 So I'd like to welcome you all to the Brooklyn Museum. My conversation about the whole range of topics, this exhibition is at the Brooklyn Museum as part of the celebration of the tenth year of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. I was asked to do an Egyptian exhibition that would be part of that celebration. I immediately thought of Karen's articles on this subject, so without any further ado. So my question is, how do you think that feminism has had an impact on Egyptology? So the invitation is nice to be in New York. And I didn't know this was going to be, because I don't read my emails or read them too fast. Does anyone else do that? Yeah. So I read my emails too fast, and I didn't know this would be a discussion. He's like, oh, we sit down and have a discussion. I said, oh, that's so great. I love that. So we're sitting down and having a discussion. And he's asking me current questions. Which I could talk in those with whom I studied at Johns Hopkins, and that as an Egyptologist to a time... I always, whenever I end up talking about this question, which I do sometimes in class when I talk about politics, I always think of Betsy Bryant, because she was my classmate at a time in Egyptology, at a time when all of the fact, and it was unusual that an Egyptologist, although there must have been many young women who wanted to be Egyptologists, in the meantime, women have taken up with the schools, which is interesting that we could discuss that in general, and it does women, but Egyptian archaeology have really been taken up. So last time when I was thinking about this discussion, I figured out that about a third tautology in this country now are the days when I was a student. Now it's an institute of archaeology at UCLA, and there are so many female students. The director of the program says, oh, well, that's a diversity. We should consider this student. And in many ways, he's right when he says that. So the feminism in Egyptology is a strange thing, because the women have very much are moving and coaching to take over the field. So questions of women in ancient Egypt, any of the questions were systematically of... In case studies, they're so popular now. Yeah, so I wrote a book called, which makes a reaction to certain religious events, which decided they wanted to be more upfront about the sexuality of the person on the inside of that coffin. We're very upfront about the inside, shows the ancient Egyptian female in getting to the next life, I found very intriguing, in the same social... Could you explain what the problem was? Let's go back to our creation as not... You worked for six days and you read it. The Egyptians were not shy about showing how this creation... So how did women deal with the fact that fertility or recreation is really a masculine activity? And that a woman needs to be reborn in her coffin. She's isolated inside her coffin after her death, and she needs to be reborn into the next world. So how did women deal with that? And with no masculine principle nearby? Well, as you and I have discussed, it's more complicated than just the feminine needing the masculine. The masculine, it seems, the coffin itself is a feminine element. Ancient Egyptian was just like the smurf, smurf and smurfette. So you add a T and you... The ancient Egyptian coffin, osiris-like as she possibly can. And I don't have an image of it here. The inner piece is what she is meant to become. And in typical Egyptian fashion, they put all of the stages there. In one coffin set, it is a fate of complete. Your rebirth is a given, this is the way it's going to happen. All of these objects are making this so in material, magical form. So means she died older. It's inside of the Osiris. The 18th Dynasty used to have more of an androgynizing piece. And then as you go into... See, sorry, as I skip ahead. Let me do this piece. As you go into the 20th and 21st, there is a move away from showing the female form and the femininity on the inside. And this piece has been reused. So you see the decoration on the bottom and then decoration on the top. They've just plastered over it. You see the lines on the bottom there. So that's the garment of a male or a female could be either one with formation through an Osirian transformation. Fashion dictated or religious beliefs dictated. One of the things I like to point out in our version, our coffin that shows this process is the way skin tone is used. And I often say that our coffin where it walks, it has man skin even though she's a woman. Could you talk about that? So if I look at... Sorry, this piece here. It is typical for... In an Egyptian statue, and there's much discussion about this by Egyptologists as well, there should be. But it is typical for Egyptian statues to show a male with a dark red over skin and to show a female with a woman staying in the home and thus not being out in the fields and being an active member of society or passive and thus her skin color is lighter. We could discuss all of those. And I think coming from the top down because Nefrotardist, she has that dark red red and she's released it. We wouldn't have a job. We wouldn't. Could you talk a little bit about the... The very first time I heard you talk you were still a graduate student and you talked about the economics of coffins. I think people... It was such a great paper that I sat there as a... I was actually an assistant professor