Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Sex & Scandal in Ancient Egypt About this episode 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.
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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, and you are listening to Betwixter 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 adult subjects, and you should 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.
1:10 Kate Lister? 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 scrawled on the back of a toilet door at the local pub. It looks slightly out. A 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 know this. It does rather put Queen Hatshepsut in a different light, and hints at a real scandal during her reign. The saucy bitch.
1:56 Kate Lister? 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.
2:38 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in 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 gaze. 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.
3:22 Kate Lister? 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, a 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.
4:04 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Dr Campbell Price.
4:12 Speaker 01 Dr Kate Lister, hi.
4:13 Kate Lister? How are you?
4:14 Speaker 01 I'm very well. I've wanted to be on this podcast for a long time. The honour really is truly mine.
4:20 Kate Lister? Oh, have you? Oh, thank you so much. That's extremely impressive because your credentials are something to behold, to be completely honest. You're Egyptologist at the University of Liverpool and you're the curator of Egyptian and Sudanese artefacts at the Museum of Manchester. I mean, wow, that's a lot of Egypt, Campbell.
4:42 Speaker 01 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.
4:49 Kate Lister? Where did it start for you?
4:51 Speaker 01 Honestly, honestly, I remember quite, 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 very young.
5:18 Kate Lister? Wow. And was it the Egyptians specifically in the museum? Or did you kind of gravitate towards that once you'd got the smell of floor polish equated with history?
5:30 Speaker 01 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 basins. Missed that, skipped that, straight to Egypt.
5:41 Kate Lister? Okay.
5:42 Speaker 01 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.
6:07 Kate Lister? And I bet you've seen actual Egyptian bodies and many of them. Do they smell like floor polish? Were you correct in your assumption? I've never been that close to one.
6:17 Speaker 01 They have an aroma of mummification of the oils and unguents and.
6:21 Kate Lister? They still smell of like oils all this time later?
6:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
6:24 Kate Lister? Wow.
6:25 Speaker 01 Not an unpleasant smell if you encounter it, but yeah.
6:29 Kate Lister? 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.
6:38 Speaker 01 Yes, we are.
6:38 Kate Lister? What a fascinating subject this is. My PhD was in basically how Victorians wreck history.
6:46 Speaker 01 Hello, I'm talking to my kindred spirits here.
6:51 Kate Lister? I was looking, I was looking at medieval history in particular, and I was looking at gender and about how the Victorians. 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.
7:05 Kate Lister? And Egyptologists do that a lot.
7:07 Speaker 01 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 that we're 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 scholar.
7:35 Kate Lister? Oh, really?
7:36 Speaker 01 Naughty things like wooden penises. When there were texts.
7:39 Kate Lister? Shocking.
7:39 Speaker 01 Shocking. And 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, so all of that, I think we still live under the shadow, especially when it comes to the body, conceptualizations of the body. Yeah, those Victorian Egyptologists have a lot to answer for.
8:05 Kate Lister? 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 seemed to be trying to sanitize 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 kind of, 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.
8:33 Speaker 01 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 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 awe of them. So there's a tension.
9:15 Speaker 01 Between great admiration and dismissiveness and fear. And that whole Gothic horror trope of the vengeful mummy absolutely is rooted in this sense of.
9:31 Kate Lister? Is that them?
9:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is, what if the ancient Egyptians bumped 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.
9:50 Kate Lister? I've never thought of it like that.
9:52 Speaker 01 Yep, it is a big theme.
9:54 Kate Lister? What, just for anyone who's listening who doesn't know what the vagina dentata is, could you give us a quick, a quick.
10:00 Speaker 01 You might be, you might be better placed 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 isn't, when you're aware of it and you reread a lot of those, yeah, late 1800s stories about Egypt, the daring do of the white male Egyptologist very much comes from this place of, yeah, fear of reprisal. Something the Egyptians, and often the ancient Egyptians, before the kind of, I'm shuffling, mummified
10:40 Speaker 01 body becomes a real trope, often ancient Egypt or ancient Egyptians are femme fatales. And they're trying to seduce the male archaeologist and something nasty will happen to him.
