Status Updates From Egypt: Land of the Pharaohs...

These last pages of the book are a timeline, references, and sources, but it's the timeline that I'm more focused on.
From what I'm seeing, it looks like ancient Egyptian royalty was mainly Sub-Saharan just from the sculptures of the different pharaohs. The populace may have been more diverse. But as time went on and the deserts didn't keep out invaders, Egypt became invaded from the Middle-East and Greece.

"About four years older than her preadolescent bridegroom, Ankhesenamen, third daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, married Tutankhamen at the time of his coronation. Perhaps she inspired his affection early in the marriage by nurturing him during the difficult transition from boyhood to kingship. And the bonds may have deepened as the couple faced the tragedy of a stillborn child." Weren't they brother and sister?

Rameses II is probably the second most famous pharaoh of all of ancient Egypt with just the amount of monuments, campaigns, and recordings he made to himself. This includes a massive tomb to himself in the Valley of Kings.

"On November 14, 1165 BC, during the reign of Rameses III, the laborers of Deir el Medina became so exasperated by delays of supplies that they threw down their tools and marched off the job. Gathering together, the workmen staged what may have been the first sit-down strike in history...'It is because of hunger and thirst that we came here. There is no clothing, no fat, no fish, no vegetables.'" Socialism FTW!

The laborers reported to their tomb as if a factory worker on a timecard, and there is even a list of various excuses! "Eye trouble" and "brewing beer" were popular ones (you're in the desert and in Egypt, so understandable), but "could not come to work because he was busy embalming his mother" takes the cake for most inventive!

"The wives of the workmen cared for their many children, baked bread, and wove clothing. Under Egyptian law, these women of long ago had property rights more advanced than those of the wives of the American and British archeologists studying them. They held title to their own wealth and to a third of all material goods." And in some cases today, wives still don't have their own fortune or inherit it from their parent

"Contrary to popular belief, the royal tomb artisans were not slave laborers but highly skilled artisans. They lived with their families in mud-brick houses with flat roofs made of wood beams and matting." See.

They even had tweezers, razors, wigs, and cosmetic boxes!

"These [ostraca] fragments, which were used like scrap paper by the Egyptians, proved to be letters, receipts, work records, law suits, laundry lists, even magical spells to ward off illness." The more things change, the more they stay the same. Even back then society was as complex as it is now. It makes for some interesting thoughts on how we should perceive ancient society.

"During his four-year reign, Ay eradicated inscriptions honoring Tutankhamen, replacing them with ones glorifying himself, and, within a few generations, the boy-king's name was routinely omitted from the official lists of Egypt's rulers, just as Akhenaten's was. But in an ironic twist of history, it is Tutankhamen who has become celebrated around the world." That omission had saved this treasure trove it seems like.

Much like later Roman art showing a glimpse of the attitudes, thoughts, and humors of all walks of Roman life, ancient Egyptians were very much the same way with their art and its varieties.

The three sarcophagi, each a work of art of colored glass and gold, is an example of the amount of wealth that these kings had and an example of how much of it was stolen from ancient tomb robbers.

Funny how only after disturbing King Tut's tomb did people (including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes) declare that there was a curse placed on the tomb only because one guy died, and not on any of the other excavations of the other tombs.

If Tutankhamen's/Tut's tomb had 3000 objects that they had to take out and record, imagine what all of the other tombs had if they hadn't been robbed!

"Agony is frozen on the face of an unembalmed body. Bound hand and foot, the anonymous victim had been enclosed in sheepskin -- considered ritualistically unclean by the Egyptians -- and placed in a plain coffin for reasons unknown. He was apparently left there to suffocate. The dryness of the tomb dehydrated his body, preserving it." Sounds like Imhotep from The Mummy. Better not read from the Book of the Dead.

The sculpture of Queen Tiy shows that she was Sub-Saharan. So, this makes me think that Egypt, particularly pre-Hellenistic period, was very diverse with a variety of skin-tones and peoples living in this river valley and along the coast.

