Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society How Filthy Were the Egyptians? About this episode 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.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:35 Kate Lister? 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 spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, coming around adult subjects, news, being an adult too. Have you got all of that? Can we take all of that? Right, okay, then let's crack on.
1:08 Kate Lister? Oh my God, the heat! Oh, it's too hot. It's been seconds and I'm already sweating. Forty 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 betwixters, because today we are in ancient Egypt. And boy, is it freaking hot here. And certainly in a world without air conditioning. I know I should be focusing on the pyramids and the palaces, but I just wanna 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?
1:50 Kate Lister? How do you keep yourself clean and cool in weather like this? Well, I am ready to find out if you are.
2:20 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. This month, we are having a peek, 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 a world before modern plumbing and modern waste disposal? And, well, let's face it, modern sewage solutions? And who was using enemas? Well, papyrus isn't ready, everybody, let's crack on.
3:05 Kate Lister? Well, hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Campbell Price, how are you doing?
3:11 Speaker 01 I'm great, Dr Kate Lister. I'm really pleased to be back talking to you.
3:15 Kate Lister? We had so much fun last time, that was a very popular episode. You have a lot of fans out there, you really do.
3:20 Speaker 01 Oh, I'm so pleased to share the platform to talk about naughty things with you.
3:25 Kate Lister? 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 again. Normally, talking absolute shite, I'm sure that that was a historian that must absolutely drive you nuts.
3:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, how much shite can you talk better than me makes you a better historian? I think that's, that's the rule.
3:47 Kate Lister? Well, you must just watch stuff like Another Mummy, really, really, Another Egyptian Curse, for sake. Or can you rein it in and sort of enjoy this stuff?
3:56 Speaker 01 I think you kind of filter out some of the general hubbub. But amidst, 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 homed in on in the past. So hopefully in this episode as well, Kate.
4:12 Kate Lister? Absolutely. They're doing a new mummy movie, apparently, Brendan Fraser and Rachel.
4:17 Speaker 01 They're always doing a new bloody mummy movie. But when will they leave the mummy franchise?
4:22 Kate Lister? Never.
4:22 Speaker 01 And do something quite interesting like a biopic on hatchips at the female pharaoh? That's what I would love to see.
4:29 Kate Lister? No, mummies, we want more mummies.
4:31 Speaker 01 More mummies.
4:33 Speaker 01 Show me the mummies again.
4:34 Kate Lister? 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
4:44 Speaker 01 Yes.
4:45 Kate Lister? 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 of they were very, very beautiful, very well presented.
4:55 Speaker 01 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 fleek or however you want to describe them. And they describe in their own texts, 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. Stine kids books, they
5:36 Speaker 01 talked about the wheezing, whistling, rotting mummies that are coming to get you. And this whole thing about, oh, well, we've talked about Victorians and how they've
5:48 Kate Lister? Sucked it up.
5:48 Speaker 01 Fucked up our impression of the past. But you have this real sense of colonial guilt because you've taken these, 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 idealized version of the world. And in that, you're absolutely right. They are preened, they are clean, they are dazzling for the gods.
6:21 Kate Lister? 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, that's the colonial mindset. Do you think that that's because when the white British people went over to Egypt and whenever we turned up, they realised it's quite hot over there?
6:39 Speaker 01 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.
6:50 Kate Lister? Yes.
6:50 Speaker 01 But that's applied to lots of places. But this thing about just our use of language, so in English, we describe mummified bodies as wrapped in bandages. And even if you're a kid, you know, and you get a scrape in 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 swathed in. So there's this association with, like I say, threat. It's, it's not just uncleanness. It is uncleanness that's trying to pollute.
7:26 Kate Lister? Just trying to get you.
7:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:28 Kate Lister? Yeah. And of course, it would have been very dusty for people going to have experienced it for the first time. So it's hot and it's sweaty and it's, it's all of these things combined that inform a colonial mindset of, weirdly, this is a very clean place, but a very dirty place at the same time.
7:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, if you're not used to those kind of conditions and don't know how to keep yourself clean and dry.
7:50 Kate Lister? Plus, if you're wearing a corset and.
7:54 Speaker 01 A George Piers in a pith helmet.
7:55 Kate Lister? And a nice woolen suit, you morons.
7:57 Speaker 01 Yes. Hello, Howard Carter.
