Why everyone wants a piece of ancient Egypt

Episode Summary 

I don't get to do a lot of ancient history episodes on this show, but I always love it when I get the chance, and that's because history is a mirror of the present. Not because we judge or even fully understand the people who lived in ancient times, but because they were humans just like we are now.

Ancient Egypt has always had a magnetic pull. In ancient times, people were very interested in what the Egyptians were doing, and with good reason. In more recent times, Egypt has developed an aura of mystery, especially for followers of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter-day Saint movement.

But there’s something even deeper than the hidden tombs and eternal life legends: A lesson of what makes us human, and what justice means.

I'm pleased to be joined on this episode by Kara Cooney. She is a professor of Egyptology at the University of California Los Angeles, and she's written a number of interesting books on its history.

We’ll be talking about some of the themes in one of these books in particular called The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World. She's also the host of the podcast Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, which will soon be appearing in the Flux podcast feed.

The video of this episode is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

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Related Content

--Kara’s “Out of Egypt” mini-series

--The ancient Greek Skeptic traditions have renewed relevance in an age of misinformation and propaganda

--Why pluralism was the biggest Renaissance invention

--Inside the demon-haunted world of Christian fundamentalism

--The desire to submit to authority is as old as humanity itself 🔒

--Susan Sontag’s essay, “Against Interpretation”

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

04:40 — Ancient Egyptians were regular people, even though it's easy to forget

14:11 — A brief overview of ancient Egyptian history

20:35 — The Exodus narrative and historical evidence

28:33 — The fall of civilizations and modern parallels

32:11 — Mormonism's Book of Abraham and Egyptian lore

38:53 — Religious neo-orthodoxy and Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation"

45:08 — Akhenaten's religious revolution

52:16 — The Ma'at goddess and wisdom traditions

01:02:17 — Universal human understanding of fairness

01:05:55 — Conclusion

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: It's great to have you, but for people who don't know you, Kara, tell us give us a little background on some of the research that you've done. What do you do in Egyptology?

KARA COONEY: I've been in the field now for 30 years, which is terrifying, but I started my PhD work in 1994. So there we are. My work started with Social competition and rich people competing with each other. And I did that through the lens of coffin research. So I will forever be associated with coffins and I call myself ‘Coffin Girl’ sometimes, which is strange.

But, it's amazing what you can learn from a coffin as a social document. And that's been the gift that keeps on giving because I now am embedded in coffin reuse research. So I look at how rich people would take other rich dead people out of their coffins, and they might have been related to them, they might not have been, but they will reuse those coffins for—

SHEFFIELD: Oh my God.

COONEY: —freshly rich dead people. And it's very much associated with collapse and crisis and ripping up social contracts and, drought and collapse, which I think are very much on the mines. Of people today. And so that work on coffin reuse has been very topical and helped me to see what we're going through, what it means, how long such collapses last, when they're the worst, things like that.

[00:04:00] And then the more—I won't say it's happy and fuzzy because it's not—but the more popular side of my work is on women in power. I teach a very popular class at UCLA called Women in Power in the Ancient World. And that has driven me to work on a number of books. One on Hatshepsut, another on six queens of the ancient world, five of whom became king.

And then I'm working on a book about Nefertiti right now, which is damn is it hard to get through all of that scholarship and try to determine what my story shall be. I feel the weight of that book as I'm working on it now. So that's me in a nutshell.

Ancient Egyptians were regular people, even though it's easy to forget

SHEFFIELD: Okay. And then, so all, if you could also talk about just like some of the challenges that are kind of unique about studying Egyptian history compared to some of the more well,

COONEY: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Longer known historical please.

COONEY: There, there are so many I, shall start with the over idealizing of Ancient Egypt. By us, by them, by everyone. It's a place that Herodotus said was more religious than any other, that the Egyptians were more religious than any other people. It's a place that perfected political propaganda through religious means.

And because of that, we're, it's hard for us to then pull the veil aside and see authoritarianism instead of religious belief and freedom of religion and or to see a more cynical, brutal patriarchal taking rather than a fatherly guidance. And that is indeed why I wrote the book, the Good Kings, which annoyed many of my colleagues.

But that book is about how we egyptologists and really the public at large, particularly in the western world, since the discovery of Alman and before that, since [00:06:00] Napoleon entered Egypt and created the description on do we really feel like we, we are connected to these people. But to have me come along and then say, you're drinking the Kool-Aid, you're becoming an apologist for these ancient kings.

It's, a problem. So, I am exposing something. That is our positivism of this history at the same time, then what do you do? This is what people will say. Students will say it to me. Other colleagues will say, well, we have all of this documentation, we have these written records. How do you then parse them if what you've been given is not necessarily something that you can trust?

and I say to that, well, what do you do with the Romans when they give you, you know that they're lying to you half the time? You know that every speech that somebody is giving, whether it's Mark Antony, or Cicero, has an alternative agenda. So how do you deal with that? And we need to deal with the Egyptians more in that way, but not with the politics we understand in our gut, but with a religious politics that really tries to transcend any sort of worldly grappling.

And I think that's been something that I'm very much drawn to working through. But it's not easy. It's not easy to do. It demands a lot of hypothesizing from me, which means. Other scholars are like, well, now you're just making stuff up. And I have to say, well, what do you think you're going to get from King Kim Jong-Un's regime?

what do you think you're going to get from a closed authoritarian regime where things happen seriously in a back smoky incense filled room? What do you, how are you going to solve this? And so that has been the really, the purpose of my career, revealing power that does not want to be revealed in a way that breaks many of the rules of scholarly training.

And I, take joy in doing that. So,

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And let's talk about this a little bit more though, because, I, I think an [00:08:00] unsophisticated critique of what you're doing, Kara, is that you're engaging in presentism, but in fact, not what you're doing.

COONEY: No, it's not. no. I've been, accused of being universalist. And one, it was a very important book review written by Christina Riggs in the Times Literary Supplement of my first popular book on Hot. She, and she even quotes the scene that made her think that I was being universalist, where I talk about Hatshepsut's birth of her daughter.

And, I made it a human visceral experience. And I talked about the blood and the shit and the screams and what any birth is like. And tried to imagine hot shep's, it's emotional state when she gave birth to a girl. I can't know any of these things. I say in the text that I don't know any of these things, but I was accused of being universalist, which you take to heart because it means that you're imposing your own scholarly ideals on or present way of living upon the ancient world.

