Sheep and Goats

Tag: Bob Brier

Notes from Ancient Egypt: Weighing in on Joseph and the Exodus Account: Part 1

Sitting in on Bob Brier’s Egyptology lecture series for Great Courses, you learn that nations don’t war on their neighbors. They don’t conquer them. They “beat up on them.” If he said it once, he said it a hundred times. List the accomplishments of any pharaoh: he built the temples, he built the tombs, he beat up on the Syrians (or whoever).

“Beating up” is especially emphasized in Egypt, for with them, there was no place like home. Egyptians warred with their neighbors constantly—“peace was not a virtue in Egypt,” Bob says—but they never established garrisons in those conquered lands. Why—were you to die thousands of miles from home, how could you be properly mummified? And if you weren’t that, what would happen to your chances at the afterlife?

So they didn’t stay. They “beat up” their neighbors, left demands for yearly tribute, but after a while, people forget. You have to go and “beat them up again,” to remind them they had better pay—carting off “everything that wasn’t nailed down” while you were at it.

What is it with this guy? Is he from the Bronx? In fact, he is. And even though he’s a professor steeped in Egyptian honors at Long Island University, he still lives in the Bronx. (as of 1999, when he recorded these lectures). Of the supports used to raise a body so mummy wrappings could be wound beneath him—“it’s like jacking up a car,” he adds helpfully, possibly while gazing through his window at a muffler being attached to a jacked-up car).

(Photo by Sam LaRussa)

What would he do when he comes to Bible accounts? I wondered. He will blow them away, of course, but will he do it with respect or ridicule? He seems like a nice guy. But sometimes people with brains lose it when it comes to spiritual things.

To my surprise, he does not blow them away. He treats them with great respect and allows that they are probably true in essence. To be sure, the “external evidence” that is archeology is scant. Archaeology corroborates the Bible in many things, says Bob, but it says next to nothing about the Israelites in Egypt. However, what he calls the “internal evidence” is strong, and as an Egyptologist, he has learned how the two must be combined.

After the Old Kingdom period, during which the pyramids were built, there arose the “Hyksos,” kings who ruled from the north, the delta region. The word means “rulers of foreign lands.” Could Joseph’s family have been the Hyksos? Not much is known of the Hyksos, Brier says, they “didn’t integrate well,” Some have said they were the family of Joseph. Josephus says so. Therefore, I say so, too. I mean, someone has to correspond to Joseph and his brothers. The north is a damp and marshy region, where archeological finds are meagre, inferior, and badly damaged. It is the dry climate to the south that preserves papyri for thousands of years.

At this point Bob Brier assigns his listeners homework. They are to read Genesis 37-50. Then he narrates the story—just who was Joseph and what was his involvement with Egypt, highlighting what these “guys” are doing and what those “guys” are doing.

There is no external evidence for Joseph, but what is the internal evidence? Does the story “hang together?” It does, he thinks. He recounts the Bible story, which ends in a tearful tale of forgiveness—Joseph sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, his quick rise in Potipher’s house, his reversal and hard times, his meteoric rise to fame upon deciphering the dream that had perplexed Pharaoh, and how those same brothers approach and bow before him decades later—he, the one now in charge of alleviating famine.

In a dream that nobody can figure out for Pharaoh until someone remembers that Joseph in prison had a knack for that sort of thing, he is brought to interpret the dream. Seven lean cows are preceded by seven fat cows. The lean ones eat up the fat ones! They are years of famine following years of plenty. During the years of plenty, preparation can be made for the years of famine. “Based upon Joseph’s interpretation of dreams, the economy of Egypt is planned for the next 14 years.”

Joseph shows what a “sharp businessman” he is during the famine period, is how Bob Brier puts it (perhaps as he is buying a used car from a sharp businessman on the corner lot). People get destitute enough that they eventually sell him their land in return for food. He makes Pharaoh very wealthy, and Pharaoh rewards him.

The ring that Pharaoh gives to Joseph—that also is how they would do it in Egypt, a ring to the “right hand man.” A signet ring. A sign of authority. When the Bible says, everybody cried out Abrek after Joseph—that’s “real Egyptian.” Somebody knew what he was talking about. He deciphers the phrase as roughly meeting ‘Let God be with you.’ (Genesis 41: 42-43)

For a long time, Bob had a problem with Egyptian priests admitting defeat in interpreting Pharaoh’s dream. They never admitted defeat in anything. But later finds cleared it up for him. There is a papyrus in the British Museum which is a book for interpreting dreams.

All dreams meant something, the Egyptians believed. They were all prophetic. The trick was in interpreting them. When you had a dream, you went to the priest to see what it meant. Everything was written down in a book. The priests didn’t “just wing it.” They looked it up in a book. “If it’s not in the book, you’re stuck,” Bob says. So Joseph‘s account has the ring of truth to it, he says. When they said to Pharaoh, We don’t know, about his dream, it just meant that nothing about fat cows or lean cows was in the book—it didn’t go there. So it wasn’t the fault of the priests, who never would have admitted a fault—it wasn’t in the book. (Genesis 41)

There’s a Egyptian inscription on Sahel Island of seven years when the Nile did not rise, resulting in famine. Another inscription shows skeletal figures of people who were not slaves. Potipher is an Egyption name. Goshen is where the brothers of Joseph settled—a real Egyptian place in the delta region. Two cities are cited with names they had at the time, and not names they would be given later. Joseph (and Jacob) are embalmed by the Egyptians and mourned for the proper period. The Joseph story is written by someone who knew Egypt, Brier states. Testifying that Hebrews did indeed come to settle in Egypt is the excavation of a classic Israelite four-room house, with its unique floor plan. A full-sized model of one can be seen at Semitic Museum at Harvard University.

“Internally, we get a feeling for the Joseph story that it fits. It’s not archaeological evidence, but the story fits.” Embalming for 40 days, mourning for 70. For a long time that was not understood, but it turns out that is how Egyptian‘s did it. (Genesis 50:3)

The Hyksos did not control all of Egypt. Instead, they coexisted with the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Dynasty, which were based in Thebes, 500 miles to the south. Warfare between they and the pharaohs of the late Seventeenth Dynasty eventually ran the Hyksos out of Egypt. (and Bob approves of this, because the Hyksos are not “his guys”—they are not real Egyptian) Later leaders of them would be portrayed as oppressive and warlike.

A papyrus of the time, sent by the last Hyksos king to the Prince of Thebes, reads: “The hippopotami in your pool are keeping me awake at night. They have to be silenced.” What exactly does that mean? Dunno, but it’s not friendly. Inflammatory for sure, Bob says. The Prince sends an army in retaliation. How does it turn out? No idea. The papyrus breaks off. The first and the last portions of an ancient papyrus roll is often no good. The inside end is wrapped so tightly that it breaks. the outside end is on the outside where it gets knocked around a lot, torn and scuffed up over time.

See Part II, Evidence of the Exodus

….Visit Smashwords bookstore. Also available at Amazon & other ebook retailers.

