Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - How Filthy Were the Egyptians?

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

Lead in eyes, scented animal fat melting over wigs, teen circumcision - the Ancient Egyptians went to great lengths for beauty and hygiene. So how clean were they, and how has the colonial perspective impacted history's view of them?To find out, Kate is joined once again by Manchester Museum's Campbell Price.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.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.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. Are we still saying Happy New Year? We're not. Are we? No, no, that's long gone. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets.

Thank God you're here. I've been waiting ages. Right, pull up a seat, but before we can continue together, I do have to let you know. This is an adult podcast book of my adults to other adults about adultery things and an adulty way coming around. Adults' subjects and you should be an adult too. Have you got all of that? Can we tick all of that?

Right, okay, then let's crack on. Oh my God, the heat. Oh, it's too hot. It's been seconds and I'm already sweating. 40 degrees is no climate for a northern woman. We're not supposed to be in places this hot, but I'm doing it for you, lovely betwixt us, because today we are in ancient Egypt,

and boy, is it freaking hot here. And certainly in a world without ever, air conditioning. I know I should be focusing on the pyramids and the palaces, but I just want to shower, which does bring us rather neatly to the topic of today's show, how clean were the ancient Egyptians? How often were they showering? How do you keep yourself clean and cool in weather like this? Well, I am ready to find out if you are. Oh, and welcome back to Betwigs the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kit Lister. This month, we are having a peak, or rather a sniff, around the people of history,

to determine just how clean or dirty they actually were. And today I'm joined by one of our previous guests, the rather fabulous and ever-fragrant Campbell Price. And you know what that means? Yes, it means we're off to the Egyptians. How do they keep clean in the world before modern plumbing and modern waste disposal and, well, let's face it, modern sewage solutions? And who was using enemers?

Hmm. Well, papyruses are the... ready everybody let's crack on and welcome back to betwixt the sheets it's only campbell price how are you doing i'm great dr kate lister i'm really pleased to be back talking to you we had so much fun last time that was a very popular episode you have a lot of fans out there you really do oh i'm so pleased to share the platform to talk about naughty things with you well i mean the egyptians are endlessly fascinating aren't they they are one of those periods of history that we go back to again and again and to get normally talking absolute shite, I'm sure that that was a historian that was

absolutely driving nuts. Yeah, I mean, how much shite can you talk better than me makes you a better historian? I think that's the real. You must just watch stuff like, another mummy, really, really, another Egyptian curse. Fuck's sake. Or can you rain it in and sort of enjoy this stuff? I think you kind of filter out some of the general hubbub, but amidst the, you know, the constant stream of kind of generic stuff, There is some really interesting details about how people lived. And I think that's what we've honed in on in the past. So hopefully in this episode as well, Kate.

Absolutely. They're doing a new mummy movie apparently. Brendan Fraser and Rachel. They're always doing a new bloody mummy movie. When will they leave the mummy franchise? Never. And do something quite interesting like a biopic on hatchet suit, the female pharaoh. That's what I would love to see.

No, mummies. We want more mummies. More mummies. We won't. Show me the mummies again. Show me the mummies again. But one of the things that is part of the mythology of the Egyptians in popular imagination is that they are very clean. Like it's not that we think of them as being particularly like, you know, anal about these things.

But they have that image like the Romans do, if they were very, very beautiful, very well presented. Yes. I'm glad you introduced that the way you did. There are two sides to this. There is the general perception of the ancient Egyptians. through artworks as yet very well groomed, always on point, wigs just kind of on fleak or however you want to describe them, and they describe in their own text, you know, dazzling white linens, like, how did you get your linen so white? But then that is contrasted with the other side of ancient Egypt, which is the mummy movies, this fear of pollution and contagion and

dirt. And I remember, you know, when I was a kid reading one of these R.L. Stein Kids books that talked about the wheezing, whistling, rotting mummies that are coming to get you. And this whole thing about, well, we've talked about Victorians and how they've fucked it out, fucked up our impression of the past. But you have this real sense of colonial guilt because you've taken the remains of these people out of their tombs. and then as a result of that, you then feel that they're going to try and get their own back. So there's this fear of the unclean contrasted with the presentation of ancient Egyptians in daily life, and we're using a lot of air quotes, because it's not really daily life, it's an idealised version of the world. And in that, you're absolutely right. They are preened. They are clean. They are dazzling for the gods.

