Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex in Ancient Egypt

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

How did the Ancient Egyptians differ from us? In many ways they did, but in terms of sexuality, perhaps not so much. As we’ll find out, they were certainly partial to a filthy poem. Taking us on a journey back to this ancient world is Egyptologist Sarah Parcak. Amongst other things, she talks us through the Turin Papyrus - possibly the oldest depiction of human sexuality we have. This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts.Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code BETWIXTTHESHEETS1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/ 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. How the flipping heck are you? I'm doing all right, thanks for asking. But before we can keep going on our little journey together, I think you know what's coming your way. That's right.

It is your fair do's warning. Here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things covering a range of adult subjects and you should be an adult too. And now we've managed to get through that. On with the show! The year is 1150 BC and we are in Egypt. We are having a bit of a nosy around our mate's house

while he's off getting us a beer. He's got a load of papyruses on the table in front of us, a yellowishy material, kind of similar to thick paper. Most of the sheets have hieroglyphs on and they're going on about your kind of everyday humdrum things, but at the very bottom of the pile is a very different-looking papyrus. It has images of cats and dogs, and they're all wearing human clothes and parodying human behavior.

I mean, it's kind of cute. It's a bit weird, but cute. We pick it up to have a closer look, revealing the other side of the papyrus, which is filled with images of people having sex in all kinds of different positions. And they look like, well, how do I put it? put this delicately. They don't look like stereotypical sex gods. They're pop-bellied. They have thinning hair, but they do have gigantic penises. What the hell is this? Well,

betwixters, we have stumbled upon the erotic Turin papyrus. Oh yeah. And today we're going to be talking all about it. What do these images tell us about sex in ancient Egypt? What were the rules around marriage and divorce at the time, was there really a god who created himself through masturbation? Well, we are about to slide between the Egyptian cotton sheets to find out. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

Goodness, what beautiful time. It has nothing to do with it, Derry. And welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. A challenging aspect of studying sex throughout history is finding the evidence for it. Many people don't actually keep detailed records

of what they were getting up to. However, every now and then, an artifact pops up which gives us a bit of an insight, and it's never boring. Take, for instance, the Turin Papyrus. You can have a look at that via the link in the show, Show notes. Brace yourselves, kids. It's pretty strong stuff. Today, we are joined by the awesome Egyptologist Sarah Parkak to talk about sex, sexuality, erotic poems, and just about all the horniness

that ancient Egypt can throw our way. I had so much fun recording this one. I hope you enjoy listening to it. And welcome to Betwicks the Sheets. It's only Sarah Parkack. How are you doing? I'm great. I am so excited and happy. to be here. Long time fan, first time appearance. I can't believe we haven't had you on before. I think we've just been storing you up, saving you. Watch out. Are you ready? This is such a fascinating topic and it's one that you are absolutely the person to talk to. Sex in Ancient Egypt. Wow. When we think of Ancient Egypt is definitely one of those historical periods.

that has been so romanticized in modern culture and film and TV. And what we think of as ancient Egypt, the kind of the myth of ancient Egypt, it almost takes on a life of its own. It becomes almost like a fantasy. Do you feel like you kind of go around going like, no, it wasn't like that. Sorry to spoil the fantasy. Or as you've been researching it, you've been more like, actually, it was completely like that. So I think, you know, when we think about ancient Egypt, you know, first of all,

we're looking at it through the glamour of what we think the past was. And it's tut porn, right? It's gold. People get gold fever. And they get this shiny look in their eyes, gold, gold, gold, gold. Even in Egypt, when we find gold, and yes, I found gold, it just changes the vibes of everything. And people get crazed looks in their eyes. It's like piracy and treasure.