May 19, 2021
The Exodus: Did it Really Happen? The Musings of an Egyptologist (Part 2)

“There’s no straightforward archaeological evidence” for the Exodus account, says Egyptologist Bob Brier in his Great Courses lecture series, and from that one might conclude that he will trash it. But he doesn’t. There is internal evidence for it and the internal evidence holds up, he says.

Brier’s not concerned that the external evidence is not there. The Egyptians kept only records of their victories, never their defeats, and the Exodus would for sure have been a defeat for them. “If you read all the battle accounts of all the pharaohs, they won every one. Some of them they just kept winning closer to home, as they retreated.”

He also is not concerned because, even if there had been such records, they would never have survived in damp delta area where all the Hebrew action takes place. Chimes in Thomas Mudloff, another researcher: “Indeed, archaeologically we have virtually nothing of this nature from the Delta. The fact is that the entire area is simply too wet for material of this sort [papyrus] to survive. Anyone familiar with the problems of excavation in the Delta will immediately understand. The ancient ground level is now some twenty feet or more below the modern surface and the water table is so high in the area that most current excavations must employ the constant use of pumps to keep the diggings dry.”

Mudloff also builds upon Brier’s first point—that the Egyptians kept no record of defeats, only victories. In the attempt to account for that, the reason that immediately springs to mind is that of pride. Victors write history down to this day, and whenever they think they can get away with it, they are equally inclined to hide whatever embarrasses them. But there is another factor: that of the Egyptian religious belief that “once anything is written down or spoken it may have the ability to be perpetuated and perhaps repeated, something that is part of the nature of Egyptian religious beliefs. We see examples in the Egyptian’s desire to have their names spoken after death in order to maintain their existence in the afterlife, and so the idea that writing an event down will also make it possible for the event to continue, perhaps recurring at some future point. Surely so catastrophic an event as so many slaves being let go at once would not be something the Egyptians would wish to commemorate.”

Besides, Brier doesn’t think the birth of the Jewish nation would be all that important to anyone else. “Do you think the Hittite king cares about what’s happening in upper Egypt?… Nobody cared.” He compares it to the early stirrings of the American Revolution. Would anyone in the Middle East have cared about it enough to take note of the details? He thinks not.

I’m not so sure about this comparison. According to Rahab, the Exodus was the talk of the town in Jericho: She “went on to say to [the Israelite spies]: ‘I do know that Jehovah will certainly give you the land, and that the fright of you has fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land have become disheartened because of you. For we have heard how Jehovah dried up the waters of the Red Sea from before you when you came out of Egypt . . . . When we got to hear it, then our hearts began to melt. . . ’” (Joshua 2:9-11)

But Rahab is one of the little people, telling the fears of the little people that are not necessarily in the official report. Being a little person, she is only a hairbreadth away from being a fictional one, and until her Facebook page is found, most scholars will suppose she is.

So get used to it—there’s little external evidence for the Exodus. (though there is some, as will be seen) That said, Brier looks at the “internal evidence” “Does the story hold together internally?” He examines the details and declares that it does.

One detail he likes (with every such detail, he says: “So that’s pretty good,” as in building a case) is the straw in the bricks. “[Moses and Aaron] go to [Pharaoh] and say, ‘let my people go’—not only that, but it’s what we would call chutzpah, they say we want three days off! To celebrate a festival to our God. And Pharaoh really thinks this is outrageous. …He says you’re not getting the three days off to celebrate your holiday, and not only that, we are not giving you any straw for your bricks,” the non-Bronx version found at Exodus 5:10.

Bricks in Egypt were made with straw to give it strength. But they were not made that way in Canaan. The factoid points to an authentic account of someone who knew Egypt, not a made-up-later tale from a Canaanite outsider. Brier likes the fact that they worked with bricks, and not the stones that a later writer might suppose from the pyramids and tombs. He likes where they did it, “building cities as storage places for Pharaoh, namely, Pithom and Raamses.” (Exodus 1:11) There were such places and they were storage cities in the days of Ramses II. Brier thinks that Ramses II (Ramses the Great) would have been the pharaoh of the Exodus, assuming that there was one.

He likes how the Hebrews got into their bondage: “In time there arose over Egypt a new king who did not know Joseph. And he proceeded to say to his people: “Look! The people of the sons of Israel are more numerous and mightier than we are. Come on! Let us deal shrewdly with them, for fear they may multiply, and it must turn out that, in case war should befall us, then they certainly will also be added to those who hate us and will fight against us and go up out of the country.” (Exodus 1:8-10)

It fits in well with a previous lecture of his on how Egypt pushed back at Libya, taking captives: “It seems that the Egyptians always minded when foreigners become too numerous. It was okay to have a few, but when they became a large body to be reckoned with they didn’t like that. As for example, remember the Exodus?”

He also likes a detail of Exodus 1:16, in which Pharaoh lays plans to kill off the newborn Hebrew boys. He there instructs the midwives: “When you help the Hebrew women to give birth and you see them on the stool for childbirth, you must put the child to death if it is a son; but if it is a daughter, she must live.”

The Hebrew word for “stool for childbirth” literally means “two stones,” as in ‘a stone under each buttock.’ Egyptians did give birth that way—it can be seen in their hieroglyphs—and it makes more sense than the modern way of lying prone, for it allows for gravity to assist. One source even tells of an old Egyptian put-down of a capricious man as: “He left me like a woman on the bricks.” What kind of a lowlife would do such a thing?

There are even a few who think “watch the two stones” has nothing to do with the birthing stool and everything to do with the testicles of the newborn! If you see them coming down the birth canal, kill the one who has them.

The two midwives mentioned in the Bible, Shifra and Puah, fear God, and so they disobey Pharaoh. In time, Pharaoh wants to know why: “The king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them: ‘Why have you kept the male children alive?’ The midwives said to Pharʹaoh: ‘The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women. They are lively and have already given birth before the midwife can come in to them.’”

Arthur Waskow says that the midwives are very clever here—they placate Pharaoh with a pun that appeals to his prejudices. ‘They’re not civilized like us—they drop them fast, like animals,’ is what he hears. It makes perfect sense to him. And Yahweh rewards the midwives for it, Brier says. He doesn’t use the anglicized ‘Jehovah’ form of God’s name, but neither does he say “The LORD.”

What of the frequent expression that Pharaoh’s “heart was hardened?” “Very Egyptian, very Egyptian,” Bob says. The Egyptians believed that a person thought with his heart. After all, it is the heart that beats faster when someone is excited.

Brier likes the name “Moses,” and says that it’s a purely Egyptian name. It means “birth.” It is incorporated into the names of several pharaohs: Ahmose, (“the moon god is born”) Thutmose. (“Thoth is born”) In Greek, the name with its appended suffix becomes Amosis and Thutmosis. Ramesses is similar in pattern: (Re is the one who bore him)

If this Egyptian etymology is correct, it makes an even greater point for authenticity, because the Bible writer doesn’t appear to know that, and he attributes a Hebrew setting to the name, a play on the verb mashah (to draw out [of water]). We read that the weaned infant was brought to Pharaoh’s daughter, “so that he became a son to her; and she proceeded to call his name Moses and to say: ‘It is because I have drawn him out of the water.’” (2:10) The application doesn’t quite fit, say some, for the word construction implies that Moses does the drawing, whereas the text says otherwise, and the only way to solve the difficulty is to ignore it. Moreover, why would Pharaoh’s daughter name the child with Hebrew etymology and not her own? Without intending to, the Bible writer gives added reason to regard the account as genuine.