That's true, actually. I hadn't thought about that, but you're right. We do have this slightly dirty image of it. And that's the colonial mindset. Do you think that that's because when the white British people went over to Egypt in whenever we turned up, they realized it's quite hot over there? Yes. The climate had something to do with it. It's a standard trope in European, Western, especially British, writing about the Egyptians, that it's so hot everyone is lazy.

Yes. But that's applied to lots of places. But this thing about just our use of language, so in English we describe mummified bodies is wrapped in bandages. And even if you're a kid, you know, and you get a scrape and you need your knee and you put a plaster on it and it gets dirty because you're running around.

Bandages are dirty. Bandages are kind of, yeah, unclean and they're not something that you would want necessarily to be swaved in. So there's this association with, like I say, threat. It's not just uncleanness. It is uncleanness that's trying to pollute.

Just trying to get you. Yeah. Yeah. And of course it would have been very dusty for people going to have the experience in it for the first time. So it's hot and it's sweaty and it's all of these things combined that in form a colonial mindset of weirdly this is a very clean place but a very dirty place at the same time. Yeah, if you're not used to those kind of conditions and don't know how to keep yourself clean and dry. Plus if you're wearing a corset and whatever. Or jodd purrs in a pith helmet.

And a nice woolen suit, you morons. Yes. Hello, Howard Carter. Yes. Yeah, you're going to get a bit toasty. But what do we know about actual Egyptians? I mean, the colonial thing of like, oh, you're actually all very dirty. We'll park that and revisit it in a bit.

But were they as clean as we kind of like to also think of them? By that, I kind of mean, like, we sort of have this idea of them lazing around by baths with a harrim and being covered in oils and put. Again, it's that sensual cleanliness, isn't it? Yes. come back to the baths. But from the earliest archaeological evidence, you know, back to basics, first principles, you go out, you dig. What do you find for the evidence of ancient life? Well, you find lots of evidence of death because you're finding graves. You're not generally finding people's houses. And in the earliest graves we have, the essential items are things to do with cosmetics,

things to do with pigment for the face, combs, things to do with adornment. Things to do with adornment. So you already have this idea that that was an important aspect of life that you would want in some sense to continue after death. So the archaeological record informs us about that. But then, yeah, the Greeks and the Romans, we've got to thank or not thank them for our impression of ancient Egypt. They thought of the ancient Egyptians as very indulgent and exotic and always taking baths. You know, you don't want to spend too long in the bath, that makes you... Girly. Yeah.

Oddly, girly, right? It's a weird thing. It's like... Vanity is a thing. Yeah, that's it. It's vanity. Eddie Isod once did a sketch where they talked about the pursuit of cool and they said that it was circular. And I think that this is kind of that.

It's like, you've got, right, you clean, manly, manly, clean and sporty. And now, oh, now you're a big girl again because too much time in the bath. And it's... It's... It's... It's... It's got to be clean, but if you do it too much, now, oh, no. Now, now you've become all...

You're soft. And soft and woety. Literally, you're soft. So I think that idea, you know, from Cleopatra, this idea that she bathes in asses milk. It doesn't sound very clean that. No, it doesn't. And whether it's good for your skin or not. So there are different cultural ideas that are formed by people who are not Egyptian. The ancient Egyptians themselves have ideas of non-Egyptians. They are quite clear that non-Egyptians are themselves unclean. They wear stuff like wool and they don't wash properly. And they're, uncircumcised, we might come back to that. But yeah, for an ancient Egyptian, for an elite

