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

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

What did the Ancient Egyptians think about sex? Is there any truth to a rumoured royal sex scandal? What did they think of same-sex relationships?In today's episode, Kate's joined by the fantastic historian and author Dr Campbell Price to go back thousands of years to the always-fascinating world of Ancient Egypt.Find out why the Victorians sexualised the Ancient Egyptians, what an Ancient Egyptian mummy smells of, and what the first recorded chat-up line in history is!*TW: This episode includes references to sexual assault*This episode was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. 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.  You can take part in our listener survey here.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, and you are listening to Betwetwester sheets. Hurrah! I like talking to you. I'm so glad that you've come back, but before we can go any further together,

I have to tell you, I have to let you know, I have to give you the fair do's warning, and here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults, about adulty things in an adulty way covering a range of adults subjects and you'd be an adult too. I'm sure you knew that. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's the... reason you're actually listening. But just in case it's not, now you know. Right, on with the show.

I am taking a look around the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut in Egypt. She lived 3,000 years ago. That is a long time ago. And wait, what is this graffiti on the wall? Well, it's got all the markings of the kind of drawing you might see scrolled on the back of a toilet door at the local pub. It looks slightly out of place in this sacred, temple, but I'm sure the people who drew it knew what they were doing. Or did they? But I will leave it to the episode for the full description of what I'm looking at. But let's just say this.

It does rather put Queen Hapshet Sut in a different light and hints at a real scandal during her reign. That saucy bitch. And what else do we know about ancient Egyptian attitudes to sex and sexuality? How much of it is informed by the entire cast of the 1999? film The Mummy. Oh, don't tell me you didn't have an erotic reaction to that one too. I know you did. But let's move away from fiction and try and get to grips with some facts. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society with me, Kate Lister.

The ancient Egyptians suffer from what I like to call Victorians fucking it up. That's not a scholarly term, but it'll do. It's no fault of theirs that our understanding of them comes through a very judgy white colonial gays and a group of people who projected a lot of their own anxieties and morality onto them. But how did the ancient Egyptians themselves view sex and sexuality? What scandals do we know that they endured? And why are we still obsessed with eroticising ancient Egypt? Joining me today is the fantastic Dr. Campbell Price author and Egyptologist at the University of Liverpool. He's also curator of one of the UK's most significant Egyptology collections at the Manchester Museum. So if anyone can help us get to the bottom of this, it's him.

Oh, and before we proceed, now very, very big thank you to the many, many people who emailed in after our Mitford sisters episode to let us know that, yes, there is a town in Canada called Swastika. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Third Reich. and thank you to the people that let us know there's also a town called Dildo in Newfoundland. Now without further ado, let's crack on. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Dr. Campbell Price. Dr. K. Lester, hi. How are you?

I'm very well. I've wanted to be on this podcast for a long time. The honour really is truly mine. Oh, have you? Oh, thank you so much. That's extremely impressive because your critic, credentials are something to behold, to be completely honest. You're an Egyptologist at the University of Liverpool,

and you're the curator of Egyptian and Sudanese artifacts at the Museum of Manchester. I mean, wow, that's a lot of Egypt, Campbell. It's a lot of Egypt, and do you know what? I can't get enough Egypt, so that's why I've come to talk to you about more Egyptian things. Where did it start for you? Honestly, honestly. I remember quite clearly, but five. years old being in a museum in Glasgow. I grew up in Glasgow, the wonderful Kelvin Grove Art Gallery and Museum.

And I remember the smell, the smell of the museum, which was just like the aroma of antiquity, but was probably just floor polish, but it smelled to me like antiquity. So that was it. I mean, I was hooked from... Wow. And was it the Egyptians specifically in the museum, or did you kind of gravitate towards that once you'd got this malle floor polish equated with history. Well, I think it was, the Egyptians had no other competition. There was nothing else. I wasn't into dinosaurs ever or, you know, Greek phasis. Missed that, skipped that, straight to Egypt. Okay. But I definitely equated the smell with the smell of the ancient Egyptian bodies, mummified bodies that were there. So there is this, maybe we'll come back to talk about this.

an equation between ancient Egypt and the body. There is something about the preserved, preternaturally preserved body that I think really speaks to a lot of kind of weird kids like me. And I bet you've seen actual Egyptian bodies and many of them. Do they smell like flaw polish? Were you correct in your assumption? I've never been that close to one. They have an aroma of mummification of the oils and unguants and...