by that point and I thought to myself, I wish I had written this paper. Was it Michigan? No, I don't remember where we were. It could have been in Michigan. But anyway, you were really one of the first people to talk about how much did these things cost? And so could you give a little idea of those issues, what the issues are there and how you figure that out? Well, I like to... Egyptologists talk about coffee at work and we get lost in the weeds. It's useful there. But I teach a graduate seminar at UCLA that deals with... Everyone's going to be picking up that each of you is going to feel the desire to totally get lost in the weeds and start to argue with each other about what the... Do you see how they're in the similar interworld divinities here? What are they doing and how does it work? And if we do that, then we fall into the trap. So let's just wipe all of that aside. Yes, the coffins object par excellence. It's there to transform the dead into a living person, into an OSIRIS, and then into a... Decisions about one direction or another is not necessarily from telling you which should be this way or that way. Or Goats or eyeliner or Hello Kitty markers or whatever. Next years, I remember the teachers' park used their material objects to gain power for a generation. Ecologists usually look at these objects as transformation pieces and transformation pieces only from a religious perspective. And look at them as objects that display family. These pieces are... Just say a few words perhaps about specific prices and then I was hoping you would talk about a related issue which you've worked on which is the reuse of coffins as coffins get more expensive. Because the coffin in the exhibition was actually one that was reused at least once over several generations. But in comparison to the amount of labor a person would need in order to earn enough to have a coffin. And you know what? The reuse. So let me start with the second part because that's actually changed a lot of my ideas. I feel like I have to rewrite it as being reused. So maybe we can step back and just give a basic explanation of what you mean by reuse. And I'm going to the pieces I'm showing here. It's 20 seconds. So right now the only piece I have that's reused potentially is this one here. And it's the earliest evidence of reuse that I've got so it's okay. This is a piece in the British Museum and I think you can see the reuse pretty clearly. It's an extraordinary thing to think about taking the body of an ancestor out of a coffin, placing that body over to the side, bringing that coffin out of the tomb, redecorating it, re-commodifying that coffin essentially, reselling it or reusing it within the context of the family, and then putting a new body inside of it. And when I bring this idea up to people, the first question that's raised, particularly in Egypt where people are very sensitive about this, is how dare you say that these coffins are reused. That's an extraordinarily immoral thing to do. And I say, how is it, it's the most moral solution in a time period of crisis and economic scarcity. So we can all imagine that we live in a time period of economic scarcity and a very fiercely loved, loved one and your family has died. And you're in Egyptian, you believe that you need this materiality to transform the dead into an Osiris. This needs to happen in your mind. And are you just going to let your mother not be transformed? Are you going to go into the family vault, go into the burial chamber, move some pieces around, belong to an ancestor that you don't know or remember anymore? Your family doesn't even talk about that ancestor. You move some things around, you take the coffin set out, you open it up, you see the ancestor, and then it kind of hits you. Oh, dear. You believe in the angry dead. You believe that these dead people could come back and harm you in some way. You might then bring in a magician or a priest or somebody who can make sure that the dead is going to not turn against you. And there is some really... the inscription for Nessie Kahn's, have you read it recently? It's a 21st dynasty text where it keeps encircling her heart and circling her heart saying that no harm will come to anybody from Nessie Kahn's suit. That she will not harm this person, she will not harm that person. Nessie Kahn's suit will not harm anybody. People like Robert Rittner this Nessie Kahn's suit woman must have been quite a horrible woman because they're all terrified. The Nessie Kahn's suit is going to come out of her grave and just attack them, and they're all freaked out so much so they go to the priesthood in Karnak and say, please, you know, write up this text for us and do this magical spell. I looked at that and went, oh, my God, it's a magical spell to make sure that when they're reusing her coffins that her ghost doesn't come and bite them when they've done this. So they bring somebody into encircle her heart and make sure that she's not harming anyone and then they move her aside in the burial chamber. It's why the only 19th Dynasty burial chamber, so Ramosid burial chamber that was found intact had only nine bodies buried in coffins and another 11 or 12, I don't have to look at the exact numbers, were found outside of coffins. I used to understand that was because they wanted to be buried with the rich people. The poor cousin who couldn't afford a coffin put the mummy in and then the other