ancient Egyptian, remember most of our evidence concerns wealthy people. We get this impression of cleanliness, purity. And I should emphasise that word, because that's important for religious observance. And that's true still in lots of religions today. In order to interact with gods, to pray, you need to be of a certain standard of purity. Well, fair enough. But what do we know about their religious beliefs? Were they of the cleanliness is next to godliness? Was it part of a ritual of some beliefs for them? Yes. I think the idea is, well, gods are perfect and they have golden skin and silver bones and hair made of lapis lazuli. So they're superhuman, obviously, because they're gods. So to properly interact with them, especially if you're someone who's working in a

temple. So this is something we've got lots of evidence of. For the men and women who, who are are properly sanctioned and sanctified to be in a temple space, it's not like a church, a mosque, a synagogue where anyone can go in. It's not congregational worship. It is only specialists go in. And in order to go in, you need to abstain from sexual relations. You need to shave all bodily hair off. You need to wash. And by washing, you know, me too. But, you know, when you talk about washing, you're not cracking out the imperial leather, you're using a mixture of essentially a sodium compound, salt, what Egyptology calls Natron and has become very obsessed with the treatment of the body after death with Natron as a preservative. In fact, it's a purifying agent, which was

used by living people, priests and priestesses. So you need to do all this in order to achieve this kind of prime purity to be in the sacred space of the gods, because temples are housed. of the gods. If you're in the gods house, you need to be properly purified. Fair enough. That's a proper wipe your feet and then some, isn't it? Mm. And then some, yeah. Did they have any understanding of illness being caused by not being clean? Like, you see that in some sort of understanding. And I guess by the Middle Ages, people have this idea about myasma, which is sort of like dirty smells getting in to the body. But did they have an understanding of cleanness and health going together? That's a good question. And I'm struggling to think.

think of some direct link that is made in an ancient Egyptian text. And we have lots of texts that concern medical matters. There are manuals, if you like, for how to deal with injuries, illnesses. There isn't a strong link with what we would think of as sterility and keeping things sterile and keeping things clean. I mean, if you've got a problem, I mean, there are various, there's a whole range of solutions to deal with illnesses. So, So if you have something wrong with you, you might take a fumigation, which means you have to squat over some burning incense and let it enter your orify. Right. Interestingly, so the ancient Egyptian word for incense means literally to cause to be divine.

So there's something about the power or presence of the gods letting that smoke get to work. So it's not about, you know, clean it thoroughly with salt water, which may, of course, have had a positive effect, but where the texts are written concerning what you should do with something, it tends to be have a fumigation. A fumigation, that's the word. Don't try that at home, by the way. Just don't.

Just stick with the matey. That's fine. So if you're going to go into a temple, it's very ritualistic and it's about preparing the body and being clean is a big part of that. What evidence do we have, if any, because as you've already pointed out, a lot of the evidence relates to rich people

doing rich people stuff, what evidence do we have of just how your everyday Egyptian would have approached being clean? Because it can't have been easy, even in the best civilizations, because, you know, they didn't have mod cons, they didn't have, actually, I don't know. I don't know that, actually.

I don't know if the Egyptians had running water, did they? I was once asked that by a school kid in the museum, did the ancient Egyptians have taps? and it really gave me pause like, no, no, we don't have any evidence for taps, but... It's good to know my questions are on par with a school child says. Yeah, those are high.

The bar is high for, you know, really sussing out a dodgy historian from a question of a 10-year-old. But, no, that really made me think, well, in terms of we take running water for granted, but imagine in a world, pre-modern world, bathing, I mean, I would struggle even to show you before the Roman period,

because the Romans have this big thing about socialisation and bathing and baths and bathhouses. But before that, the standard weight for a relatively well-off person seems to be to have a shower. And in order to have a shower, you need somewhere with a big pot of water to pour it over you. That seems clear. And we have evidence for the kind of shower trays, like the base of a shower. Right. Which made of alabaster. Now that's interesting. Travertine alabaster, Egyptian calcite, is associated with purity. So it's referred to in Egyptian text as being this white, milky stone. So it's something that would make a good bath. And we have evidence of these things from temples where priests seem to have used them and had water

board over them. I struggle to think of any evidence for anything like we would think of as a bathtub. Yep. Okay. There are big lakes. There are sacred lakes where priests and priests and priests, priestesses are maybe going in. There's the Nile, of course, the big river, which is good for a wash, although it's got other things in it. But no, individual baths, not much for things. So they weren't. Even in palaces. There weren't one for communal bathing then. Other than jumping in the Nile. That doesn't sound very, actually, I don't know that either. Would the Nile have been clean at this point in history? It's got crocodiles in it. That's not good for a bath time. That's for sure. Yeah, watch out the crocodiles.

