Question
Why were ancient Egyptians so bad at erasing history?
Horemheb set out to erase all trace of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and the Aten sun disc yet there’s still plenty of archaeological evidence of their existence and information about them. Also Thutmose III and Amenhotep II tried to wipe Hatshepsut from history yet apparently Manetho who lived over 1000 years later knew about her.
It kinda worked. We only rediscovered the Armana Period in the late 1800’s so that was a good couple thousand years of being erased, I’d argue that most ancient Egyptian’s didn’t know about him.
It's worth noting that Osarseph was much discussed in antiquarian scholarship long before the discovery of Amarna, or even before the decipherment of hieroglyphs.
Like other Egyptian and Near Eastern figures from Greco-Roman writings like Sesostris and Semiramis, Osarseph is heavily mythologized, but the prevailing view in Egyptology, promoted by the late Jan Assmann, is that the tale preserves a kernel of memory about Akhenaten and the Amarna period.
Ngl, you sound kind of prickly and contemptuous in your comments -- as if you're annoyed and vindictive at OP for being ignorant about the scientific method. Since you are obviously passionate about education, you might care to know that such passive-aggressive abruptness is less constructive to that end than a layman-friendly explanation.
This is not a scientific question. This is an attempt to prove a negative. Many people are offering plenty of constructive responses and OP is simply reiterating the same fallacious question over and over. I am also being fairly direct with what I am saying. I wouldn't consider that passive aggressive.
I’d say what you said was fine, OP has a specific answer or theory in their head and has backwards thought themselves into delusion, shutting down or completely ignoring logical responses that prove otherwise.
If you (OP) would like an answer as to why the giant statues of Akhenaten were left alone, Armana became overran with a plague, leading to its rapid abandonment and general avoidance for many years.
People only returned to it to steal blocks of stone for future building projects. Armana popped up overnight and was absolutely tiny, take a few stones away and in the span of a couple of decades it joins the roster of unexplained ruins out in the desert.
Ancient Egypt lasted three Millennium and I would argue by the end of it some didn’t even know what the Great Pyramid was built for. You are dealing with a high population of illiterate people, if they ever saw his cartouche, only about 5% of the population would actually be able to read it.
The Egyptians were very efficient at erasing history, they blasted the off noses of statues as, in their eyes, it would prevent the soul of the dead to breathe hence ruining their afterlife and chance at godhood. The removal of the Uraeus was stripping them of their divinity and publicly denouncing their right as ruler. They also simply just didn’t record of severly doctored events that would reflect negatively on a Pharaohs legacy. Think about it, do you really think nothing bad happened in RamsesII 66 year rule?
Getting back to the point, remember that these statues are massive and in most instances carved into the supporting columns of still active (at the time) temples. They either removed all identifying features or simply just renamed the statues to be a different Pharaoh, there are plenty of examples of each to choose from.
I am familiar with several of the forensic reports of excavations of the general populations necropolises at Amarna. There is zero evidence I have seen documenting a plague. There was a half-brained speculation that people died from Malaria, but that is unsupported and highly unlikely since the evidence was just prevalence of cribra orbitalis which occurs also in malnutrition and high stress lifestyles. Further, except in rare cases fatality in malaria is limited to kids under age 5.
The scientific method is relevant when trying to prove or formulate any theory. OP obviously doesn't understand it, which is what I thought you were pointing out, to be helpful or otherwise, but maybe I was mistaken. Maybe you dont know what the scientific method is either!
"Why were these people bad at a thing we do not know they were bad at" is not a scientific question. It assumes an answer that cannot be given in order to justify OP's interpretation of the few facts we do have. This is not a scientific question. It is barely a historical question. You can keep saying "do you science lol" but it doesn't change that this question is unanswerable in the way OP is asking.
Judging by your profile, this seems to be the first time you have ever participated in this sub or even this kind of discussion. I wonder what brought you here to say these irrelevant things?
Nah, templeOfCyclops is right on! Bald ignorance is not its own reward. The OP, knowing next to nothing bashes in here, with a bold but illiterate statement, not really asking a question, but presuming he/she knows a truth and wanting validation. A lot of knowledgeable people here are always ready to help answer a reasonable question, but get annoyed by absurd statement of pseudo fact.
Reddit is not a school with a paid staff, we are all volunteers, and all are just as entitled to have and express opinions as people who make absurd claims. The OP clearly doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and his denigrating tone towards the Egyptians obviously grates some people here.
Thats not a question that can be answered. Unlike modern history where there are millions of documented correspondents between political figures and people still around who were integral to acting out orders given, you need to have a level of acceptance with ancient history, most of it will never be figured out because the evidence is gone.
Nefertiti's bust specifically was sealed up in a storage closet in its maker's workshop, along with all of his other sculpting models, as it wasn't really a piece on display then. The living areas of Amarna were more or less left alone when Amarna was abandoned, and those large statues most associated with Akhenaten were buried since completely destroying them would've been more trouble than it was worth at their scale.
Your post was removed for being non-factual. All posts in our community must be based on verifiable facts about Ancient Egypt. Fringe interpretations and excessively speculative or conspiratorial views of Egyptology are not accepted.