10:53 Kate Lister? 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.
11:21 Speaker 01 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.
11:31 Kate Lister? Alpha men. Before that was a thing.
11:34 Speaker 01 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 are very much consciously following this Roman model of we are like the great generals of ancient Rome. So you're absolutely right. 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, 90s, very much Manchester takes great pride in its work ethic. So good northern people working hard.
12:20 Speaker 01 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 fame for tell. Egypt and Egyptians are effeminate, and that is viewed in a negative way.
12:42 Kate Lister? 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?
13:00 Speaker 01 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.
13:21 Kate Lister? And when we're talking about sex, I suppose, you've got to be particularly careful that you don't accidentally fall into these, these sort of pitfalls that have been left before you. And that you're suddenly going, oh, they, 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.
13:42 Speaker 01 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,
14:27 Speaker 01 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 it's they're more or less interested or actively involved in sex than than anyone else.
14:43 Kate Lister? So what are the kind of sources that we use then? It's interesting that you said there that you've always got to be aware that the kind of 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'd be like your few things that you wanted to take.
15:07 Speaker 01 No, exactly. And I think it depends on your conception of what is the afterlife going to be about?
15:12 Kate Lister? Yeah, what is the after, what are you going to need when you get there?
15:16 Speaker 01 And what do you need to get there? Oh, yes, this whole thing.
15:19 Kate Lister? 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? We've got like grave goods, tombs. What else have we got to attempt to understand what, how sex was understood back then?
15:36 Speaker 01 So I think ancient Egypt, again, elite society, is heavy on imagery. And that is what ultimately is so seductive. Ancient Egypt is so distinctive, like the visual culture. You go into a museum again, and like, 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 have lots of writing.
16:19 Speaker 01 So we've got laundry lists and love songs and wells. 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.
16:46 Kate Lister? Interesting.
16:47 Speaker 01 So you've got to, I, I, 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, 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.
17:13 Kate Lister? So difficult.
17:15 Speaker 01 It is difficult. So one, 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 of understanding another culture.
17:39 Kate Lister? What we see as erotic, they might not have seen it as that at all. An example of that is 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.
18:04 Speaker 01 It's kind of penis blindness, I suppose. If you're exposed to a lot of them, you just kind of filter out. So a good case is in 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 a 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 as Egyptologists describe them as ethaphalic with a very prominent erection. And these gods are described in ancient Egyptian as gods who flaunt their potency,
18:49 Speaker 01 which is a wonderful. We all know that person who flaunts flaunts their potency. Oh, yes, we do.
18:56 Kate Lister? Put it away.
18:59 Speaker 01 So it seems shocking to us and it was shocking to, you know, a Victorian upper middle class archaeologist. 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.
19:18 Kate Lister? No, they haven't. Oh, no. Yes. Oh, bless. I love 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.
19:36 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Campbell after the short break.
19:47 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 them really do like that.
20:16 Kate Lister? Right, let's get on with it.
20:28 Kate Lister? So we've got to dismantle our own frame of references, very difficult. But for your money and having looked at the artefacts that you've looked at 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?
20:49 Speaker 01 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 call decorum. And we still say, you know, you've got some decorum about you. So there are definitely little moments. The reign of Tutankhamun's dad, a round about 1350 BCE, a guy called Akhenaten.
21:30 Speaker 01 This is shocking just because the king is shown kissing his wife.
21:35 Kate Lister? Oh my god. Why was that shocking to them?
21:39 Speaker 01 Because you would never.
21:40 Kate Lister? Was it like with tongues? Was it like, what, what we're talking about here?
21:43 Speaker 01 You can't say if it was with tongues or not, 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 Akhenaten 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.
22:25 Speaker 01 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 and the queen kissing, like, I mean, Charles and Camilla wouldn't do it necessarily.
23:04 Kate Lister? Actually, no, I think about it. If they released like a public photograph of themselves, like, like actually kissing, like full tongue, like that it would be worthy of comment. It would be, it would be like a, okay, not, 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.