An element of spice to your morning routine. An element of risk to wake you up. That is a point because clearly, you know, there are hippos as well. There are dangerous animals around and about so that Nile is more lively than it is today, I guess. I think you've got to be careful not to imagine the Nile is just one massive river. There are lots of canals and there are pools and there are ponds which you could use more safely and get out of the way of the crocodiles. Okay. So water is accessible, not quite in the luxurious, you know, lounging around a bath that we sometimes see in movies.

A shower with just water being poured over you. That sounds pretty hardcore to me. What about soap? Oh, now, this brings up a word I am most a fan of, and that is the word unguent. Unguant, which is kind of an old Egyptological term to try to. a couple of terms which seem to refer to ointment or oil that smells nice and which could be used in some kind of cosmetic cleanliness routine. So we're not imagining soap that can be lathered, as we might have today, but certainly the Egyptians had various oils, fats, unguance, just because I love that word, which could be scented in various ways, using resins and floral sense, I guess. So you would apply that and then scrape it off, potentially like a Roman, or wash it off with water.

But there's a whole word field or a field of meaning associated with this. So the cat goddess Bastet, to take it to the realm of the gods and mythology, is the friendliest on a spectrum of divinity, feline divinity, where you have the scariest is Sechmet. She's the lioness who's going to. to mess you up. If you piss her off, then between Sechmet and Bastet, there is Pachet, and that means literally she who scratches, so she's going to do some damage. Sechmet means she who is powerful, so she is the most dangerous. So Bastet, the reason I'm mentioning Bastet, is because her name literally means she of the ointment jar. So it's this idea that she kind of placates and calms. And it's

maybe more kind of a medical sense than just cleanliness. But this idea of having a jar of sainted oil is something that you use to, yeah, clean, feel good, moisturise. And that's associated with the cat goddess. I just think that's a nice association. That is, isn't it? And I think that that probably would get you reasonably clean. Like, you know, the Romans and the Greeks did that, they rub the oil on and then. Stridgill.

dig it out. Yeah, like scrape it off. Some of them were using sound or maybe I've just hallucinated that as like an exfoliant. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that would get you reasonably clean, I suppose. I'll be back with Campbell after this short break.

What about perfume? Because, again, this is probably a Cleopatra thing, is there's lots of myths about her, actually, maybe it's true, about dipping her sails and perfume when she's going into Rome so they can smell her before they see her and all of this stuff.

But like, what about, What evidence do we have from actual Egypt about their perfumes? So, I mean, yeah, this is a widely known thing about the, you know, the somewhat sinister, very excessive orientals that are kind of threatened the good Roman way of life. There's Cleopatra with all our perfume. It's not manly. It's not Roman to smell nice. No, you must smell like shit.

That's what real men do. But there is clearly, I know, because I've smelled the scent of resin, various types of resin, which smells kind of like incense. which smells nice. And that survives still, you know, thousands of years after it was first used. There's an interesting iconographic cue, because of course, in Egyptology, we're always searching around for little cues that we think we can interpret to see what life was like. So there aren't, as far as I'm aware, detailed recipes for perfume. There are allusions to smelling nice and there's love poetry about, you know, your beloved smells nice.

There's a great tale where the mother of Queen Hachipsuit has a nocturnal encounter with the god Amun, who's kind of disguised as her husband and conceives a child Hatship suit, and that's a kind of way of legitimizing Hachipsuit's rule, because she's not just the child of the previous king, she's the child of a god. And it is said in that text that the whole palace suddenly smells of mure. and incense from Punt, this very exotic land on the Horn of Africa. So this idea of, you know, frankincense trees and myrrh and things we associate now with incense, all of that is highly prized.