People think treasure hunting. And it's part of it, right? Because we always joke about finding, you know, golden mummies and treasure. treasure, but that's not how it was. And I think as well, we have this whole lens of Orientalism when we think about Egypt and other cultures from the ancient Near East, Middle East, North Africa. There's all this othering that takes place, hyper-focus on sexuality, on exoticizing the other people. And again, there's always an element of truth to fantasy, right? What fascinates me about ancient Egypt and why I love doing what I do, it's the nitty-gritty,

it's the daily life that's figuring out what made everyday people tick and why we see all the changes throughout time because I think people think of ancient Egypt as like this monolithic culture and it wasn't. There were so many different time periods where the culture evolve, the language evolved, the art evolved, the way the people existed evolved and yet there was also this timelessness to it. So when you go to ancient Egypt today and you're inside a tomb in Luxor and you see a man behind an ox and a plow wearing a sort of a long shift and you walk outside and you see a modern man in the Galabia, which is the same get up with a plow with his ox. Now he's on a cell phone, but it's the same, right? It's the same. It's the same vibe. So there's change and there's

timelessness. And maybe that's the romantic part of why so many people like me love being there, because so much of ancient Egypt hasn't changed. Because when we say ancient Egypt, it could be a very convenient way to go, oh, that particular period in history, it could almost be 10 years or it could like, what chunk of time are we talking about here when you say ancient Egypt? So yeah, so that's also like that term is misleading because we're talking about a 3,000 year period of time. But really, it goes back even before that. If you're studying the Neolithic from ancient Egypt, then we're talking about, you know, between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago or earlier. But really, it's this sort of main period of time between roughly sort of 3,000 BC and 30 BC-ish. But then, again, that's misleading, too,

because half my PhD was on the late Roman period in Egypt. So this period of time, quote-unquote, post-phoronic period and in the lead up to when, when Egypt flipped from Christianity to Islam. And again, there are so many elements of ancient Egypt that remain the same. So I think to not see it as this continuity, but also respecting that it is different periods of time, can be misleading to. And I think on top of that, you know, I think scholars today disregard the importance of what people in Egypt today think about their past and how they interact with their past.

And it's their past. It's not our past. So there's this lack of respect, I think. That's changing, right, for people of our generation. But yeah, ancient Egypt, sort of, I'd say 3,000 BC to zero-ish BC around that time. And when we're talking about modern perceptions of ancient Egypt, which is actually thousands and thousands of years of history in a country that is still very much here, and it's now not ancient anymore.

But one of the things that we do in popular culture is we have made it very sexy. we have done that. I'm thinking of like Brendan Fraser in The Mummy and there's all these like nubile nude people and it's very eroticised in our cultural imagination. When it comes to sex in ancient Egypt, again, thousands of years of history that we're looking at. But is there any accuracy for that or is that more of a Western fantasy? Like how do we even start to unpick what kind of sex were these people having? I think it's hard. First of all, you. You know, anytime you're looking at any past culture, we have our own modern, preconceived notions of sexuality. Of course, that depends on the individual. You know, are you cisgendered? Are you trans? Are you queer? If then, right?

Everyone's on a spectrum. So that influences how you engage with material in the past. And it's been really interesting sort of the last, especially 30 to 40 years in archaeology as a whole. We're seeing what's more queer scholars, the idea of gender. is not being fixed. We think one burial is male, but it's female. What does that say about how people were in the past? So I think we have to try to remove who we are today from what people were like back then. And that's mostly impossible, but we can try to understand it on their own terms. And I think with the rise in sort of settlement archaeology in ancient Egypt over the last

50 to 60 years with a much greater emphasis on daily life, we're able to see more and appreciate more, whatever day people would have been like, because those are the people that are having 95% plus of the sex, right? That's the thing that's human ancient Egyptian society. So I think, you know, first of all, anyone who goes to Egypt, there's a lot of penises on temple walls. There is a lot of cock.