23:23 Speaker 01 A break with decorum. So there's 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 3000 BCE. Then Cleopatra is 3000 years later. Thirty BCE.
23:45 Kate Lister? Wild, isn't it?
23:46 Speaker 01 And Akhenaten's around the middle. So, yeah, it's a long time.
23:50 Kate Lister? Wow. What about, because this is one of the, the most interesting things that, that your research has found. Because we've got a whole series looking at the history of sex work and sex for sale and sex for, you know, sexual services and ha reams and how all of 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?
24:11 Speaker 01 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 a 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 favors. And she says, oh, you know, I'm not a cheap stomp it. Come and see me in my father's house, which is a beautiful villa, palatial villa.
24:56 Speaker 01 And she makes all this demands of this guy, eventually saying, you've got to kill your children. He then.
25:01 Kate Lister? Holy shit, that, that took a hard left. Wow. Okay.
25:05 Speaker 01 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. So it's kind of a.
25:26 Kate Lister? Strange story.
25:27 Speaker 01 Yeah. The woman is called Tabubu in this, this tale.
25:31 Kate Lister? Even better, quite frankly.
25:32 Speaker 01 That's a great name in this tale of Setni Kaamwassit. So this is the very end of the Thronic period, so the last couple of centuries BCE into the first maybe couple of centuries CE. 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.
26:02 Kate Lister? Hurrah.
26:03 Speaker 01 Strange dream. But yes, it's difficult to extrapolate from that. What did your average man or woman in the street think?
26:13 Kate Lister? Yeah, that is, that is quite difficult, isn't it? See, it's, 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, 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, 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 that whose job is selling sex, just like any other job. But it's interesting that you'd say that there's, there's a sort of a limited evidence for this in ancient Egypt.
26:58 Kate Lister? 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, she's the expert. But then you're saying as well, there might be limited evidence in, in ancient Egypt as well.
27:20 Speaker 01 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?
27:30 Kate Lister? Assuming it.
27:31 Speaker 01 It's that kind of, yeah, Liz Taylor basing again, our impressions on the art. So there's lots of, you know, flesh on display in ancient Egyptian art. So it seems surprising. We know of one community, the, the workers and their families who built the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. So this is between like 1500 and 1000 BCE. And there are people living very close, cheek by jowl there. And there's a supercharged, super high rate of literacy. Because they're involved in state work as basically a state controlled settlement.
28:12 Speaker 01 And in that, there's plentiful evidence of bed hopping and all kinds of crafts and trades. But exactly like you say, pharaonic Egypt is not a monetary economy. You don't have coinage. So yeah, if you want something doing.
28:28 Kate Lister? 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.
28:43 Speaker 01 Precisely.
28:44 Kate Lister? But there is evidence of harems, which we could, you can make the argument that that's a kind of a transactional thing.
28:52 Speaker 01 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.
29:03 Kate Lister? Okay, so this is the state's version of...
29:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, the institution of kingship and being a pharaoh. So the pharaoh has multiple wives and many, many children. So Ramses II has at least, at a conservative estimate, 100 children.
29:24 Kate Lister? Holy shitballs, it's like Elon Musk.
29:28 Speaker 01 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.
29:53 Kate Lister? Interesting. Okay.
29:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:56 Kate Lister? Okay. When there were queens, pharaohs, I was going to say pharaohesses, now that's a weird word, but like, could Cleopatra have a harem? Was this very much a male prerogative?
30:07 Speaker 01 Now, this is a great question, because we don't know too much about the kind of standard setup for what we would call a harem, 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 Ghorob, which is a lovely area near the Fayum Lake, nice kind of country hunting residence for 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.
30:43 Speaker 01 On its own. So the royal women, the senior royal women are entrepreneurs in a sense. They are managing a major textile industry.
30:53 Kate Lister? So already, this doesn't sound like a harem when you say, when you say the word harem 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.
31:04 Speaker 01 There may have been some wafting, but there is also business, there's also business happening. So people boast about the fine quality of linen from this, 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 monarch. He's going around, he's, 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 that 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
31:46 Speaker 01 a female pharaoh, one of the most successful, one of my all time favourites, Queen Hatshepsut 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-
32:04 Kate Lister? You go girl. Wow.