And what it instead I am trying to do is to un-fetishize The ancient Egyptians have been wholly separated from us as these people, as Zhi Haas would say. The, most famous egyptologists right now are people of magic and mystery. And, if you're a people of magic and mystery, then you've set them aside and you, don't treat them as we are. They are somehow different.

And we do this with the ancient world quite a bit, but particularly with the ancient world, we feel less connected to. We particularize them. We, make the work about that particularism and we demand it. We say that, oh, you can't compare this and that because this is within this space.

And these people were of their time and thinking of their time. And then I come up around and say. No, I can use the word harem. I understand it's an oriental imposition. I understand it was created by the Ottoman regime to explain their collection of young women for one man and the intensification of his birth [00:10:00] regime.

But I think that the ancient Egyptians had a similar system. Was it different in particularities? Yes. Should I compare it? Yes. Because the same thing is happening to women in both places. and I'm going to take it further because I have a book contracted with Rutledge that I'll be working on later in 2026.

That will compare all of these harems to what Epstein created to a, serial monogamy of Donald Trump going from one woman to another to this idea that, or Elon Musk gives us a great example too, right? Where he is creating all of these children, with different women and it is a kind of harem in a sense, and they present their masculine power in late stage patriarchy in that way. I think all of these things can and should be compared.

And one of my main points when people accuse me of Presentism is to say that we are them and they are us. That they gave us this patriarchal system. They help create it. There are some of the primary foundational creators of it. We are, it's last recipients. Is it more complicated? Do we have computers now and phones we carry around in our hands, yes, but it's the same system, and if people reject that and think that they have this modern exceptionalism, one would hope that COVID would school them on that one would hope that the difficulties that we're dealing with right now in terms of women's rights and freedoms and, job security and payment would school people on that.

But it doesn't, one would think that the way we treat the foreigner, the, nation state boundaries, I mean the, all of these things are in the ancient records. You could compare the Book of Exodus to ice kidnappings and, people saying, oh, they will replace us and white supremacy. There's too many of them, so let's move them aside.

And, other people are saying, we need to return to our place of origin. I mean, it's all, there is what I'm saying. The ancient world gave us all of the stories, and we can learn from the past to deal with the extraordinary problems that we're going through. They're not [00:12:00] different. They're not separate. That's, my main point.

SHEFFIELD: Other thing is that, saying that ancient people had the same emotions and many of the same social structures or biological needs, it's saying that they were human. That's what it is.

COONEY: Yes, it's, that's what it's saying and people, their heads explode. They're like, how dare you? I'm like, so I can't say Egyptians are human. I can't say ancient people are human. That's what they're saying. Yeah. They had shorter lifespans. Yeah. They had diseases we don't have, but I think we're going back to those shorter lifespans in those diseases that we used to not have, and maybe it's time to learn from those things too.

SHEFFIELD: And you can see a lot of the mentality, in with regard to diseases or, medicine, with a lot of people's approaches to COVID or vaccines, like they have a genuine mystical worldview of health that it is a spiritual thing rather than a, medical or scientific

COONEY: Interestingly,

SHEFFIELD: so it's fair to say, to draw these

COONEY: It is, but Well, but you're, saying that we don't have that spiritual worldview now, or they know

SHEFFIELD: No, I'm saying some

COONEY: itself. That we do Ah, yes.

SHEFFIELD: that some people have it and you can see it, that there's an innate, be, because I mean, the, reality is that, how the brain works or why it works is still a mystery. And so therefore, there's always going to be some inherent there's the, temptation to say, well, there's something magical about us.

And then the further back in history you get, the more magical people become. And, this is not helpful.

COONEY: No, it's not. And the distrust of the modern medical community, I think is. Real right now for a variety of reasons. That's a different podcast. so it's, it would be good to talk about these things and make ourselves more human and less robotic, less, having to fall into certain parameters.

Everyone will lose weight by following this diet or that diet. It's, we're, we need, by looking at the ancient [00:14:00] people as people, I think we can find our own, humanity better that I think we've lost in the modern age, that of the last a hundred years that we have lived through.

A brief overview of ancient Egyptian history

SHEFFIELD: I think that's a fair point. Yeah. Well, okay, so for people who haven't really read much Egyptian history, tell us, the, major periods here for, so for people, I just want to give them a quick overview so they can have some reference point in what we're talking about here.

COONEY: Yeah. We're talking about a land that became the first regional state on the globe about 5,000 years ago, so around 3000 BCE Before Current Era. You can still use BC if you like. I don't really care. They're all arbitrary times. We saw Egypt coalesce into a centralized state with one man ruling it one and that became the first dynasty.

You have a proto dynasties before that. You have a pre dynastic. It's a long history before it's complicated. But where I start and where my work starts is really with the centralization of power and with that creation of patriarchal structures in a state capacity. However you define the state, that's also super interesting question to ask because it changes through time.

And then you go from that early dynastic period to what we know is the old kingdom, the, time period when the pyramids were built. Third pyramid, third dynasty of the step pyramid built by Djoser fourth dynasty. You have Khufu building the Great Pyramid on the Giza Plateau, old Kingdom Falls. And you have the First Intermediate Period, which is the first time of civil war crisis collapse economically, socially, environmentally.

That then re coalesces in a bigger form. Every time it collapses, it becomes more complicated as it re coalesces. You could argue that's a truth for all of humans on the planet until now. We can, get to that. But you have the Middle Kingdom, then as Egyptologists call it, dynasties 11, [00:16:00] 12 and 13.

Those that involves kings Senusret III, the third, that might be the, big shot of, that set of dynasties that falls apart with the second intermediate period, which is known as a time of foreign occupation.

And that's when the Hyksos come in. So be like 16th century, 17th, 16th century BCE. There was then a coalescing of power in the, what we call the New Kingdom that took its shape in the military expulsion of a group of people called the Hyksos. And they'd set that up, these Theban kings of the 17th and 18th dynasties as a freedom expulsion, a way of making Egypt great again and bringing native power back to Egypt.