And that could be titillating, right? Right. Yeah, there's, it's not like they're tiny. It's present. Porn star penis. And I think, you know, we're like, oh, there's penises. And it's the Victorian-esque, puritanical, Avert your eyes. But for the ancient Egyptians and for so many cultures, sex and death and birth, they're not hidden away. You know, you're living in a small house with your parents. You're going to hear

them having sex. Yeah. It's just not removed. So there's not this, ooh, like, sexy feeling around it, I think that would have existed. It's just like, okay, my parents are having sex. having sex. It's part of life. That's a perfect example, isn't it, of us dragging our modern comprehension of sex and using that to view the past, because when we see those enormous penises all over Egypt, we're like, oh my God, they must have been at it like rabbits. This must have been a really, really sexualized culture, but that can't have been how they saw it, or it's not necessarily how they saw it. Like, if you go to somewhere like Pompeii, there are erotic frescoes in people's, what were living rooms. It's like, you're like, you're like, you.

like putting porn hub on with your family just sat there. They can't have viewed it in that same way. And I think, too, I ask my students, what would ancient Egyptians think if they saw us today? I don't know. What would they think? Oh, my God. They didn't think we were perverts. We were, like, you're going to the beach and your women are dressed like that and your men

or what, you know, what's going in movies? Take all the technology stuff away. In magazines, online. You know, we're the perverts. Let's face it. I think we are, you know, but we are endlessly attracted to these kind of the relics from ancient Egypt. Like there's a god, isn't there, with an enormous penis? There's probably more than one. Right. So the god, min, men. That's it. And I was the ancient Egyptian. Yes, because his name is

min and it's not min imam at all. That's right. So he was the ancient Egyptian god of sexuality, of fertility. So this is the other thing, too, that we have to think about when we think of ancient Egypt. for us, everything is so shut away, whether it's sex, whether it's religion, we go somewhere to do a thing. We go to church to worship and maybe we pray at the dinner table to say thanks for our meals. But our lives are so compartmentalized. And in so many ancient cultures, it wasn't for ancient Egypt. Religion and science and existing and daily life, it was all sort of one and the same. The closest I have felt to a sense of what I think ancient Egypt was like is when my husband and I went to India together about 15 years ago.

And we were in southern India during the monsoon rain season. And it was like the floods in ancient Egypt. And I'm in no way suggesting that ancient Egypt is connected to India at all. I mean, they were later, but not ancient Egypt. And you're walking through this temple that's inundated, in effect, from, rainwaters and you're amongst all these celebrants and you see these bald priests wearing shifts carrying a boat shrine with the images of with the idols with the gods inside it and it's opened up and they're anointing them and they're feeding them and they're bathing them and they're singing

and there's music and there's no separation you're part of this joyous long tradition and it's just everyone's open and it's amazing it sends chills down my spine I'm thinking of it And that's ancient Egypt. Greg and I just love my husband's name is Greg. We just looked at each other. We're like, oh my God, we're here. Wow. This is what it would have been like.

So to find these moments where you're connected to the past and where you feel like you're there, it's so rare to find. But in India today, this lack of separation is something that's prevalent. And so in Egypt, when the wind is blowing, it's not the wind. It's the touch of the God's shoe. And their whole life, their whole existence revolved around the inundation, the flooding of the Nile every July and would the land come back to life? Their whole existence depended on it. And the religion, the way the economy function, the way society functioned was, is the flood

going to be good enough this year or not? So fertility, rebirth, regeneration, fighting off chaos, fighting off the desert so that they can keep living. It's the core part of what existing in ancient Egypt would have been like. So of course we're going to have images of God with huge penises. It's not sex. It's existence that they're celebrating. It might tell me that. I'm I've got this one around, but in an Egyptian creation mythology, was it the God Atom who brought the world into being by masturbating? Is that one of the creation? Yes. Does that suggest a culture that was free, that, you know, masturbation was a very good thing, or should we not read too much into that? You know, I think from what I know about ancient Egyptian sexuality, I don't think people

were wanking off in public. I mean, I think, again, there's some propriety. You read it here first. Yeah. But, yeah, of course they were, of course they were masturbating. Of course they were having, there's enough references to illicit affairs going on, to adultery, which we can talk about later. they would have lived the rich sexual lives that we lived today. And the problem is, of course, for 95% of ancient Egyptian society, we don't have textual evidence. The textual evidence we have is from very upper class tombs and papyri that are from, again, the tombs of very wealthy people. We rarely have references to what everyday people would have been doing

because most of them would have been illiterate. Right. That's the thing, isn't it? Because you can look at the Turing Papyrient. on one side, it's full of erotic art, very, very acrobatic stuff going on. But that doesn't mean that the person, just your average Joe on the street would have seen that or knew anything about it or lived their life in any way. There's always that disconnect, isn't it?