I've never smelt mere, you know, just thinking about it. I wouldn't know what that smelled like. I think maybe if you popped into a Catholic church around this time of year, you might get a sense. It's Christmasy, yeah. So there are texts that talk about smells, which is interesting, and we can extrapolate from botanical evidence these days, but there are

iconographic cues, as I say, where you have a scene of a banquet and there are people men and women together shown wearing very kind of diaphanous see-through linen sexy outfits. They're big

wigs. That betokens sex, sexuality, a good time. Don your wig for a happy hour. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. But on top of the wigs, both men and women are shown, and again, we've got to draw a distinction between what's shown and what actually happened. They're shown with what have been interpreted as perfume cones, where you mix perfume, something that smells nice, with wax or animal fat. You plonk it on your head and in the heat, it melts and it kind of oozes down your wig and drips. and you can see the kind of staining on these white linen garments

and it's very sexy and you can imagine it being quite you know quite seductive. Smells nice. I'm not sure about that, Campbell. If somebody tried to seduce you with a big load of lard on their head and sort of started doing sexy dances like, look, it's melting, it's melting in my hair. Is it doing anything for you? Maybe it's a different culture, Kate.

Cultural... Quite right. I'm being horribly ignorant. Yes. cultural... Cultural relativity here. But Egyptologists are still struggling to know, is it really a thing where you have, as you say,

a thing of animal fat on your head, or is it simply a kind of hieroglyphic way to say in a two-dimensional scene, this person smells nice. It's like smell a vision. And some researcher friends of mine who are working in Egypt at the moment have found evidence that actual oil,

actual perfume, was applied to the wall scenes of these banquets. So when you went into a tomb chapel, it would be like scratch and sniff. So you would smell the banquet, which I just think is very kind of multimodal way of experiencing a scene. It's not just written.

There's text. It's not just visual, but it's also olifactory. So yes, there were, for those who can afford it, perfume, and it was something that was prized. Wow. That's incredible that that would be. be like a visual indicator. But I mean, fat is used to capture smells. That's effectively what perfume is. It's oil. But it clings to animal fat as well. So yeah, that was a well-known

thing in ancient Egypt. Let's go to the less erotic part of keeping clean, but a very important part because every large group of people has to deal with this. Human waste, toilets. It's a very underappreciated history, this one, is if you're going to have a civilization, you have to have some kind of toilet system. You just do. You do. So the number of archaeologically attested toilets for a civilization that lasted 3,000 years is minuscule. No. Minuscule. I can point you to one toilet seat that is held in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. It is a limestone seat with a slit in it, basically. But otherwise we are really struggling. And it's interesting actually, again, to look at the outsiders' perspective

on ancient Egypt. You know, the Greeks and the Romans, like Herodotus, classical historian Herodotus, talks about how weird the ancient Egyptians are. Everything's topsy-turvy. They salt, they're dead, they worship animals, they're all weird. But they're very clever. They've got a long history and they're very intelligent and great historians, great mathematicians, great medics. But he says in this topsy-turvy world, and this is the real mark of, you know, our Greek craziness. Women urinate standing up and men urinate sitting down. No. And I mean, there are studies about this around the world now, but it's funny that that's a marker of something that clearly an outsider can observe in Egypt, which makes things a bit unexpected. But

when you look for the actual archaeological evidence of going to the toilet, it is so hard to come by. Wow. Why do you think Herodot just said that, you know, he's a historian in massive inverted comments, because he does talk a lot of crap a lot of the time. Why do you think he said that? Do you think that was just one of the things that he just said in some kind of fever dream? Because he has said that about like weird stuff about other cultures before that definitely didn't happen. Or do you think there was some substance to that? I think there might have been some substance assuming, as we generally assume that he did actually travel to Egypt and he had some experience. But you can imagine, you know, we know, we know ourselves. If you're a historian, you want to interest your audience. So you think, oh, this is a juicy little tidbit that I could put it out there. Oh, you'll never, you'll never guess. You'll never guess what they're doing. They're absolutely mad. And that's such a personal thing that it's maybe taken as very insightful into not just the society, but the psychology and the roles of men and women, which were not what a Greek might expect the roles in Egypt. And there was a lot of like the Greeks and the Romans