There is a document, known as the Leiden Papyrus, from the time of Ramses the Great. It contains an instruction to “distribute grain rations to the soldier and to the Apiru who transport stones to the great Pylon of Ramses. Some connect “Apiru” (it means “stateless people”) with the origin of the “Hebrew” that it sounds like. It fits well with Exodus 1:11, “they appointed chiefs of forced labor over [the people of Israel] to oppress them with hard labor, and they built storage cities for Pharaoh, namely, Pithom and Raamses.”

Ramses the Great ruled for 67 years, had about 100 children, of which 52 were sons, and outlived many of them, including his firstborn, Amunhirkepshef. It is his 13th son, Merneptal, who succeeds him as pharoah. Of his early military campaigns, (“he’s going to list the countries that he’s beaten up,” Bob says) Merneptal has recorded in his fifth year that “Canaan has been plundered into every sort of woe; Ashkelon has been overcome; Gezar has been captured; Yano’am was made nonexistent; Israel is laid waste, its seed is not.” This is the first (and only) mention of “Israel” in ancient Egyptian records.

It is telling how the word “Israel” is written. At the end of every other mention is a hieroglyph of three hills. It means “country.” At the end of “Israel” is the drawing of a man and a woman. It denotes Israel is not yet an established place, not yet a country. It is still a people wandering in the Sinai wilderness? If so, and counting backwards, might Amunhirkepshef be the firstborn of Pharoah who’s death at last twisted his arm to let the Israelites leave Egypt?

Bob doesn’t buy into the Bible number of Israelites leaving Egypt, 600,000–all men—not including families. It’s like the fish tale that gets bigger each time you tell it, he says. He thinks the number is much smaller, maybe by a factor of 1000. Nor does he buy into the Red Sea. It is a mistranslation of “Reed Sea,” (Hebrew: Yam Suph) he says. I am reminded of a tale somewhere in Jehovah’s Witness literature in which a schoolteacher tries “educate” a child away from his faith in the Exodus account by asserting that it was not the Red Sea, it was the “Reed Sea,” and the latter was a marshy area of water probably just “two inches” deep—whereupon the child begins to snicker. When the annoyed teacher demands the reason why, it turns out the child is amused at his teacher thinking the Egyptians could drown in just two inches of water. Maybe he was combining the image with God “taking wheels off their chariots so that they were driving them with difficulty.” (Exodus 14:25) Come on!—how can anyone not smile at that image?

“Suph” means “reed” in Hebrew, and from that fact comes the “Reed Sea” derivation, a place that no longer exists, but some think might be bodies of water replaced by the Suez canal. However, there is also a Hebrew word,“Soph,” which means “destroy,” “end,” or even “storm-wind.” What a fine pun it would be, some have suggested, to let one stand for the other, “suph” for “soph,” since the Egyptian army did indeed come to an violent end in that sea. Besides, King Solomon later builds a fleet of ships “upon the shore of the Red Sea (also Yam Suph) in the land of Edom.” (1 Kings 9;26) He wouldn’t do that if the sea was only two inches deep.

To make a pun not so fine, you can only water down the Exodus account so much before you create problems with Brier’s earlier lecture of Ramses II’s life. His early years were warlike. No battle in history is so well-documented as Ramses fighting the Hittites at Kadesh in his fifth year. It is carved everywhere—Egypt’s version of Washington crossing the Delaware, Bob states. Afterwards, Ramses relocates from Memphis to more strategically located Pi-Ramses to the north, because he means to return and pummel the Hittites, perhaps yearly.

Yet, he later experiences a “midlife crisis,” as Brier puts it more than once. He signs a peace treaty with the Hittites, very much to their benefit since they were also battling the Assyrians, but for Egypt, making peace was unheard of and seemingly unnecessary. The treaty may be the first one recorded in history. A temple wall inscription says Hittite and Egyptian soldiers “ate and drank face to face, not fighting.” Bob declares it nothing short of “amazing—Hittites were one of Egypt’s nine traditional enemies.”

Thereafter, Brier states, Ramses II becomes “a more sedentary pharaoh,” who turns to supervising tomb building, his last forty years so different from “the glorious beginning” of his reign. Ramses “didn’t seem to have any fight left in him,” says Bob. “Why did Ramses have a midlife crisis?” Bob Brier ends a lecture with this cliffhanger: “The Exodus, as we shall see in the next lecture, may have had something to do with it.”

Well, it wouldn’t have had something to do with it if the Exodus was some penny ante affair involving just a few hundred fleeing people, and chariots that bog down in the two-inch mud trying to catch them. No, a “midlife crisis” only ensues if it was a spectacular event involving thousands of Israelites and the mass destruction of Pharaoh’s troops.

Does Bob not realize the non-sequitur he sets up? Or does he realize it very well, but also realizes that he puts his status as learned Egyptologist at risk by siding too openly with the Bible account, and so he avoids speculating on the available facts (as he doesn’t elsewhere)? Dunno. Still, I appreciate that the Egyptian record allows very well for the Exodus account to be reality, even if it doesn’t nail down the point. Given what archeologists have uncovered thus far, you could hardly expect it to.

(Thomas F. Mudloff is the author of Hieroglyphs for Travelers)

Photo by CCXpistiavos

See Evidence of Joseph:

….Visit Smashwords bookstore. Also available at Amazon & other ebook retailers.

May 18, 2021
Live Tweets from Ancient Egypt: Part 7

Great Courses, Bob Brier, tweets composed and sent while dog-walking. AI screwups corrected in brackets

For continuity, start with Part 1:

King Amenemhut I has a prophecy about himself. It is an Leningrad museum. He is prophesied as son of man. Previous ferrules [pharaohs] were son of Ray. [re—the sun-god] It is to say a commoner is destined to be King.

Brier thanks he may have been someone like a prime minister to the previous feral [pharaoh], not royalty.

Amenemhut does a land survey. It is as if to say “I have arrived.” The bad old days are gone. He has himself a pyramid build, just like in the good old days.

The opening of Amenemhut Pyramid, alligns north. Lines up with the North star, the north star is fixed. All the stars rotate around it. It is as if the feral [pharaoh] says I am fixed, I am just as stable.

He was murdered, Brier is pretty sure. But he had made his son as a call regent. [co-regent]How do you say the feral [pharaoh] was murdered, when the feral [pharaoh] is a God? …1/2

How do you say the pharaoh is God when there are two coexisting ferrules? [pharaoh] Bob brings up, but doesn’t know the answer, to these questions….2/2

Six pharaohs with alternating names, Amenemhut alternates with Sesotris. Amenemhut II is grandson of Amenemhut.

Artwork that shows tired pharaohs, facially. Well-built, but tired, as the board [bored] with being feral? [pharaoh]

Papyrus exists supposedly from Amenemhut warning his son to always watch his back. ‘I was benevolent, and look where it got me,’ Very cynical papyrus, Bob Brier states.