people would have a nice coffin so they would all be there together. Everyone that went into this burial chamber had a coffin originally but they were taken out of those coffins as the 20th Dynasty went on. So your mother's died, we're going with our hypothetical idea of somebody you fiercely love has just died and this is the only moral solution. You remove an ancestor whom you don't really remember. You treat that ancestor with respect. You move the body over, keep it in your burial chamber in a protected space, yes, without a bodily container, but you keep it there. And then you bring that coffin out and you update it. It's important to update these pieces if possible. The very least you must update with the name and title of the new person. Which is all your coffin of where it walks at or Ben Suipit has, right? Ben Suipit is the re-user and where it walks at was the original owner. And this coffin amazes me, the coffin in the exhibition here, because when that piece was displayed in the funeral, everyone would have known it was reused. Everyone would have known it was an old piece. It's not like getting married in a vintage wedding gown, guys. This is not something you want to show off to people. The norm for reuse was to hide your traps, cast your over the old decoration as we see here, and put a new decoration on the surface. This is why reuse was not seen for so long, and I'm the first person to look at it systematically. It was uncrazely obsessed with coffins, and that's not something everybody should do. It's a weird thing. But so the idea that this is immoral, I push back against. This is the only moral way of dealing with it. But the Egyptians themselves knew there was a problem with their traps more often than not. And when they reused, they updated and tried to make it modern and stylish. This piece here is a reused set, but I can't show you where it is without any close-up pictures of the crafts to give you an idea of where the old decoration would be. But I've been looking at coffins dating to the 21st dynasty, time period during and after the Bronze Age collapse, a time period of extraordinary crisis in the ancient world when the sea peoples are sweeping around the Mediterranean, and kingdoms are falling in their wake, and people don't have enough to eat, and there is warfare everywhere. Down south in Egypt, in Thebes, people are able to hold on a little bit better. But they still have no wood in cultivation in the delta, because the delta has been laid waste from all we can tell. And they don't have wood coming in from the Lebanon in trade, because that trade has been shut down and we have other pieces of evidence to make that point for us for the 21st dynasty. And people are driven by the lack of wood in particular to take old wooden coffins, scrape that decoration down, and start again. And I've been looking and I've looked at probably 300 coffins of the 21st dynasty with my own eyes, sometimes through museum cases, sometimes not, trying to determine if a piece was reused or not, and my numbers right now, it's 65% It's 65%. With just what I can see with my two eyes, and I know that if I was able to use my super X-ray vision for all of these pieces, some sort of stealth means of looking through plaster, I would see much more than that. But 65%, it's not too bad. So the reuse is, to me, it again makes the point that the Egyptians, when they had to choose, were more interested in the short-term use of these objects and display than they were in the long-term ownership. And there are even coffins that I could show you in a different PowerPoint that have a blank that is varnished over for the name. Which I think approaches a kind of coffin rental, if you like. Because you can write over a varnished surface and you can easily wipe that away with a wet cloth. I call it the Wipey Board Hypothesis. And I'm working with a conservator to help me determine how that would work if you applied varnished to a surface, how you could apply ink to, and how you might be able to wipe it off and reapply. My final issue that I want to be sure we covered before we open the floor up to questions has to do with the use of language. And where it walks its coffin in particular, there is the issue that masculine language is used to address the deceased in the notions of woman. So I wanted to ask you to talk about that. Yeah, this is a really cool feature of ancient Egyptian coffins that, or funerary objects. Where you see different pronouns being used. So on this scarab you see the name and title of the deceased. In this case it's Noob E.T. And it's Iris Noob E.T. She says to introduce the book of the dead text that goes along with the scarab which is about the heart of my mother, heart of my mother and it goes on. Later on in this book of the dead text, the pronoun his is used. And the Egyptologists who published this said that it was a stock piece that was purchased on the market and then they just changed the pronoun because this was the way things worked. And I thought okay, I'm not sure because on a coffin like this piece here in the British Museum fully gilded set, cedar wood, 19th dynasty, highest quality of the highest elite you can possibly imagine. The fact that this came to the museum in one set is extraordinary in and of itself. And if you look at here we've got her name. She's the Osiris. Do you see the Osiris? They're the eye and the seat and the