You've got to be really careful that you found an object and what you extrapolate from that about an entire culture. I think one of the things that I was surprised about when I came to do a little bit of research around ancient Egyptian sexuality, because I approached it again thinking that they were, you know, that they were gods masturbating. They're huge penises. They're erotic papyruses. But in many ways, they're quite conservative. Their expressions of gender seem to have been quite conservative. Like, this is a man and this is a woman. Or maybe I'm wrong with that. But they seem to be quite defined in those roles. You're absolutely right. So in ancient Egypt, this concept

of duality was extraordinarily important. You know, you had a god and a goddess that were pairs. You have the harsh desert. You have the fertile mile floodplain. And again, people would be like, well, weren't there trans people in ancient? There have always been trans people. But we don't really hear about them because that idea doesn't fit per se within daily life in ancient Egypt, although there is gender ambiguity and Aknautin, which we see later on. But for the most part, you're absolutely right. You know, you see men who have darker skin, slightly more orangey skin because they're the ones that are outside. Right. Yep.

So you have public spheres and private spheres. So men are outside. They're in the fields. They're the ones who are in the meetings. Women are in the houses. And they're the ones. But it's not, again, it's not like, you know, 1950s gender roles at all. The role, mistress of the house was incredibly important. We know women were in charge of household, economy, finances, and even their family businesses when their husbands would go away and travel. They took over. We know of a lot of very sort of smart, strong women who lived in ancient Egypt. But you're right, yeah, so where do women belong and where do men belong? There were distinct spheres of existence. And, you know, even from a young age, you know, if you were a girl, you would have learned how to weave from your mom. You would have learned how to cook. If you were a boy from a young age, you were out in the fields with your father and uncles. Or if your dad was a scribe, you'd go to scribe school from the age of six or seven. Wow. What were sort of standards of beauty for women? Because I know that when you go back through the Egyptian, sources and texts, they've got a lot of beauty tips going on. And I am fascinated to read them about what's changing perceptions of what is a hot ancient Egyptian. So yeah, so they were obsessed with beauty, right? Beauty was fertility. Beauty meant that you could find a partner or you find a husband or wife and have babies. And so this is, this ties into, kind of another key thing

for ancient Egypt. So thinking about resurrection and fertility, the other important thing is when you died, you're in a tomb. And for your soul to continue existing, your children had to come and make offerings at your tomb. They had to say prayers to keep you alive, to keep you going. So the most important thing that you could do would be to find a partner, find a husband, and have babies to perpetuate your cult when you died. So that was sort of the driving force behind everyone, I think. And I think some of these beliefs, you know, even would have trickled down that they certainly would have been held by everybody people. So, you know, these beautiful linen shifts, some of the weaves were so fine. It was like silk. We see this in museums. Every upper class tomb, we see beauty kits. So this

thick coal like eyeliner, they would have put beneath their eyes, which also helped to protect their eyes against the dust. Perfumes, oils, they would have scented their hair. They wore wigs. So we certainly see in tombs, you know, images of nubile young women dancing. saying naked or just covered with beads that are woven. So definitely, there's a huge emphasis on beauty and what you look like. And also, if you are going to go out in public and you are an upper class woman, you get ready. You put your game face on. If you go into the palace, you want to look hot.