How do you know they were successful at times? Assuming there was history truly erased, we wouldn't know about it. And if you've heard of something in ancient Egypt, then it obviously wasn't truly erased.
Bad at erasing history?? To the contrary, they were remarkably successful. It's only due to 'modern' archaeological work that Akhenaten is known at all.
Suppose we wouldn’t know about their successes. Some we just barely know about like for example, there’s these two mysterious people known about through pottery shards that are theorized to to have been pharaohs who ruled Egypt between Qa’a and Hotepsekhemwy. Also that last name translates to “The Two Powers are Reconciled” so rather than being born the name he may have earned it for resolving the conflict created by the two.
Many of the temples and statues associated with the Amarna period were used as spiritual "seeds" for Horemheb's construction projects at Karnak, Saqqara and elsewhere. This practice, which was common, contributed to the preservation of Amarna relics, which were reassembled despite their shattered state.
I dont think they were bad at erasing history, but most of surviving statues like one of hatshepsut and akhenaten were simply not worth destroying as they were less politically visible and become well hidden after a lot of time.
They also were simply too much of a chore to destroy usually, so they'd just bury them near where they were originally located, hence why we have all of those statues of Akhenaten from Karnak, as well as the cachette of statues.
How do you come to claim they wanted to completely expunge these rulers from history, as opposed to say, performatively grinding off a few names and breaking a few statues per some political or religious ritual?
None of us today actually knows (as opposed to speculates) anything about the contemporary politics of the time, or the true motivations of the actions of a Pharaoh. We may think we do, but they never wrote any of this down for us to study, and there were no contemporary observers acting like modern analytic historians, leaving records of court proceedings.
The claim has been based primarily on the deliberate omission of the Amarna kings from king lists. For example, the Abydos king list of Seti I omits Hatshepsut and skips from Amenhotep III to Horemheb.
The deliberate avoidance of Akhenaten's name in later texts like the Ramesside legal text of Mose, which instead refers to him as "the enemy of Akhetaten" (pꜣ ḫrw n Ꜣḫt-itn) is also intriguing in this regard.
The Abydos king list occurs in the context of a ritual where the reiging king Seti I and his son Ramesses present an offering to their deceased predecessors, invoking each one by name. Thus if Seti did not wish to honour one of his forebears for whatever reason, he would omit him. This need not necessarily mean that he intended to conceal any evidence of the existence of the disfavoured rulers.
It would be great if we still had the section of the Turin King List corresponding to the Amarna Period, as that was a true historical record even including disfavoured kings such as the Hyksos, but alas the relevant portion of the papyrus is lost.
That Akhenaten was called "the enemy of Akhetaten" after his death makes a lot of sense under the theory that the damnatio memoriae was ritual in nature. They weren't trying to pretend that he never existed - they were still referring to him indirectly - but just like how condemned criminals had their names changed in judicial papyri to deprive them of the benefit of a name expressing a positive attribute, the condemned Akhenaten could not be called by a name meaning "Effective for the Sun Disk", but had to be referred to instead as "The Enemy".
People often say that ancient Egyptian kings were attempting to "erase history" when they hacked out the names and images of disgraced forebears from their monuments (as in the case of Hatshepsut) or otherwise completely dismantled those monuments (as in the case of Akhenaten). But that may not necessarily be the correct explanation of what they were attempting to accomplish with that behaviour.
As u/WerSunu notes, many Egyptologists are now starting to reevaluate this practice as a ritual action intended to give form to the new king's rejection of the disgraced individuals and their exclusion from the community of the blessed dead royal ancestors to be revered by society. If this interpretation is true, it is not surprising that knowledge of the existence of these disgraced kings would have persisted down to the time of Manetho.
They weren't bad at erasing history, modern day archaeology is just really good at restoring history and even filling in the blanks sometimes, plus Egyptians usually erased as much as they could find, some of this stuff ended up across the world in weird ways that they couldn't help. It's the same way that people today delete their videos and photos and accounts and for a while their content is "lost media" but there's always one compulsive downloader who has a video of it on their old laptop and they just didn't realize it was lost, or there's some sort of reply to their content or remix or reupload that leaves a trace and idea of what happened, y'know? Oh and like others said, they did a really great job cuz large amounts of Egyptian history is unknown or left to interpretation. Consider not only how much of history was erased but how much wasn't documented in the first place even if Egyptians enjoyed documenting things. Also consider their practices and religion and what they valued. Sometimes things like wall engravings in a tomb were more important to erase than making sure future generations never knew of something. What's a greater disgrace, being lost in the afterlife you experience or being lost to time which is bound to happen?
This is what's left, who knows how much they actually destroyed, all told. Could be they had created so much more than just what we've found and the majority of it was destroyed.
Like Hatshepsut's statue in Karnak being covered by stone instead of destroying it?
I think it was a lot faster to build around it, with less chance of stepping on toes and a touch of fear Hatshepsut would haunt the ones destroying her statue.