Yeah. And, then you're in the New Kingdom, which is really a period that most people know. Like even, the people listening to your podcast will be like, oh yeah, I've heard of Thutmose III, I've heard of Hatshepsut, maybe who, ruled with and alongside him I've heard of Ramses the Great, Ramses II, right, of the 19th Dynasty. There, there are known Akhenaten in between right late 18th Dynasty, the man that arguably invented monotheism. His great hymn finds its way into the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible, which is pretty cool. And when the New Kingdom falls apart, you have what's called the Bronze Age collapse, which is very much in the zeitgeist.

I think. Eric Klein's book on, on 10 77 BC and the year Civilization collapsed, I think is, important for many people and. That's a period that I really spend a lot of time in. That's where the coffin reuse data is that, that I work on so much. And this 20th to 21st dynasty collapse of society is I feel it. I see it.

and I'm always telling my grad students, and anyone who will listen like your listeners, to not try to solve 20th Dynasty problems with 19th Dynasty solutions. So make sure that you're not using an old way to try to deal with [00:18:00] something that is being swept away. These, our systems are crumbling and, they will be replaced by us as we create workarounds and, are exploited and decide not to be exploited.

it's a whole thing. but the Bronze Age Collapse is a place that I dwell a lot, and then after that Third Intermediate Period, that's what we call that, that time after the Bronze Age Collapse, you have what's called the late period. You have the 25th Dynasty. When the Nubian Kushite rulers come in and rule Egypt for 100 years. And then 26 Dynasty, which is a puppet of the Assyrians who came in and had sacked Egypt.

And from that point on, Egypt is very much a, in the control of one empire or another. And you can list those empires off. So you have the Assyrians came in and sacked, and then you get, before it was the Cushite, then the Assyrians.

Then, you have a brief foray with the Babylonians. The Persians come in and occupy and set up Atropy, and, they're driven out by Alexander the Great. You have the Ptolemys, it is its own occupation in a sense, and of Macedonian rule.

And then after that you have the Romans, and then after that you have Islam, right? There's the Arabians. And, it arguably still continues to some extent to this day by Saudi and UAE, but that's, the history of Egypt in a nutshell.

SHEFFIELD: It is. Yes. Very, a very quick tour there. I like it. Yeah, so, and one of the, things. It is interesting though about Egypt as a historical influence is that because the language was not read in the modern era for so long and not read in the medieval era, and that, a lot of people were not aware of just how much influence that it had.

And, you can see that that because of that language gap, so many of the popular terms Hyksos itself is a Greek word and like a lot of the pharaohs that, or that people know [00:20:00] of, or like Memphis, that's not the word for it. And, and like, so, so many of our, of of what we think were Egyptian words or names, they're not. And they were known through the Ptolemys primarily.

COONEY: I mean those, yeah, those colonial occupiers, those empires that took them over either the Greeks or the Romans. You're exactly right. And that's why, we used Thutmosa, or Thutmoses instead of Djehutymose, right? And if I started writing about Djehutymose III, I think people's heads would rather explode. So I try not to do that.

The Exodus narrative and historical evidence

SHEFFIELD: yeah. But at the same time, a lot of cultures also want to insist that they have these links. So, and like we can see that obviously with the Exodus story. And, to this day, I mean, and, there's no record that there were Hebrews in large numbers in Egypt as a population. It didn't seem to have happened--

COONEY: Oh, I opinion on that. I have a--

SHEFFIELD: I want to, yeah. Well, and I to hear it, like, and like, but, and then, and, but of course the identity of who the Hyksos were, that is kind of one of the, big debates. So, maybe if you can talk, give us some context on that.

COONEY: The Egypt is right next to the Levant, the Sinai, pop over, and you're, there. The East Delta is filled with people who have Levantine connections and it always was. And can't be today because there's these big state created blockades and, borders and other things that keep people apart, right.

The Gaza border at Rafa being a case in point, but. In the ancient world, you didn't ha you had guarded, manned towers and fortifications and such. But you people, me went back and forth across these borders and you could argue, and that Niv Allon article that you sent me about Seth being Baal, mentions that the Ramesside kings associated themselves [00:22:00] very much with the Levite world were of from the Eastern Delta and, were named Seth, right?

Seti the first, his name is the one of Seti or the one of Seth, and he is associated with a Levantine past. He's Egyptianized, that's a scarer word, but we'll, touch that third rail and use that word. Right now he's egyptianized, but he's still bringing in a Levantine self. So the Hebrews being a people that are not noted in any large numbers, that is correct. Right.

There are no Israelites being mentioned. The, first mention of Israel is on the Meesa, and it's him going to them, right? Not them coming to him, but he does talk about bringing live captives back from all of these places. So it, it seems that there's a cultural unification of what it means to be Israelite or Hebrew happening vis-a-vis another place, which my colleague, and UCLA alumna, Danny Candor, describes really well with a comparison to Italian immigrants.

Italian immigrants who came over in the 19th and early 20th century to the United States, thought of themselves as an Napolitan or a person from Sicily, or a person from Abru, abso, or something like that. When they came to the United States, then they were Italian. Right, and you have this centralization of what it means to be Italian.

You could argue that Egypt created that for the Levantine person of the highlands at least, and created this idea of a Judean or Israelite ethnic or cultural identity that then helps to, place them within their own cultural milieu. But it is created vis-a-vis another. It's Egypt that's the grindstone that sharpens that ethnic identity.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well,

COONEY: there were tons of Levite people in short, so there, there were, they were there and they're named. And, but this, is a [00:24:00] story of, them then leaving, right? So it's a, and that story being of the state being diminished and that's also there. It's happening in real time.

The Bronze Age, col, it's in the Bronze Age Collapse. Egypt is being diminished. Its army is literally being swallowed. In a sense. Pharaoh is making boneheaded decisions that no one can figure out. People are trying to square why this is happening in their minds. How could the greatest state of the ancient world collapse like this?

It has to be something supernatural. This is a way of understanding that Bronze Age collapse.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, that's why, the, Exodus narrative, it is important as a, anthropological self story. But you know, it's, and I, think for people that, they might have of a sort of, they might have a more secular interpretation of the Bible, and they're saying, well, these stories are probably not true.

But, the, you guys actually know that that, there wasn't a large people that suddenly left. There were these plagues, like they're not documented. And, but it doesn't mean that there weren't Canaanites.

