The protests in Iran may have started against the mandatory hijab law and wanting justice for Mahsa Amini’s death but now it has turned into a protest _ a war dare I say _ against the whole regime. People are just fed up with the dictatorship of Ali Khamenei and want him gone! They are chanting things like “death to the dictator” and “death to the Islamic Republic” in the streets. And it’s not something new it’s just for the first time we’ve been able to raise our voices and make the world listen. The mahsa amini tag has been trending on Twitter for days and Iranians are still trying to keep it trending so please be our voice and spread the news. Let the world know the real face of our government.
Controversial Truths About Ancient Egypt Masterpost
The pyramids were built by contemporary workers who received wages and were fed and taken care of during construction
The Dendera “lightbulb” is a representation of the creation myth and has nothing to do with electricity
We didn’t find “““copper wiring””” in the great pyramid either
Hatshepsut wasn’t transgender
The gods didn’t actually have animal heads
Hieroglyphs aren’t mysteriously magical; they’re just a language (seriously we have shopping lists and work rosters and even ancient erotica)
The ancient Egyptian ethnicity wasn’t homogeneous
Noses (and ears, and arms) broke off statues and reliefs for a variety of reasons, none of which are “there is a widespread archaeological conspiracy to hide the Egyptian ethnicity”
The carvings at Abydos aren’t modern machines but recarvings over old carvings. Sure they look like them but if you can read hieroglyphs and know that Ramesses II will even usurp the carvings of his own father just to be a little shit
‘No soot on the ceilings and walls of the Dendera temple!’ is actually because of extensive restoration works and not because Egyptians were in on shit like Baghdad “batteries”
While the Egyptians were fine-ass astronomers they didn’t align any of their enormous and/or important buildings to modern star constellations, because constellations look very different now than they did ~5000 years ago
The pyramid is the simplest, sturdiest shape with which to build and many different cultures discovered this in their own time. There were never any weird fish humans/aliens involved
The sphinx of Gizah is only an approximate 5000 years old; the 10,000 year/rain erosion nonsense is proven hokum
Speaking of that particular sphinx, the Napoleonic expedition is not responsible for its missing nose
Akhenaten was not a “heretic” by contemporary standards
Ramses II appropriated a lot of his predecessors’ buildings/reliefs and isn’t really deserving of the epithet “the Great”
The Battle of Kadesh ended in a stalemate (twice)
While they had feline deities throughout their history, Egyptians didn’t actually worship cats themselves. This was a later Greek/Ptolemaeic addition
It was not, in fact, practice to shave off eyebrows after cats died; Herodotus lied about that
Herodotus lied about a lot of things and many misconceptions about ancient Egypt can be traced back to his Greek ass
I can’t believe I forgot my favourite Hill to Die On
Seth was not the god of “evil”, and despite his chaos providing a foil to order, he wasn’t completely villified until very late in Egyptian history, when he became associated with despised foreign enemies
Hats off to the few of you who’re reblogging this with tags saying you’re going to check my claims later. You make me not entirely despair of this hellhole.
Here are some vetted Egyptological books/sources (that are by and large appropriate for a lay-audience) you can find most, if not all of the above:
Lehner, M., The Complete Pyramids
Wilkinson, R. H., The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt
Hornung, E., The One and the Many: Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt
Dunand, F. & Zivie-Coche, C., Gods and Men in Egypt
Kemp, B., Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization
Bard, K., An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt
Stevenson Smith, W., The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt
Kitchen, K. A., The Life and Times of Ramesses II, King of Egypt
Sweeney, D., Sex and Gender (in Ancient Egypt)
McDowell, A. G., Village Life in Ancient Egypt:
Laundry Lists and Love Songs
Te Velde, H., Seth, God of Confusion
Guys do me a solid and reblog this version instead of continuously asking for sources on the other versions thanks
is there a version of this post where y'all talk about how the ancient Egyptians had advanced technology (that is lost and unknown to us) that allowed them to cut multiple ton granite stone to such precision that if you were to try to slide a human hair between the cuts, the hair wouldn’t fit? and if you try to take a photo of the cut from a few inches over head that you can’t even tell the cut line is there? unless the ancients were some sort of advanced earth benders, how do y'all explain that???
Yeah it’s called “the ancient Egyptians were skilled stone workers with the attested tools at their disposal and we didn’t lose that knowledge actually” and you can find all the pertinent evidence in The Complete Pyramids, run along now.
i made a great response to this but then i realized your complete and utter rudeness is not worth it at all. i had a genuine question and there was no need to respond like that. and no, my “earthbender” comparison wasn’t serious.
You know why I was harsh? Because you coached your question in the exact same terms every single conspiracy theorist uses to deny ancient Egyptians their agency when it comes to their stone working. Your reply had the exact same tone of many, many people who tried to play gotcha with me in 119k+ notes, and I’m just not here for that. There is a need to respond like that, actually, because conspiracists will take a mile if you give them an inch on their barely disguised racist beliefs that the Egyptians couldn’t have built their monuments themselves. You either shut it down immediately or you give them ammo. If you got caught in the crossfire of that, that’s regrettable but there is a reason for it.