guy. That's the name of the god Osiris. And then you have Nebet Pair and there's the pair. And then she's Shemaitan Amen. So she's the chantress of Amen. And then her name and I can barely see that. Henu Mahit is here. Then you see the snake, the cobra, Jed S. She says very clearly they understand she's a woman, she's got female titles no problem. But if you look at the book of the dead 151 on the case size and in other parts he, his she's masculinized. The people who made this were amazingly skilled craftsmen. The people who ordered it were very rich discerning rich people. Do you know any discerning rich people around? Right? The kind who can look at a really nice Armani suit and go oh yes that's you know that was from last collection. I am not that person but we all know those people right? And the discerning rich people who can read hieroglyphs are going to know whether there's a he in there. And they're not going to think of it as a scribal mistake. It's a facile way of going about this. This was purposefully done. She's able to have her cake and eat it too. She's able to be masculine and feminine simultaneously. And they do it in very clever ways. So she is feminine when her identity is introduced. Her, her self the title, mistress of the house, chanters of almond Henu Mahit, she says but then in all of the text it talks about making sure her corpse is intact and making sure that her Osirian body parts are put together in an Osirian way. She is he. He does his body his this or that. Purposefully done. And so that's where the language element comes in. But that also stresses to you guys how much of an elite and intellectual problem this was. That in many ways the Egyptian rich created for themselves when they started to bury their dead in anthropoid Osirian like coffins in the first place and before that point when they were just buried in boxes this wasn't even an issue. The problem gets worse for the female the more tricked out their their coffins get. So I would think this would be a good point to start taking questions from the floor and Kara I'm going to ask you to call on people because I'm not having vision problems right now I'm going to see his hands up. Check in Dutch and the reason I say check in Dutch is because Yaroslav Cherny who was a God of Egyptian heratic texts of non-fiction heratic texts went around the world whenever there was an Ostracon or a set of Ostraca that he could transcribe he did and his notebooks then made their way into the Griffith Institute in London and sorry what? Oh sorry Oxford, thank you in Oxford and when I was doing my dissertation research the Griffith Institute was closed and I couldn't get in but at Leiden University at the Nino and I'm not going to try to translate but it's the Near Eastern Studies department in Leiden they have they have Xerox copies of the entire notebook from Cherny so I went to Leiden and Leiden is also a bastion of these non-literary heratic texts and they've added to it as well and there's a wonderfully Egyptologist who recently died named Jack Janssen who wrote a book that sounds it's got the sexiest title you guys are not going to believe it called Commodity Prices from the Ramisted Period a book you and I both know well it is a great book sounds horrible but it is amazing what this guy did and Jack Janssen collected prices for different kinds of wooden objects coffins, shirts sandals, livestock of all kinds food of all kinds it's a discussion of vocabulary as much as anything else trying to figure out what's what and the section on coffins I found rather intriguing he was pretty he got almost every piece I found a couple of prices that he didn't include in there but for the most part he was able to find every piece where Jock and I disagreed and Jock Janssen did you know this when I was writing my dissertation I wrote him a letter saying this is my dissertation that's what I'm working on and he wrote me a hand written ten page letter saying this is a horrible idea and why it was a horrible idea but I can imagine that I was making assumptions that the Egyptians had a market economy an understood profit and that that was stupid and that the Egyptians had a primitive economy and this was the way it worked and I didn't know how to react to that you know when you're a grad student you don't have the confidence that you have later you think that you're an idiot and when somebody like Jock Janssen writes you a ten page letter saying that you suck you're like oh my god you suck and so I remember going in tears to my advisor and saying what do I do what do we do they're like you just rework the economy stupid and I went oh okay so then I became involved in discussions of ancient economy and it's yeah the Egyptians had an understanding of profit yes they knew how to buy and sell yes they knew what the value of these things were and yes value did go up in time depending on the scarcity or the plentiful nature of the commodity in question and the reason prices for things like sandals or shirts changed so little is because in an agricultural economy the price for flaps or the price for leather and the labor there too changed so little it doesn't mean that there's no inflation there's grain inflation to be seen in the Egyptian texts but so we had an economic disagreement but does that yeah go ahead go ahead oh sorry thank you thank you thank you so these texts all come from ancient Thebes and