COONEY: But there, the plagues are, I mean, from my perspective, the plagues are a way of explaining the diminishment of Egypt. And Egypt was horribly diminished from the 20th into the 21st and 22nd dynasty. So that it's, a, it's analog set of analogies to understand how this worked. And in the, you could also argue, and there does seem to be push-back against people from the Levant.

There are some texts that talk about a distrust of people from the Levant of people with Semitic names of people that they don't [00:26:00] necessarily want there anymore. And there is evidence that when Egypt is thus diminished, that a lot of people go on the move and leave and go to other places, maybe return to a homeland that, serve them better. They still have connections with, so there's to say, oh, we know it's not true. I wouldn't say that. I think it's absolutely true in describing a larger human process, but within a moment, a story creates a moment.

But we're talking about a process that took two, 300 years. So if you look at it from that perspective, it's, all

SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah. But going back to what you were saying about we don't really fully know the motivations or the, veracity of anything these people say. That's what you have to think about with this story as well, because that. It means that there may, that there was something, there were periods where people were moving in and out in large numbers of Egypt.

And so, there might be something there, and this may be multiple stories combined into one.

so like the hio obviously, where's the second intermediate period? And you're talking about the third. So, like, and that's the, that is the, problem of historical documentation in the ancient world is that everybody has their own agenda.

The, knowledge of what was happening was so imperfect much more worse than now. And we'll talk about Mormonism in a second, when I was growing up as a fundamentalist Mormon, I would always hear people say, oh, there's always so many, so much more disasters and famines.

Now this is a sign that Jesus is coming back. And eventually as I got more aware of the world and technology, I would say, well, how do we know that's just not us becoming more aware of things that were always there. And they would say, well, don't talk about that, Matt.

COONEY: I mean, but, and don't get me wrong, Egyptologists right now do not touch the Exodus. They don't want to, by and large, they don't want to think of it as a story that has kernels of truth in it, [00:28:00] because we are still a product of the modern secular world view. And that the person who tries to prove the Exodus as a historical truth is like seen of as a 1920s William Flinders Petrie type, and we're not going to do that.

and so we now avoid connecting these stories to truth. Not every Egyptologist does that, but it's not something that people who study the third intermediate period in the Bronze Age collapse or not necessarily using the Exodus as a historical source.

SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah. And,

COONEY: an impression.

The fall of civilizations and modern parallels

COONEY: It's like, how could it happen? People are like, how could this happen? How could Egypt fall? How could it happen? And that's, what the story is also trying to answer. And we're discussing the same thing in places like the United States or Britain. It's like, how could this state with so much power and so much money, how could it fall?

How could everyone make these boneheaded decisions? Well, we're watching it in real time and we are also writing our own stories about how it could happen. Bringing a supernatural answer to the question, I think it, it helps people to understand what's going on better.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and yeah, and it was, I mean, it's a, it is a natural thing to do,

COONEY: Yeah, it is. Certainly is. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: But going back to this idea of, trying to oneself or one's ideas in the ancient past, because that is a natural human tendency to think. And, we see it now, with people saying, oh, well, my, scam medicine that I'm selling, ivermectin or whatever, that it's, it, was sold in the, in, it, comes from ancient China, or ancient India, or, like, so this idea that things that are old are more true, this is a very pervasive narrative.

when, and, it's a, it is dangerous because it, the, entire f. Achievement of society is to have done things that are not natural. Like medicine is not natural. Like having having living in a city and having sanitation, these are [00:30:00] unnatural things. So that's not a good argument

against ipso

COONEY: know because I read just recently about, I can't remember if it was a gorilla or a chimpanzee, but I think it was a gorilla who was, had a, skin infection and used a leaf of a plant and rubbed it on themselves. And that was to heal the infection. And they knew what plant to use and it was a repeated thing.

And so it's pretty damn natural for a gorilla to go out and find a, tree leaf or a plant leaf, put it on an A wound and try to do something with it. We are still, this is the other thing what's natural. We are natural, we are products of this world which makes the computers we work with a product of this world too.

So a lot of these separations we make between natural and unnatural are also hugely problematic. But yes. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I mean, well, and that is my point, that our reason and our faculties and our cooperation, those are natural things. And so when we, make a medicine like a COVID vaccine or something like that, these are natural products. And so, and they're not any less natural than somebody who has a poultice that, know, that there, that some ancient tribe had discovered was effective on a certain malady, like are all natural.

COONEY: Yeah. I think you're right that this idea of natural versus unnatural is brought in when really it's about restriction and boundaries of the one that you have to buy or you have to have a PhD to know how to make, or you have to work in a lab or the poultice that you can grab from a tree and get an essential oil and put on and do by yourself at home.

And so there's also a, social liberation in involved with this, that becomes that much more challenging for people who are in the halls of power saying, well, no, you can't do this, you can't do that. Which is why ivermectin took off, right? Because people are like, well, I can get this, I can get this myself.

It's meant for animals. It's, I mean, I can order off of Amazon or whatever. And they did. As opposed to the COVID shots, which were very hard to get at the beginning, if you remember. And people didn't know what was in them and who made them and what, there was a lot of

SHEFFIELD: And they didn't explain it[00:32:00]

COONEY: no, they didn't.

They really didn't. There's a reason that we distrust our, medical community, and I think that needs to be discussed by them internally. But but yeah. I see your, point.

Mormonism's Book of Abraham and Egyptian lore

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So, so, but in, so, the idea though, that, again, like people trying to root their culture or their religion within Egypt. And Mormonism obviously is the best example of this that, so, so for, just as a review for people who are not, super famili fresh on this stuff that, so Mormonism, in addition to the Book of Mormon that is more famous, that they have, they have a couple of other smaller books, one of which is called the Book of Abraham.

And that book was said to be a translation of some papyri that Joseph Smith bought from a guy who had, long chain of custody. Somebody had stolen it in one of Napoleon's soldiers had stolen it out of a grave in Egypt and was selling stuff or giving it away as they got back. And, and eventually he came into the hands of the Mormons.

And, Joseph Smith said that these papyri, he had translated them and that they were the literal writings of Abraham. And that he had some other ones that were the writings of Joseph from the Bible as well. And that. That's, for me as somebody who wa was a very fundamentalist Mormon, it gave Mormonism a magical truth to me.

