Was Tutankhamun Mummified Erect?

What happened to King Tut's 'Little Tut' during mummification? The rumour is that he took an erection to the afterlife, but what can we know after several millennia and a very rough excavation? Dr Campbell Price came into the studio to bust a few myths about the boy Pharaoh. But not to worry, for every myth busted, Campbell has another golden nugget! Campbell is Curator of Egypt & Sudan at Manchester Museum. This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Subscribe to the new Betwixt The Sheets YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@BetwixtTheSheetsPodcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 2:10Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to Betwix the Sheets. That's me doing jazz hands, but you can't see it because we're still on audio. Welcome back, it's fab to have you here. But because we care about you and your precious, precious feelings, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, but I'm adult, so I'm adult, but dirty things and adulty way occurring on racial subjects and you should be an adult too. And that's just to keep your feelings safe. We call that the fair do's warning, because if you keep listening and you happen to get upset, well then tough tits, because that one was on you. Fair do's, we did tell you. Right, let's crack on.

• 2:47Kate Lister?

  How would you like your body to be preserved for the afterlife? Would you have your hair in curlers? Would you have gel or acrylic nails? Or how about a simple, massive, swinging hard-on? Because that's how Pharaoh Tutankhamun was parceled up for eternity, and that is just the tip of it.

• 3:27Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwix the Sheets, the history of sex scandal and society with me, Kate Lister. In 1925, three years after archaeologists uncovered Tutankhamun's tomb, a formal committee unwrapped the body and found something completely unexpected. The boy pharaoh had been mummified erect. To work out what the hell is happening here, we are joined by Dr Campbell Price, who has joined me in the studio to find out all about King Tut's little tut. Are you ready? Let's do this.

• 4:07Kate Lister?

  Well, hello.

• 4:08Speaker 04

  Hello.

• 4:09Kate Lister?

  And welcome back to Betwix the Sheets, it's only Campbell Price. How are you doing?

• 4:13Speaker 04

  Very well, thanks, Kate. And it is a delight to be back, honestly.

• 4:16Kate Lister?

  It is an absolute pleasure to have you back. You are a firm guest favourite.

• 4:21Speaker 04

  Well, that's very kind.

• 4:22Kate Lister?

  And for anyone who's listening and not watching, you are wearing a spectacular jumper.

• 4:25Speaker 04

  For you, Kate, I literally would not wear this for anyone else on any other medium. A gift from my husband, it's got a naked man on the front.

• 4:34Kate Lister?

  It does have a naked, is it David?

• 4:37Speaker 04

  It is David, my husband's called David, so.

• 4:39Kate Lister?

  Oh, fabulous. Fabulous. And very fitting for what we're talking about today. Another naked man, or at least a man's body parts. We're here to talk about Tutankhamun's member.

• 4:52Speaker 04

  Yes. Yes, that's the springboard, you might say.

• 4:55Kate Lister?

  That is.

• 4:58Speaker 04

  To further discussion about Egyptology. Yes.

• 5:01Kate Lister?

  Yes. So this was a fact that I learnt relatively recently, and this is what piqued my interest.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 5:08Kate Lister?

  Tutankhamun was mummified with an erect penis. That's the story that I've read.

• 5:12Speaker 04

  That's the story that you've read.

• 5:14Kate Lister?

  Oh no, you're going to tell me that's not true.

• 5:16Speaker 04

  I think, first of all, it's worth saying Tutankhamun is one of these historical characters that just pops out of the page and the documentary.

• 5:25Kate Lister?

  The boy pharaoh.

• 5:26Speaker 04

  Wow, yeah, boy king, golden king, tragic, only was he 18?

• 5:30Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:32Speaker 04

  So we know all of that. He ruled for about nine years, at a time, it's true, of quite a lot of religious change. And this will come into the interpretation of his bodily treatment.

• 5:42Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 5:43Speaker 04

  So normally, when the king or anyone rich dies, they are mummified, it takes 70 days. And the basic purpose of mummification, Kate, is not to preserve the body.

• 5:53Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 5:54Speaker 04

  But to transform the body into something perfect and superhuman, something divine.

• 5:59Kate Lister?

  Okay, okay.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  So it's in that context that fairly recently, the, well, fairly recently, the reports of the unwrapping were revisited. So remember, Tutankhamun's found in 1922?

• 6:14Kate Lister?

  Yep. A big, and it was a whole thing, right, when they found it?

• 6:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:18Kate Lister?

  It was like, the advent, the media had just really kind of got going and like, it was, it was a global phenomenon when they discovered that.

• 6:25Speaker 04

  Other than wars, it was probably, probably the first big news story, full stop, was the Tutankhamun tomb. So eventually, they clear stuff out, they get into the burial chamber, the team, the international team, Egyptian specialists working for a man called Howard Carter, he's the one everyone knows. So eventually Carter gets into the burial chamber, gets down to the body, and it is now well-known that Carter is using very invasive methods to remove Tutankhamun from his coffin.

• 7:01Kate Lister?

  What's he doing? Is he just, is it just smash and grab?

• 7:04Speaker 04

  Essentially, yes. Because the stuff is, so first of all, they wonder, why is the coffin so heavy?

• 7:10Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  Because there are these Russian doll style coffins, three of them, one inside the other. The innermost one is made of solid gold.