7:59 Kate Lister? Yes. Yeah, you're gonna, you're gonna 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? But by that, I kind of mean, like, we sort of have this idea of them lazing around by baths with a harim and being covered in oils and put, again, it's that sensual cleanliness, isn't it?
8:27 Speaker 01 Yes. I'll 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.
8:41 Kate Lister? Hmm.
8:42 Speaker 01 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. 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.
9:26 Speaker 01 You know, you don't want to spend too long in the bath, that makes you.
9:29 Kate Lister? Girlie.
9:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:30 Kate Lister? Oddly girly, right? It's a weird thing.
9:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:32 Kate Lister? It's like.
9:33 Speaker 01 Vanity is a thing.
9:33 Kate Lister? Yeah, that's it, it's vanity. Eddie Izzard 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're clean, you're manly, manly, clean and sporty and now, oh, now you're spending, oh, no, now you're a big girl again because too much time in the bath. And it's, it's, so like, you've got to be clean, but if you do it too much now, oh, no, now you've become all.
9:55 Speaker 01 You're soft.
9:56 Kate Lister? Soft and wussy.
9:57 Speaker 01 Literally, you're soft. So I think that idea, you know, from Cleopatra, this idea that she bathes in, in ass's milk and.
10:04 Kate Lister? Doesn't sound very clean, that.
10:05 Speaker 01 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
10:48 Speaker 01 pray, you need to be of a certain standard of purity.
10:52 Kate Lister? 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?
11:02 Speaker 01 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 are superhuman, obviously, because they're gods. So to properly interact with them, especially if you are someone who's working in a temple. So this is something we've got lots of evidence of. For the men and women who 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
11:41 Speaker 01 sexual relations. You need to shave all bodily hair off. You need to wash. And by washing, you know.
11:50 Speaker 01 Me too. But, 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.
12:02 Kate Lister? Ooh.
12:02 Speaker 01 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 houses of the gods. If you're in the gods' house, you need to be properly purified.
12:28 Kate Lister? Fair enough. That's a proper wipe your feet and then some, isn't it?
12:31 Speaker 01 Hmm, and then some, yeah.
12:32 Kate Lister? 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 had this idea about miasma, which is sort of like dirty smells getting in to the body. But did they have an understanding of cleanness and health going together?
12:51 Speaker 01 That's a good question, and I'm struggling to 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, 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, gates to deal with illnesses. 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 orifice.
13:36 Kate Lister? Right.
13:37 Speaker 01 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, you know, 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.
14:03 Kate Lister? A fumigation, that's the word. Don't try that at home, by the way. Just, just don't. Just stick with the matey. That's fine.
14:11 Kate Lister? 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's 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?
14:45 Speaker 01 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.
14:55 Kate Lister? It's good to know my questions are on par with a school child's.
14:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, those are high, the bar is high for, for, you know, really sussing out a dodgy historian from a question from a ten 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 socialization and bathing and baths and bathhouses. But before that, the standard way for a relatively well-off person seems to be to have a shower. And in order to have a shower, you need someone with a big pot of water to pour it over you.
15:36 Kate Lister? Oh, okay.
15:38 Speaker 01 Clear. And we have evidence for the kind of shower trays, like the base of a shower.
15:44 Kate Lister? Right.
15:45 Speaker 01 Which made of alabaster, now that's interesting, travertine alabaster, Egyptian calcite, is associated with purity, so it's referred to in Egyptian texts 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 poured over them. I struggle to think of any evidence for anything like we would think of as a bathtub.
16:13 Kate Lister? Yep, okay.
16:15 Speaker 01 There are big lakes, there are sacred lakes where priests and 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 of a thing.
16:28 Kate Lister? So they weren't.
16:28 Speaker 01 Even in palaces.
16:29 Kate Lister? There weren't one for communal bathing then?
16:31 Speaker 01 Other than jumping in the Nile.
16:33 Kate Lister? 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.
16:42 Speaker 01 No, yeah, that's for sure. Yeah, watch out for the crocodiles.
16:47 Kate Lister? An element of spice to your morning routine.
16:50 Speaker 01 An element of rescue to wake you up.
16:54 Speaker 01 That is a point because clearly, you know, there are hippos as well. There are dangerous animals.