One tired barrel [pharaoh] of that time built his pyramid with the entrance facing south, unlike all the others. To fool to robbers? It fooled Petrie the archaeologist….1/2

He found it only by excavating from the top street down until he hit the burial chamber. Even then it was an easy, for there were many passages that were dead ends…2/2

Amenemhut IV dies, he is the last of the dynasty. We don’t know too much about him. He has a temple, but it has been ruined. The dynasty ends with a queen, a sign of trouble, Bob says. Why didn’t they have a king?

Beginning of lecture 14, the second intermediate.

It is for the second time that Egypt civilization collapses almost totally, Brier says. In fact, he says Egypt is the only civilization ever to have completely collapsed twice and got its act back together both times.

If you build your pyramid in Dash sure [Dashur], Brier says, he calls it “going back to the good all days”. It is where feral Steven [Pharaoh Snefuru] build his massive pyramids. …1/2

The others that the 12th dynasty built were not that good, the ones the intermediate. Were worse still….2/2

Did those later ferrules [pharaohs], pyramids, built in – have an inferiority complex? Bob uses the phrase. He thinks so lost half. One says, not since the days of Snefuru. A bit like the temple OK guys time [of Haggai’s time] that was good, but not like of old

And early feral [pharaoh] of that next period, Whore, [Hor] short for Horus, has a statue with two arms extended straight up from the head. Bob Lykins [likens] it to a referee signaling a field goal.

Again, Brier point salt [out] that when the Greeks came in from the north, they saw this marshy triangular land at the mouth of the Nile. Because it was triangular, they called it the delta, their triangular letter. So all river deltas are named by the Greeks.

When Egyptology started, the motive was to prove the Bible. The first society so dedicated was called the Delta Exploration Society.

They dug in the Delta, hard to do because it has standing water, but they were looking for traces of the Israelites leaving Egypt.

In time it became known as the Egypt Exploration Society, I name it still holds.

The 14th and 13th dynasty, temples and tombs supposedly in the Delta, but the Delta is marshy and stuff has sunk down very hard to excavate and who knows if claimed temples are actually there? …1/2

Bob doesn’t think much of the ferrules [pharaohs] of the 13th and 14th Dynasty.

Dynasty 15 is Egypt under foreigners….2/2

The Egyptians had a very special history, Brier says. They never kept records of the bad days.

The ferrules [pharaohs] of that time record no defeats. They just keep recording victories, each one closer to home, as they retreated.

This is the warmest day of the year so far. A beautiful spring day. 78. Low humidity. No box. [bugs] Mild breeze in the dog park. No wonder those agents [ancients] went bonkers in the spring, when the earth comes back to life.

I know my dog. It does not go in the water unless it is warm, to take a drink. Some dogs instantly head for it, warm day or not.

Of this period, Egyptians worship south.[Seth] I let this pass unmentioned before, but Seth is the evil god from a prior lecture. How can a Gyptian’s were shipped [Egyptians worshipped] the evil God? Bob says we don’t really know. Maybe, he speculates…1/2

the evil god turned over a new leaf and became good….2/2

Many times, Brier says: we can’t really be sure of this, or we don’t really know much about that. I can’t help but wonder, what of the things he is sure of or thinks he does know? Is all of it that way?

The Hyksos [AI spelled this correctly—first try!] didn’t integrate well Brier says, they ruled from the north. Some have said they were the family of Joseph. Bob thinks they were illiterate. Reliefs are art work only, with no words.

There is no dynasty 16, Bob says, it’s a spurious dynasty. And he passes on to Dynasty 17, the dynasty that kick the pixels [Hyksos] out. Bob cheers this, the Egyptian‘s are back in charge—his guys.

“The hippo pot a mess [hippopotami] is in your pool are keeping me awake at night.They have to be silenced.” It’s a papyrus, from the last Hyksos king to the Prince of thieves [Thebes] 500 miles south. Inflammatory for sure.

The prince sends an army in retaliation. How does it turn out? No idea. The papyrus breaks off.

The first and the last part of the papyrus role is often no good the inside one so tightly wound that it breaks. the outside on the outside where it gets knocked around a lot.

The thieves king retaliates, dies in battle, as Bob thinks can be told from his mummy, which exists. His sons succeed in chasing the Hyksos out of Egypt, and to Palestine. Bob likes this. He sides with Egyptian’s always. They are his people.

Go to Part 8

….Visit Smashwords bookstore. Also available at Amazon & other ebook retailers

April 14, 2021
Live Tweets from Ancient Egypt: Part 6

Great Courses, Bob Brier, tweets composed and sent while dog-walking. AI screwups corrected in brackets

For continuity, start with Part 1:

After the first Egyptian dynasty period of six dynasties, comes the intermediate period, About which we know almost nothing, says Bob Brier.

Kurt Mendelson gets credit; he’s written books that Bob thinks is wrong. But Bob likes that he thinks things through. Kurt thinks Egypt went into decline when priests persuaded people that temple pyramid building was wrong …

and this led to unemployed laborers, who got so rowdy that the country went into downfall. Bob thinks he’s all wet. But who can say?

Manetho says of the first intermediate period that there were 70 Kings in 70 days. It’s not literal, Bob says. But it means turnover was high, or there were kings raining [reigning] consecutively in different places.

Bob Brier explains the period of limitations, [Lamentations] of the middle., By saying “people are complaining” it’s as good an explanation as any. And the Bible book of Lamentations is not the only such collections out there!

The value of a book of Lamentations is from the early middle period. In that, from what they are bitching about, you can piece together what went wrong in the intermediate., About which Bob says we know almost no nothing, even though they lasted as long as the current history of the United States.

Bob repeats that Snefaru was his favorite feral, [Phoraoh] for he taught the Egyptians how to build pyramids . The book of Lamentations longs for the good all days of Snefaru..

When Egyptian’s traveled, which they almost never did because Egypt was the best place on earth, and it rained, which it never did and Egypt, they said “this land has its Nile in the sky.”

That was bad. Their Nile flowed down the middle, predicable and always there. It didn’t fall haphazardly, unpredictable and not always there.

Lamentations is about divine order and social order being turned upside down. It rather reminds of the Ecclesiastes verse of foot soldiers on horseback, and princes plodding along on fort.

“I have seen servants on horses but princes walking on the earth just like servants.” Ecclesiastes 10:7

Egypt was the worlds largest bureaucracy, the first one to systematically tax. They text [taxed] according to how high was the Nile. The higher it was, the better your crops should have been.

Oh. OK. Another reason the intermediate is so hard to study is that the capital Memphis is gone. It is underwater. Two or 3 feet. Probe with a pole if you are excavating, hit something and somehow dig down to find what you have hit

So, the middle period consists of the 11th and 12th dynasties. I’ve got it now. The dynasties are consecutively numbered, and then imposed upon them is, first period, intermediate, middle, and so forth.

Bob likes the dynasty that built the pyramids, the first period. Which consisted of the first six Dynasty’s, though the fifth and sixth was all downhill, maybe even the fourth. I forget.

Bob has reached the point in history where he comes across the feral [Pharaoh] described as the first dog lover. He had five dogs. One of them was named Blackie. [this revelation caused Samson to stop in his tracks and suddenly take notice.]