most of these texts come from the Theban western desert many of them come from a site called Derel Medina where the workmen who decorated the tombs in the valley of the kings lived and many of them come from the valley of the kings or queens itself and the reason they survive and essentially there are pot-shirts or limestone flakes with black or red ink written on them the only reason they survive is because they weren't deposited near the inundation areas so objects like this would have been made little notes like laundry lists you send your laundry out or I'm going to buy this cow and it's going to cost me 60 debon and you make a little list of it you might put it in ink on a pot-shirt but if you live in the delta and you throw that away archaeologists who find it go look a pot-shirt you find that in the desert in the Theban desert you find that there is a lot of dust on here and then you can work with it in a different way because of the arid climate and I'm sorry I skipped over the sources of that yes please sort of I can say that amongst the top 3, 4, 5% notice how I just did that we know so little about the people who are in control of this Egyptian society that I don't know if it would really be 3%, 5% or what but the people at the bottom the whole status emulated the people at the top so the people at the top would have any of you guys been to the Met recently and seen Meket Otten the beautiful image of the female all of those figurines from the middle kingdom too and she's got the thing on her head with the bread and beer and she's bringing these things in for the dead that's what and I think I might actually have that in this discussion but she's the, yeah something like this which doesn't suck but it ain't that Meket Otten piece is it and you can see the difference in quality this is something that out of perspective I have been advised do not talk about that there are no quality differences that they have different feelings to them but they have the same function I agree yes they have the same function but in terms of display the discerning high level elites something like this and say yeah I mean how cute yes it's going to function for you but they will just overlook it and not even notice it's like a gap sweater for them right who cares but that Meket Otten piece that will be talked about it will be discussed people remember it and that is a way of making your case amongst other elites can I really make any sorts of discussion in terms of numbers and give you a sociological analysis of this not with what we have not really I could show you some way uglier examples of this I have a photo of a piece that I saw in storage in Berlin at the a gift issues museum and she looks like that girl she's got like these weird eyes and her head is just a block just stuck on there and the duck looks horrible but it's got the duck, it's got the beard it's got the woman and it's got breasts just kind of boom right there yeah so they're meant to be functional but there are different ways of communicating your worth think of the Mask of Tut you can all see it in your mind's eye right now drop dead gorgeous amazing piece solid gold, you know that's power and then you see a gilded piece that's trying to approach that power and then you see a coffin that is polychrome that is not even close but they're trying to make their case amongst their display audience so to kind of give a quick and dirty answer to your question one thing is to say that people are displaying to the people that make a difference in their social life these people aren't going to display to the Uber rich the Uber rich don't care about their tune they're not going to be there to see it the Uber rich are only going to be looking at where they're looking it's a much closer circle tighter thing, details will be focused on a way that you don't with these pieces and the lower elites are going to focus on making a bigger splash taking their more limited resources and being more ostentatious with it and trying to make a bigger display because they have more people to impress than the very very rich does that kind of make a point? I would just add that that whole process then goes on in modern museums as well so we have a storeroom full of things that are lesser quality but the exhibition space which is limited is one of the best things and put them on display for you so that creates a kind of distorted picture of what ancient Egypt was like everybody I've ever met who is reincarnated from ancient Egypt he was a king or a prince I've never met a peasant who was reincarnated I'm going to do a graduate seminar this next year at UCLA on Egyptian social history because we have the social history of ancient Egypt but what the hell was that and that needs to be redone it's a beautiful book but it's a confusing book written by four different authors and nobody really knows what to make of it that's the O'Connor who else is O'Connor Lloyd Trigger but you and then you please back to his question I'm going to give you an example of a guy in coffins and where people would put their wealth their limited wealth everyone has limited wealth even a king has limited wealth you can't take all the gold in the world and put it in the tomb and it's always a question of audience who gets to get in there and a question of how many people in your audience you want to impress let me give you two different examples they're