32:05 Speaker 01 Yeah. She's well, I mean, really well connected.
32:08 Kate Lister? Unless that king was all the same person, because I know that they do like incest.
32:14 Speaker 01 The husband and the brother, stepbrother were the same person, but he, he doesn't stick around long. Tutmos the second, God bless him.
32:22 Kate Lister? Okay.
32:22 Speaker 01 Too mostly useless. So Hatshepsut's dad is called Tutmos the first. Her brother, husband, Tutmos the second, her stepson, nephew, Tutmos 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.
33:07 Speaker 01 I'm the king of Egypt.
33:09 Kate Lister? Balty.
33:10 Speaker 01 And she says that she rules Egypt very successfully for about 20 years. You cannot tell me that, you know, 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 linked with one chap who's got a heap load of titles, almost a hundred titles, almost unheard of in ancient Egypt.
33:47 Speaker 01 He's like the, 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 Senenmut and I have just, Kate, finished a biography of this man, Senenmut.
34:03 Kate Lister? Oh, wow. Well done.
34:05 Speaker 01 So he is an obsession of mine and he is unusually for an ancient Egyptian man, unmarried. So this has spawned many.
34:16 Kate Lister? Gay. He's gay. He must be gay. He's gay.
34:19 Speaker 01 Because he's very creative. He's very creative.
34:22 Kate Lister? Doing it again, isn't he?
34:23 Speaker 01 So he must be. Yeah, there's been a lot, more than most people have projected onto the character of Senenmut and Hatshepsut.
34:30 Kate Lister? 200 years from now, people will be looking back at us going, they made everyone gay. It's so annoying.
34:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, maybe they were just friends.
34:38 Kate Lister? That'll be our legacy to history. Just, geez, calm down. Right, okay. So he's, he's good at architecture and unmarried.
34:45 Speaker 01 Yes, he is either he must be homosexual or he must be Hatshepsut's lover. And there are various links between the two of them. And there is one infamous graffiti in a cave overlooking Hatshepsut's.
35:00 Kate Lister? I'm looking at it right now.
35:01 Speaker 01 Oh, you can see it.
35:01 Kate Lister? He doesn't look very gay. He doesn't look very gay.
35:05 Speaker 01 So this shows, all we can say is it's two people having sex. That's it.
35:11 Kate Lister? Yep. Yeah.
35:12 Speaker 01 There is no identifying on people have lots of ink has been spilt trying to identify who these people are. So it has been.
35:21 Kate Lister? From behind, one's bent over.
35:23 Speaker 01 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 Hatchipsoot.
35:32 Kate Lister? Full bush, by the way. That's quite an interesting addition. Full bush there.
35:37 Speaker 01 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 Hatchipsoot has been likened to, oh my gosh, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth the First.
36:00 Kate Lister? Yeah.
36:00 Speaker 01 Guinevere. 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 archaeologists, who were living in the UK under the reign of Victoria, were very negative about Hatchipsoot. They thought she was an unscrupulous woman who'd seized power. And the Senenmut character was this kind of Machiavellian prop to her illegitimate regime. And together they schemed and used propaganda.
36:33 Kate Lister? Okay.
36:34 Speaker 01 Even the conception, modern political conception of propaganda, trying to project that back three and a half thousand years, it's deeply problematic. Exactly. So in answer to your question, Kate, could Hatchipsoot 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.
36:59 Kate Lister? Were you gonna say no?
37:00 Speaker 01 No. So we're very fixated with, yeah, putting her in certain gendered boundaries. And one of the most interesting things with Hatchipsoot is in the official art, a lot of her imagery is male coded because kingship in Egypt, if Roanoke Egypt is male coded. That is not to say she went around dressed in male attire. It's simply that.
37:24 Speaker 01 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 Hatshepsut reincarnated.
37:36 Kate Lister? I believe her too, quite frankly. That makes perfect sense to me. Why did she think that? That's amazing.
