Egyptologist Fact Checks Egyptian History Slop

Let's take a look at this scene.

Where to start?

The headdresses that these guys are wearing

are completely nuts.

[light thoughtful music]

Where are the other pyramids here?

What's wrong, however, is this sort of yellow hat.

This has nothing to do with ancient Egypt.

I'm archeologist Laurel Bestock.

I study ancient Egypt.

Let's fact-check some AI slop.

[pen scrapes]

Okay, first video.

What's the most difficult part of being a pharaoh?

No one ever builds statues of me smiling.

I'm divine, not miserable.

I find this line hilarious because, in fact, most statues

of ancient Egyptian kings do have a slight smile on them.

We as Egyptologists recognize a particular era

late in what we call the 12th Dynasty

when statues are frowning,

and we have an enormous difficulty

explaining why these kings made statues

where they weren't smiling,

because most kings did smile in their statues.

What's your job like?

Well, I lift stones all day

so a dead man can feel tall forever.

So the whole construct of What's your job?

How do you make a living?

Doesn't really apply to ancient Egypt.

This is a very modern way of understanding

what professions are and how we work in the world.

What's your role in society?

I am Ra, bringer of the sun.

But I also run the fish stall on weekdays.

This is nonsense.

Ra is a god,

and the people who would have served as priests for the gods

are definitely not the guys

who are selling fish in the marketplace.

[Interviewer] How's the flooding season treating you?

Well, the Nile gave us water, took the house,

and drowned the goat.

But the barley's optimistic.

And this is, of course, hilarious way of putting it,

but the importance of the flood in ancient Egypt was real.

The Nile flooded annually for several months a year

and brought not only water to irrigate crops,

but also fine silt, which was basically nature's fertilizer

so that there was fresh ground

in which to plant barley indeed,

as well as wheat every year.

[Interviewer] How's business today?

Made three sales, got accused of sorcery,

and my goat ran off with the change, so could be worse.

We don't know that much about marketplaces

in ancient Egypt, although they must have existed.

But the idea that they were selling things for money,

that there was change that goats could have run away with,

is nonsense.

Money had not been invented yet in ancient Egypt.

It was a barter system, so people worked out exchanges

of what was of similar value to them

in a marketplace context.

Okay, next video.

Chloe, welcome to my home.

She knows my name.

Cleopatra knows my name. [gasps]

Before we get to ancient Egypt,

this is driving me crazy

because of the stereotypes of women in our [gasps]

own society and what we're interested in.

I can tell this is all gonna be about makeup and clothes.

Surely we have better questions to ask about ancient Egypt.

Okay, I have to ask, what is the actual beauty routine?

Because your eyes are...

I mean, how?

Beauty routines in ancient Egypt.

This is set up in this way

that is an exclusively women's world here,

and that this is something that girls are gonna talk about.

How do you get so pretty?

Cosmetics in ancient Egypt were actually used by everyone.

Men were as heavily decorated, as heavily painted,

as heavily jeweled as women were.

These murals depict the great victories of my ancestors.

I don't see any victories depicted in these great murals.

We do have images of warfare

that come from scenes on temple walls in ancient Egypt,

and these are not they.

These are temple scenes.

They show gods and kings here.

This is not what you would expect in a palace.

You also wouldn't expect to find scenes

of great victories in a palace.

[person speaking in foreign language]

[Cleopatra speaking in foreign language]

I don't speak Greek,

so I cannot evaluate whether or not that was accurate Greek.

But here it looks like these guys

are speaking Greek to one another,

and that's actually a point that's important.

So Cleopatra was definitely a polyglot ruler.

She spoke multiple languages.

Greek was one of them.

Her own ancestors were, in fact,

from the Greek-speaking world.

What's really interesting about this

is that we have everything around her here

is shown in a classically pharaonic idiom.

So we have walls that look like a New Kingdom temple,

and we have outfits that look like New Kingdom outfits.

These are from Egypt

from before Egypt was conquered by Alexander the Great.

Alexander the Great was one of Cleopatra's ancestors,

and the fact that she spoke Greek

is because she was descended from him.

Would she have dressed like an ancient Egyptian

from many hundreds of years earlier?

Or would she have dressed like a proper Greek queen?

Probably the latter.

The library is there.

Everything the world has ever known

lives inside those walls.

So here we are on the coast of Alexandria.

Cleopatra is showing her where the library is.

We do know approximately

where the Great Library of Alexandria was.

It was in the Royal Quarter, which is on the coast here.

It burned in the ancient world.