• 7:18Kate Lister?

  That'd do it.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  Which could be pretty heavy.

• 7:21Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  Lot of caritage. So eventually, they get into this solid gold coffin, take the lid off, they see the mask, I mean, the mask of Tutankhamun.

• 7:29Kate Lister?

  Iconic, isn't it?

• 7:31Speaker 04

  Incredible. Now beautifully displayed in the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, if you want to go and see it. But in order to get that undoubted masterpiece out, it's glued fast with black goo. Tutankhamun's whole body is covered in black goo.

• 7:46Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  Set fast.

• 7:49Kate Lister?

  What did they do?

• 7:50Speaker 04

  They start by trying to use knives to pry him out.

• 7:55Kate Lister?

  Even I know that's a shit idea.

• 7:58Kate Lister?

  Like, but with these things, you tend to think like, oh, maybe that was like what the best that they had at the time. Was that the best that they had at the time? It doesn't sound like hacking at it with knives is the best they could have come up with.

• 8:08Speaker 04

  They used lots of very advanced for the time methods on other parts of the contents of the tomb. But they, eventually they take Tutankhamun outside into the sunshine to try and melt the black goo. So they're using hot knives, they then start to use solvents to try and get him out.

• 8:27Kate Lister?

  Behave.

• 8:28Speaker 04

  So when you say unwrapping a mummy, you imagine a kid at a, like Halloween costume party?

• 8:36Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 8:37Speaker 04

  Where they've got toilet paper in them. No, no.

• 8:39Kate Lister?

  Like the Andrix puppy.

• 8:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not that. It is, he is atomized in order to get the bits out. And remember, again, there's a lot less bandage, there's a lot less linen bandage than you might imagine, there's all this black goo. The body's absolutely sheathed in an armour of jewellery, of weaponry, there are weapons in there, of magical, religious, ritual objects. So to get all of these out, you slowly have to pick the body apart. So his arms are broken off, his legs are broken off.

• 9:18Kate Lister?

  Oh no.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  He's decapitated to get the mask out, which is massive.

• 9:21Kate Lister?

  This isn't good.

• 9:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's a massive helmet-like thing.

• 9:26Speaker 04

  So when we get on to his genitals, uh, well, he's been torn apart. So that's worth saying.

• 9:34Kate Lister?

  That is worth saying, actually, isn't it? That they were just, they're just hacking at him.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  It's a sad story because the, the whole purpose, as I said, of mummification is to keep the body intact, integral, um, eternal, immortal, impervious to change, like a god, shielded in gold because gods have flesh of gold. So they undo all of that magic.

• 9:53Kate Lister?

  Just on site as well?

• 9:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. Uh, in the tomb chamber.

• 9:57Kate Lister?

  Were they supposed to do that? Like, I can't help thinking that there must have been somebody further up that, that chain just going, I'm sorry, you've done what?

• 10:03Speaker 04

  Um, I mean, they did move him to a slightly roomier tomb because Tutankhamun was buried in quite a small tomb. Uh, the so-called laboratory tomb. But again, although there's this great pretense to, and I think genuine belief in science and using

• 10:19Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 10:20Speaker 04

  scientific techniques, the reality of it is Tutankhamun's actual mortal remains are, yeah, totally decimated.

• 10:28Kate Lister?

  Didn't know that. All right. All right. So we wouldn't have done that today.

• 10:33Speaker 04

  We would not have done that today.

• 10:34Kate Lister?

  All right. What's the black goo?

• 10:36Speaker 04

  The black goo is a substance of transformation, which you would paint on. It's known from later coffins where you have a beautiful, painted, you know, colorful, intricately decorated surface. And someone has come along and literally put a big bucket of black goo on it.

• 11:02Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 11:03Speaker 04

  To activate the magic of the hieroglyphs and the images.

• 11:08Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 11:09Speaker 04

  And it's, it's a wonderful contrast to what we think when we go into museums. There's a good case actually in Sheffield, you know Sheffield, just in the north. Beautiful display there of a coffin of a lady who has had this black goo put on and it splashed all over her body and face. But you can still see the features underneath. You can see the, the decoration elsewhere. But a museum curator, a museum conservator just wants to clean it off.

• 11:34Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  And usually in museums around the world, the cleaning has happened in Sheffield and in Berlin, I think. One of the few museums that don't clean it off. So the black goo.

• 11:46Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  Is basically, it's been analyzed. It's a mixture of plant resins, of, um, bitumen. Which was, I think, the, the assumption when Howard Carter and others were cleaning Tutankhamun up, that he'd been covered in bitumen. The purpose of this was not to preserve him, remember, it is to turn him into Osiris.

• 12:09Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 12:10Speaker 04

  And Osiris is a god and he can have green skin or he can have jet black skin. And so you want to make the deceased most like the god. So that's why you apply black goo.

• 12:20Kate Lister?

  Put the black goo on. It's like a setting spray. It's like, that's the final bit. Just, there we go. And I'm done.

• 12:28Speaker 04

  And I think that's exactly it. It is the final act in the funeral, it seems, in Tutankhamun's case.

• 12:33Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah. Let's get the black goo in.

• 12:37Speaker 04

  That's black goo.

• 12:37Kate Lister?

  Let's talk willies. Right.