amazing mummies how many people do you think got to view those mummies how were they displayed you're not supposed to show a naked body this is an Ossirian thing it's supposed to be protected and safe who were you displaying this to maybe 10 people 12 people the people who had their bodies mummified like this were displaying it to a very small set in a closed very competitive community of other high elites they did not need to worry about impressing the people below they needed to worry about impressing their peers in this competitive high priesthood of Amin that mummification technique disappears when society broadens and they need to display to a wider set of people it only lasts when the community to be displayed to is also small and inward looking and then my second example would be these beautiful sarcophagi and I don't have a picture of it here you know Kansu and Sinejo from Theven Tomb 1 you guys can google it they're bigger than this table probably six feet tall eight or nine feet in length meticulously painted absolutely gorgeous they're in the Chiron Museum now we're found in the same tomb as this piece was found in and a number of other pieces that I've shown and for these people these are craftsmen this woman was the wife of a craftsman who decorated the tombs in the valley of the kings and the sarcophagi that I'm talking about they're wooden rectangular objects into which you would place a nested inner outer coffin set with the mummy board and the mummy of course and for these lower elites having these big huge sarcophagi to drag around in procession obviously got them a lot of play it was something that was very useful to them but you don't see and they put more of their wealth in those outer pieces than they did in the inner pieces and so maybe for them making a splash to more people was more useful because they're lower elites but I still have to think about this I mean it depends I don't think there's one rule it depends on where you fit in society and who you have to display and how many people they are and what social level so it all depends third example and then I'll get to the question behind you a burial chamber sometimes very high elites decorated their burial chamber who got to go into a burial chamber that's a place that's supposed to be capped and sealed and closed ostensibly you only get to go into it when the first two moner is interred and these are very small spaces and this little tomb chapel is up above where people can come and go this is the burial chamber that's often down a deep shaft or a sloping passage hard to get in and out of and very few people can fit inside if you're decorating your burial chamber you only need to impress 12, 10 people and so it's a and burial chamber decoration is rare people don't buy Maserati's and hide them in the garage right? they buy expensive stuff something really really special and only show it to 10 or 15 people in their home if it's something that will get them some sort of social status marker or drink a $20,000 bottle of wine or whatever insanely rich people might do but I hope that kind of answers your question it's a complicated one you just asked you could write a book about what you just asked in the back please please start with this the Egyptians and I'll get to the point about power politics part about power politics is the way the Egyptian culture worked vis-a-vis femininity A, being flexible you could masculinize or feminize and B, allowing females to have more power than other places in the ancient world and C, having a totalitarian or authoritarian regime that needed to be upheld all of those things allowed women to power more systematically and regularly than other parts of the world that doesn't mean that there's not a push back when it happens but it happens more regularly in Egypt than anywhere on the planet in the ancient world that I've ever seen just weird and strange and amazing and that's why I have more to say but the cool thing, and it was Anne Macy Rocket pointed this out the first time and she's an Egyptologist who's in New York at NYU she remarked how you have an earth agonist what femininity is it it's a culture, it's a female it's the earth gods right the Egyptians had an earth god and then this sky in western culture you think of Zeus and thunderbolts and lightning and storms or ball and some fierce weather god but in the Egyptian understanding it is a female and the sun at his death goes below the western horizon and has swallowed into her enveloped into her body then moves through her to be born from her in the eastern horizon over the earth, but it's a feminine thing the idea that I talked about that creation itself and this is what drove the mother and child from the room if none of you noticed right? yeah, because I mean so I knew it might happen but so if creation is displayed in such a masculine sexualizing way you would think that this would take power from the female in social settings but interestingly it doesn't if you look at the same text from Diro Medina this erid place that I was talking about preserves all of these texts when women and men get divorced there's often a discussion for the reasons for the divorce and they'll say oh the man is the woman is dry, the man hasn't put semen inside of her he is given the fault for the lack of a pregnancy not the woman in some ways having the onus of creation hurts the woman something to be