Of course you do. The woman that is renowned as being probably the most beautiful of all the ancient Egyptians is Queen Cleopatra. We've got to talk a bit because I just thought of it then when you talk about perfume because there are legends about her soaking the sails of her ship with, I think it was, Jasmine perfume. So Mark Anthony knew she was arriving in Roe or Caesar, whoever it was. That's a power play. So Cleopatra is one of my favorite figures from ancient Egypt. I've been obsessed with her forever. Even like when I played football for Cambridge for my college team, I actually had the

name Cleopatra on my back. I'm ridiculous. So our perceptions of who she was, and why she did the things she did. That, of course, has changed before we relied mostly on the Roman accounts, and they thought she was a whore. They disregarded her. She twisted First Julius Caesar and then Mark Antony. They painted her as this evil sexual creature, and that's how she was portrayed,

even in the Elizabeth Taylor 1960s movie. But now, with all this archaeology and excavations at dozens of settlement sites on long-distance street, we have a totally different view. and different perceptions of what life was like in the Ptolemaic period. So, first of all, to me, her real sexiness, the hottest thing about Cleopatra was her mind. She was a smart cookie that one, wasn't she? She spoke at least eight languages we know of. Her identity, we've seen all this debate, like, was Cleopatra Black?

Like, did she have darker skin? Again, those are sort of those are questions seeped in modern perceptions of race, racism, that wouldn't really have existed in the past. Her dad was Macedonian, so that's at least half, if not more, of her background, whether it was a mom, an aunt, a grandmother, somebody who was close to her, to whom she was related, was Egyptian.

It's the only way she would have learned ancient Egyptian, and no one else, no other Ptolemy had bothered to learn ancient Egyptian. So this is why the ancient Egyptian people loved her, because the language was the root into the culture. Of course. And for her, this sort of essence of her identity, she was the living goddess Isis. She was in charge of the resurrection. She was the one who could keep ancient Egypt going.

She understood her role better than almost anyone else in history. She knew she was it. She knew that if she didn't make a strong alliance with Rome, if she didn't have kids that were somehow connected to the Roman Empire, Egypt was toast. She knew the Romans were going to take over. So this is why she seduced. Julius Caesar. By the way, she was a virgin, probably, when she seduced him. I didn't know that. I mean, again, like, how would we know, right? We would never know. But we can take what we know about ancient Egyptian princesses and the court and how that really never changed to our Egyptian

history. The most important thing in ancient Egypt, if you were a royal woman, was your virginity because ultimately it was out of your womb that the next king would come. You had to be 100% certain who the dad was. Yeah. No messing about. Yeah. And so she would have been kept largely in the palace. Every minute of her life would have been monitored. And she would have known this too. She was not messing around with the kitchen boy. Although she certainly would have known what sex was, I'm sure she would have been instructed because there's no way Julia Caesar would have fallen for a fumbling virgin. No. No. Absolutely not. But she clearly went him over. And that was it. So sexuality was part of her identity, but not sexy in the way we think about it, sex and sexuality in the sense

of fertility and regeneration. She was that icon. She was the living ISIS, and that was the core part of who she was for her whole life. I'll be back with Sarah after this short break. Let's talk about incest for a bit, because one of the things that kind of, it's one of the things were ancient Egypt that people go, I'm sorry, pardon, what were they doing now? What was that? Say it again. But in the royal family, there was a lot of intermarriage. I mean, I think I might be wrong, but Cleopatra married two of her brothers. Was this normal in the aristocrats?

Like, was this something that your average person on the street would be doing? What was the logic behind this? So first of all, I think there's a lot of sort of misconceptions around incest in ancient Egypt. So the terms of affection, my brother, my sister. So even when you read this in ancient Egyptian text, people are like, oh my gosh, you're talking about your sister. It's not your sister. It's your loved one.

It's an ambiguous term. So I think the ancient Egyptians, again, and we don't know this for sure, but I think they would know. We call them FLK's funny looking kids like the Habsburgs, right? They would have known, if it stayed in the family too long, you get funky ears and it ain't right. So on the one hand, you know, there's the terms of affection they used. And also, Claypatron never consummated those marriages.