• 12:39Speaker 04

  So, and I reread the published account of the autopsy in preparation for meeting you.

• 12:46Kate Lister?

  All right.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  To be able to say Tutankhamun was wrapped with, his penis was wrapped erect. I don't think that's possible to say.

• 12:57Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 12:58Speaker 04

  Because.

• 12:58Kate Lister?

  No. I love that story. I loved it because it was like, because he's a teenager and it just seemed like such a teenage thing to say, I want, no, I want, I want an erect one. How do you want to go into the afterlife? No, bigger than that, please. Much bigger.

• 13:13Speaker 04

  And there are maybe much more recent ways of conceptualizing sex and sexual prowess that, that we'd expect that. But no, we're talking about ancient Egypt.

• 13:21Kate Lister?

  Yes, we are. Behave. Right. Okay.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  In the autopsy report by a man called Douglas Derry, who was an anatomist.

• 13:28Kate Lister?

  And this is 1925?

• 13:29Speaker 04

  1920s, yeah.

• 13:31Kate Lister?

  Yeah, okay.

• 13:32Speaker 04

  Um, now I'm not a size queen, but, but Tutankhamun's penis was five centimeters long.

• 13:42Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  What was left of it. Remember Carter had been.

• 13:46Kate Lister?

  Well, you're, anyone's might look like that after several thousand years in the, in the ground.

• 13:51Speaker 04

  So at that size, I don't think you can say a lot about its positioning, really.

• 13:58Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  So if one imagined it was intentional, and this is an if, it could be a reference again to Osiris. Because we have later figures. And again, because ancient Egypt is such a long time, we're talking 3,000 years. Some people will say, well, in the pyramid age, they did this. And then a thousand years later, in the time of Tutankhamun, it's a long time. So I'm, I'm hesitant to say it, but we have figurines of Osiris from almost a thousand years after Tutankhamun that are covered in black goo, which have little erect penises. So little figurines.

• 14:37Speaker 04

  So there's nothing around the time of Tutankhamun that iconographically connects to the.

• 14:45Kate Lister?

  It wasn't a thing at the time. Like, we've got, no one else is going, I want to be buried with a hard on.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. If, if it was a thing, if that was a religious thing, we would have evidence of it. Because enough people have rummaged in bandages and unwrapped bodies.

• 14:59Kate Lister?

  Yeah. So if he did ask that, there must have been like a load of priests going, you want what? What?

• 15:05Speaker 04

  So I really, I really do not think it was intentional. And the reason I mentioned the religious milieu, the, the setting of the time, is that Tutankhamun's dad did things pretty differently. He's a guy called Akhenaten. He closes all the temples. He says there's one god.

• 15:20Kate Lister?

  It must have freaked everyone out.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  It was a total, yeah, revolution is not too strong a word. So Tutankhamun is restoring everything.

• 15:29Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 15:30Speaker 04

  So if you remember, yeah, Tutankhamun's dad Akhenaten believes in one sun disc, which is kind of an iconic. It doesn't have a human form.

• 15:41Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 15:41Speaker 04

  So maybe there's a real emphasis on the human body and the divine body. But even so, the, the bit that remained of his, uh, penis doesn't allow us to say it was deliberately intentionally wrapped in a certain fashion.

• 15:59Kate Lister?

  What's that got to do with his dad being the, um, bringing, like, saying there's only one god, you can't worship all your other gods?

• 16:05Speaker 04

  I wonder, some Egyptologists have thought that, that maybe there's a reaction against the, the one god theory.

• 16:13Kate Lister?

  Oh, I see. So.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  And we're going back to Osiris and Isis and Anubis and all of the other gods. So they're trying to make Tutankhamun look like.

• 16:23Kate Lister?

  Right. He has a penis like the gods.

• 16:26Speaker 04

  Yes. And it's funny, in looking at all of Egyptian art, you do notice there is relatively little nudity. There is almost no allusion, just obvious allusion to sexual activity. So by showing some gods, and some gods do get shown with erect penises, that is a quality of divinity you would never show the pharaoh or a regular man in that way.

• 16:54Kate Lister?

  Okay. So if what they're doing is keeping the body intact for the afterlife,

• 17:02Kate Lister?

  what are they envisioning that you're doing on the other side? Did they think that you would go to the other, to the afterlife and have sex, for example?

• 17:09Speaker 04

  I don't.

• 17:09Kate Lister?

  Do you have sex in heaven? That's, that's an old Christian theological question.

• 17:13Speaker 04

  Quandary, yeah.

• 17:14Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 17:15Speaker 04

  Um, so they thought you were going to become divine, you were going to become a god because mummification is transformation.

• 17:22Kate Lister?

  Gods have sex?

• 17:23Speaker 04

  And we know that gods have sex. So yes, but there's no sense that you're actively procreating in the afterlife.

• 17:29Kate Lister?

  So you wouldn't be having babies?

• 17:31Speaker 04

  No.

• 17:31Kate Lister?

  In the, right. Okay.

• 17:32Speaker 04

  So it was a free for all in a sense with no consequences.

• 17:36Kate Lister?

  I was gonna say, maybe he'd need an erect penis if he was gonna have babies in the afterlife. But this is a stretch. I'm reaching.