And I took a college class and in Egyptology and I was so excited that the professor, I knew he, that he was going to talk about the Book of Abraham. And then about halfway through the course, I realized, oh, he's not going to talk because he doesn't and like, this is, this Mormonism trying to, has since then, trying the, now we have the papyri, and they're examined they are

COONEY: It's a book of breathing. it's a late Roman period. Book of the Dead, So, Or maybe not Roman [00:34:00] Greco Roman. I'm not sure of the date, but it's late. It's late later than what I work with.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is Ptolemaic for sure. And and, but at the same time, Mormons have been trying to. Try to come up with any possible alternative reading of these documents. And it's, something that every Egyptologist, it's, always there in the background, isn't it?

COONEY: It is. And I will say that many people are attracted to Egypt and have been attracted to Egypt. So you can think of Cambyses and the story of him losing his army as he goes to Siwa to try to talk to the oracle. And you can think of Julius Caesar stationing his regiments in Alexandria, and that's where he meets Cleopatra. You can think of Mark Antony as he tries to become the next Alexander the Great. Egypt is a feather in his cap, and it's gotta be one, one step on a long journey to becoming king of the world, literally.

And so Egypt seduced many. Egypt has this, and that's what my book The Good Kings, is partly about too, that Egypt has this power to make people think if they get a hold on this, if they can grasp it, if they can somehow own a part of it, that their power will thereby be enhanced.

And I think Joseph Smith was, it worked for Napoleon until it didn't. It worked for the British Empire, and they still have many beautiful things in their museum. The Louvre is one of the most in Paris is one of the most amazing exhibition spaces of Egyptian objects in the world. So colonial powers have very much found their ownership of Egypt, their pieces of Egypt to be very important too.

So I would put Joseph Smith into that-- into that milieu of time into that white European colonialism because he's just doing what everyone else around him is doing, which is finding ideological power through this antiquity. And he does. He does so and, it works for millions of people and millions of people around the world think that this [00:36:00] ancient Book of the Dead as it had holes in it.

So he put in certain things that, that he thought were there rather than what was actually depicted. He misunderstood a scene that shows a man being mummified as a scene of human sacrifice. And there are Mormon Egyptologists who do studies on human sacrifice so that they can, and they can prove that the Egyptians actually did sacrifice that man, that it's not a caretaking of a mummy, it's something else.

And. And so right now, it's funny that the modernism, the secularism that drive that Petrie, if you don't know who William Flinders Petrie was, he was essentially an archeologist to prove the Bible true. We went to the Near East, he went to Egypt, he found these ancient cities. He's like, look, the Bible's true. Right?

And the last a hundred years, we've had all of these people saying, oh my God, look, the Bible's true. Joseph Smith is. he's holding on to, he's created his own Bible. And now you have a bunch of Mormons who have PhDs in Egyptology who are saying, look, the book of Abraham is true.

And when you do that, and then you find the real Book of Abraham, you're able to study the actual thing. You have somebody like Robert Ritner write a, an excoriating a series of chapters about why this isn't, a sacrifice and why it's not what Joseph Smith represents. You're painted into a corner and then you can't use secular modernity to get your way out of it.

You have to then use ideology or just lie to people. Just lie. Get your PhD. Say: 'I have a PhD from UCLA, I have a PhD from UPenn." And then you go to people and you say: "I have this PhD. Would I lie to you with this PhD I've been given this by the halls of modernity, the halls of secularism? They granted this thing to me. I'm looking at the same documentation. Those people aren't telling you the truth. I am.'

And so now it's like a, they're using the same tools of secular modernity and it's, it is in my [00:38:00] opinion, blowing up in people's faces. But it's interesting to see the conversation evolve in that way.

it was one tactic that Mormons and high positions of power obviously tried to do because they helped to fund these send them, send these young men out to, and sometimes women out to different universities to get these scholarly, accutrements and then to go out, back to the Mormon fold. That's where they, exist. They bring them back to Brigham Young or they go to Brigham Young, Hawaii or some place, some temple space.

And then they become those people who use their secular modernity, little tokens to say, oh no, this is, actually real. It's actually true. And when somebody like me points out, wait, you're lying. Then, I'm, anti-religious freedom, but it's fine.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

Religious neo-orthodoxy and Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation"

SHEFFIELD: and, the other thing is that as they've been doing, kind of filtering back they've created what I call Neo Orthodox Mormonism. And we see this also in, with regard to Christian apologetics as well, that essentially, so Susan Sontag had a very famous essay called “Against Interpretation,” which I will put in our show notes for everybody to read.

It's an interesting, fascinating essay. And her thesis in the essay is that interpretation is distortion against a text. and it kind of dovetails very nicely actually, Kara, with what you have been saying here. That, so for, her, she says, we, we need to look at literature and, she was doing it in the context of literature, but this makes a hundred percent with regard to all ancient documents because they were all literature, they weren't, they, almost no one was saying they wanted to be a historian or and so, but anyway, so, so for Sontag, when you look at ancient documents or, something that someone else made and you say: 'this is what it really means.' And then you invent your own, version of [00:40:00] it. And that is completely divorced from what they intended. So, in other words, and she traces it with regard to like stoicism trying to reinterpret, various ancient mythologies or the way that, Judaism, evolved to start saying, well, the Bible isn't it wasn't meant to be true.

It was really just these metaphorical things and this is what it really means. And the guys who wrote it, ah, they, this is not what they meant. And so, and she's saying, look, you can't do. You need to read ancient documents, how they were intended to be by human beings and what they wanted.

And so, and this sort of neo orthodox interpretation of the Book of Abraham is doing the same thing. What they've done is that instead of saying, well, okay, yeah, even though it says in the Book of Abraham that this is, was written by the, by Abraham's own hand, even though it says that, well, it actually wasn't Abraham who wrote that scroll.

It was some later Jewish scribes who were just copying it. and they, and and then they've created this other idea that they called a catalyst theory. That Joseph Smith, yes, he got these documents and he thought that they were from Abraham, but God knew that they weren't from him. And, he used the documents in front of Joseph Smith to give him a spiritual interpretation of the Book of And so therefore, there's no conflict, Kara, between the scrolls are just a regular funeral document and the book of Abraham saying all this false history, there's no conflict because it was a catalyst.