They still smell of like oils, all is... Time later? Yeah, yeah. Wow. Not an unpleasant smell if you encounter it, but yeah. I can't detour. I'm detouring myself already. I just want to know what Egyptian bodies smell like now.

But we're here to talk about sex and sexuality in Egypt. Yes, we are. Now, what a fascinating subject this is. My PhD was in basically how Victorians wreck history. Hello, I'm talking to my kindred spirits here. I was looking at me. medieval history in particular when I was looking at gender and about how the victor. But it's amazing how many historians from how many different periods I talk to.

And when you mention the Victorians, they all go fucking Victorians. And Egyptologists do that a lot. Yes. They have reimagined. I mean, usually it's the bearded white middle class men, ostensibly heterosexual men who have written a lot of Egyptology that still in some quarters gets regurgitated. I'm sure you've encountered this in your own field. So, you know, there were definitely objects in museums in the 19th century that were in locked cabinets.

You were only allowed to see if you were a male upper middle class, a scholar. Naughty things like wooden penises. When there were texts. Shocking. Shocking. When there were texts translated from ancient Egyptian that mentioned naughty things, incestuous liaisons, they were translated into Latin. So that only Latin readers could understand them.

So all of that, I think we still live under the shadow, especially when it comes to the body, conceptualisations of the body. Yeah, those Victorian Egyptologists have a lot to answer for. So what kind of messages were they pushing when it came to Egyptian sexuality? Because they did it with the Romans, they did it with the Greeks, they did it with the medieval period. In one way, they seem to be trying to sanitise it completely and just like write it in Latin, keep it in a locked cupboard. No one's allowed to talk about it. But then it obviously escapes those confines because they're also obsessed with the sexuality of these groups of people. And they really focus in on it.

Yeah. I mean, I think for Egypt, definitely, the context is, you know, the colonial encounter. Britain invades Egypt in 1882. And there has been an ongoing relationship, if you can call it that, between Napoleon. Napoleon goes, Napoleon Bonaparte, invades Egypt. Egypt in 1798. So there's this thing about, well, we, the Europeans, have to kind of pacify Egypt and show that it needs European governance. But at the same time, the ancient Egyptians are, you know, building these wonderful monuments,

producing these great texts and artistic products. So we're in all of them. So there's a tension between great admiration and dismissiveness and fear. and that whole gothic horror trope of the vengeful mummy absolutely is rooted in this sense of what... Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is one of the ancient Egyptians bump back. What if...

And there's the allegory of the vagina dentata, these male archaeologists probing these dark tombs where they're not meant to go, they're uninvited. I've never thought of it like that. Yep, it is a big theme. Just for anyone is listening who doesn't know what the vagina dentatter is, could you give us a quick, a quick detail? You might be better place to explain.

So it's the fear of the teeth of female genitalia doing something to the man's parts. And it appears in fiction, but it definitely is it when you're aware of it and you're aware of it and you, reread a lot of those yet late 1800s stories about Egypt, the daring do of the white male Egyptologist very much comes from this place of yet fear of reprisal, something the ancient Egyptians and often the ancient Egyptians before the kind of I'm shuffling mummified body becomes a real trope. Often ancient Egypt or ancient Egyptians are femme fatals and they're trying to seduce the male archaeologist and something nasty will happen to him. Interesting.

And there is a real feminization of Egypt culturally, isn't there? Like, it's thought of, I don't know how to explain that, but there is, like, it's spices and it's opulent, and whether it's our conceptions of Cleopatra and the movie representation of it, there's this real contrast between this masculine Roman archaeologist and this feminine, feminized, lazy lounging about smelling nice, kind of in Egypt.

Exactly. You've just absolutely hit the nail on the head there, Kate. So you have, yeah, Mark Antony and Julius Caesar are these, you know, models of male military might. Alpha men. Before that was a thing.