• 17:42Speaker 04

  I, I tend to think of it as there's the idea of for both men and women, that you have sexual attributes as a deceased transformed person, just in the service of rebirth. So it's this idea of sexiness in the service of rebirth. The potential for recreation, but you're not actually, you're not actually having children, you're giving birth to yourself. You're literally recreating yourself. So in that sense, yeah, genitalia would be important.

• 18:20Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Campbell and Little Tut after this short break.

• 18:27Kate Lister?

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• 22:08Kate Lister?

  Would they have wrapped the penis as part of the mummification process? Like wrapped it separate from the body?

• 22:14Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, they would. There are other examples of that.

• 22:18Kate Lister?

  Okay. So why do we think that Tut's was erect?

• 22:21Speaker 04

  I think it's just like everything about Tutankhamun. It's he had a wonky leg, he had something wrong with his wrist, he had something wrong with his eye.

• 22:31Kate Lister?

  Right, okay. He wasn't a well lad, was he?

• 22:34Speaker 04

  By the standards of the time, he was obviously well looked after because he was the king of Egypt and he probably had the best people looking after him. But the ancient people in general were maybe not well.

• 22:48Kate Lister?

  Yeah, okay, good point. Yeah, okay, good point.

• 22:50Speaker 04

  So, I don't know. Certainly with Tutankhamun, and it's true of other ancient Egyptians, I just feel he's been clinicised and medicalised a lot.

• 22:59Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:59Speaker 04

  So for example, they were found in his tomb, which bear in mind was the only tomb found intact. So all the stuff was there pretty much.

• 23:07Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  So it's an insight into what a tomb would have contained. So you can't say how typical or not typical something is because there's only one example of it.

• 23:16Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  So they find all these sticks. Aha, a sign that he couldn't walk properly. He might have had disabilities. We don't know what the other kings' tombs were like. They probably were full of sticks as well. Do we say they were?

• 23:30Kate Lister?

  They might have been.

• 23:31Speaker 04

  Not able to walk properly.

• 23:32Kate Lister?

  It's definitely in the autopsy that that penis was erect.

• 23:36Speaker 04

  Yes, it's a speculation at the time.

• 23:38Kate Lister?

  It's a speculation at the time. So, and it was five centimetres and they're claiming that it was buried outward from the body, which is, if that's true, that would be unique.

• 23:48Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 23:49Kate Lister?

  But you can't think of any reason why that would be, you think that maybe, and also, as you said, that like they're hacking at it and his body and like it wouldn't have been in the best nick.

• 23:58Speaker 04

  It wouldn't have been in the best nick, no.

• 24:00Kate Lister?

  No, no.

• 24:02Speaker 04

  No.

• 24:02Kate Lister?

  Oh, I loved that story. But actually, no, because the story doesn't finish there because they lost his penis, didn't they?

• 24:08Speaker 04

  They did. So after Carter was finished with him, he was put in a sand tray and then re-buried, which is, in a way, is something because at least it was an acknowledgement that his body was going to be put in the outermost of those three coffins, left in his sarcophagus in his actual tomb. And I've had this debate with eight-year-olds, Kate, it's classes of eight-year-olds. What is better, class of eight-year-olds? Tutankhamun is left in the place he wanted to be buried, in Luxor in the south of Egypt, in the Valley of the Kings, or he is put with all of his stuff, which has been moved

• 24:52Speaker 04

  to Cairo, which is hundreds of miles away in the north of Egypt in a museum. And presumably he was buried with the stuff because he needed.

• 25:00Kate Lister?

  He needed his stuff?

• 25:00Speaker 04

  The stuff.

• 25:01Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 25:02Speaker 04

  For transformation and existence as a god in the afterlife. And the eight-year-olds weren't able to decide. So.

• 25:09Kate Lister?

  Was it hung jury?

• 25:10Speaker 04

  It was, it was, the jury was out. But in the case of his body, as you rightly said, he's not in a great state. He's put in this, yeah, sand tray. The coffin lid is closed, the sarcophagus lid has been removed, the stone lid, and it's replaced with glass. So remember, this is happening in the 1920s. And then in the 1960s, a team from the University of Liverpool, my alma mater, go and x-ray him for the first time. Big news. It is clear someone has had a rummage, Kate, in that space, in the sand tray. And things are missing, like his penis.

• 25:53Kate Lister?

  His penis is missing, missing in action.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  And the front of his ribcage is gone.

• 25:58Kate Lister?

  Oh, so it's like there's more, not just the willies gone.

• 26:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So it seems that Carter had left, because it was impregnated into the black goo, on his chest, there was a beaded jewelled collar that couldn't be removed. So someone had been in and.

• 26:14Kate Lister?

  And had it. Who had done that?

• 26:16Speaker 04

  I mean, it was the Second World War.

• 26:19Kate Lister?

  Oh, that, yeah, everyone was a bit distracted.

• 26:21Speaker 04

  People were a bit distracted, maybe the security wasn't as good as it could have been. So it seems like someone had gone in and had a rummage and what was left of the penis had been knocked off into the sand tray.

• 26:35Kate Lister?

  Tutankhamun's ghost.

• 26:37Speaker 04

  Oh, gosh.

• 26:38Kate Lister?

  Right, okay. Oh, I get back on track. So the news goes out then, King Tut's penis is missing.

• 26:46Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 26:47Kate Lister?

  Do they have any leads, any suspects?