16:58 Kate Lister? God, yeah.
16:59 Speaker 01 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 as 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 the way of the crocodiles.
17:15 Kate Lister? 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?
17:30 Speaker 01 Oh, now, this brings up a word I am most a fan of, and that is the word uguent.
17:39 Kate Lister? Unguent.
17:40 Speaker 01 Unguent, which is kind of an old Egyptological term to translate 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, uguents, because I love that word, which could be scented in various ways, using resins and floral scents, I guess. So you would apply that and then scrape it off, potentially like a Roman, or wash it off with water.
18:21 Speaker 01 But there's a whole word field or 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 Sekhmet, she's the lioness who's gonna mess you up if you piss her off. Then between Sekhmet and Bastet, there is Paket, and that means literally she who scratches, so she's gonna do some damage. Sekhmet means she who is powerful, so she is the most dangerous. So Bastet.
19:03 Speaker 01 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 a kind of a medical sense than just cleanliness. But this idea of having a jar of scented oil is something that you use to, yeah, clean, feel good, moisturize. And that's associated with the cat goddess. So I just think that's a nice association.
19:32 Kate Lister? That is, isn't it? And I think that that probably would get you reasonably clean. Like, you know, and the Romans and the Greeks did that, that they rub the oil on and then-
19:43 Speaker 01 The stridge, dig it out.
19:45 Kate Lister? Yeah, like scrape it off. And some of them were using sand or maybe I've just hallucinated that as like an exfoliant.
19:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
19:51 Kate Lister? Yeah. So that, I mean, that would get you reasonably clean, I suppose.
19:59 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Campbell after this short break.
20:10 Kate Lister? Hello, betwixters. I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
20:52 Kate Lister? What about perfume? Because again, this is probably a Cleopatra thing. There's lots of myths about her, I don't know, maybe it's true, about dipping her sails in perfume when she's going into Rome so they can smell her before they see her and all this stuff. But like, what about, what evidence do we have from actual Egypt about their perfumes?
21:12 Speaker 01 So I mean, yeah, this is a widely known thing about the, you know, the somewhat sinister, very excessive Orientals that are kind of threatening the good Roman way of life. There's Cleopatra with all her perfume. It's not manly, it's not Roman to smell nice.
21:26 Kate Lister? No, you must smell like shit. That's what real men do.
21:29 Speaker 01 But there is clearly, I know because I've smelled the scent of resin and 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 Hatshepsut
22:10 Speaker 01 has a nocturnal encounter with the god Amun, who's kind of disguised as her husband and conceives a child Hatshepsut. And that's a kind of a way of legitimizing Hatshepsut's role 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 myrrh 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.
22:47 Kate Lister? I've never smelt myrrh, you know, just thinking about it. I wouldn't know what that smelled like.
22:52 Speaker 01 I think maybe if you popped into a Catholic church around this time of year, you might, you might get a sense.
22:58 Kate Lister? It's Christmasy, right?
22:59 Speaker 01 It's Christmasy, yeah. So there are texts that talk about smells, which is interesting, and we can extrapolate from, you know, 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 the distinction between what's shown and what actually
23:41 Speaker 01 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, the, the kind of staining on these white linen garments. And it's very sexy and you could imagine it being quite, you know, quite seductive. Smells nice.
24:10 Kate Lister? 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. Does it, is this doing anything for you?
24:23 Speaker 01 Maybe it's a different culture, Kate. Cultural.
24:26 Kate Lister? Quite right, I'm being horribly ignorant. Yes, okay, so that's.
24:30 Speaker 01 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
25:15 Speaker 01 not just written, there's text, it's not just visual, but it's also olfactory. So yes, there were, for those who could afford it, perfume and it was, it was something that was prized.
25:25 Kate Lister? Wow. That's incredible that that would be like, 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.
25:38 Speaker 01 So yeah, that that was a well-known thing in ancient Egypt.
25:42 Kate Lister? Let's go to the less erotic parts 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.
25:59 Speaker 01 You do. So the number of archaeologically attested toilets for a civilization that lasted 3000 years is miniscule.
26:08 Kate Lister? No.
26:09 Speaker 01 Miniscule. 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 outsider's 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.
26:50 Speaker 01 But he says, in this topsy-turvy world, and this is the real mark of, you know, to our Greek craziness, women urinate standing up and men urinate sitting down.