I mean, let's not even get into Cleopatra. I mean, there's a whole tradition in Arabic scholarship about Cleopatra being a scientist and a linguist and a great politician and that doesn't depend on her being a seductress. but when the British arrive in the 1880s they're very much consciously following this Roman model

of we are like the great generals of ancient Rome so you're absolutely right the Egypt itself is seen as threatening exotic lazy and this is something I've looked at in my own work trying to understand the history of Manchester Museum in the 1880s and 90s very much Manchester takes great pride in its work ethic So good northern people are working hard

But then the cotton for the cotton industry in Manchester From the 1860s is coming from Egypt And so the Egyptians are contrasted as being lazy And not caring about their own history And then there is this other reading where yeah There's not just the historical fam fatal Egypt and Egyptians are effeminate And that is viewed in a negative way

You see that a lot cropping up all over the place when did scholars start to push past that? I mean, I think we could argue that it's still very much with us in modern conceptions of Egypt, you know, your Hollywood films and things like that. But as scholars, when did we start to go, hang on a fucking minute here? I think for Egyptology,

it depends on who you're talking about and we might come to some particular historical personages later. But the mid-20th century, there's a move. There's a push against that. And unsurprisingly, it's because, of a more formal widespread role of women in academia in Egypt. Egyptology. And when we're talking about sex, I suppose,

you've got to be particularly careful that you don't accidentally fall into these sort of pit holes that have been left before you and that you're suddenly going, oh, maybe they were all obsessed with sex. But generally, as I've discovered, is no one's any more obsessed with it than anyone else. They've just got different attitudes around it.

Exactly. Exactly. and obviously this is the forum to really get to the nitty gritty of this. The ancient Egyptians simply present their world and I would say their elite world because when you're walking into a museum gallery you're not seeing a cross-section of society. You're seeing the rich people, the dead people

because most of the stuff comes from tombs. So you're not generally seeing what comes from everyday people's houses because they don't survive. So you have this double bias. It's the top of society and it's things people have taken for their afterlife or some afterlife existence. So in some sense, in ancient Egyptian religious thinking, sex and reproduction is important for regeneration and rebirth,

which seems kind of weird to us. So in some sense, sex can be quite overt, but in other ways, there's a sense of decorum, but I totally agree with you. I don't think they're more or less interested or actively involved in sex than anyone else. So what are the kind of soft? that we use then. It's interesting that you said there that you've always got to be aware that the

data is skewed. This is rich people and this is what rich people would want to take with them to the afterlife, which kind of opens up a question of what would you like to take with you to the afterlife if you had to pick some things? And I guess it probably wouldn't be a very accurate representation of you, would it? It would be like your few things that you wanted to take? No, exactly. And I think it depends on your conception of what is the afterlife going to be about. Yeah, what is the after, what are you going to need when you get there? And what do you need to get there? Oh, yes, this whole thing.

What do you need to get there? What are you going to need when you do get there? Oh, there's a lot of questions there. Right, we're on a side quest. Let's get, let's reorientate ourselves. Right. But what are the sources? So we've got like grave goods, tombs.

What else have we got to attempt to understand what, how sex was understood back then? So I think ancient Egypt, again, elite society, is heavy on images. and that is what ultimately is so seductive. Ancient Egypt is so distinctive, like the visual culture. You go into a museum again and if you know nothing about history or archaeology, you know what is Egyptian because it exists in popular culture now. Mesoamerican stuff is confusing or even classical art seems a bit not quite so clear cut. Ancient Egyptian art is very clear and is very consistent.

and so we have depictions on temple walls, tomb walls, and then we've lots of writing. So we've got laundry lists and love songs and wills. And that is a really interesting insight into the conception of marriage, the conception of status and how you would think of property rights. So women can inherit and dispose of property. in a way that is not attested in other parts of the ancient world. Interesting.