• 26:50Speaker 04

  I mean, I think you could imagine that if it had been deliberately taken, it was taken as a souvenir.

• 26:56Kate Lister?

  But would you know that that's what it was though? Because from what you're describing here, is that's not an item that you would look at and go, that's a penis?

• 27:04Speaker 04

  No, it's not in his case. But I think more broadly, and this is a really important point, although, you know, Egypt is a majority Islamic country today, some Christian people, some Jewish people. There is still a very profound belief in the materiality of ancient stuff. So I've, you know, been in Egypt and seen bits of stone in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by syringes and pill bottles, because people believe antiquities will amplify your medicine, the effectiveness of your medicine.

• 27:44Speaker 04

  And if you go to an Egyptian temple wall and there is a depiction of an ethaphallic, erect penis god, often it's worn away from constant touching and scraping because there's a belief in its fertility power.

• 28:00Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 28:00Speaker 04

  I'm sure you've know that from lots of different historical contexts.

• 28:06Speaker 04

  So if I were of those traditional beliefs and I were to get into a rummage inside that gold coffin of Tutankhamun, you'd think, wow, that is a pharaoh's actual

• 28:18Kate Lister?

  Shlong.

• 28:19Speaker 04

  Shlong.

• 28:20Kate Lister?

  But it wasn't taken, was it? Because it turned

• 28:22Speaker 04

  It was discovered. Yeah. So all of this is to say, no, call off the search.

• 28:27Kate Lister?

  I love, I love that fact. It went missing and then it was found again.

• 28:31Speaker 04

  It was just in the sand tray.

• 28:32Kate Lister?

  It was just in the sand tray. And I've never looked up the research team that found the penis because in my head, it's a group of women who, after 40 years, a group of men go, have you seen it? Where's the penis? Well, I don't know where it is. Where did I put it? Just a group of women go, it's there.

• 28:45Speaker 04

  It was there all along.

• 28:46Kate Lister?

  It's the last place that you looked, for goodness sake.

• 28:49Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 28:49Kate Lister?

  But they found it.

• 28:50Speaker 04

  Yes, they found it.

• 28:51Kate Lister?

  Right. Okay. And where is it now?

• 28:53Speaker 04

  It is with him, as far as I know, in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings. So he's been taken out of the sarcophagus and he's in rather a clinical looking case in another of the chambers in the tomb. And so the last time I was in Cairo, it does seem that the Grand Egyptian Museum, where all of his other stuff is, has a secluded room waiting for his body.

• 29:21Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 29:23Speaker 04

  With the bodies of his two children.

• 29:25Kate Lister?

  Yeah. Two children?

• 29:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, he was buried with the fetuses of his stillborn daughters.

• 29:30Kate Lister?

  I did not know that.

• 29:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:33Kate Lister?

  How do we know that they were stillborn?

• 29:35Speaker 04

  Their size, just their condition.

• 29:37Kate Lister?

  Okay, okay, right.

• 29:39Speaker 04

  And they hadn't previously, as far as I'm aware, been on display, but it is possible to view them now. So I don't know whether the Egyptian authorities are going to move the body, all of, all of him that remains, to the museum with the stuff.

• 29:52Kate Lister?

  Okay. So he probably wasn't buried with an erect penis.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  I personally do not see the, the, the evidence. Like we said, if it was a thing, and you can imagine if the king of Egypt wanted something, or that was the top notch level of mummification, everyone would want it.

• 30:09Kate Lister?

  Yeah, I suppose they would. Yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  And it is not attested. It doesn't seem to be an important thing. And to be honest, you know, the mummification process dehydrates the body. So you get all dried out.

• 30:24Kate Lister?

  That would be quite difficult to mummify an erect one.

• 30:26Speaker 04

  Manipulate the body in that way.

• 30:29Kate Lister?

  That would be, I hadn't even thought about the logistics of that.

• 30:32Speaker 04

  You've not had the chance till today.

• 30:33Kate Lister?

  But now, now we are. But let's talk about penises at the time of Tutankhamun anyway.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 30:39Kate Lister?

  Because do they appear a lot within the mythology, within their worldview? Is it like, you know, like the Romans were just cock crazy? They just had dicks on everything.

• 30:48Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 30:49Kate Lister?

  What's that like in ancient Egypt?

• 30:50Speaker 04

  I was thinking about this on the train down. I think, and of course, like any kind of history, we're viewing it through our own eyes. And what do we want these ancient people or these people in the past to be like? To conform to our own ideas. I would say generally, the ancient Egyptians were pretty fallocentric. I think they were. The reason I would say that is one of, one of several creation myths involves the creator god who comes from nothing, finds himself alone and has to masturbate.

• 31:24Kate Lister?

  Oh, that's true.

• 31:25Speaker 04

  Universe into existence. So there's that. There's a, a really fascinating addendum to that idea. So if you think, okay, the, the first being is, in the Egyptian way of thinking, coded male, and they are alone and they have to procreate the universe. It's interesting that in, grammatically speaking, the ancient Egyptian word for hand, geret, is grammatically feminine. And so around the time, or just before the time of Tutankhamun, the highest, one of the highest priestly roles is held by a woman who is the god's hand.

• 32:08Speaker 04

  So she's literally the woman who wanks off the god.

