to say what the work people were like. They probably went back home after their shift or if they died at the time they were sent back home. However, we have some, again, quite sinister evidence from the site of Amarna. So this is the town in Middle Egypt where Tutankhamun grew up.

And at that time, the king at the time, Tutankhamun's father probably, Akhenaten, says, right, we need a new, completely from scratch city. We don't have time to drag big blocks. We need to use small blocks enough that one person can carry. Now this is something that really shows us that it's better to have a team of people drag a big block than to have individual people carry a single block. Yes. Because we have the people's bodies and they are young and their backs have

literally been broken from the effort of carrying the walls. And a kind of a sinister aspect of this is in the wall scenes, you see common mortals in the tomb scenes of the elite are all shown bending at the waist. You kind of wonder, is that maybe because they have literally been cowed by the work of doing whatever they've had to do to make this amazing city appear in 20 years. of wonder is that maybe because they have literally been cowed by the work of doing

whatever they've had to do to make this amazing city appear in 20 years. So no, we don't have evidence directly from Giza, from the sites of the Great Pyramids, but I don't think it would have been a party. Yeah, no, far from it. It would have been better if it was aliens, I think. was aliens, I think. Better for people. The ancient Egyptians, yeah, very clever people. But it's neither hell on earth nor in utopia. It's somewhere in between because that's human society. Some people get more power and they use that power in different ways. As a final question then, just thinking about the sacrifice that these people made in building the pyramids and the damage that was done to them and thinking about the wider conversation that we've had and

this idea of effect and sort of magical thinking. What is in it for these people building these huge monuments? What do they believe that is allowing them to wake up every day and do that and be broken in that way? I mean, again, it comes back to this, to what extent are we using colonial imagery and putting that back on to the ancient Egyptians? So, evidence which could be interpreted as corvey labor where you know, you get a work gang together. Did that exist? To what extent did that exist? Egyptologists are still not quite sure but

Even if it didn't exist Even if some hard conscription didn't exist and people were willingly doing it Yeah, what are they getting for it other than a sense of pride as I maybe alluded to before I suspect if it were me, and if you were successfully going back home to your family and saying, guess what, I've been up to, there must have been not just a sense of pride, just human pride and, wow, I did this thing and I've seen more of the world. There may have been a thought of, I have materially contributed to a monument, which is conventionally interpreted as the

tomb of the king, whether it actually is the tomb of the king. It's some kind of- Future episode. Perhaps. It's some kind of incredible religious royal structure. Whether the king was buried there or not, whether it was a tomb or not, doesn't matter. The fact that you physically touched and helped put those blocks in place, going from all the other evidence we know from pharaonic Egypt, where materials, association, physical proximity to gods

is important, for centuries, for millennia after the Great Pyramid, Step Pyramid were built, people were jostling to get buried in the shadow of those monuments. You're not telling me if you had actively had a hand in building them, some metaphysical benefit came to you. I'm sure that was the case. I suppose one of the things that's really struck me about this conversation, which has been so enlightening in a way, is the extent to which Egyptologists are constantly unraveling some of this data that is, and then changing the interpretation of that data that's coming through. And I think that makes it such, it almost to an extent explains why it's so enduring as a subject area where it going, we think it's this 20 years later, actually, oh no,

we think it might be this now. And it's, and it's, it's, it is that thing that feeds back into what you were talking about earlier, Maddy, about like codes, because in a way they have left us so many codes and we think we understand and then we go, Oh no, I'm not quite sure I did understand that correctly. Let's rephrase that and look at the code again. So it's, that's potentially one of the reasons, along with loads of other things, that it's so enduring and it's such an enduring subject. There are definitely people, and maybe this is the subject for another episode, who I like to say they're playing a game with monuments and signs and codes. And one of the things

that I think Egyptologists find most satisfying is feeling like you work out the code, the game. And sure, there's a fraction of things preserved and we look at things still generally with a very modern Western view. But even amongst all that misunderstanding and lack of evidence, to feel like you are communicating or get some point that the ancient Egyptians were trying to make to us, that is so, so rewarding. Yeah. Great. Great to be an Egyptologist. Yeah. I think that's the perfect place to end. I know I might retrain now. Yeah. Although I couldn't take the Heath. You'd be terrible. Yeah. I would enjoy it. I couldn't go and work anywhere cold. I couldn't be a historian of any cold place. If you enjoyed this episode you can leave us a five-star review wherever you get your podcasts. If

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