So you've got to, I mean, I think texts are very insightful, if like anything you know how to read them. You know, I always say to students, if you read a letter from the 1920s in England, it's got its own little cadences, it's got its cultural nuances, that you have to be a member of that society to fully understand. Try turning the clock back three and a half thousand years,

totally different place. So difficult. It is difficult. So one caveat I would warn against in all the beautiful statues, I mean literally sensuous, beautiful, seductive, erotic, some of it art. None of that represents the world as it actually is. It's not

photography. And that sounds so obvious, but it's a pitfall, as you said, of understanding another culture. What we see is erotic, they might not have seen it as that at all. An example of that is the many, many cocks around Pompeii. It's like to us as a modern people, it's certainly

noticeable, whether it's shocking or not, I suppose, depends on who's viewing. But it's definitely at least out of the ordinary. But we don't know what they saw when they looked. Presumably they can't have been walking around going, oh my God, there's a penis on the floor because they'd have been doing that all day long. It's kind of penis blindness.

I suppose. If you're exposed to a lot of them, you just kind of filter right. So a good case is an Egyptian religious imagery. So, I mean, gods can be crocodiles and gods can be hippos and gods can be the river or the stars. I mean, we're talking about really broad conception of divinity. There is one aspect of a couple of male gods and some also not male gods, but maybe we'll get into that, that are shown as Egyptologists describe them as ethophalic with a very prominent erection. And these gods are described in ancient Egyptian as gods who flaunt their potency, which is a wonderful. We all know that person who flunts their potency. Oh yes, we do. Put it away.

So it seems shocking to us, and it was shocking to, you know, a Victorian upper middle class or a psychologist who would, there's a wonderful case in the Petrie Museum in University College London. There's a big relief with a god with a stonking big penis, and they've put the label over the erect penis. No, they haven't. Yes. Oh, no. Yes. Oh, bless.

I love that. It's kind of an effort to conceal it, but not show that we're trying to conceal it, but definitely concealing it. I'll be back with Campbell after the short break. So we've got to dismantle our own frame of reference is very difficult, but for your money and having looked at the artefacts that you've looked and trying to do the work on yourself as a modern scholar

to not get too carried away with it. What kind of sexual culture was this? Bearing in mind that it's actually a very long period of time we're talking about as well, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, there's a strong sense when you look at ancient Egyptian artistic representation, although it seems very samey, and as I said, it's very consistent,

and that's what in part makes it so recognisable today because it was produced in the same sort of way for thousands of years. There is definitely fashions and there is a changing sense of what Egyptologists called decorum. And we still say, you know, you've got some decorum about you.

So there are definitely little moments. The reign of Tutankhaman's dad, a brown about 1350 BCE, a guy called Akanatin, this is shocking just because the king has shown kissing his wife

Oh my God. Why was that shucking to them? Because you would never... Was it like with tongues? Was it like what we're talking about here? You can't say if it was with tongues or not. It wasn't necessarily French kissing. But if you imagine, the Egyptian pharaoh is never shown eating, really or drinking.

It's never shown in physical contact with anyone else, apart from maybe a god who's a metaphysical idea anyway. So Akanatin comes along and he outlaws... almost all of the Egyptian gods, quite a controversial character, quite a rebel in some ways, a bit of a weirdo. He says,

well, to take the place of all these many images of gods, I will show myself with my wife, little-known lady, called Nefertiti. And so he and Queen Nefertiti are shown driving through

the streets of his royal city in a chariot having a smooch. And you've got to imagine it, as you said, if something seems unusual to us would it have seemed unusual given all the other art we've got from ancient Egypt none of the other kings are shown doing this whether they did or not is another question

so in artistic depiction you know imagine you're the like the artist going in to paint that temple wall and you're like what do you want me to paint the king of the queen kissing like I mean Charles and Camilla wouldn't do it necessarily Actually, no, I think about it. If they released like a public photograph of themselves, like actually kissing, like full tongue like,

that it would be worthy of comment. It would be like a, okay, not like a peck on the cheek, but like even then I think people would go, that's a bit of a break with Royal Protocol. A break with decorum. So there is definitely a shift in decorum. And like you said, Egypt, ancient Egypt lasts conventionally, Egyptologists would say, between about the emergence of the United States, if we can call it that, lots of air quotes,

around 3,000 BCE, then Cleopatra is 3,000 years later, 30 BCE. It's wild, isn't it? And Akinatans are in the middle. So, yeah, it's a long time. Wow. What about, because this is one of the most interesting things that your research has found,

because we've got a whole series looking like the history of sex work and sex for sale and sexual services and harrims and how all these things kind of bleed into one another. But your research has got some rather interesting things to say about that. Is there evidence of sex work in ancient Egypt? I would struggle to say definitively this is like copper-bottomed evidence of sex work. There are allusions in literature.