worrying about the Egyptians being like overly feminine and the women being in control. So they might be feeding into that kind of like, oh my God, the men even peace sitting down. What is the place coming to? Exactly. I mean, it feeds into a thing of, I mean, one aspect that's thought to be strange in Egypt

is, you know, women can, you know, run markets that they go and sell stuff. whereas men do the laundry, men do washing. And this is seen to be totally against the Greek worldview. So the urinating standing up or sitting down is betoken some other, you know, oriental difference. And we kind of joke about it, but that kind of prejudice absolutely exists today. And those kind of oppositions that Horodicists and other classical historians set up persisted absolutely to the present. When you get sort of like Western history and then we're looking at royals, they, oh, maybe not even just royals, just very rich people.

They have lots of people employed slash enslaved to look after them in very, very intimate ways. Like Henry VIII famously had a groom of the stool, which was somebody to wipe his royal bottom. So I'm guessing that sort of like Egypt royals were kind of saying if they don't have a sort of a sewage system that we know about, They must have had people looking after their most intimate bodily functions. Yes, and we do have good written evidence for this. Oh, hello. Yes, because in a society like ancient Egypt where the evidence concerns a pretty small elite and there's a lot of competition amongst that elite,

you want to demonstrate that you are very close to the king. So you have the pharaoh here's this autocratic god king ruler. who dominates elite societies, the centre, the top of the pyramid. So people want to physically, literally get close to him. So you have people say in the pyramid age, I was so important that I got to kiss the king's foot instead of the ground in front, the dirt in front of the king's foot. Okay.

Although a lot of those texts are quite generic, some quite specific details. And we do know that in the planning of the royal pyramid complex, X-you-over-the-pyramid. The most important people tend to abut close to the royal tomb because they want to be near the king or they're required to be near the king is better for eternity. So you get people like the king's doctor, the king's dentist, someone who's allowed to do something with the teeth. Again, we don't have any evidence for ancient Egyptian toothbrushes, but maybe a bit of a, I don't know, I'm just imagining here, a mouthwash with the salty, salty nature on water actually would keep your teeth in fairly good neck. You have the royal barber is close to the king.

So if you believe the king is semi-divine and you're allowed to shave him, or even we have a royal manicurist, small number of royal manicurists, they're allowed to do the king's cut the king's nails. Nothing has ever said about toiletry issues, but you could imagine, as you've just said, there is something like a groom of the stool who deals with the royal waist. Because frankly, to think of it literally, if you believe the king is divine, any emanation from him is also divine. You need to treat that very carefully. And what seems to be a concern looked at in other way is if you in this society where, you know, excretions are divine from a divine person, if they fall into the wrong hands, someone can do black magic against the king. So we have texts that talk about a harem conspiracy where people try black magic, they use essentially an equivalent of voodoo dolls made of wax. They need parts of the king's

person. And listen, Kate, this is the reason Tutankhamen was buried with 140 underpants made of linen. That's a lot of underpants. But is it enough for eternity? Oh, good point. Because it wasn't meant that they were to last for eternity. It's not like stockpiling fraternity. It is probably because anything that came in contact with the king's flesh, which is divine, has to be saved. So this, I mean, he only died at 18, so he didn't live a long life.

But imagine for a king like Ramesses II who lived to be 90, presumably all of the clothing that was... Must be kept. It's not quite like Princess D'S. Diana's dresses are kept and sold and put on exhibition. If you literally believe the king is divine, we know from other sources that wrapping that was put on statues of gods is kept and might be used for very favoured people when they're wrapped up after they die. That idea to take it back to what happens when the king has to have a bowel movement,

presumably that is treated in some very special way that's not mentioned in texts, but has to be treated by some kind of ritual specialist. It must have been. It must have been, somebody's job. Wasn't there a job of somebody that could administer enemers to the pharaoh? Well, there's this... Allegedly. Is that a silly thing? The shepherd of the royal anus? Yes. The shepherd of the royal anus, which is something to do with rear end functions,

but we're not clear absolutely what. And clear, well, if it was an important role, it doesn't get repeated. That title is not a standard one. It's like a one-off. Okay. So you can't be absolutely 100% sure what's going on on one occurrence. So one text somewhere mentions something, but we don't really know what that is. Yeah, precisely. Okay, that's, that's fair enough.