27:02 Kate Lister? No.
27:04 Speaker 01 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.
27:24 Kate Lister? Wow. Why do you think Herodotus said that? You know, he's a historian in massive inverted commas. Because he does, 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?
27:45 Speaker 01 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 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 out there. Oh, you'll never, you'll never guess.
28:07 Kate Lister? You'll never guess what they're doing. They're absolutely mad.
28:09 Speaker 01 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.
28:23 Kate Lister? And there was a lot of like, the Greeks and the Romans worrying about the Egyptians being overly feminine and the women being in control. So they might be feeding into that kind of like, oh my God, the men even pees sitting down. What is the place coming to?
28:36 Speaker 01 Exactly. I mean, it feeds into a thing of, I mean, one aspect that's, 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 betokened 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 Herodotus and other classical historians set up persist absolutely to the present.
29:16 Kate Lister? 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.
29:47 Speaker 01 Yes. And we do have good written evidence for this. So.
29:51 Kate Lister? Oh, hello.
29:52 Speaker 01 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, the pharaoh is 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.
30:33 Kate Lister? Okay.
30:34 Speaker 01 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, so you have 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 a mouthwash with the salty, salty natron water actually
31:18 Speaker 01 would keep your, your teeth in fairly good nick. 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, a small number of royal manicurists, they're allowed to do the king's, cut the king's nails. Nothing is 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 waste. Because frankly, to think of it literally, if you believe the king is divine, any emanation from him.
31:57 Kate Lister? Yeah.
31:58 Speaker 01 Is also divine. You need to treat that very carefully. And what seems to be a concern, looked at another 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 Tutankhamun was buried with 140 underpants made of linen.
32:37 Kate Lister? That's a lot of underpants.
32:38 Speaker 01 But is it enough for eternity?
32:40 Kate Lister? Oh, good point. Good point.
32:42 Speaker 01 Because it wasn't meant that they were to last for eternity. It's not like stockpiling for eternity. It is probably because anything that came in contact with the king's fledge, 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 Ramses the second, who lived to be 90, presumably all of the clothing that was
33:06 Kate Lister? Must be kept.
33:07 Speaker 01 It's not quite like Princess 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.
33:36 Kate Lister? It must have been. It must have been somebody's job. Wasn't there a job of somebody that could administer enemas to the pharaoh?
33:43 Speaker 01 Well, there's this
33:44 Kate Lister? Allegedly. Is that a silly thing? The shepherd of the royal anus?
33:48 Speaker 01 Yes, the shepherd of the royal anus, which is something to do with rear end functions, but we're not clear absolutely what. And clearly, well, if it was an important role, it doesn't get repeated. That that title is not a standard one. It's like a one off.
34:05 Kate Lister? Okay.
34:06 Speaker 01 So you can't be absolutely 100% sure of what's going on on one occurrence.
34:11 Kate Lister? So one text somewhere mentions something, but we don't really know what that is.
34:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, precisely.
34:18 Kate Lister? Okay, that's
34:18 Speaker 01 I'm afraid.
34:19 Kate Lister? Fair enough.
34:24 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Campbell after this short break.
34:35 Kate Lister? Hello Betwixters, I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that.
35:04 Kate Lister? Right, let's get on with it.
35:17 Kate Lister? 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. And the Egyptians, they liked a full beat, as far as I can see. They liked a full glam look.
35:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, having said that, almost all the evidence considers this rich little culture.
35:40 Kate Lister? The rich people, yes.
35:42 Speaker 01 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 pyramid. And essentially, when the pyramid is finished, or the cult of the king withers 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 lived 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...
36:25 Speaker 01 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 .
36:48 Kate Lister? Were they big into their wigs? That was a big thing for them.
36:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, and some really big, as I said before, voluminous wigs. So presumably some people are selling their hair because these are human .
36:59 Kate Lister? Yeah, they must have been.
37:00 Speaker 01 Hair wigs.
37:01 Kate Lister? Yeah.
37:02 Speaker 01 So, I mean, the 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 of Cahoon, the workers' town. And then in 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.
37:46 Speaker 01 And there was a little applicator, so it's like a little makeup set .
37:50 Kate Lister? Oh, a little cosmetic set, oh .
37:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, like Max Factor for ancient Egypt.