One springs to mind a very interesting in many ways for the ancient Egyptians quite racy tale of this. He's based on the historical character, but he's kind of precocious, and he's trying to steal knowledge from his ancestors. So he's digging around in ancient tombs. He sees this beautiful woman, and he tries to pay her for sexual favours. And she says, oh, you know, I'm not a cheap strumpet. Come and see me in my father's house, which is a beautiful villa, palatial villa. And she makes all this demands of this guy, eventually saying you've got to kill your children. Holy shit, that took a hard left. Wow, okay.

So he bumps off the children, throws the bodies to the dogs in the street, and then runs into her bedroom, she shrieks and disappears. Her house, the villa, her herself disappears, poof in a puff of smoke, and he's left naked scrambling around in the dirt. What a strange story! Yeah. The woman is called taboo-boo. Even better, quite frankly. That's great name.

In this tale of setney-Kaham Wassett. So this is the very end of the phronic period, so the last couple of centuries, BCE into the first, maybe a couple of centuries, C.E. But that's an insight into maybe attitudes and, like I say, a kind of morality tale of he's going around trying to steal things from tombs and then he's perhaps in some sense dissing this woman

and then she gets her own back. his children aren't dead, fortunately. It's all been a kind of strange dream. But yes, it's difficult to extrapolate from that. What did your average man or woman in the street think? Yeah, that is quite difficult, isn't it? It's interesting because there's this expression that sex work is the oldest form of work in the world. And it's not.

It's not. Because in order to have that, you need a profession and you therefore need money and you need that exchange system. And I mean, there's been bartering. You know, we've all swapped sex for, you know, some nice things once in a while. But like the actual idea of like it being a profession, you need money, you need professions. I think the oldest profession that we know of is the medicine man or the midwife. So when you've got cultures that don't have money and that don't have jobs, essentially,

you're not going to get somebody whose job is selling sex, just like any other job. But it's interesting that you'd say that there's a sort of a limited evidence for this in ancient Egypt. Because we interviewed Stephanie Boudin, who is the professor of Mesopotamian gender and sexuality, fantastic scholar. And quite shockingly, she said that there's no evidence of sex work in Mesopotamia. And at the time, I was like, wow, mic drop. I'm not entirely sure that I would agree with that, but she's the expert. But then you're saying as well, there might be limited evidence in ancient Egypt as well. And I think it is surprising and it is interesting what you say about Mesopotamia, because

ancient Egypt is fundamentally quite sexy. So people assume, you know, what is it about? Assuming it. It's that kind of yeah, Liz Taylor basing again our impressions on the art. So there's lots of flesh on

display in ancient Egyptian art. So it seems surprising. We know of one community, the workers and their families who built the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. So this is between like 1,500 and 1,000 BCE. And there are people living very close, cheek by Jowel there.

And there's a supercharged, super high rate of literacy because they're involved in state work as basically a state-controlled settlement. And in that there's plentiful evidence of bed hopping and all kinds of crafts and trades. But exactly like you say, Ferronic Egypt is not a monetary economy. You don't have coinage. So, yeah, if you want something doing... So, I mean, I think we'd be naive to say that people hadn't worked out that sex can be a fantastic thing to manipulate a situation or to get what you want.

I'm sure there was bartering systems. But if there's no money, that complicates what we think of as jobs, I suppose. But there is evidence of Harim's, which we could, you know, you can make the argument that that's a kind of a transactional thing? Yes, and I think this is something we can be fairly certain of because we've got lots of evidence visual and written, albeit official, visual and written evidence about the institution. Okay, so this is the state's version of... Yeah, the institution of kingship and being a pharaoh.