COONEY: It is extraordinary. I mean, it's almost like you have a spirit guide who's like, no, you're not ready to know that information yet. This is the information you can know, which means it can always change. So it, doesn't, it's a floating narrative that never can be pinned down, but I know Egyptologists who got PhDs in topics [00:42:00] specifically associated with the Book of Abraham, I'm sure to prove it right.

as you were thinking when you were a Mormon in, the Egyptian class, you're like, oh, we're going to, you know, I'm going to see how this is right. And these people are people like Kerry Muhlestein, John Gee. They are accepted into the halls of Egyptological power because they're willing to do service.

Mormons are really good at service. They roll their sleeves up. They, can do a spreadsheet, they can organize things. Mormons are very good at this. You would agree?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I credit them for that, yeah.

COONEY: Yeah. Yeah. So, you're willing to do service that a lot of people in this dying higher education system can't take on. And so you see them running committees and in important positions of power. With an a priori agenda of using that power to further proselytize and or, and, or maybe proselytization is the wrong thing, but to have power over their, the, Mormon population in their community in whatever way. And--

SHEFFIELD: To provide an answer. Yeah. No matter how vague it is. To, sorry. To give a, it's just to give an answer. Like, it's what they say would never be convincing to anyone who is not an LDS Mormon. But this father and son duo, they wrote a paper in which they purported to use Bayesian statistical analysis to prove that the Book of Mormon was true.

COONEY: I love that. I love that. They should try it on the Bible. They should do that because it's not going to work. But you know this idea of truth T Capital T truth. You know what, is that? I don't, you were asking me how do you use ancient Egyptian sources? We're never going to find a capital T truth for all of this stuff.

You're just pa you're just walking around in the dark, feeling around [00:44:00] trying to get the best understanding of the story that you can. And you're not trying to find capital T truth. They're dead, they're gone. It's about us. We're doing it for us. We're not doing it for them. We're doing it so that we can figure out our place in the world.

I'm not telling all the historians in the world to go and make up shit because it doesn't matter because it's all about us. No, we're trying to find what kernels of truth exist in this narrative to help us to muddle through the world that we're in now. So, until we get that trusty time machine to go back and even when you're living in the present day and there's been, an Iraq war run by W. Bush.

Do you know why? Do you know who started it? Do you know the mechanisms of it? No. It takes years and years to sort all of that out and there will still be disagreement. Oh, it was because of this. Oh, it was because of that. So even when you live in the actual space and time of where the history is occurring all around you, it doesn't mean that you can parse it out with any capital T truth. We humans are messy. It doesn't exist.

Akhenaten's religious revolution

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And, but it is nonetheless true that the ancient Egyptian cultures and religious practices and beliefs absolutely did have a lot of in the ancient world. And, you mentioned Akhenaten maybe give us let's come, back to him in that regard.

COONEY: Yeah. So we're dealing with the mid 14th century, BCE 1300s. He, ruled for about 17 years. That's the highest reign date that we have for him. He was not the first choice of his father. Amad Tip III, it seems there was another son by the name Thutmose who was preferred. He dies for whatever reason.

Maybe there was plague, maybe there wasn't. But this. Akenna-- this man, Ahmenhotep was his name. He was the fourth of the Ahmenhoteps. He becomes king as an adult, not as a child like his father, Ahmenhotep III, not like a [00:46:00] a possible usurper like Thutmose IV, his grandfather. But as a full fledged adult and one who seems to have been steeped in solar religion for whatever reason, in whatever way was he a priest of Atum Re at Heliopolis? Maybe some suspect he had a part to play there.

But as soon as he hits the ground as king, he starts running towards this solar theology that his father had already started. But he tries to perfect and propagate to some extent, but really it's more about the perfection of it.

He's not interested in a grassroots spreading of the word necessarily. He's interested in a communication of his message and getting that message right, even if it doesn't bring along followers. he wasn't interested in creating followers. He didn't make this a religion that was a happy, fuzzy, inclusive connection to God.

The connection was to him and his wife and the royal family. he told people explicitly that he and his wife, but particularly him, were the only ones who understood God. But he was the first one to really sit down with his pen and papyrus, and whether he wrote it himself or he dictated, he's trying to understand what divinity is, how it works, what it sources, and how.

One then. Works with it, how it connects to the earth and the solar aspects are, prioritized. He includes the earth and the rain and the other natural elements, but it's very much a naturalistic present moment, philosophy of life and death. But, he, his, creation is definitely still reverberating today.

And you could argue that what he created found its way, it certainly found its way into later Egyptian [00:48:00] philosophizing of religion and others who are religious scholars who have written much more on this than I, and much better obviously, Jan Asman eor. Both of them deceased but ha have written amazing things.

But he affected how Egypt thought about God and moved them towards a monotheistic way of seeing divinity so that they could write a text like, ray is the face pat is the body, and almond is the, oh, I'm not getting it right. is somehow the spirit of it. But you, put all God into one and they actually say, all Gods are one.

And then they, divide how, it works. And it's embarrassing that I can't get it right here. I'll, I could find it. But what he said also made its way into the Psalms. Psalm 104 scholars argue is a phrase for phrase connection to the great hymn of the Aten. and that's Akhenaten’s contribution.

there's later Egyptian contributions from wisdom text that find their way into the proverbs and other things. But Egypt is always there in the creation of. Of Biblical wisdom. And biblical wisdom also finds its, or many of its stories, find their origins in ancient near Eastern tropes that go back millennia.

Right. So it's, a collection of a, of ancient world material that works for these people called they, who called themselves the Israelites, among other things. But, yeah, Akhenaten is there. He haunts the discourse in a very interesting way. Joseph Smith would've loved him Too bad. he didn't really know about him.

SHEFFIELD: He hadn't got to it yet.

COONEY: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: And just as a just as a little historical or philological note that, he literally changed his name to a—

COONEY: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: honorific to other [00:50:00] gods to, of the Aten, the solar disc, which—

COONEY: Yeah. Aten

SHEFFIELD: Specifically a god—

COONEY: He kind of, it's complicated. So, people discuss this, but in his year five, he moves his capital, his capitals were Memphis Helios and Thieves. And he moves to this out in the middle of nowhere place in middle Egypt, very remote and starts a new capital city. And at that point, he changes his name, but he had already given his God the Aten, that is the physical manifestation of the sun in the sky.