So there were religious ceremonies where you would marry your brother, sister, father, etc. But I don't think there would have been procreation that took place. Now, of course, again, we don't know for sure. I think there was some, right? There's always incest that's part of cultures around the world. But it's not the same way. It's not the way that we think of it today. It's more ritual.

And this was a society that was very much founded on the institution of marriage. Or was it? Because I've read that marriage wasn't necessarily a religious right. It was something else, but it seems to have been very central to this culture of like, right, you pair up. That's what we're doing. Have babies. Have legitimate issue. So, you know, for us today, right, it's very formal. It gets announced. There's an engagement. We post about it. There's a huge ceremony. You're making a public commitment in front of your friends and family. It wasn't that way, I think for the most part in ancient Egypt, I think very upper, upper class people could have afforded a party. It could have afforded a celebration for sure. But for

most people, you know, you find a man or a woman you love, you want to partner with. You basically set up house together. You cross the threshold together and that's it. Wow. You're married. I'm sure, right? Like everyone loves a party. I'm sure there were drinks and celebrations and good food. It's an event to commemorate, although we don't know. We just, you just don't know. We don't have the records for it. But you sort of move in together, and then if it doesn't work out, you can just say we're done. And then that's it. So easy to divorce? Easy-ish. I mean, I think if there are kids involved, that's a different story. And of course, we have to remember, too, like so many ancient cultures, a lot of ancient Egyptian women would have died in childbirth. So we see if a man is in a tomb with a lot of

kids, probably half of them are from his first wife and half would have been from his second. They were pretty harsh on adulterers, as you were alluding to earlier, that can get married very easily, you can get divorced, easy-ish, adultery punishable by death. Yeah, absolute no, no, in ancient Egypt, especially, especially for upper class individuals, again, because you're having all these kids. And it's not just about having a son or two or four or whatever to go worship at your tomb when you die. That's only part of it. Part of it is that it's so entwined with ancient Egyptian concepts of class. You know, whatever you're born into, there's hardly any movement in ancient Egypt. If you're born as the son of a stone mason, you're going to be a stone mason, young man.

I don't care if you like performing or whatever. That's it. That's what you do. So if a woman has a child, especially in an upper class household, you don't want the riffraff, you know, having these great positions, especially if you're in the priesthood, right? Because again, that's a lifetime. Employment, great food, benefits, you're living very well. So paternity would have been really important. Now, does this mean people wouldn't have snuck around? No, it's humans. People are, we have lots of references to it. We know there were some Letharios who lived, especially in the New Kingdom when we

have records of it. And it's interesting, too, like, who is allowed to have other women? And of course, it's the king. The king has his harim. The king has his collection of women who are his, quote, quote, wives from other cultures because that cements political alliances. He's allowed to do it, but nobody else is. I think being in the harim would be a pretty sweet job, actually. If you have to be a woman in this ancient world, I mean, if there's enough of you, then you might have to just work once every month or so, and then you can just lays around. Or maybe I'm overly romanticizing that, and it's actually, it's not, that much fun at all to be in a harem. What do you think? I think it's a little of both. I think,

for example, if you're a princess and you come from modern day Turkey, when you go to Egypt, you will never see your family again. So it's sad. And you're told by your parents, like, you are here to represent us. And you get there. And after the terror of sex with the king for the first time, you're like, that's it. I'm every third Tuesday of the month. Amazing. That's my life. You know there would have been a time table. And there would have been favorites and people would, anyway, I just, this is what we think about when we're on digs. But the Harim's would have been fairly shut off. It would again, would have been this very private sphere and who would have been in charge? Who would the headwomen have been? But on the flip side, you know, I think all those

women knew how to read and write. Yep. I think there would have been song and dance and games. They would have eaten very well. You have to think that these are like, they're obsessed with beauty. So there's going to be exercise. They're going to keep fit. So in terms of the standard and quality of life compared to most other Egyptians, you've got it pretty good. So while you're giving up your freedom, you know, you also have power. And we even know in the New Kingdom one woman who's in the Harim schemes

to have her son take over the throne and we have the Harim conspiracy, which is this whole thing. I don't know why no one has done a documentary series or a short TV series on it yet. So again, we have all this intrigue around the court. So I think it would have been a lot more like the time of Henry VIII, you know, lots of gossip, lots of gatherings. So a bit of both. I wonder where the courtesans and the Harim went when they, you know, they were getting on a bit, if there was a retirement home for courtisans or if it was a lifelong occupation.