• 32:14Kate Lister?

  No.

• 32:15Speaker 04

  Yes. So, I mean, imagine the theological, metaphysical power of each day you are

• 32:23Kate Lister?

  Is she literally doing this then?

• 32:25Speaker 04

  On some level recreating the, the creation of the universe.

• 32:30Kate Lister?

  Wait, what? So is this, is this like a metaphor? Like, I am the hand of God, I spiritually masturbate? Or is she going in every day and tugging off the pharaoh? What is happening here?

• 32:38Speaker 04

  We can never know the reality of the situation. I, I mean, I've, well, I'm skeptical.

• 32:45Kate Lister?

  Applying for that.

• 32:45Speaker 04

  I'm skeptical that even, so imagining this priestess is going into the temple every day. I don't think the god's statue is life size. Put it that way.

• 32:55Kate Lister?

  Okay. But is she like, is she doing this to the real pharaoh?

• 33:02Speaker 04

  Well, at least initially, probably yes, because she's the king's wife or a female relative.

• 33:07Kate Lister?

  Oh, right. So she's

• 33:08Speaker 04

  Who's married.

• 33:09Kate Lister?

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 33:10Speaker 04

  But then, but then, a few hundred years after Tutankhamun, this, the god's hand or the god's wife, as she's sometimes known, is, well, as Egyptologists would describe her, she's celibate, so she's not married to a human man.

• 33:24Kate Lister?

  Hang on, what? Is this all the same person?

• 33:27Speaker 04

  So this is, we're talking over hundreds of years.

• 33:29Kate Lister?

  Wife who's wanking off a pharaoh, but also not a pharaoh. And what's happening?

• 33:33Speaker 04

  We've gone, we've gone off piece tier. Okay. So it's a role which comes into the Egyptian way of thinking about 1500 BCE, right?

• 33:47Kate Lister?

  With you so far.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  So you have a female member of the royal family, the king's wife.

• 33:52Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 33:53Speaker 04

  Who plays this role.

• 33:54Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  In a ritual setting. God knows what that actually involves.

• 33:58Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  And so generations of women are doing this.

• 34:01Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 34:01Speaker 04

  Including my favorite pharaoh, Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh.

• 34:05Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 34:05Speaker 04

  But that's a discussion for another time. Then around the time of Tutankhamun, that fashion dies off and royal women are not playing that role. Then a few hundred years later, royal daughters, exclusively royal daughters, are installed into this temple role in the south of Egypt. And they are basically the highest member of the clergy, outranking even the male high priest.

• 34:33Kate Lister?

  But they're not having sex with the pharaoh, are they?

• 34:35Speaker 04

  No.

• 34:35Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 34:36Speaker 04

  And they are not allowed to marry. They're not allowed to marry from the practical, political point of view of

• 34:40Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  They're not starting a rival dynasty.

• 34:43Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  And that, I mean, the problem I have with the term celibate is it carries a lot of judgment. And remember, of course, a lot of Egyptology is written by upper middle class, white men with beards,

• 34:57Speaker 04

  who were in the Victorian period quite uncomfortable with the idea of sex and about the strange things the Egyptians did. So the idea is there is an unmarried, unmarried to a human man.

• 35:08Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 35:10Speaker 04

  Royal daughter. And she is responsible for the practical running of the rituals. She's got a huge staff of, of temple flunkeys who look after not just her and the temple, but also land. So she's immensely wealthy. And she's holding that position kind of in trust for her dad, because he's the pharaoh. But at the heart of it, it is still, she is the god's adorer, the god's hand. And it is related to the creation of the universe by masturbation.

• 35:41Kate Lister?

  That is such a male thing to have come up with. Just imagine the pharaoh sat there every morning just going, sorry, love. It's, it's, we've got to masturbate the universe into existence. It's not my fault. I don't want to do this.

• 35:54Speaker 04

  It may literally have been, that may literally have been what happened. I knew you'd like that story.

• 36:01Kate Lister?

  I love that story. I just can't imagine like, you know, applying for that on, putting it on your CV.

• 36:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:10Kate Lister?

  All right. So that is a very fallocentric culture then.

• 36:14Speaker 04

  It is, yeah.

• 36:15Kate Lister?

  Um, well, do we have anything in the sort of the surviving papyruses or anything like that about things like cures for impotence? Or do you get a sense of how important penises are there?

• 36:23Speaker 04

  Yes, yes. I mean, you, you talk about, I mean, there are lots of things to do with fertility for both men and women. So that is a concern.

• 36:32Kate Lister?

  There was nobody wanking off the queen, was there? There's no hand of the queen to masturbate into existence.

• 36:37Speaker 04

  No, it's not an, an even playing field in that way. And also, I mean, let's be clear, apart from real luminaries like Hatshepsut, who's a female pharaoh, but she's interesting for lots of ways, in lots of ways. It is usually a male pharaoh and lots of wives.

• 36:56Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 04

  There is usually the great royal wife, the senior queen, who's meant to be the mother of the next king. But, and she almost always has to be blue blooded. She must be related to the previous royal family and therefore related to the king himself. So you get into

• 37:15Kate Lister?

  It's getting a bit weird, isn't it? It's all getting a bit Game of Thrones-y.

• 37:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. But in general, I would say medicine focuses on, yeah, I guess it does focus on fertility generally, but I mean, even up till today, there is a, a focus on depictions of the penis.