A set of kingly names, contained in cartes, those long ovals with a little lion at the bottom that signifies the solar circuit. And he also, auten has his names in cartouches. So it's Don Redford who said that. That Anaan lowered the level of divinity and raised the level of kingship. I think it's a reasonable way of looking at it, but it's also, he's somehow taking the humanity away from God by taking the anthropomorphizing out.

There's no hawkhead man, God that represents the son anymore, but he's trying to humanize the God in our terms, in terms of rule and, kingship that maintains Maat and things like that. So tho that those elements are, there, it's, not always clear what Okana was trying to do, but because he's changing things throughout his reign, you can tell that he's dissatisfied with some of his first attempts and.

And he changes them like the name, he includes the name of the God, Ray Harti and the first attestation of the name he creates, or that is channeled to him or he receives whatever for the Aten. And he's not satisfied with that. He's like, no, the, there is only one. We can't use Ra Harti in here. I can't use the name of the God's shoe, the for light filled air, so I need [00:52:00] something else.

And then he removes those elements and he's constantly trying to perfect what it is that he sees as God.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah,

it was like the a theologian very clearly I think we could

COONEY: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very much so. Very much

The Ma'at goddess and wisdom traditions

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, now you mentioned Maat, that was, that's something I, is another big influence culture. I think and, one, but one that's not as nearly well known. Like people, I think a lot of people have some idea about Akhenaten, and monotheism.

But Maat is much less famous. But even though to the Egyptians, that principle and the goddess who represented it—they were central. Tell us about Maat.

COONEY: Maat is balance, truth, justice. We even have a hard time defining it. Ask five Egyptologists what Maat is and you will certainly get five different answers. And it's not something that you can easily pin down. And I think it's purposefully so, right? When you ask somebody what's justice, it's, not going to be easy to, it's like, well, what's right?

Well, what's right for whom? In, in what circumstance? When you say law and order to a white CEO of a rich company, he's going to be like, yes, law and order. I like that. When you say law and order to a disenfranchised black person in East Baltimore, they're going to have a very different perspective of what law and order means to them, right?

I think I have the same hesitations with Maat. I, understand that she's there as a divinity an element of that needs to exist. We need balance in the world. you don't want to have everything imbalanced and even, the more we learn about quantum mechanics or, [00:54:00] and I'm no specialist in physics, but you see that things are out balance and they try to come back into balance, right? Out balance, but then they need to come back into balance and there's this constant attempt to, find some sort of balance.

That is something that a society needs. You can't have people running around lawless. However, when you have the concept of Maat and it, I'm not exactly clear on when it, this word was first written down.

I would suspect the pyramid texts 2,400 BCE, but may find a verbal origin before that. But I suspect the concept of Maat is much older. I can't prove it. but let's say that it goes back to 4,000, 5,000 BCE, that there was this word, right? But when you create an unequal social system in which a few men are able to hoard and exploit and control a massive population, and contain them as shareholders and take, a massive pro part of their proceeds and just have the, this.

I mean, Egypt is a top down society. Egypt is a still is. But in the ancient world, we think of it as this, as the top down society par excellence, the king gets what he wants and everyone bows down in gravels, right? It's that idea of a God king. As soon as you create that social inequality, and this would be around 3000 BCE, 3,500 BCE took some time for that to develop, right?

But then you have to co-op the idea of Maat and, here's where I'm conflicted about the term, because I think our neurological human brain implicitly understands what balance and fairness means.

SHEFFIELD: Animals have that.

COONEY: Yes, exactly. Like if they've proven that if you take some snacks and you give it to a bunch of birds or, a bunch of chimpanzees and you give one a whole bunch to one and nothing to the others, they'll freak [00:56:00] out. It's not fair, it's not right. And when you're feeding the ducks, don't you try to like be fair to which ducks are getting what? But anyway, that's, maybe that's my game, but, our neurons understand what Maat is. Our 250,000 year old human brain understands that. But as soon as you develop the agricultural revolution or the domestic revolution, herding or farming, and you develop the social inequality that goes along with that for men, for women, with regards to men, for children with regards to adults for the disabled, with regards to the able bodied for the, non-binary sexually regards to the, with regards to the binary who can associate with the binary.

As soon as you create that with the agricultural domestic revolution. Maad has to be co-opted. Maad has to be changed. And that's your conundrum. That's why the Egyptians wrote and wrote about it. That's why Y Oman's book is like this damn thick. because he can't figure it out because you're dealing with a concept that is co-opted.

Every time a new king takes power, every time an elite man says, I get the big house because I inherited it, And you have to grovel before me because, so we lie to ourselves constantly about what law and order are, and we're constantly confused by it because it doesn't jive with who we are as humans. And that's exactly what I think we're going through right now. We are going through an anti patriarchal revolution. The earth isn't getting bigger. We're not going to be able to have another coalescing into an ever larger, more complex patriarchal scheme that gets more stuff to distribute to the, their lieutenants, because there's no more earth to go around.

She's, given all, it's like the giving tree. She's like there as the stump. She's like, what do you want from me? I'm done. And, so given that reality, we either figure out a real Maat, like universal income and like AI is going to help us with that one too. But we're going to either figure out a real income, or we're, or real Maat, or we're going to, we're going [00:58:00] to perish as a human species.

And it's a, it's damn, but it's an interesting time to be alive. But Maude is, it's, yeah, I know you're trying to go to the biblical part of it, and I

SHEFFIELD: Oh, well, no,

COONEY: but

SHEFFIELD: It's more, it's bigger than that. But Yeah. I do want to come back to what you're saying though. But yeah, just real quick, like the idea though of, because I mean, Maat, it was both a principle and also a goddess, and there's no certainty as to which came first or whether they were the same regarded as the same exact thing.

And it's all very, not undefined. basically it was what you, it was, you believed it when you knew it when you saw it.

COONEY: Yeah, I mean, Maa and Maat, when you add a T to something in the Egyptian language, you nominalize it. So you take an adjective that is balanced, right? Something's balanced, something's fair, and then you say It is what is fair. It is what is balanced. You've added the T. And when you add a tea, you're also feminizing.

So there's Amun, the God of hiddenness, and then there's is his female counterpart, Ammunet, right? And, so when you take Maa, what is fair, and you add the T, Maat, it is that, which is fair. You can then take a feminine divinity or a feminine avatar, as I know you like that word to encapsulate the concept of what it is. Is she a goddess? There's not any temples built to Maat.