So the pharaoh has multiple wives and many, many children. So Ramesses II has at least at a consistent, conservative estimate 100 children. Holy shitballs. It's like Elon Musk. This is not just to one wife, of course. And there is definitely a strong sense of the importance of diplomatic marriage. So if you want to seal an alliance,

but there is a hierarchy with that. It's kind of a one-way street. The Pharaoh will marry any number of foreign princesses, but no daughter of Pharaoh will marry a foreign prince. That would be a major no-no. Interesting. Okay. Yeah.

Okay. When there were queens, Pharaoh's, I was going to say, Pharaoh S's. Now that's a weird word. But could Cleopatra have a harem? Was this very much a male prerogative? No, this is a great question, because we don't know too much about the kind of standard setup for what we would call a harim, which is all kinds of associations

which can be kind of orientalising and we're not quite sure. We have actually in Manchester Museum a big group of objects from one site called Gourob which is a lovely area near the Fahum Lake nice kind of country hunting residence of the Pharaoh

and that is where the royal wives and children seem to have hung out and it's a place which was really economically viable on its own. So the royal women the senior royal women are entrepreneurs in a sense. They are managing a major textile industry.

So already this doesn't sound like a harim when you say the word harim and you imagine everybody lounging around by a pool being wafted by a small boy with a palm leaf. That's not what this sounds like. There may have been some wafting, but there is also business happening. So people boast about the fine quality of linen from this kind of textile. manufacturing. And it's women who are running it. So it's royal women who are running it. So it's not that people are just lounging around. So if that's the default, okay, the king is, as in many pre-modern monarchies, the king is a peripatetic monarchies going around. He's having this royal progress to keep an eye on everyone. So he's periodically there. He's not living there all the time. And so if that's the default, because the Egyptian pharaoh is usually male, he's an incarnation of a male god, the god Horus. Fascinating. when you do get a female pharaoh, one of the most successful, one of my all-time favorites, Queen Hatship suit of the 15th century BCE.

She is the daughter of a king, the wife of a king, the sister of a king and the stepmother, aunt of a king. And at some point, she's really well connected. Unless that king was all the same person, because I know that they do like incest. the husband and the brother, stepbrother were the same person but he doesn't stick around long Tutmos II, God bless him

Tooutmosely useless So Hatship's dad is called Tupmo's the first Her brother, husband Tupmo's the second her stepson, nephew Tukmos the third When the third comes to the throne he's only probably a toddler

And as is common for women in the royal family at that time. The king is either super young or away fighting battles, so it's actually the woman, the senior royal women who are running the country. So an interesting dynamic. She does that for a bit and thinks, this is fine. And then a big change comes when she says to herself, I do this quite effectively and I've got the loyalty of all these officials. I will just go one step further and say, I am the pharaoh. I'm the king of Egypt. Bulti. And, and she says that she rules Egypt

very successfully for about 20 years you cannot tell me that she wouldn't have indulged in any of those male prerogatives why not so there's a close connection between as is and there's lots of historical parallels

for this between a woman in power and high male officials who may need her patronage to advance their own cause and so she's She's linked with one chap who's got a heap load of titles, almost 100 titles, almost unheard of an ancient agent.

He's like the prime minister. He's in charge of all the cattle and the granaries and all the important stuff. He's the architect, essentially. He's called Senen Mutt. And I have just, Kate, finished a biography of this man, Senen Mutt. Oh, wow. Well done. So he is an obsession of mine.

And he is unusually for an ancient Egyptian man. unmarried. So this has spawned many. Gay, he's gay. He must be. He's gay. He's gay. Because he's very creative. He's very creative. He's very creative. That's us again doing it again, isn't it? We're projecting. Yeah, more than most people have projected onto the character of Sen and Mouten, 200 years from now, people will be looking back at us going, they made everyone gay. It's so annoying. Yeah, maybe they were just friends. That'll be our legacy to history. Jesus, calm down. Right, okay. So he's good at architecture and unmarried.

Yes, he is either he must be a homosexual or he must be Hatchipsis lover. And there are various links between the two of them. And there is one infamous graffito in a cave overlooking Hachships. I'm looking at it right now. He doesn't look very gay. He doesn't look very gay. So this shows all we can say is it's two people having sex. That's it. it. There is no identifying or people have lots of ink has been spilt trying to identify who these people are. From behind, one's bent over.