• 37:35Kate Lister?

  Oh, they love a cock. They do.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  I mean, if you look and see in the temples in the south of Egypt in Luxor, that temple had something to do with this union of the god and the priestess. And there's something going on. So there are lots of depictions of erect penises. There are ethophallic gods.

• 37:57Kate Lister?

  Oh, there are. Okay, okay.

• 37:59Speaker 04

  And if you go there just as a tourist, you see, you know, a temple wall, which has lost most of its paint. But then you see these halos of grease around the penises. And it can't just be tour guides pointing. And I have it on good authority that these places are open after hours, after dark for rituals.

• 38:26Kate Lister?

  No.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  Which still absolutely connect to that, yeah, very fallocentric belief in the, yeah, the materiality of the wall.

• 38:43Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Campbell and Little Toot after this short break.

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• 41:00Kate Lister?

  So it's not inconceivable then that within this culture, Tutankhamun might have thought his penis was a big deal in the afterlife.

• 41:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:10Kate Lister?

  You're not, no, you're not buying this, are you?

• 41:13Speaker 04

  I think, yeah, because of the unfortunate handling by Heard Carter.

• 41:18Kate Lister?

  See, that's a big one, isn't it?

• 41:19Speaker 04

  That is going to skew any kind of, any kind of anatomical thing you're going to say about, about Tutankhamun is going to be biased.

• 41:30Kate Lister?

  And they snapped it off anyway, didn't they?

• 41:31Speaker 04

  They snapped it off.

• 41:32Kate Lister?

  Because if it was buried, if it was in a sand pit underneath him, then it wasn't in situ, was it?

• 41:37Speaker 04

  The, the poor guy was very brittle and was in bits anyway. So I think it's unwise to make any informed judgment based on remains that were so heavily contaminated, so heavily intervened with.

• 41:53Kate Lister?

  Okay, all right.

• 41:54Speaker 04

  I'm afraid.

• 41:54Kate Lister?

  No, that's all right. You've, you've convinced me, but this was a culture and a worldview where that kind of symbolism was very important and it would have been important to him as a pharaoh because he did have kids, but they died.

• 42:07Speaker 04

  Yes. So I mean, I, I think the biggest job of the king and the queen is to produce another.

• 42:13Kate Lister?

  Make babies.

• 42:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, an ear and a spear at least. I mean, at that time, and I can think of a particular ancient text around the time of Tutankhamun, that is basically a sculptor saying, he's probably a sculptor who's worked for Tutankhamun's dad, this is really interesting, when all the other gods were outlawed. So God's goddess is not allowed to be depicted. There's just the sun, the disc, the sun disc in the sky, that's all we're worshiping. And then Tutankhamun's dad dies by whatever means. Tutankhamun, at the advice of his, you know, high courtiers, restores everything and says, right, we're back to the way things were.

• 42:56Speaker 04

  And so this sculptor has to go around and restore all the statues of all the gods that were destroyed. And I mean, imagine how many temples.

• 43:06Kate Lister?

  She does a big job.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  It would have totally messed up the whole economy by closing temples.

• 43:12Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:14Speaker 04

  Whatever, I think.

• 43:15Kate Lister?

  Close for refurbishment.

• 43:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. And yeah, if you were making a lot of money in the temple, you would not have been happy.

• 43:20Kate Lister?

  No, you wouldn't.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  Anyway, eventually Akhenaten gets bumped off, as a lot of revolutionary people do. So the sculptor goes around and he says, I was intimately familiar with the images of gods. I was initiated into what he calls the domain of gold, which is this kind of craft, trade guild, where he's allowed to, to see and create images of gods. So he talks about different goddesses he's allowed to see, different gods. And he talks about the god Men. So Men is the god of fertility or rejuvenation. He's the god of a particular part of Egypt called Koptos, and he's a very ancient god.

• 44:06Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  We have got statues from the pre-dynastic period that probably represent.

• 44:12Kate Lister?

  Oh, he's very old.

• 44:13Speaker 04

  He's very old, before the pharaohs.

• 44:14Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 44:15Speaker 04

  And in fact, there are two of them now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. So they are three or four meters tall, huge limestone statues, which have huge erect penises.

• 44:29Kate Lister?

  Right, okay.

• 44:30Speaker 04

  That were made separately and inserted into what a colleague.

• 44:36Kate Lister?

  Let's get in that commission.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  What a colleague called a cock socket.

• 44:42Speaker 04

  When you don't like someone, they're a cock socket.

• 44:44Kate Lister?

  Cock sockets.

• 44:46Speaker 04

  So I, I had a good, good friend who worked in the Ashmolean and said she was going through the cupboards one day and found a penis, massive stone penis, which it wasn't safe to put back on display because a child could be killed.

• 45:02Speaker 04

  Oh God.

• 45:03Kate Lister?

  What a way to go. Explain that to the insurance company.

• 45:06Speaker 04

  By the massive penis. So the deity of Men.

• 45:10Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 45:11Speaker 04

  As the, as the, as the god of fertility, as the god of, in some ways procreation. The ancient Egyptians are not like the Greeks and the Romans, and it's the goddess of love or the god of war.

• 45:22Kate Lister?

  There's some job sharing.