controlled, something to be mastered, something to be veiled something to be circumcised and if you look at it the other way around it's the male that does the creating and the female is the protective vessel of it in some ways you could say that translates into more social power for women rather than less and then when they're buried as real women either kings or not as elite women and they're buried when they're buried as Osirian men they suspect that they deserve the same transformation that a man gets and you know it's not until let's be really provocative because why not and say that the idea of a virgin birth is a very ancient Egyptian notion the idea of a god creating himself is a very Egyptian notion and so the annunciation the idea that Mary is like what me it's just it's just here it's just here she has nothing to do with it she is just a vessel the god has impregnated his own manifestation of himself into her that's an extraordinary Egyptian thing then in that context and there I agree with you it translates into a loss of power for the female but it's in a confusing context the virgin birth as it's manifested in Christianity occurs in a setting where females are given all of the onus and all of the weight of the creative potential because that paganism doesn't go away all of those ideas of where creation comes from in the western world they stay then you inject the virgin birth into that and then god help you then it's not good for no one oh we get one more in the guides one more uh oh I'm so sorry there's an ed knows this well there's all kinds of curses on tombs and all over the place don't hurt my coffin or a crocodile is going to snatch you or some horrible things going to happen to you you see it all the time and so you would think oh that's interesting why are the Egyptians still reusing so much and then my answer to that would be having looked at what I looked at and analyzed what I've analyzed most reuse is happening legally in the context of the family it's not most of it is not tomb robbery most of it is happening in a very legit and in some way sanctioned way as anyone been paying attention to the discussions of King Tut in the last year the mask of Tutankhamun is a reused mask and I think that that was made very clear to me when I was in the Egyptian Museum last standing right next to Nick Reeves who showed me the reused cartouche and where the old cartouche was with the backing of Dieter Arnold and Mark Gabold and this is legit stuff that's a 26 pound solid gold mask of Tutankhamun that's reused but it's reused in a legal context of the family we don't know the circumstances of it do they snatch it from a dead body we have no idea if you're snatching it from the dead body but it's your family member then there are ways of dealing with the problematic nature of that and thus the crocodile that could potentially harm you in such a cursed inscription wouldn't come after you the Egyptians thought about this I'm sure but they never wrote about it directly the Egyptians and Ed knows as well as an Egyptologist the Egyptians don't even discuss the death of Osiris directly right it's always like the day that he fell under the tree and you're like wait fell under a tree I don't understand but they're talking about his murder by his brother's set but they never talk about it directly and this is the same with the Battle of Qadesh and Ramses II oh it was a great battle and I saved the day when really the empire was lost on that day and was never the same so this is not a authoritarian regime's like to spin the truth yes have we learned this I think we have and the Egyptians as a people like to spin this reuse but also I think since most of it was happening in a legal context it doesn't have the same meaning and you know why I can say it was happening in legal context because there's so much and this kind of comes full circle it will be a perfect stopping place before we go on our little tour is there were so much gender modification so so many coffins that were changed from male to female and then from female to male a female coffin has flat hands a male has fisted hands because the females pass it and the male is active right females got a wig and earrings and breasts male doesn't have these things you just got your lobes or a full ear and a striped headdress and you see these things switching back and forth you see a female coffin made into a male a male coffin made into a female extremely expensive time consuming clunky where I can see the old stripes underneath the female wig and I can see where they pulled off the air and just painted over it roughly and why would they do that if they could just go to the black market or the market and buy a coffin for a female because that's what they need or in their limited and scarce context of the family they've got one coffin set and the females the one who's died and they're like oh crap they've got to make it into a man's coffin and switch it and then also we can't lose sight that the coffins that I'm looking at are the last instance of reuse and I can't, some coffins I have been able to prove for instances of reuse on one coffin that's the most I've been able to go back in a sense when you're removing wood and removing pigment there's only so much I can say for the number of instances of reuse I think it's much higher than any of us could possibly imagine so I would like to thank all of you for coming