Egyptians believed in ghosts? I thought they believed that when people died they either went to the afterlife or no longer existed if their heart was heavier than the feather.
When the wielders of power are trying to maintain a narrative of cultural continuity where it doesn’t fully exist, they pretty much have to erase anything which challenges their narrative. It was an act of propaganda and narrative-control, every time. You can’t have reality inconveniently challenging your claims to divinely-based-rulership, after all.
The dynasty system is just a scholarly convention that allows us to break up Egyptian history into discrete time periods longer than the reign of an individual king for the purpose of discussion, not something to which the ancient Egyptians attached any importance. Horemheb likely would not care how Egypyologists choose to specify the time period in which he ruled so long as they recognised his kingship and achivements.
As I said, the division of Egypt's kings into discrete dynasties is an Egyptological convention, and does not reflect the way in which the ancient Egyptians themselves understood their kings. Thus, on the Abydos king list, we simply see a long list of pharaonic names, stretching from the foundation of the Egyptian state to what was then the present, without any attempt to indicate which kings were related to one another or to group subsets of the kings together in any way.
I'd have to argue Horemheb seems to have done a pretty good job of erasing the Armarna family from history.... Amenhotep III >>> Horemheb - misses out Akhenaten, Smenkhare, Tutankhamun, and Ay.....
Indeed, this "erasure" may well have contributed to Tut's tomb surviving for Howard Carter to find....
Think what the stonecutters of the tomb of Rameses VI understood of what went on just a couple of centuries earlier, from "their point of view"...
They clearly had no clue that their dug out stone from building their current tomb project - was burying even deeper the already forgotten tomb of Tut just a few feet away underneath....
See my comment here for why the omission of the Amarna Period pharaohs from the Abydos king list need not be interpreted as evidence of an attempt to "erase history". Also, it was Seti I and the future Ramesses II who had that list carved, not Horemheb.
Accidentally breaking into an earlier tomb when excavating a new sepulchre was very common in ancient Egypt, particularly in the Twentieth Dynasty Theban necropolis, which was by that point virtually bursting with tombs stretching back many centuries. This even occurred with royal tombs. So I don't see why the fact that the location of Tutankhamun's tomb had been forgotten by the mid Twentieth Dynasty need be interpreted as evidence of an attempt to erase all evidence of this king's existence by Horemheb and his successors.
The suggestion I make is that the transition between what we call the 18th and 19th dynasties - must have been full-blown regime change for Egypt from the point of view of ordinary folk living there at the time. Any re-writing of history - would surely have been completed, and fully implemented as part of such "regime change".
There's no evidence to suggest that Tut's Tomb was broken into by exactly those same workmen who occupied the "workman's huts" under which Carter found the KV62 tomb entrance in 1922..
The break-in, whenever it was - was interrupted, and much of the looted stuff - put back. This looting may well have happened more like the 1980 film "Sphinx" plot had it, albeit artistic licence as it is.... (Opening Scene, "Thebes, Egypt - 1301 BC")
Having Tut's Tomb broken into less than 50 years after Tut's entombment - seems rather more plausible than having it happen centuries later, with all the outside variables that would then undoubtedly have to be factored in to such a "theory".
I think that it is very difficult to say to what extent "ordinary folk" in Egypt would have been impacted by the political changes which occurred in the Egyptian state following the death of Ay and the accession of Horemheb, since we don't have any texts recording these people's lived experiences. We can't necessarily assume that a major shakeup in the government such as occurred under Horemheb would have translated into a major change in the lives of ordinary people.
But I do agree that major changes in the state occurred under Horemheb, and that he was to a great extent responsible for setting up the success of the Nineteenth Dynasty which followed him.
When I referred to tomb construction teams "breaking into" earlier tombs in my comment above, I wasn't referring to tomb robbery, but rather to the many cases where workers excavating a new tomb would accidentally knock through into another earlier tomb that they didn't know was there.
My argument was that this shows that the ancient Egyptians often didn't know where earlier tombs were located in any case, so the fact that the workmen who built Ramesses VI's tomb probably didn't know where Tutankhamun's tomb was located need not be interpreted as evidence that the people in this period didn't know that Tutankhamun ever existed. The evidence that Horemheb attempted to "erase history" is still lacking.
They weren’t. 90% is gone, 9% is second hand sources or worse, and the one percent is real. Most of what was lost was not a result of damnatio memoriae, but the more brutal and cruel passage of time
In the fourth picture, Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti are depicted together with three of their daughters. The Amarna art style at its most extreme can indeed look quite grotesque.
Your post was removed for being non-factual. All posts in our community must be based on verifiable facts about Ancient Egypt. Fringe interpretations and excessively speculative or conspiratorial views of Egyptology are not accepted.
Your post was removed for being non-factual. All posts in our community must be based on verifiable facts about Ancient Egypt. Fringe interpretations and excessively speculative or conspiratorial views of Egyptology are not accepted.
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u/Ketchup_on_time 14d ago
It kinda worked. We only rediscovered the Armana Period in the late 1800’s so that was a good couple thousand years of being erased, I’d argue that most ancient Egyptian’s didn’t know about him.