Mummies can not only reveal blood lineages but also how the environment affected their daily lives! Blackening of the lungs revealed exposure to smoke from lamps and cooking fires, silicosis from dust storms, sand particles in the digestive system from eating bread that contained them and wore teeth down as well. Parasites and bacteria from the Nile could also be found.

Nefertiti does not seem to have much of a role post-Akhenaten's death in succession or in relation to the following pharaohs. It is believed that she reigned briefly and may have been regent-mother of the famous Tutankhamen/Tut. After that, nothing.

But the following pharoahs certainly didn't waste time in returning Egypt's religion to the old gods.

"King Ashuruballit I of Assyria boldly demanded of Akhenaten: 'Why are my messengers kept standing in the open sun? They will die in the open sun. If it does the king good to stand in the open sun, then let the king stand there and die in the open sun. Then will there be profit for the king!'" D-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMMNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The people back then had as much sass as they do today!

The sculpt of Nefertiti here definitely doesn't show that she was Sub-Saharan, unlike some "historians" that perpetuate the lie that all ancient Egyptians were Sub-Saharan before Middle-Eastern, Mediterranean, and Arabic conquerors arrived over a period of a thousand years.

"In the view of some scholars, however, the king was too preoccupied with his religious obsessions to look to the outside world. Displaying few signs of the military virtues of his forefathers, he seemed more interested in direction the works of his artists and worshipping his god than in leading his army." Especially when he believes that he is his god incarnate, it stands to reason he wouldn't want to risk himself.

"An unfinished limestone sculpture shows Akhenaten affectionately holding and kissing one of his daughters. Such representations were intended not only to suggest family devotion, but also to demonstrate the blessed state in which the royal family lived as direct recipients of the sun god's beneficence." Sounds like they're trying to sugarcoat the incest that was apparent among ancient Egyptian royalty.

"These and other texts, commissioned or composed by Akhenaten, made it clear that the obligation of ordinary mortals was to worship the pharaoh as a conduit of Aten's power...in the view of some scholars, his hymns and invocations reveal Akhenaten as a pioneer of monotheism, a precursor of Abraham and Moses." The time period does match up with what we know when Judaism was beginning to form.

"Some time after [Hatshepsut's] death, her stone portraits were shattered and her name erased; who did it and why remains a mystery." Well, let's think about that: she was one of the few female rulers of the majority patriarchal Egypt in its ancient history, she had a commoner as her chief steward, she made her 12-year old stepson coregent after she assumed the throne, and made herself look more male. Sure...

"A doting Amenhotep showered [Queen Tiy] with gifts, including a man-made pleasure lake at Thebes, vast rural estates, and a temple in Nubia dedicated to her worship." In other words, he gave her her own harem complete with a massive pool, mansions, and a temple to her honor complete with worshippers. That is dedication and elitism.

"This flow of diplomatic brides was strictly one-way traffic: When the king of Babylon had the temerity to ask Akhenaten's father for an Egyptian princess in return, he was curtly informed that 'from of old, a daughter of the king of Egypt has not been given to anyone.'" Pretty sure the translation here is not exact as Pharoah's grew up believing they were divine and could only marry divinity, hence the incest.

"At the time of [Akhenaten's] birth, the New Kingdom was at its apogee, with a sphere of influence extending far beyond its boundaries. To the south, Nubia lay under the direct control of an Egyptian viceroy, while across the Sinai, in Western Asia, tribal chieftains took care to heed the pharaoh's wishes and curry his favor." Any chance those "tribal chieftains" were Canaanites, the ancestors of Hebrews?

It is this history of the Egyptians erasing the evidence of previous pharoah's out of hatred or jealousy that has some conspiracy-minded Christians to believe that the Egyptians had erased "evidence" of the 10 Plagues of Egypt from their recordings. But there would've been physical evidence as well to support their claims that it happened.

It's also incredible how the tombs of these kings are able to rise higher than the Statue of Libery, the Taj Mahal, Saint Peter's Basilica, and even the Cologne Cathedral.

And what Christians call "Jacob's Ladder" were to Egyptians were the steps for their god-kings to ascend up to their version of heaven after they had died.