This is not Sampson the Bible hero, who pushes apart the pillars. This is Samson the dog, who pees on them.

Egyptian’s were pet lovers. Look under any chair or table in the artwork, and there is often a pet. Samson is very interested now. Oh. Bob just said cats are the most highly prized Pat. Samson has lost interest, and pulls on his leash. Time to get a move on, he thinks.

I forget the rationale, but Bob is calling Kings by the name of Intel [Intef] now, first beginning with the 11th and 12th dynasties

The Egyptian’s loved words that were on the wedding poetic. [onomatopoetic]Cat was they ‘meaw.’ Donkey was a ‘ee-aw.’ Wine was urp. Bob thinks it is from burp, which is what you would do after much wine

Almost always. Middle kingdom burials are lying on their side, facing west. “They know where they’re going,” says Brier.

It is during the intermediate that all the tools [tombs] are robbed. That is one of the themes of limitations. [lamentations] “Kings have been cast up.” That is, they were dug up from their burial tubes and just cast on the earth as robbers made off with there stuff.

The New York Metropolitan Museum of art displays nearly everything at the house. There’s nothing in the basement. Unusual for a museum, which is often keeping the good stuff out of sight.

Winlock, 1920 Director of the New York Museum of Art, excavated in Egypt. He found many cool things. His museum has health [half], the Cairo Museum has the other half. It was the deal back then. Today, Egypt keeps all.

A certain religious figure is described by Bob as the Ka priest. Were the ‘ah’ sound, as in Brooklyn .Sorry, but my mind wandered to a used car lot where the star salesman might be called a cah priest.

Death Comes in the End, an Agatha Christie novel, was based on the Haggadah letters that Winthrop discovered. Agatha’s husband was an Egyptologist. She knew Egyptology.

The 11th dynasty, in the middle period, starts to restore Egypt to its heyday. Recall it started to go downhill beginning with the fifth dynasty of the first period. No more lectures for a while, until I get the next batch of CDs from the library.

Walking the dog, finishing up now, I’m passing through a field and I see many discarded masks. Did you know that those things are not biodegradable? They leave trace plastic everywhere, and animals ingest them.

And don’t get me going about plastic in the waterways. Someone this picture says more that 10K words will:

Of course, that reminds me of the NPR story about the plastic scam. 10% of all discarded plastic has been recycled, no more. It’s not feasible to recycle, for new is cheaper, and the recycled is not as good. And the makers always knew it but tried to salve public conscience to go full steam ahead with sales.

Somehow I’ll let that stand as a metaphor for this entire system of things, that promises so much, has you believing it for decades, and only toward the end do you find it delivered just 10%, if that.

Go to Part 7

….Visit Smashwords bookstore. Also available at Amazon & other ebook retailers.

April 9, 2021
Live Tweets from Ancient Egypt: Part 5

Great Courses, Bob Brier, tweets composed and sent while dog-walking. AI screwups corrected in brackets

For continuity, start with Part 1:

Lecture 9-10

Oh my. The individual tweets from Egypt are coming out pretty rough. AI does a number on them. I dress them up later for the blog post, but—should I spare followers these tweets? AI somehow managed to put a Starbucks in Ancient Egypt.

I am going to rename the Pharaohs on account of AI. Not only it screws up the names, but even one or two words on either side. Sometime I can’t decipher the sentence I have tweeted. So if you read about Richard the pyramid builder, don’t worry. I’ll make it right in the blog

Or put brackets to indicate the correction.

Now Bob is talking about the Great Pyramid. And he’s about to go into conspiracy theories. Let’s see what he has to say. Incidentally the builder of the Great Pyramid was Kenny [Khufu], son of Steven [Snefaru], who built the first one

Bob relayed some stories about the pyramid, it’s magical qualities, he doesn’t buy that I had never heard myself.

Napoleon went inside the Great Pyramid as his men marched around it. He asked to be left alone for a time. When he emerged, he was Adam.[ashen—thanks, AI] People asked him why, he would not tell them. Even on. St. Helena . He almost told someone. And then didn’t.

The Great Pyramid was built with free men, paid.Not slaves. Very little slave labor in Egypt, Bob says. The time of the Exodus was much later.

90,000 men working in three shifts.

Howard [Herodotus] the Greek historian said a Gyptian’s [Egyptians, not ‘a Gyptians’] used machines. Did he mean levers? There is no written record of how the pyramids were built. Like a trade secret.

There is a helicopter hovering 200 yards away. With a guy perched on the runner. Are they setting him down atop the power tower? I think so. Let me get it from a different angle.

Yes. It is somehow servicing the tower. Didn’t Jehovah make flying things that are soundless? Lord, this thing is noisy!!

Oh, and in case anyone is confused, this helicopter I see while walking the dog and narrating the Egyptian tweets. I’m not saying the helicopter is in ancient Egypt.

No more than 2 inches variation of level over 2 acres. Precise, but no great need for mathematics, says Bob. Still, I am reminded of Smart Ancient Syndrome (SAS). Just once I would like to see archaeologist say, my God these people were stupid! But no, it is always about how smart they were.

Tourists enter the Great Pyramid by the robber’s entrance. It was chiseled in the ninth century. The actual entrance was unknown. Today it is known, but sealed up.

Here is a pup that just brought his ball to me on the end of a strap. Dropped it at my feet. He wants me to fling it! I do and he runs happily to fetch it. Uh oh. Now he is bringing it back.

They use core bald [“corbelling”] step ceilings to relieve the weight on pyramid ceilings. I have avoided this word because a, I wasn’t sure what it was, and B, I know full well that AI would mess it all up

It is how the upper portions of the interior rooms gradually come together in a series of step-like patterns to distribute the weight. If you were upside down, you could climb them from the top as though climbing stairs..

Two theories on how the mass of stones got so high. A long ramp. That would have been a quarter-mile. A huge undertaking in itself. Or corkscrewing around the structure as it is being erected. I think I have read massive objections to both simply

as a matter of moving that much mass. Don’t know if he will go there or not. At this point, it seems like he will breeze over them as to trivial appoint to consider.

Yes, he does not expand. But does say how you can’t get a sheet of paper between the blocks. A remarkable achievement, Bob says, and then moves on to the trick of coordinating so many people to do it.

Oh OK. He attributes it to the power of a god-king, who can lean into people, make them do what he wants. That’s why he likes powerful kings so much. I’m not sure I buy that either. I mean, they can lean into him, but I’m still not sure with what result.

While all the other dogs run around the dog park, there are six now in total, but my old dog walks straight up to the people and stands by them. They always like him. One of them called him wise.

If I am right there Bob ignores the physical impossibility of certain feeds, or at least extreme improbability, then it is an example of how this system of things work. People become brilliant in their own fields, not worrying overmuch about how or if they link to other fields.

You really don’t get as much battery life as you think you should. No wonder they sell them by the dump truck load at Costco. The first time my batteries went dead, I didn’t recognize the problem. I had expected the narrative to slow down, as it would on a cassette tape.