I don't know. We don't really hear about these women. And I think you never do. I'd like to think, at least from everything I know about ancient Egypt, you know, with this great reverence for elders and for ancestors, I'd like to think that if you've served and served well, you know, it's not like they're booting you out on the street. They probably give you a nice room to the side and you can be granny and boss all the other women around. It's sort of like a guaranteed retirement home, to be honest. Honestly, I just think I would have just been a massive slut in every single historical era. This sounds pretty good to me.

It's sign me up. But I'm being very smutty, but let's talk about romance. I know that I can't keep you here forever, but it's a very romantic time period, but what was their concept of romance? I mean, was marrying just like, right, we have to make babies, this is a sort of a business deal? Or was there a sort of a cult of romance and love and courtly love and all those things? So we're very lucky from the New Kingdom especially, right, this time.

period around sort of 3,500 to 3,000 years ago where we have this rich corpus of thousands, tens of thousands of texts. We actually have love poetry. So the idea of wooing, of courting, of obsessing about, you know, oh, does he love me? Does he not? I'm going to sneak off. Whereas once you were married, that was it. Like there don't seem to be restrictions around what boys or girls you can or can't see. I'm sure, of course, class was a part of it. You're not allowed to see that boy. He's, you know, you're the daughter of a scribe. What are you doing with this profession? So what I've done, I have with me, and if it's okay with you, I would like to read you a couple of these short love poems to give you a sense of what it would have been like. They're not very long. I have a couple more.

Yes, please. And the translator, so it's this wonderful love songs of the New Kingdom, translated by John Foster. it's verbatimish. He's taken some liberties, but for the most part, it's just putting it in terms that we can understand. So this one is called, My Love is Back. Let me shout out the news. My love is back. Let me shout out the news. My arms swing wide to embrace her. And heart pirouettes in its dark chamber, glad as a fish. When night shades the pool, you were mine, my mistress, mine to eternity, mine from the day you first whispered my name. Oh. It's just so lovely.

And some of them are a little like, ooh, like speaking of smutty. I'll read you one more. Okay. That's a little, we can read between the lines. This is called, I wish I were her Nubian girl. I wish I were her Nubian girl, one to attend her bosom companion, confidant and a child of discretion. Close hidden at nightfall, we wish.

whisper. As modest by day, she offers breasts like ripe berries to evening. Her long gown settles, then bodiless hangs from my helping hand. Oh, she'll give pleasure. In future, no grown man will deny it. But tonight to me this chaste girl bears unthinking the delicate blush of a most secret landscape her woman's body. That's pretty sexy, isn't it? That's pretty steamy. So again, we see all these references to the natural world, ripe pomegranates, bursting berries, allusions to fertility and rebirth. And everyone would have understood those references. Everyone would have understood the context.

They're breakup poems. They're girls who are sad because their boys. Stop seeing them. It's seeing someone else. So all these things we have a moan about today that we see on social media, we see in movies. So again, those themes are timeless. We see them thousands of years ago. Sarah, you've been amazing to talk to today.