• 45:23Speaker 04

  Exactly, there's some job sharing. So Men is associated, especially these big statues seem to be associated with a trade route. So you go from the Nile Valley all the way through the desert to the Red Sea.

• 45:35Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 45:36Speaker 04

  So that is something which is dangerous, arduous, you'd want the protection of Men. So maybe the statues are something to do with, do with that. But fascinatingly, at some point, these massive statues, four meters tall things, fall over and people come along when they've fallen and scrape little bits of the statue body. And if you look in the Ashmolean now, they're kind of pocked marked in this really strange way, although they've been re-erected.

• 46:05Speaker 04

  And it's because of this belief in Men as, yeah, a guarantor of, yeah, the sap of life, the, the possibility of rejuvenation. So literally you would, and I think the belief persists to today, if you go and you see a temple wall with images of gods, or you see a fallen statue of the god Men, you carve a little bit of, of dust from his statue and you bake it into your bread.

• 46:34Kate Lister?

  No, you don't.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  And you eat it and then that adds to your weather for the man or for the woman. And it makes you more.

• 46:41Kate Lister?

  Eat it.

• 46:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, more inclined or more capable of having children. So it's really a practical, very material thing. Men is also associated with lettuce, coarse lettuce.

• 46:54Kate Lister?

  They love a lettuce. It's such an, today lettuce is such a humble plant. When you look at its history, it is an absolute dirtbag of a vegetable. I, I don't know what it is about it. Like, actually, no, it was explained to me by Sarah Pahak. It was that, so the lettuce I'm thinking of is like the bag of lettuce that you get down the supermarket. And she said that like the Egyptian lettuces were actually quite phallic.

• 47:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 47:18Kate Lister?

  They were all like, they, they were like big chunky things, enough to look like a dick to have got this reputation.

• 47:24Speaker 04

  Yes, and they, they have this kind of semen-like sap.

• 47:27Kate Lister?

  Sap that comes out of it.

• 47:29Speaker 04

  So that is maybe no surprise that when you see the god Men with his penis, very obvious, he's often got one of these lettuce plants behind him. So the reason I mention him is in the time of Tutankhamun, this sculptor's going around restoring all the, all the statues of gods. And he comes to Men and he describes, and this is one of my favorite phrases in ancient Egyptian, I forget the actual sound the ancient Egyptian would make, but in English, Men is described as he who flaunts his potency.

• 48:01Kate Lister?

  I've met a few of them.

• 48:03Speaker 04

  Don't we all know someone who just flaunts their potency? So, yeah, but bear in mind, Men is one of hundreds of gods and goddesses and most don't have.

• 48:16Kate Lister?

  And it's, it's a bit of a stretch to say this one god had a swinging tackle, so therefore Tutankhamun must have wanted this. But god damn it, but fair enough. Campbell, as a final question then, if you're going to be preserved for the afterlife, you're on, you're, you're the pharaoh, you get top billing, you get to say exactly how you want your body to be treated, what would you want to be preserved?

• 48:37Speaker 04

  Of myself?

• 48:38Kate Lister?

  Of yourself, yeah, like your body, like, let's just, so the discussion is like, did Tutankhamun go, look, no, I want a really big erect penis in the afterlife? How would you like, because I think I'd want my curls preserving. I'd be quite upset if I arrived on the other side and they weren't there.

• 48:51Speaker 04

  And they were quite good at that, you know?

• 48:53Kate Lister?

  Were they?

• 48:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, Tutankhamun's granny had an incredible head of hair still and he had.

• 49:00Kate Lister?

  Amazing, sign me up for that.

• 49:01Speaker 04

  Tutankhamun had a lock of her hair in his tomb.

• 49:04Kate Lister?

  Oh, well, that's quite sweet.

• 49:07Speaker 04

  And I mean, I'm all for a religious ritual interpretation.

• 49:10Kate Lister?

  You're going to tell me now that like he married her or something?

• 49:13Speaker 04

  No, but I think that, that is possibly just, he loved his grandmother.

• 49:17Kate Lister?

  Oh, he loved his granny.

• 49:18Speaker 04

  And, and he wanted, or the people who buried him, of course, the dead don't bury themselves, wanted him to have that in the afterlife, which is kind of sweet. Gosh, what would I want to be preserved? I mean, I quite like my feet.

• 49:32Kate Lister?

  Feet, yeah.

• 49:33Speaker 04

  Feet.

• 49:34Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 49:35Speaker 04

  And again, if, if the body is dehydrated, that's probably part that looks quite lifelike because we don't have a lot of.

• 49:44Kate Lister?

  Nice, okay.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  You know?

• 49:45Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:46Speaker 04

  Fleshiness in the feet.

• 49:48Kate Lister?

  All right, okay.

• 49:48Speaker 04

  So feet.

• 49:49Kate Lister?

  Keep the feet, want the feet looking good. Campbell, you have been amazing to talk to. Thank you so much. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 49:58Speaker 04

  At Egypt MCR on the socials.

• 50:01Kate Lister?

  Will you come back again and tell us more about ancient Egypt?

• 50:03Speaker 04

  I would be delighted, Kate, yes.

• 50:05Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much.

• 50:08Kate 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 with you and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov, produced by Sophie G. McKenna Fernandez. The engineer was Hanif Hussain and 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.