Bob blows away the theories of some competing archaeologists. They’re wrong, he says. They probably are. Bob represents the majority view

Bob represents the majority view, and he has the platform for that reason, but so much of history is the victor writes the rules. How much of it is true here? He presents it all very well, but what of that verse that the rival comes through and says it all differently.

”The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.” Proverbs 18:17

The Greek archaeologists of another lecture series stated, What if you found figurines and Arches? Are they gods and temples? Or are they Barbie dolls and McDonald’s?

No, Napoleons troops did not shoot off the nose of the spanks. [Sphinx] Napoleon would not have allowed it.. He revered history. And a prior relief of the spanks shows its nose already shut off.

One portion of the Sphinxes beard is in the Egyptian museum. Another portion in the British Museum. Egypt would like it back. Bob thinks the British would like to give it back.

But they don’t give it back due to the president. [precedent] Give the beard back, and next thing you know, they will want the Rosetta stone back.

Almost all Egyptian tombs were west of the Nile. They even said, he’s a westerner, just as people say, ‘He’s gone south.’ Why west? Sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Ra was the sun god.

Last king of the 6th dynasty—Pepi II, is the longest ruling king in history. Ruled from a boy till his death at 98. Bob thinks maybe that’s why the old kingdom collapsed. He is a god-king, and thus cannot be supplanted. But he is too old to lead armies. Do I buy this?

Go to Part 6

….Visit Smashwords bookstore. Also available at Amazon & other ebook retailers

April 6, 2021
Live Tweets From Ancient Egypt: Part 3

Great Courses, Bob Brier, tweets composed and sent while dog-walking.

For continuity, start with Part 1:

Lecture 5

The professor said his goal was that everyone should be able to read and write his name in hieroglyphs his talks conclusion. Up till then I thought maybe the lecture would be too technical to tweet, but it’s game on!

OK, ancient Egyptian is not picture writing. Most people think it is, but it’s not. I thought it was.

Two languages are on the Rosetta Stone, but three scripts. Briar says it is like Egyptian in type, Egypt in cursive, and Greek.

St Mark entered Egypt in the first century CE, says briar. He was preaching the Trinity, which the Egyptians ate right up. They were used to trinity’s.

Egyptian Christians are cops. Monotheism is divisive, says Bob. Because it is saying I am right, and all you others are wrong. Yeah, I suppose. Sometimes things like that.

Coptic is ancient Egyptian written phonetically. And those ancient Christians were Copts, not cops. Thank you AI

In fairness, though, perhaps a few of them became cops.

As usual, I’m walking the dog. I’m keeping abreast with a pair of robins on the other side of the fence beautiful weather lately. Spring is at hand. And I saw a cartoon of Batman’s Robin peeking behind a tree presented as a sign of spring.

Neither of these dogs are mine, but they’re having a ball in the nearby creek.

The Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799, brought to Egypt Britain in in 1801, was not deciphered until 1822. When it was, the written history of ancient Egypt could be on earth,

There is an extremely frisky brown puppy that keeps getting under my feet, tripping me up. He was trying to play with my old dog, who kept saying, I don’t want to play, but remember, I’m the boss!

The Rosetta stone is basically a thank you note written by the priest of Egypt thanking time with me for excusing them from Texas. [taxes—AI strikes again] Written in hieroglyphs, because it was important and the language of the people so others could read it, and Greek, because no Greeks could read it

I don’t think Bob’s project will work, that I can write my name in hieroglyphs. But I am distracted, walking the dog. I could if I was at home.

There were no vowels in ancient Egyptian, just like ancient Hebrew. Bob says it is because people were mostly illiterate, and a vowel is just a placeholder, not very significant in itself.

The point is, and I get this, a hieroglyph does not represent a picture. It represents a sound. So choose the sounds, or hieroglyphs, that correspond to your name, and you are home free.

Oh. OK. They could be pictorial, but usually weren’t. Three ways to write hieroglyphs. One of them was a picture, if you didn’t have the space to write something out.

There are now four dogs in the dog park. A German Shepherd has entered, bigger than my dog. Oh. My dog is trying to mount. Not to worry, he’s fixed. Where are his manners?

As much as I study the Bible with this dog, it doesn’t do a bit of good. Meanwhile, Bob says hieroglyphs can be written left to right, right to left, up to down, or down to up.

It was that way for artistic purposes, Bob says. Egyptian’s liked cemetery. The nail fold up to down bisecting the country making everything symmetrical. [symmetry—the Nile flowed]…I think I will post such corrections as a nod to AI

Lecture five, just ended, was the Rosetta stone. Lecture six, just starting, is the first nation in history.

Walk is over for the frisky dog that tripped me up. They are taking him out. Of course he leans my way to say bye. And I give them a good tousle.

No Egyptian crown has ever been found. There was none in King Tuts tomb, for example, he couldn’t take it with him. Bob thinks that at any given time there was only one in existence, history, which he admits might be wrong.

Huh! Bob says Egyptian temples would have inner compartments, called holy of holies, where just the god or statue was. So maybe it wasn’t just a Hebrew thing it was an attribute of other temples.

Dusk is falling, my wife just called for me to do something else. I’ll have to come back to this later. Usually I walk the dog much earlier in the day. But we were on a mission today.

…Several times Bob refers to the relief of the person with a nose ring with string attached to a falcon, (the king) and each time he does, he appends: “this poor guy.”

When the Greeks came into Egypt, the swampy mouth area of the Nile was triangular shaped, like the Greek letter ‘delta.’ That’s how rivers today often end in deltas

Other middle eastern areas had kings, but only Egypt had a god-king, and that was a “really good thing,” Bob says. Yeah, I think so, because he can do whatever he wants.

Another reference to Plato’s philosopher kings. I wrote about these guys, and how they are in most respects reflected in the Governing Body of JWs.

Bob carries on with much enthusiasm about what you can do with a strong king, even a god-king. You can raise armies and dig irrigation ditches. You just say what you want done, and people do it! Reminds me of that centurion speaking to Jesus.

…Go to Part 4

….Visit Smashwords bookstore. Also available at Amazon & other ebook retailers

March 27, 2021
Live Tweets from Ancient Egypt: Part 4:

Great Courses, Bob Brier, tweets composed and sent while dog-walking. AI screwups corrected in brackets

For continuity, start with Part 1:

Bob starts his lecture by once again gushing about the advantages of a strong king. What comes to my mind was the Israelites pestering Samurai [Samuel—thank you, AI] before about the same. Yeah! That’s what we want! A king! Trusting in God is so for losers. We want a king!

The first Egyptian city the invading Greeks came across was Memphis. They asked the name of it They couldn’t pronounce the answer. The closest they could come was a word that later morphed into Egypt. (No, and it wasn’t because Elvis wasn’t there to say it right)

Petrie was the first archaeologists to pay his workers for every discovery they made. Up till then, the saying was that archaeologists discover only large objects, never small. The reason was that the workers would pocket the small items themselves to sell privately.

One kings mama fied arm [mummied arm] was donated to the Egyptian museum in 1890. The Director stripped the gold rings off the arm, kept them in the museum, and threw away the arm. The archaeologists later said that sometimes museums are dangerous places.