And my final question for you is, as someone that has studied the history of ancient Egypt, their entire life and who has excavated numerous sites, has there ever been anything about Egyptian sexual practices that has surprised you? I know that as historians and scientists were supposed to be, you know, open to anything, I will not judge with, but has there been anything that made you kind of go, Jesus Christ, guys, steady on? I think especially now with the moment we're having in our very modern times talking about gay people, LGBT plus, you know, the right to marry, all of these awful things that are happening in the U.S.

to trans kids, to trans rights. That has helped me to rethink what people like that would have been like in ancient Egypt and how they were perceived and accepted. And we have a couple of instances where I think the ever. evidence is clear for people who are gay in ancient Egypt. So there's a tomb at Sakara from the 5th Dynasty. So from roughly 4,500 years ago, it's called the tomb of two brothers, Niant Knoom and Knoomhotep. And you're first, you're like, two brothers. Okay. And in this tomb, there are two men, and they've got this connection with their name, Niant Knoom and Knoomhotep. So were they twins? Were they just brothers? Or could they have been lovers? And a lot of

Egyptologists said, well, they weren't lovers. They had. babies. They had kids. They had wives. I'm like, and so do most of the gay men I know in the South. Like, really? You know, they wanted to have kids for their tombs, but also maybe they were by, who knows? But this idea that we can be open to the ways that people would have had to have existed in the past, similar to how so many men and women have had to exist before it was more part of our societal fabric before it was more okay to be gay, to be queer. And I think that's what it would have been like for these guys. They were, I kid you not, they were royal hairdressers. I mean, talk about stereotypes. It's amazing. I was like, really? Manicurist hairdressers? And they're intimately

touching, right? They're embracing one another. And there they are with their wives and their kids. So part of me is like their wives, of course, would have known. And if they were twins, they were twins. we also see images of women together from the old kingdom. And again, people were like, oh, they were just sisters. They were living together. Very good friends. And anytime I'm excavating in Egypt, anytime I'm working on tombs, and I think this is this way for lots of archaeologists,

or at least our generation, I have this dialogue in the back of my head because there's all this controversy now, like, do we disturb the dead? Do we, should we be excavating? Is it even okay? But because I've over my lifetime gotten to be friends and learn from the queer community, the gay community, gay scholars, you know, I don't just think about who would these people have been, you know, what did they do for jobs? What were their family relationships like? I think about the rich fabric of their lives. Who they were as entire people. Would they have been gay? What issues did they have with their friends and family and work stresses? We have enough instances. We have enough bits from tech. from carvings and descriptions and temples on tombs and on rock walls, where we do get this inside view into the complexity and richness of life in ancient Egypt. And it would have been like that for everyone.

So that's what I think about when I think about when I excavate. I think about how these people would have been in the past. And like I'm looking at a femur, right? Because it's all a jumble of bones mostly, especially if a tomb has been looted. You're never going to know most of the time. You're not even going to know someone's name. but I think to me it's more respectful if we just open our mind to all the different ways people in the past could have existed.

And that, of course, includes their sexuality. That's such a huge part of who we are today. That would have been no different thousands of years ago. Sarah, honestly, I could talk to you for several thousand years. You are, I've been absolutely amazing. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Not physically. Don't go looking physically for Sarah.

Leave Sarah alone. Yeah, please don't. So there's lots about me on the internet, I guess, for better or for worse. My last book is called Archaeology from Space, How the Future Shapes Are Past. I'm also currently working on my next book, which is called Humanity, a Survival Guide, which is looking and sort of inverting the idea of collapse. I don't think ancient society's collapsed at all. It's a book that looks at resilience, at continuity,

and kind of key traits like joy and tradition and cooperation that have allowed us to sort of survive and get through war, climate change, disease, all the imperialism, et cetera, all these things that we're dealing with today and how little has changed. So it's showing me, even though things are awful, it's giving me a lot more hope for the direction I think we could go in. So that'll come out, knock on wood, at some point the end of 2025. but I'm on Blue Sky. It's another social media handle. I'm also on Twitter and Indy from space. Thank you so much for talking to me today. I've thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Sarah for joining us. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, well, you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com.

We have got episodes on every day. everything from sex in ancient Rome to Dickens' women with Miriam Margulies, all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie, the senior producer with Charlotte Long. Join me again Betwixt the Sheeds, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.