37:42 Speaker 01 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 Hatshepsut's temple.
37:52 Kate Lister? Wow. Why do 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 they think that's two men?
38:03 Speaker 01 Um, I don't know. I mean, I think that 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. Nefewi phechwi ek, how beautiful are your buttocks?
38:26 Kate Lister? Oh, no, that's, oh.
38:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
38:31 Kate Lister? How, like, unpick that one from a modern lens. Oh, my God.
38:39 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Campbell after this short break.
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39:50 Kate Lister? Just to 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?
40:00 Speaker 01 We were talking about sex work. I mean, just the human behaviour is human behaviour, and I have 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
40:38 Speaker 01 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.
40:56 Kate Lister? We know it's there, don't we? 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 with 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 crops up all over the place. And I was wondering if there's any evidence of that in Egypt?
41:19 Speaker 01 Not explicit evidence, but the case I mentioned, this mythological case, so you have the kind of wicked uncle for want 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, Horus. 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.
41:56 Kate Lister? 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, I say what a mad mythology, but when you dig into many world mythologies, they are, they are challenging to modern audiences. But 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 going, they had ankles, it's erotic?
42:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, oh god, all the ankles. So the, the papyrus you're referring to is unusual. So it's, 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
43:10 Speaker 01 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 Kama Sutra, 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-
43:44 Kate Lister? Oh, they're joking.
43:45 Speaker 01 They're joking.
43:46 Kate Lister? Okay.
43:47 Speaker 01 It would seem to me. But again, there, 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, it's more is going on there than simply, yeah, pornographic bit of illicit representation.
44:18 Kate Lister? 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
44:26 Speaker 01 Which have gone.
44:28 Kate Lister? Which have gone, which have long gone. I mean, even if like, 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, that must be very difficult.
44:46 Speaker 01 It's a real tricky situation because we've, 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.
45:08 Kate Lister? Yeah, yeah.
45:08 Speaker 01 Or whether it's done as a joke. I mean, is sex just universally potentially quite funny? The Turin erotic papyrus does seem to me personally to be a satirical work.
45:19 Kate Lister? Okay, interesting. Well, you'd just love to go back in time, wouldn't you? And just find out what they think is funny. And like, tell us a joke, like, just to sort of get to the bottom of. So if you could go back and you had like a day in, in ancient Egypt of a point of your choosing, where would you go and what would you want to know?
45:37 Speaker 01 Oh, I'd go and meet Hatchip Sut and Senenmut 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
45:51 Speaker 01 in the company of Senenmut intellectually recently in writing this book. And the guy is like an ancient Egyptian Michelangelo and you don't know.
46:00 Kate Lister? Wow.
46:01 Speaker 01 Is it that he, I've come to the conclusion that he, he genuinely does think Hatchip Sut 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
46:19 Kate Lister? Subtle.
46:21 Speaker 01 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
46:29 Kate Lister? That's true, isn't it?
46:29 Speaker 01 Say, if you're a living goddess and you don't happen to have a living human husband, because she in some ways is united with various gods, yeah, you could just have sex with anyone you wanted.
46:43 Kate Lister? Campbell, you have been fascinating to talk to. Thank you so much for coming along to talk to us.
46:49 Speaker 01 Thanks.
46:49 Kate Lister? And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
46:52 Speaker 01 Well, I am on social media at Egypt MCR and I've written a little book, Ancient Egypt Brief Histories.
47:00 Kate Lister? Fabulous.
47:01 Speaker 01 Which I recommend. And I will have a book about this man Senenmut out with American University in Cairo Press next year, 2026.
47:09 Kate Lister? Will you come back and tell us all about that when it's when it's out?
47:11 Speaker 01 I will. And there's lots to say about good old Senenmut and Hatshepsut.
47:17 Kate Lister? I love it. Thank you so much. You have been a blast.
47:20 Speaker 01 My pleasure, Kate. Nice to talk to you.
47:25 Kate Lister? 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, review and follow along, whatever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we have got an episode on the mother of all Tudors, Margaret Beaufort, and another on the royal harem'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 [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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