A fine bit of ancient trivia, Bob is so full of them. He is so good. This item is that jackals have an unusual digestive system, and prefer decayed meat. That’s why they would frequent cemeteries. Anything shallow buried in the sand didn’t stand much of a chance against them.

Why can broken pottery usually be found along migration routes? “Pilgrims tend to drop pottery, and break them.” Case closed.

Old Ferrells [pharoahs would have “rejuvenation ceremonies“. Easy athletic contests for them, for instance. It’s sort of reminded me of the James Earl Jones pre-funeral in the new Eddie Murphy movie. A pre-funeral that he had while he was still alive. Unfortunately, the movie is so filthy we didn’t get far into it.

Hey my Starbucks was built around a kings burial place. Sort of like a gazebo. Someone got the idea of putting a gazebo top a gazebo. And then another one. The first pyramid head five of these top each other in a step like pattern.

[I don’t know how AI made this a Starbucks. The idea is that burial places would be ancient ditches. Then someone thought to put a top over them, like a gazebo. For someone else, a top over that, and so forth.

No, there is not a Starbucks inside the Great Pyramid, though there probably would be if Starbucks had any say in it.

The professor likes an unfinished monument better than a finished one. With an unfinished one, you can see how they were constructing it.

The dog is old now, and we are not at the dog park. After a heavy rain, that park will be muddy. We are on a path it has gone many times. But lately it reaches a certain spot, says no more, and pulls as if to go back home. I always indulge him. He’s a good dog.

Sarcophagus. And esophagus. There is a relation. Bob says. The first (sarcophagus) was known as a “flesh eater.” This is because the first one of these things they opened, expecting a mummy within, was empty.

Tomb robbers, Bob says, were usually drawn from the workmen who built the tombs, they knew where things were. That’s why he thinks one decoy to him was left on touch for millennia. They knew nothing was in it.

End of lecture seven. Start of lecture eight: snap follow [Sneferu], the great pyramid builder.

There are pyramids in the desert that collapsed while being built. They didn’t always get it right. There was much trial and error, and snap a low [Sneferu] was the one who figured out how to do it.

Oh. One of the early pyramids collapsed because the corners were built on unstable sand, that shifted. Isn’t there a verse in which Jesus says you are not supposed to do that?

Bob has been inside this damaged pyramid, you drop down, walk through a long tunnel, then have to climb a ladder 55 feet high. He says it’s the most dangerous thing he’s ever done. Inside are cedar beams, Cedars of Lebanon…

They were carted in at the time of building in an attempt to shore up the collapsing room, alas, to no avail—the tomb was abandoned and not used. But Snefalu’s [Sneferu—Snefalu is my bad—was I thinking of Scooby Do?] His hird pyramid was good. He is buried there.

The Egyptians were terrible sailors, Bob says. Let me say it right out, he says. It is because they were spoiled by the Nile.

If you look at Egyptian paintings, you can tell if the boat is going north or south by whether or not the sails are up. if they are the boat is heading south with the wind at its back. If they are not, it is heading north letting the current take it downstream.

Go to Part 5

….Visit Smashwords bookstore. Also available at Amazon & other ebook retailers

March 26, 2021
Live Tweets from Ancient Egypt: Part 2

Great Courses, Bob Brier, tweets composed and sent while dog-walking.

For continuity, start with Part 1:

Lecture 3:

One cute thing to get your head around is that upper Egypt is lower than lower Egypt. That’s because the Nile river flows MapWise uphill, but like all rivers flows from up to down

Egyptian gods that are female always have names ending in T. That does make things easier.

The professor mentions Isis, the Egyptian god, what the name is twice supplanted, once by the terrorist group, and once by Bob Dylan‘s cool song, best performed at Woodstock.

Isis also is a female guard. It is a T God. But we know what S form because the Greeks got a hold of it.

Bob reaches the point of saying, in his classroom, students are all ready to kill him after he says what he is about to say. So I pause here and tweet, before seeing just what it is he says. Will I want to kill him to?

I’m sure he doesn’t mind being called Bob, either. If he did, he would not be Bob briar. He would be Robert briar.

Oh yeah. He can live. He just says philosophical questions have answers, to contrast with some who think they don’t. As an example, he says is there life after death? It has an answer, even if it is unanswerable, in his opinion.

Whoops! My bad. He says they can be answered.

His example is, does the universe have a beginning or not? Did it come into being, or has it always existed. So far, OK. But then he says if we can disapprove one, the alternative will stand. Not according to skeptic Michael Shermer‘s heads I win tails you lose rules.

that say just I am wrong (or can’t answer everything) , it doesn’t mean you are right. I think he is just trying to stack the deck.

The beginning of Lecture 4:

So Napoleon was an OK guy the professor says. I’m sure he doesn’t mean across-the-board. Or maybe he does. That’s how it is with academics. They’re blown away by other academics. And Napoleon had some culture to him.

Napoleon is the guy, who first came up with a scheme of odd numbers on one side of the street and even numbers on the other. He got tired of not being able to find things

Ha! Now he mentions cabinet of curiosities that wealthy people used to have back then. I wrote about that, here.

Napoleon assembled a huge scientific retinal for his conquering trip to Egypt. In 1898. Very few of them knew where they were going. It was a secret. His political mission was to mess up the British, taking their colony. His personal reason was to see Egypt.

The fighting stopped for 10 minutes when Admiral Nelson blew up the French ship Lorient. Nobody could believe it. They were in shock. Nelson had navigated between the French ships and the shore, and blasted the French who had guns facing out.

After destroying the French fleet, Nelson sailed away, stranding Bonaparte. But Bonaparte took his 150 scientist and began an institute for studying Egypt.

Napoleon abandoned his army, set sail to eat to Paris, declared himself the conqueror of Egypt. The brothers know the truth, and ridiculed him. But he had started the beginnings of Egyptology. Next year next year his scientist at least the definitive volume on Egyptology.

OK, I didn’t know this, or much of anything else. The Rosetta Stone was found by Bonapartes expedition, some Egypt items went to Bretton part of the peace treaty, some were retained by the French. The French wanted to keep the result of stone that contains the key to…1/2

But the British insisted upon it. But the French had made a copy of it before hand. So they got the benefit from it too. This is the beginning of Egyptian antiquities being collected. A huge collection in Britain, and an equally huge collection in the Louvre

Go to Part 3

….Visit Smashwords bookstore. Also available at Amazon & other ebook retailers

March 24, 2021
Live Tweets from Ancient Egypt: Part 1

How much composition can you do walking the dog while listening to the Great Courses on CD? We will see. I know one thing, attempting this will improve my listening skills, which my wife will tell you are not stellar. It is enough to stop periodically and send a tweet via the phone. There is no way to rewind, and to play the entire track again is just too much—the dog will only tolerate so much inattention. So I have to catch it the first time.

This is why, in the tweets to follow, I don’t give the Egyptologist’s name. I missed it in the opening remarks. Now that I am home in my chair, I see on the CD jacket that it is Bob Brier. He is all enthused about his topic. The Great Courses professors are never duds. Only one got on my nerves a little bit, a history professor with such a passion for his subject that he seemed to present all characters within as though they were his children, some being naughty and some being nice. But once I adjusted, I was okay even with that. And you should hear the music fellow—alas, I forgot his name, but he has done several courses, showing off Beethoven! Whoa, is it ever contagious. You do come away thinking you know your Beethoven when he is done. (Granted, it didn’t take much, since I knew virtually nothing before.)