Yes. And the bent over one is interpreted as wearing a long kind of royal headdress. I don't see it myself. And this is said to be hatcheted. Full bush, by the way. That's quite an interesting addition. Full bush there. Although I visited that cave in March of this year and the Egyptian guys who were letting us into the cave, the security guys said they thought it was two men. So there are alternative constructions of interpretations of images like that.

But it's interesting that Hatchip Soot has been likened to, oh my gosh, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I first, Gwynnevere. I mean, you know, just name a name, because she can't just exist on her own. And it's very interesting going back to those Victorian male bearded archaeology. who were living in the UK under the reign of Victoria were very negative about Hatship Suit. They thought she was an unscrupulous woman

who'd seized power and this Senen Mute character was this kind of Machiavellian prop to her illegitimate regime and together they schemed and used propaganda. Okay. Even the conception,

modern political conception of propaganda. Trying to project that back three and a half thousand years. That's tricky. Exactly. So, in answer to your question, Kate, could Hatchap Suit have had any man or woman in the court she wanted? Absolutely. She was a living goddess. If she came on to you, you would not have a choice. No. So we're very fixated with, yeah, putting her in certain gendered boundaries. And one of the most interesting things with Hachipsuit is in the official art, a lot of her imagery is male-coded because kingship in Egypt, Veronica Egypt is male-coded. That is not to say she went around dressed in male attire. It's simply that that is the way

you present yourself on monuments. And fun fact, I've got to share this to you. Tina Turner, R-I-P, believed she was Hatchipsuit reincarnated. I believe her too, quite frankly. That makes perfect sense me why does she think that that's amazing? I don't know what the origin of the theory was but she had a collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts she went to Egypt, she believed the air would kind of swirl around her when she

went to Harchips at the temple. Wow. Why did those guides think that we're looking at two men here? That's interesting because the one from behind there's definitely a penis, a phallus there. Why do you think that's two men? I don't know. I mean I think there are various traditions

about what the ancient Egyptians got up to. We know, I mean, homosexual behaviour is attested. In fact, the first chat-up line recorded in history is an incestuous, come on from an uncle to his nephew. Nephwee peck, how beautiful are your buttocks. Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, unpick that one from a modern lens. Oh, my God. I'll be back with Campbell after the short break. Just to sort of broaden out that discussion then We know that incest was viewed very differently within this culture But what about same-sex attraction? How did they feel about that?

We were talking about sex work I mean just the human behaviour is human behaviour And I've no doubt There was as much of a range of human behaviour as there is Now, again, when we read ancient Egyptian texts Through the lens still of our Victorian forebears We have to bear in mind That they have projected their own prejudices on

to the evidence. So it's difficult to get away from that. But it's fairly clear that there was a heteronormative expectation of most family life. There's a man, a woman and children. But there are definitely cases of homosexual attraction, same-sex attraction between two men in literature and mythology. It's not without its issues. It's viewed not simply as a positive or a negative, but as something potentially different alternative or potentially disruptive but you know human behaviour is human behaviour

we know it's there don't we it's just it's fascinating to try and unpick how it was viewed because another thing that you see cropping up throughout history is that when we're talking about men having sex other men there is the dynamic that as long as you're the one doing the top you're topping then you are still manly

and masculine which I find fascinating because that that crops up all over the place and I was wondering if there's any evidence of that in Egypt? Not explicit evidence, but the case I mentioned, this mythological case, so you have the kind of wicked uncle for one of, or chaotic

uncle, I would say Seth, who has just killed his brother. And so as a way of demonstrating his power, his strength, his manliness, his right to govern, he attempts to rape his nephew, Horace. And so there is a sense that

Seth, who is known as the one great of strength, of course it would be him who's the active participant. So it's kind of implied there. A sensible basis for a system of government, I think, as far as as far as I'm concerned. It's just honestly, what a mad mythology, but when you dig into many world mythologies, they are challenging to modern audiences. Exactly. What about something like the Turin papyrus, which is often described as the erotic papyrus?