It was one of the most important collections of books

anywhere in the classical world.

But the building we actually see in the background here

is the lighthouse.

The Lighthouse of Pharos

was one of the wonders of the ancient world.

It was enormous.

It is not shown here as enormous at all.

This looks like a little dinky lighthouse

on the coast of New England.

This lighthouse was a working lighthouse.

We have descriptions of the fire

and how visible this was from far away.

It was very important.

Alexandria was an incredibly significant trading hub

on the Mediterranean,

and the coast of the Mediterranean is very treacherous.

We have recently even found pieces of it

through underwater excavations in the harbor of Alexandria.

It fell down because of earthquakes over the centuries.

Kohl.

It protects the eyes from the sun and from infection.

You want to try it? Oh, my God! Yes!

Oh, my God! Can we stop saying, Oh, my God?

Not all of this is amazing.

Kohl as a type of cosmetic

was used much earlier than this in ancient Egypt as well.

This is a powdered carbon-based or galena lead-based pigment

that is painted around the eyes.

And we do think it likely did have medicinal

as well as sort of sunglass protection properties,

as well as making the eyes look very dramatic.

I look incredible.

I look unhinged.

I look like both at the same time,

and I think that's the point.

Okay, let's talk about mirrors in ancient Egypt though.

Here she is applying her makeup in a mirror,

and the mirror is a perfect glass

with silver-backing mirror.

This is not a type of mirror

we have in ancient Egypt at all.

Mirrors, when we have them,

are of bronze and sometimes silver.

They would not have given you

a particularly clear reflection.

So it would've been, in fact,

a very social thing to put on makeup.

This is something you're relying on your best friend,

or if you're the queen, your servants, to achieve for you.

Next.

This scene is rather great.

Here we have the procession of a bark or a boat,

a ceremonial boat that is on poles

that are being carried by priests through a crowd.

We see in the background, we see an obelisk,

and we can see a temple here as well.

This is actually pretty accurate

for what an Egyptian procession,

a divine procession, would have looked like.

When gods traveled on procession,

the statue of the god was taken out of the temple room,

put in a bark shrine on a boat like this,

and then the bark shrine was carried on poles

carried by priests through the city.

Gods go on procession to be amongst the people,

as you can see here, but they're usually going somewhere.

They're going to visit another god in a different temple,

or they're going to another temple of their own

across the Nile, for instance.

So while the basic idea of a procession

with a bark shrine being carried by priests

is quite accurate.

When we actually look at

what's going on inside this bark shrine,

it looks totally like Ark of Covenant stuff.

That detail is not what we would expect in ancient Egypt.

This is a scene of embalming,

and it's the embalming of somebody really important.

He's getting the full works here, being turned into a mummy.

We can see multiple people working on the body.

They've got trays of things like salt,

and it looks like aromatics to put on the body

as they're drying it out and wrapping it in linen.

The detail I really like about this scene, however,

is the priest who is standing at the head

of the body that is being mummified.

We can see that he is wearing what looks like a helmet

or a headdress that has a long snout and big ears.

This is a representation of the god Anubis,

who takes the form of a jackal.

And weird as this looks, this is actually quite accurate.

We do know that priests engaged in aspects of mummification

and the burial process for important people

did actually wear headdresses like this,

masks that covered their heads.

And when they were wearing that mask,

they were themselves Anubis.

On the other hand, we have details that are also bonkers.

We have in the foreground, we can see these jars

that are what we call canopic jars.

These are in order to hold the viscera.

So you've gotta take the wet bits out of somebody

before you can mummify the body.

Those wet bits, they're your internal organs.

Those get mummified separately,

and you're gonna want them in the afterlife.

They're gonna be put in jars to go with you in your tomb.

There are only four of them in an actual Egyptian burial,

and here we have five.

Here we have a Nile scene with a temple in the background,

and the depiction of the temple is relatively accurate.

The shape of the pylon here

is what the entrance to a temple would have looked like.

And in the foreground, we have boats,

and you can see that some of the boats have sails up

and some don't have sails up.

The Egyptians did have sails on their boats,

and in fact, they used them principally

when sailing southward.

When ancient Egyptian boats sailed south,

the wind, which is predominantly from the north,

would have propelled the boats.

When ancient Egyptians sail northward,

the wind is against them,

but the flow of the river is with them.

So you drop the sail, and you can sail that way.

Next video.

You're a kid in ancient Egypt,

and you wake up on your mat looking out over the pyramid,

and you have your breakfast of honey.

Well, honey's accurate.

They did use beekeeping in ancient Egypt,

and they harvested honey both as a food.