And why am I making that “dumb comment”? Because I’m an Egyptologist. I have studied this, reviewed the evidence, read all the theories. And as I stated, we do have proof. We do have evidence that metal tools and harder stones can, in fact, cut stone. The same tools can, in fact, create a level surface on a quarried block because the Egyptians, like many contemporary civilisations, knew how to use things like measures and plumb lines.
There is, again, nothing lost or too-advanced about it. It’s technology that is actually still in use today in various fields and quarries together with more modern techniques. If you look through the recent reblogs you’ll find one that attaches many different videos showing exactly what I’m talking about.
And to reiterate, if you’re genuinely interested you can find all of this info in Mark Lehner’s The Complete Pyramids, which is relatively easily accessed online. Barring that, you can look at his website or any of the freely accessible articles by the same and also read up on this. It’s no skin off my nose if you don’t want to take my word for it, but that is why I added sources.
Saudi women compete at the annual Souq Okaz festival, a celebration of history, poetry, and a long tradition of horsemanship outside of Ta’if. The women, all elite equestrians, show off their skills in the “Knights of Okaz” competition. (Photography of Amer Hilabi)
y’all better hype this up because this is BIG and is evidence that the berlin patient wasn’t a fluke, and this could revolutionize medicine (there’s already cases of cancers where methods similar to these have worked), and while you’re at it, please join a bone marrow registry!! (especially poc bc these therapies usually only have been done on white patients due to genetic similarities, and the more poc we get in registries the more access poc patients can have to this for cancers, SSS, etc)
i saw the trailer for the new feel-good “anti-racist” US war movie about the carpet bombing of North Korea and started writing up something for this blog, partially inspired by the absolute shit storm i got for sharing that post i made with pictures of everyday life outside pyongyang
and then i gave up, because what’s the point? westerners can’t even handle a single picture of a north korean not looking miserable without screaming propaganda
meanwhile, there are no stories about the horrors of life in the ‘hermit kingdom’ that are deemed too outlandish to be believable. i can’t remember who said it, but it’s like the entire country has taken up permanent residence in the western imaginary as some silly little cartoon villain, where the leaders of the country does evil things for no discernible reason. they’re just silly and evil like that, and the citizens, of course, are silly, too. silly and brainwashed.
i watched a video recently of a tourists visiting an auto dealership in pyongyang, and the entire time he was just gawking at the employees and costumers, shoving his phone in their face, and confidently explaining to his youtube audience that everyone he’s interacting with are actually actors.
what level of dehumanization do you have to reach for that thought to even cross your mind? to think that the people you see before you are actors? that entire cities and shops are erected with to sole purpose that you, a western, will see them and be impressed?
what frustrates me the most is the casual cruelty that seeps into any mention of north korea, no matter how small. if north koreans are not being evil, they’re being silly.
a north korean newspaper reports that a group of archeologists in pyongyang have discovered an old rock carving with the words ‘unicorn lair’ (mistranslated), and the western press reports that north koreans now believe in unicorns.
a tourist at a hotel in hamhung is told by the receptionist to be careful at the beach: the waves can get high. that day the tourists goes to the beach, and there are no waves. she retells the story to her instagram followers, explaining that the poor woman at the hotel could never have seen real waves before because north koreans are probably never allowed to travel.
she adds a little teary-eyed emoji.
one of the cities i included in the post was sariwon, a densely populated city to the south of pyongyang. below are some pictures from its “folk customs street”, which was built to showcase old korean traditions and customs
here’s all wikipedia has to say about it
Built to display an ideal picture of ancient Korea, it includes
buildings in the “historical style” and a collection of ancient Korean
cannons.
Although it is considered an inaccurate romanticized recreation of an
ancient Korean street, it is frequently used as a destination for
foreigners on official government tours. Many older style Korean
buildings exist in the city.
it’s just north koreans being silly again. there’s no mention of what might motivate them to build a street like that
— why the preservation of old customs, culture and architecture might somehow be important for the city
could it perhaps have something to do with how the U.S. air force dropped
635,000 tons
of bombs, including
32,557 tons of napalm, over the korean peninsula during the war? the carpet bombings, which are now the topic of an upcoming hollywood movie about overcoming racism through warcrimes, destroyed an estimate of 85% of all buildings in north korea. some cities were entirely wiped off the map.
in sariwon they missed a few buildings, but not many
—
after an intense firebombing campaign the U.S. military estimated the destruction of sariwon to be at 95%.
none of this is mentioned on the wikipedia page for sariwon.
we destroyed entire cities. memory-holed the entire thing,
called it the forgotten war. and now, 70 years later, we’re convincing ourselves that the people living in the ruins are actors.
and somehow the north koreans are the brainwashed ones