I'll be back with Campbell after this short break. What about just looking good? Because every culture that we have, people always want to look good. We have different variations of it. We have some people, you know, oh, don't be vain. But everyone's kind of vain. Egyptians, they liked a full beat, as far as I can see. They liked a full glam look. Yeah. Well, having said that almost all the evidence considers this rich little country of people

never again. That's not quite true. We are very lucky in that we have some little insights from small numbers of settlement sites that survive where the people living there were fairly regular people. So they tend to be workers' towns associated with building royal tombs, the power. pyramid and essentially when the pyramid is finished or the cult of the king weatheres and dies off that settlement gets abandoned so it's kind of like an ancient Egyptian Pompeii where you have evidence of the people that live there so in Manchester Museum we have some items from one of these towns from about 1900 BCE it's almost 4,000 years ago where there are combs there are applicators for eye makeup where you can

imagine on a special occasion. Yeah, it's a party. It's a festival. We're having a holiday. People get glammed up. Sure. You can use, you know, pretty inexpensive things like carbon to make call, to make eye makeup. You know, you don't have to be super rich. Wigs would be quite common. They big into their wigs. That was a big thing for them. Yeah. And some really big, as I said, for voluminous wigs. So presumably some people are selling their hair because these are human. Yeah, they must be. Here, wigs. Yeah. So, I mean, the idea seems to be that lice is potentially an issue. There is a great premium put on purity.

And so shaving for both men and women seems quite important. So you might be bald and have a wig on top of your head. But, yeah, one of my favorite things is a little box from this town of Cahoon, the workers' town. In the Manchester Museum, it's a little wooden box. and it had in it juniper berries, which not suggesting the ancient Egyptians were distilling gin, which would be great, but they weren't probably. They were using juniper berries you can crush them up to make rouge.

There were other minerals like Galena that you can crush up to make eye makeup. And there was a little applicator. So it's like a little makeup set. Yeah, like Max Factor for ancient Egypt. Oh, I love that. Now you mentioned earlier, and we've got to pick up on this one, on circumcision. You did mention that we'll come back to that one. So what were they doing with circumcision? That is culturally something that on the official kind of presentation of the state on

temple walls, you have sometimes around about 1,100 BCE, you have depictions of warfare, where if you go into battle and you're battling, say, some outsiders, the means of counting the kills is to record their right hands and their penises. So you have a great pile of penises, uncircumcised, and then you have right hands. And that's how they account for the kills that have been made. So the idea culturally is the... Whose job was that? I mean, it's pretty grim. Oh. One imagines. On penis counting detail. In a hot battlefield. Oh, dear. Not great. Not great. No one would want to pull that short straw,

would they, God, oh my too. So we have one or two scenes where the operation of removing the foreskin is happening. And it seems that it's not happening to babies, it's happening to adolescent boys. I mean that, of course, culturally

this is the tested in lots of different places, but it does seem to be a thing associated with cleanliness and Egyptianness that's used as a kind of way of contrasting foreigners. So, foreigners don't shave properly, they don't wash properly, and they don't have circumcised

penises. But that said, we have, of course, the mummified bodies of several kings, and some of those are not circumcised. So it was not a hard and fast rule. Oh, that's interesting. And we do some well, again, it might be a bit of a herodotus thing of, I think it's Greek and Roman scholars writing about female circumcision being practiced in Egypt, particularly the cutting out of the clitoris occasionally. We don't, to the best of my knowledge, of any written sources or anatomical evidence that would suggest that. I mean, again, you can extrapolate a lot from one single case as you've found, but we're talking about 3,000 years, big country, millions of people, it's difficult to generalise. But for male circumcision, it does seem to have been a cultural