37:53 Kate Lister? Oh, I love that. Now, you mentioned earlier, and we've got to pick up on this one, circumcision. You did mention that we'll come back to that one. So what were they doing with circumcision?
38:05 Speaker 01 That is culturally something that on the official kind of presentation of the state on temple walls, you have sometimes around about eleven hundred 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 the kills that have been made. So the idea culturally is that Egypt .
38:41 Kate Lister? Whose job was that?
38:43 Speaker 01 I mean, it's pretty grim.
38:44 Kate Lister? Oh.
38:46 Speaker 01 One imagines.
38:47 Kate Lister? On penis counting detail.
38:50 Speaker 01 In a hot battlefield.
38:52 Kate Lister? Oh dear.
38:53 Speaker 01 Not great, not great.
38:55 Kate Lister? Well, that's, no one would want to pull that short straw, would they? God almighty.
38:59 Speaker 01 Um, so we have one or two scenes where the operation of removing the foreskin is, is happening. And it seems that it's not happening to babies, it's happening to kind of adolescent, uh, boys. I mean, of course culturally, this is the tested in lots of different places, but it does seem to be a thing associated with cleanliness and Egyptanness 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.
39:41 Kate Lister? Oh, that's interesting. And we do have some evidence, 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 practised in Egypt, particularly the, the cutting out of the, of the clitoris occasionally.
39:56 Speaker 01 We don't, to, to the best of my knowledge, have any written sources or anatomical, uh, evidence that would suggest that. The, I mean, again, we, you can extrapolate a lot from one single case as you 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.
40:23 Kate Lister? It's always about cleanliness. I mean, even today, when the issue of circumcision comes up online, there'll be a load of Americans, because it's still widely practised there, talking about how it's cleanliness. And it's such a weird argument because it's not about that.
40:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, different cultures have different views, I guess.
40:40 Kate Lister? Just wash, just get some soap. No, it's just interesting that even like as far back as we can go with the record, written records, this is about cleanliness and about keeping clean.
40:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's certainly the one very clear illustration of, 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 kind of medically advantageous. It's about, okay, this is just what happens as you. Are initiated into manhood.
41:17 Kate Lister? I must have smarted a bit, like.
41:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, I wouldn't fancy it.
41:19 Kate Lister? No, no, I don't think so. So as a final question then, throughout 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 like, maybe you're like, actually stood the test of time?
41:34 Speaker 01 Um, well, I can tell you what not to do.
41:37 Kate Lister? Excellent.
41:38 Speaker 01 Because there is evidence that using lead galena, I think it's lead galena. It's not great.
41:45 Kate Lister? Don't do that.
41:46 Speaker 01 Not great to put lead in your eyes every day.
41:48 Kate Lister? Fucking hell, no.
41:50 Speaker 01 And of course, everyone, you know, when you're speculating about Tutankhamun 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, wax, I mean, things like hair wax, you think of that being very nineties, nineteen nineties.
42:20 Kate Lister? Yep.
42:20 Speaker 01 CE. But actually.
42:22 Kate Lister? Not at all.
42:22 Speaker 01 Those kind of things were being practised 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 roosy look. And then I actually quite like the idea of a perfume going to top of your head.
42:45 Kate Lister? I'm fascinated by that one to know how does that work?
42:48 Speaker 01 Whether it is, as I said, just an iconographic thing of this person smells good or not, we have an example of a mummified body from the site of Amarna 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.
43:12 Kate Lister? Yeah.
43:12 Speaker 01 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.
43:37 Kate Lister? Well, yeah, the, the higher the oil rate in perfume, the longer it lasts. And they, they wouldn't have been fucking around with Lynx Africa or like Charlie, would they? They've got the really good stuff.
43:48 Speaker 01 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.
44:10 Kate Lister? 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 write, well, maybe you'd like that.
44:21 Speaker 01 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, what's 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 representations of an idealized world than it does from actual everyday practice. So ask me about that in six months.
44:58 Kate Lister? I absolutely will. Thank you for coming on once again. You've been marvelous.
45:03 Speaker 01 Thank you for having me.
45:08 Kate Lister? 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 wherever 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 missed them, scroll back and have a listen. And we will next be unleashing the one and only, the utterly fabulous Eleanor Yanega 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're. Say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy 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.
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