I have had to set aside Bleak House. It is 29 CDs and I was not done with it when the library wanted the set back, for someone else had put it on hold. So I reserved it for when that person was done with it, and it will just have to be a cliffhanger for now. I left off just after Bucket arrested George for the murder of the odious lawyer of whom you thought, it’s about time someone killed him. It might be George. It might be Lady Deadlock. Don’t tell me who it was. If you do, I am going to assume it was the other just to thwart you. Bleak House was another Great Courses suggestion, offered by a professor of literature, who seems to have a preference for —um— “complicated” characters, Bleak House being a “wholesome” exception to most offered fare. He says something about Esther being so nauseatingly nice that even Dickens must have wanted to kill her off a time or two.

They always spin of the credentials at Great Courses, and Bob’s is that he recently mummified a body in the Egyptian way. He has been on TV, so he probably is somewhat of a showman, and as such, he will have a Twitter account. If I find it, I will tag him once with it. Ah—here it is: #AskBobBrier—I was right. He is not one of those retiring types like the “philologicians” (his word) who love words and thus are whizzes with hieroglyphics. Nor is he a (he had a word for this but I forget) a museum type who loves to collect and study artifacts but has no interest in interacting or retrieving them.

He is probably like O’Donnell, the Professor of the Gilded Age series, who has shown on the History Channel, and who in real life (I wouldn’t know if this is true of Brier or not, at least, not yet) is intensely partisan and really hates Trump. I could be wrong, but I think historians generally do. I think the reason they do is that they get involved in their story of man ruling the earth—that’s mostly what history is, really—and they come to identify with human efforts, hoping for the noble in them, and highlighting whatever examples exist. The only way their earth will advance is if all nations “come together.” Thus, they like world bodies, they like things like the United Nations. They don’t like it when some figure says “America first,” or whatever his/her country may be. They see nothing but chaos along that road. Brier might not be one of them, for, come to think of it, he said in Lecture One that history is just a series of disasters. Therefore, he may not be so starry-eyed as are his History counterparts, so hopeful that humans will have the answers if you but give them unlimited room to try their stuff.

Probably Bob is like Ed Barnhart, who taught the Great Course on South American archeology. He was also a doer. He related how, as a boy, his mom had dropped him off to see the Indiana Jones movie, and upon seeing the caption “Somewhere in South America,” said to himself, “There’s a South America?” It began an interest in the continent, and he has discovered his very own ancient Mayan (yes, I know, Central America, but he was just getting started) city.

What a great gig to be a university professor. You get to talk about your passion all day to people who come to you and pay money for the privilege—you don’t have to go to them. And they have already acquiesced that your topic is interesting enough at least for them to be there. You don’t have to interact with poverty. You don’t see squalor. Unless you play your cards recklessly, money issues are non-existent. You get to hang out with cool people in the heady world of ideas. I like it.

The only thing that might be an issue is if you get infatuated with your students. Some of them are just awakening to to how sexuality might affect someone other than same-age, some are entirely unaware, and some know it full well and play it for all its worth. Of course, the responsibility for proper conduct will always fall on the older party, but if he is a piece of work himself, if his own life is trending towards trainwreck, and certainly if he is an opportunist, all sorts of things may happen that he will deeply come to regret in a MeToo age.

Anyhow, here goes with the tweets. It is just things that catch my attention as I am dog-walking, and I must interrupt myself now and then to hurl someone’s misguided golf frisbee back over the fence. It will be sort of like taking notes, and I may do something with it later. I haven’t quite figured out a way to separate my asides from Bob’s own thoughts. Maybe later. Sometimes it is obvious, but sometimes not. Remember that these are dictated into the phone, and then I must quickly correct AI blunders (you should see what it did to Herodotus!) I don’t usually worry much about capitalization. Everything is a bit of a rush. Here goes:

“The goal of the archaeological writer is to make the dead come alive, not to put the living to sleep.” I love it!

That ubiquitous painting of Henry the eighth isn’t anatomically correct. The artist for the braggart deliberately skewed it so as to loom more impressively over anyone who would view it.

“The Egyptian’s reduced art to paint by numbers,” the great courses professor says. Art doesn’t change for 3000 years. It wasn’t supposed to change. It wasn’t supposed to be creative. It was to reflect the way things were.

Plato wasn’t crazy about art, because his was a search for truth, and art distorted truth. But he had nothing bad to say about Egyptian art, for that part attempted to portray truth as it was, and not interpret that.

If you expect to be spending more time in an afterlife rather than the present one, you will put more energy there. Where have I heard similar thoughts? The Egyptian tombs would be engraved with scenes of whatever the deceased enjoyed doing in the present life.

If you’re taking a trip to a unfamiliar place. And you’re not just sure what you will need. You take everything that you can. So says the great courses Egypt professor. That’s why Egyptian tombs are so packed with day today possessions.

Ha! A completely speculative account for how the uneducated people probably screwed up the great Heroditus. An illiterate tour guide probably made a story up about onions being fed to the workers who built the graat pyramid , and Herodotus recorded it.

Since the Egyptian’s were huge into war, loved to record their victories, live to fight, would they have recorded that Jehovah cleaned their clocks at the Red Sea? Already I smell a rat.

As was spun in the book Is the Bible really the word of God? national chroniclers (media) loved to create the attractive version even if it wasn’t entirely true. Emphasized what they want emphasized, deemphasize what they wanted deemphasized. It is exactly the same today.

The Bishop of Usher worked out the begets and traced down to the year of creation. Watch later a Russian bishop extended it to month,week, day, and time of day! Much later his Russian successor probably agreed & also banned Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Isaac newton worked out Egyptian chronology in his spare time. As an escape for him. He is the one who predicts the end in 2060. Is he right? Or might it come before?

Now the great courses professor is slobbering over Darwin as the be all and end all. Darwins OK, discovered some stuff, added to knowledge, but not to the point of being the be-all and end-all.

He says the Egyptian’s first arrived from the south in Africa. One of Michener’s books said the same, but I don’t remember the title. Michener’s books are grand sagas, following a given family name through centuries, even before they were families.

If you dressed Neanderthal man up, and put him on a subway, you would not notice him. He would fit right in. So says the Egypt professor, he was not a hulking brute, he did not live in a cave. Dumbing down is not a phenomenon Just of modern times, tho it probably has accelerated.

What will this Egypt teacher do when he comes to conspiracy views on pyramids? You know, how we today couldn’t build what they built thousands of years ago. Even today human technology is insufficient. How will he handle that?

And what will he do when he comes to Bible accounts? He will blow them away, of course, but will he do it with respect or ridicule? He seems like a nice guy. But sometimes peoples brains lose it when it comes to spiritual things.

To be continued:

See Ancient Tweets Part 2.

….Visit Smashwords bookstore. Also available at Amazon & other ebook retailers

March 22, 2021