value was put on it. We do not know. And it's always about cleanliness. Even today, when the issue of circumcision comes up online, there'll be a load of Americans because it's still widely practiced there talking about how it's cleanliness. And it's such a weird argument because it's not about that. Yeah, I mean, different cultures have different uses. Just wash, just get some soap. No, it's just interesting that even like as far back as we can go with the written records,

this is about cleanliness and about keeping clean. Yeah, it's certainly the one very clear illustration of the operation happening, which is in a tomb that's like four and a half thousand years old, it seems to be like an initiation, which still in other parts of the world it is. So actually the emphasis is it's not made absolutely clear that it's about being clean and sterile and medically advantageous.

It's about, okay, this is just what happens as you are initiated into manhood. I must have smarted a bit like... Yeah, I wouldn't fancy. No, no, I don't think so. So as a final question then, Through all of your research, are there any Egyptian beauty tips or cleanliness tips that you think that we could actually benefit from today? Something that maybe you're like, actually, stood the test of time.

Well, I can tell you what not to do. Excellent. Because there is evidence that using lead galena, I think it's lead galena. It's not great. Don't do that. Not great to put lead in your eyes every day. Fuck you don't know. And of course, everyone, you know, when you're speculating about.

Tutankhamen or Cleopatra Everyone wants to know how did they die It was a chariot accident It was a hippo She poisoned herself with lead We don't know Because we don't have the body of Cleopatra to say I think

I mean based on research I know that's happened at the University of Manchester And other places Stuff like hair care products Oils Wack I mean things like hair wax You think of that being very 90s 1990s

C.E But actually Not at all Those kind of things were being practiced two, three, four thousand years ago. So I would say hair care the Egyptians were very good at. As I've already said, you can use things from the natural world, like berries, that are going to give you a ruggie look. And then I actually quite like the idea of a perfume going on top of your head. I'm fascinated by that one to know how does that work.

Whether it is, as I said, just an iconographic thing of this person. and smells good or not, we have an example of a mummified body from the site of a marna that has one of the cones on it. So whether that's maybe, and this gets very kind of complicated, is it maybe a practice that is meant to replicate artworks? Because you get that in ancient Egypt. They're replicating what's on a wall in three dimensions, which starts to play with meaning, makes it quite complicated to interpret what was normal practice. So I would say, I mean, I still swear by Egyptian essential oil perfume.

It sounds like a bit of, you know, snake oil. Snake oil salesman territory. But it lasts longer than standard kind of cologne from... Well, yeah. The higher the oil rate in perfume, the longer it lasts. And they wouldn't have been fucking around with Lynx Africa or like Charlie, would they?

They've got the really good stuff. And I can attest that the objects we have that are scented including mummified remains of people, still smell of that perfume. And it's not an unpleasant smell, kind of spicy, woody, woody smell. So in that sense, yeah, yeah, the ancient Egyptians were very good at planning for eternity. Oh, Campbell, you have been wonderful to talk to you once again. I knew that you would be. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

Don't put animal fat on your head and then right, well, maybe you'd like that. No, don't try it at home. I would be fascinated. Let me know on social media at Egypt MCR. I've written a couple of books and one of them, something I'm working on right now, Kate, is a book about the ancient Egyptian face. And maybe we can talk about that separately

because there is something about that Hollywood vision of Elizabeth Taylor and like you said at the beginning, our idea of the ancient Egyptians preened on point that borrows probably more from artistic representation, presentations of an idealised world than it does from actual everyday practice. So ask me about that in six months. I absolutely well. Thank you for coming on once again. You've been marvellous. Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Campbell for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like review and follow along whatever it is. You get your podcasts.

We've got more filthy history coming your way this month. We've already done the Romans. So if you miss them, scroll back and have a listen. And we will next be unleashing the one and only the utterly fabulous. Eleanor Janiger on the idea that medieval people were the smelliest of all. She didn't react well to that one. I'll tell you now. But if you would like us to explore a subject or if you wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixtat history hit.com. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The Senior Producer was Freddie Chick.

Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.