How erotic is that actually? I mean, we're talking about like an Egyptian playboy here. Like, what is that? Is that, again, the Victorians go, they had ankles, it's erotic. Yeah. Oh, God, all the ankles. So the papyrus you're referring to is unusual. So it stands out from the vast quantity of ancient Egyptian papyrus documentation we've got.

Because it shows a sequence of sexual interactions where you have, balding men and beautiful made-up women getting on in various contexts. Now, here is the classic thing. You cannot read this simply as a bit of ancient Egyptian titillation because the broader context is it's kind of the world upturned in a way because there are other scenes on the same papyrus showing animals acting as humans and doing things that you wouldn't expect, albeit it's ancient Egypt and you can have animal headed gods. So

it's not the ancient Egyptian karmusitra. It's not, yeah, the ancient Egyptian playboy. It seems to be a way of satirizing the aristocracy maybe. And the interesting thing is the men with these massively distended penises.

So they're, you know, comically large. The text that there is on it is seemingly humorous because they're all talking to each other about... They're joking. They're joking. Okay.

It would seem to me. But again, there may be some other level of understanding where the men's a little kind of friar tuck haircuts may be a reference to the goddess Hathor. Now, Hathor is the mistress of drunkenness and sex and music. So in some way, it's kind of a tribute to her or maybe they're in some ways connected to her. So it's more is going on there than simply, yeah, pornographic bit of illicit representation. Humour, I think, has got to be one of the hardest things to unpick from a historical perspective because it relies on social references that...

Which have gone. Which have gone, which have long gone. I mean, even if, you don't even have to go that far back in time and watch, like, old episodes of I Got News for you or something. And if you don't know what they're talking about, you don't know what the joke is. So to say like what did the Egyptians find funny, that must be very difficult. It's a real tricky situation because we've lost so much context. And there are some things where you can pick up that there are references to maybe well-known pieces of literature. So it's like they're quoting Shakespeare, their equivalent of Shakespeare.

But whether that's done to show erudition to show I'm so well-read. Of course I know that story. or whether it's done as a joke. I mean, is sex just universally, potentially quite funny? The Tureanerotic papyrus does seem to me personally to be a satirical work. Okay. Interesting. Well, you just love to go back in time, wouldn't you, and just find out what they think is funny. Tell us a joke.

Just to sort of get to the bottom of soap. If you could go back, you had like a day in ancient Egypt at a point of your choosing, where would you go and what would you want to know? Oh, I go and meet Hachap Sut and Sennon Mutt and see what the hell was going on there. Not that just, you know, one sighting would necessarily tell you, but I mean, I've spent a lot of time in the company of Sennon Mood intellectually, recently, in writing this book. And the guy is like an ancient Egyptian Michelangelo. And you don't know.

Really? Wow. Is it that he, I've come to the conclusion that he genuinely. does think Hatship Suit is divine and he is all about making her divinity clear to eternity. There's a euphemism he's erecting lots of obelisks in her honour.

But whether... Soutle. Whether, you know, whether that would preclude, someone pointed out to me, that doesn't preclude them actually having had a sexual relationship. But like I...

That's true, isn't it? Say, if you're a living goddess and you don't happen to have a living, husband, because she in some ways is united with various gods, yeah, you could just have sex with anyone you wanted. Campbell, you have been fascinating to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming along to talk to us.

And if people won't know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Well, I am on social media at Egypt MCR. And I've written a little book, Ancient Egypt Brief Histories, which I recommend. And I will have a book about this man's Sennon Mutt out with American University. in Cairo Press next year, 2026. We come back and tell us all about that when it's... I will.

And there's lots to say about good old sending out and hatchet suit. I love it. Thank you so much. You have been a blast. My pleasure, Kate. Nice to talk to you. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Campbell for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like with you and follow along

whatever it is. You get your podcasts. Coming up, we have got an episode on the mother of all Tudors, Margaret Beauford. and another on the Royal Harim's of the Ottoman Empire. And if you would like us to explore a subject, or if you just wanted to say hello, or if you wanted to email us more obscenely named towns, then you can do so at betwixtat history hit.com.

This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. 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.