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Controversial Truths About Ancient Egypt Masterpost

• The pyramids were built by contemporary workers who received wages and were fed and taken care of during construction
• The Dendera “lightbulb” is a representation of the creation myth and has nothing to do with electricity
• We didn’t find “““copper wiring””” in the great pyramid either
• Hatshepsut wasn’t transgender
• The gods didn’t actually have animal heads
• Hieroglyphs aren’t mysteriously magical; they’re just a language (seriously we have shopping lists and work rosters and even ancient erotica)
• The ancient Egyptian ethnicity wasn’t homogeneous
• Noses (and ears, and arms) broke off statues and reliefs for a variety of reasons, none of which are “there is a widespread archaeological conspiracy to hide the Egyptian ethnicity”

• The carvings at Abydos aren’t modern machines but recarvings over old carvings. Sure they look like them but if you can read hieroglyphs and know that Ramesses II will even usurp the carvings of his own father just to be a little shit

• ‘No soot on the ceilings and walls of the Dendera temple!’ is actually because of extensive restoration works and not because Egyptians were in on shit like Baghdad “batteries”
• While the Egyptians were fine-ass astronomers they didn’t align any of their enormous and/or important buildings to modern star constellations, because constellations look very different now than they did ~5000 years ago 
• The pyramid is the simplest, sturdiest shape with which to build and many different cultures discovered this in their own time. There were never any weird fish humans/aliens involved

• The sphinx of Gizah is only an approximate 5000 years old; the 10,000 year/rain erosion nonsense is proven hokum
• Speaking of that particular sphinx, the Napoleonic expedition is not responsible for its missing nose
• Akhenaten was not a “heretic” by contemporary standards
• Ramses II appropriated a lot of his predecessors’ buildings/reliefs and isn’t really deserving of the epithet “the Great”
• The Battle of Kadesh ended in a stalemate (twice)

• While they had feline deities throughout their history, Egyptians didn’t actually worship cats themselves. This was a later Greek/Ptolemaeic addition
• It was not, in fact, practice to shave off eyebrows after cats died; Herodotus lied about that
• Herodotus lied about a lot of things and many misconceptions about ancient Egypt can be traced back to his Greek ass

I can’t believe I forgot my favourite Hill to Die On

• Seth was not the god of “evil”, and despite his chaos providing a foil to order, he wasn’t completely villified until very late in Egyptian history, when he became associated with despised foreign enemies

Hats off to the few of you who’re reblogging this with tags saying you’re going to check my claims later. You make me not entirely despair of this hellhole.

Here are some vetted Egyptological books/sources (that are by and large appropriate for a lay-audience) you can find most, if not all of the above:

• Lehner, M., The Complete Pyramids
• Wilkinson, R. H., The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt
• Hornung, E., The One and the Many: Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt
• Dunand, F. & Zivie-Coche, C., Gods and Men in Egypt
• Kemp, B., Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization
• Bard, K., An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt
• Stevenson Smith, W., The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt
• Kitchen, K. A., The Life and Times of Ramesses II, King of Egypt
• Sweeney, D., Sex and Gender (in Ancient Egypt)
• McDowell, A. G., Village Life in Ancient Egypt: 

  Laundry Lists and Love Songs

• Te Velde, H., Seth, God of Confusion 

Guys do me a solid and reblog this version instead of continuously asking for sources on the other versions thanks