Too Super, Too Geeky

one-of-the-birds:

rudjedet:

rudjedet:

rudjedet:

rudjedet:

rudjedet:

rudjedet:

thatlittleegyptologist:

rudjedet:

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

@rudjedet Thank you for taking the to list all the books!

(via bisexualspacewitch)

gooseweasel:

unforgivablecurse-breaker:

gooseweasel:

Good Backwards World Building: In the Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery mobile game, your player character must learn the charm Silencio, which causes the target to temporarily be unable to make any sound, during their fifth year at Hogwarts. During the class, it is revealed that one of the side effects of a failed Silencio charm is for the target of the spell to begin to swell uncontrollably. For players who are clever and remember the books, this will ring a bell- it was never explained why Aunt Marge in The Prisoner of Azkaban started swelling up when Harry got angry, only that he accidentally did magic. This reveal shows that in anger, his subconscious was likely trying to “shut her up”, causing a mis-cast Silencio charm, and therefore the side-effect of swelling. The reveal doesn’t change anything about the characters or their motivations, or add anything in particular to the plot. It’s just a neat bit of trivia.

Bad Backwards World Building: JKR tweets that [x] was part of [x minority group], even though there was no indication of such in the text, simply because it adds representation in hindsight.  

Damn I was really with you until the random JK bashing….

I mean it’s the whole point of the post so like, it’s cool man. You don’t need to be there. 

(via bisexualspacewitch)

terpsikeraunos:

catastrophic-success:

terpsikeraunos:

on the one hand there are many aspects of academia that should be criticized but on the other hand i’m concerned about the rise of anti-intellectualism as a tool of fascism

Hey yo what the fuck does this say in English? Because if you can’t explain in layman’s terms you’re not doing a good job of getting your point across to everyone.

1. we are right to criticize the many problems in higher education

2. fascists manipulate people into hating anyone involved in higher education for supposedly looking down on them and being worthless to the “real world.” as a result, funding for education is cut, especially for the arts, no one listens to historians who point out that history is repeating itself or speak out against the regime, freedom of speech is lost in favor of the party line, and/or climate change kills us all since no one listens to scientists.

3. therefore, when we criticize higher education, we should be careful not to contribute to fascist tropes that claim that having knowledge is bad/smug/out of touch/useless to society.

(via hannibalsdong)

epikalstorms:

vorbits:

underrmyumbrellaella:

this is the true gen z experience

once in my sixth hour we were talking about 9/11 and i announced very loudly “more people died in hurricane maria than in 9/11 but nobody really cares because you can’t use hurricanes to justify imperialism” and then not even 5 seconds later i said “yeehaw my beets.”

man and you were only six hours old

(via venusguytrap)

mynamebatman:

blueelectricangels:

pervocracy:

are you ready for my favorite fact?

If you leave a hamster wheel out in the forest, wild mice will come and run on it.

that is my favorite fact

Bobcats and lynx will sit in cardboard boxes abandoned in the middle of the forest.

I asked the lynx researcher who told me this why, and he said “Cats, man” and shrugged.

This is now an “if I fits, I sits” appreciation thread.

(via bisexualspacewitch)

alaynestcnes:

Jon: gods Sansa just won’t get off my back, it’s always something with her and it’s driving me mad, she makes my blood boil, my heart race, my-

Literally anyone: I know, she’s annoying

Jon: what the fuck? What the absolute- how dare you, you come into my house, disrespect the woman I lo-my SISTER

(via everlastingstarlight)