She doesn't really do anything. She doesn't have sex with anyone. She's not married to anyone. She doesn't have any sort of divine family. She's more of a concept. She's a concept. She's like a thing, an idea.

And, so there, it's, even more complicated. And, Ana uses this word to go back to Ana. He's like, wait, she's, he's asking exactly what you're asking. He's like, is she a goddess? Is she not? And you know what his solution [01:00:00] was? He used the word Maat and would have the little. Figure of the divine woman after it when he first had his text done.

And then he is like, no, we can't include the figure of the woman, the figure of the goddess. And he had his chisel bearers go and erase that image of her as a goddess and only keep the phonetics of the word Maa. And so for him, that distinction was very real. He was like, no, we can't have it personified.

It's not divinized, it's just an idea. Because all di that is divine is of the Aten. All that is divine is of the sun God for him. So he even, he had some problems with that. But that doesn't mean that the idea of Maat didn't then spread out to other parts of the world and become subsumed into other people's philosophies that are better preserved to us, as you say. And the Egyptian origination texts are not, and so we think of it as, as something that is Greek or Roman or, or something else.

SHEFFIELD: Or like Ḥokhmáh as the consort of, God as wisdom. And some, and, even, but even Ḥokhmáh is, she's very, also very ill-defined. In Judaism, in classical Judaism, what is Ḥokhmáh Is she God? Is she a part of God? What is, who the hell is she? No one knows.

COONEY: So what is, balance for whom? Because the Egyptians grapple with that too. it's tough. I, think that one of the main problems with, did the Egyptians, I, create the idea of Maat, or truth or justice or whatever that is. I think that any culture, any human being anywhere inherently knows what's fair.

And I think we've proven that-- cognitive scientists have proven that, right. But. And so I don't think you need to have a, an idea of fairness than being diffused around the world. However, if that idea of fairness takes a feminine principle and is there depicted as a [01:02:00] goddess, then I would go, Ooh, maybe the Egyptians did have something to say about how this was, how this concept, that concept of the feminine element of fairness was transferred. So that, that's I think where a lot of the main debate goes for the Egyptologists at least.

SHEFFIELD:

Universal human understanding of fairness

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And let's, maybe end here by circling back to what you were saying about, just the idea of balance, of justice, of fairness. This is a universal human need and a universal human knowledge. We all know what's right. We all know what's fair. We all know that, the some guy getting up into, like Donald Trump apparently is putting posters of himself in Washington, dc at while having soldiers patrolling the streets.

Like everyone knows that these things are wrong. We know it in, in who we are and, our history and in our cognition. And, and, I'm reminded what you were saying earlier, it reminded me of that line from, from WH Auden where he said that:

Hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police.

We must love one another or die.

And that's, I think that's, that is the theme kind of that you're, you are reaching toward here. And we were talking about it in our pre-discussion here. But I think that's, I think that's what we're talking about here, is that right.

COONEY: Yeah, I think that's beautiful and I think that everything that. These systems have co-opted, whether it's a goddess of great power and strength like Hathor, or Isis, or Kali, or Durga in the Indian system, but Hathor and Isis, of course, Egyptian or Maat these, beautiful things when they're co-opted or in the Mormon situation, right? You take a, a text about re-creation after death and rebirth [01:04:00] also a beautiful concept of how do you deal with death? How do you face that mortality and, find a way through it? When they're co-opted, where some people get it and other people don't. Then it subverts all of it. And I think that these things have gone on long enough where we have all of those apologists saying, no, but let's parse it. Let's interpret it a particular way. It doesn't mean it exactly this, but not that.

But really, I think you're right. it comes down to our care for each other and, and where that, authentic balance is to be found because it's not in this social system that we're living in now. It wasn't in the social system of Ramses II, it wasn't in the social system of Akhenaten.

It is this constant search that people are trying to find for perfection. It's not in the domesticated sphere of farming or, herding. Those exploit and abuse too many people. What is it? That's what we're all asking. What is it? And that's why we're looking to the past. what did they do? How, did they.

Solve this and we need to look further back. A shaman once told me that we need to remember what we have forgotten and forget what we think we know. And that's, kind of everything. So all of the systems that we, oh, we think we know this. Oh, this is how you solve disease. Oh, this is how you deal with psychological distress.

Oh, this is how you deal with whatever. We, none of it's working. None of these systems are, working for us, whether it's education, or mental health, or healthcare or retirement accounts that we can go on. How do we care for ourselves and each other going forward? The answers are very different from the system we have now.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And they have to come from inside of all of us. It isn't one person talking or another person listening. It has to be dialogic.

COONEY: Yeah.

Conclusion

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So, all right, well, I think that's a good place to end it. We could definitely do [01:06:00] this much longer, but I, but well, we'll, we will save that for another time for us.

But so, so, you we're going to be including your podcast in the Flux Podcast Network. So tell, us about it so we can look for it here.

COONEY: Yeah. I have a podcast called Afterlives of Ancient Egypt, and we host it on a Substack platform. So if you search my name, Kara Cooney on Substack. you can find all of the episodes there, but you can also listen to it on Apple or Spotify or wherever you, listen to your podcasts and it's me with two co-hosts, Jordan Galczynski and Amber Myers, and we talk about everything ancient and try to make a connection to the modern world and why it matters, and what's, I, just made I'm making wine right now because my husband planted a merlott grapevine that's gone gangbusters after four years.

And so we just did an episode we just recorded, haven't released an episode on wine making in the ancient world. So that was fun. But whatever we, feel the spirit to talk about, we release probably every two weeks or so. And I'm also on Substack where I just released a screed about my displeasure with how scholars, Egyptological scholars of women in power, have tried to create this positivist narrative of girl bossing and it pisses me off. So I had some things to say about that, and you can find all of that on yeah, on Substack and, wherever you listen to your podcast. So it's called Afterlives of Ancient Egypt.

SHEFFIELD: All right. Sounds good. All right. Well, it's been great. Great discussion, Kara. I'm glad we had it.

COONEY: Thank you, Matthew. Thank you so much. It was a lot of fun.

SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscribing member, you get unlimited access to the archives and I thank you very much for your [01:08:00] support.

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That would be great as well. All right, so that'll do it for this one. I'll see you next time.

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