They didn't have sugar, so it was a major sweetener.

It was also used medicinally.

That you could see the pyramid at your window,

not so probable.

And let's keep following this day of a child

in ancient Egypt.

Again, pyramid in the background, not so likely.

The idea that childhood is a time

of carefree ability to explore and learn on your own

is an extremely modern construct.

The idea that childhood was even a separate

sort of phase of life is not something we see

a ton of evidence for in ancient Egypt.

We also see a donkey trotting down the street.

This is accurate.

We have evidence of the domestication of the donkey in Egypt

going back to 3000 BC.

Board games.

We do have board games from ancient Egypt.

All of our evidence is that these are actually used

by adults, sometimes ritually, sometimes to pass time.

But in fact, children wouldn't have had much free time,

and play was not considered important, as far as we know,

for ancient Egyptian children.

As soon as they could, they were being engaged in

and involved in the productive economic life of a household.

[teacher speaking in foreign language]

School in ancient Egypt.

What schools we know of were conducted within the palace.

Only very elite people were expected to learn to read

and write at all.

Very elite children would've then gone to the palace.

This is mostly members of the king's family

or very favored courtiers as well.

And they would've learned mostly

by writing down what a teacher is speaking.

They would've been using boards to write on.

They're not pre-written on, as you've seen here.

We do have school texts, so we have the bad handwriting

of people who are learning to write, for instance.

Okay, next video.

[lively upbeat music]

Here we are at Giza,

and in some ways this is a better depiction of Giza

that we're finding in a lot of the AI slop.

Look, we actually have the river,

and we have some agricultural land

between the river and the pyramids.

This is great.

[lively upbeat music]

Let's take a look at Giza here.

What's really striking me about the pyramids

is that they are represented as bright white

with yellow caps on them.

The bright white is quite accurate.

In ancient times, the outside of the pyramids

would have been cased in fine limestone

quarried across the river at the site of Tura

and really valued for its whiteness.

This glowing whiteness would have been characteristic

of the pyramids in the ancient past.

They would have been quite smooth as well.

What's wrong, however, is the sort of yellow hat

that is sitting on the pyramid.

Pyramids were capped with stones, but from far away,

you wouldn't really even have been able to see this.

It's a single stone.

We don't know if they were gilded or another color.

Most of the casing stones have been removed.

Most of these were removed in the medieval period,

if not earlier,

and were used as building stone for other buildings.

The casing stones are only left in one place at Giza,

and that is on top of Khafre's pyramid.

They just weren't quarried away on that top piece.

And so today, Khafre's pyramid

does look like it's wearing a hat.

And because of weathering over time,

the once bright white limestone

now itself is much more yellow.

Let's talk about warfare in ancient Egypt.

A lot of the depictions of battle we're seeing here

have elements that are accurate.

Some of the shield shapes, for instance,

are even pretty good.

One thing that's jumping out to me as unlikely, however,

is the scale of battle we're seeing here.

Really large armies

are not usually the case in ancient Egypt.

We have here a chariot with two people in it,

one of whom is controlling the horses

and one of whom is firing.

This is accurate.

This is what Egyptian chariots would have been like.

We have actual chariots preserved

in the tomb of Tutankhamen.

They were disassembled, but all the parts are there.

We can put them back together.

And we have numerous scenes from the New Kingdom

that show chariot warfare on the walls of temples.

The headdresses that these guys are wearing, however,

are completely nuts.

This has no relationship to what we think

people would have actually worn on their heads

while going into battle.

Next.

[bells chiming]

Where to start?

Let's take a look at this scene.

We have triple-decker boats, not a thing in ancient Egypt.

We have a line of temples on the bank of the Nile.

They're not really in the right place

with regards to the Nile,

but particularly let's look at this temple.

We have people going up this enormous steep staircase

to get to this temple, and they're entering through

a portico that has these columns on it.

Steep staircases leading to temple entrances

come straight from the classical world.

This is not what the approach

to an ancient Egyptian temple looks like at all.

Then the doorway that we get to is all wrong.

The doorway into an Egyptian temple is quite narrow.

This is designed to restrict access to the temple,

not to allow big crowds to walk in.

Most people were not allowed to go into the temple at all.

The temple is a very restricted place,

not a place where the crowds are gathering in most cases.

Even the design of the temple itself,

the facade of this stone gateway,

what we would call a pylon in ancient Egypt,

is really wrong.

We would expect a pylon in ancient Egypt

to have different sides.

The two sides are higher than the middle.

So the middle actually has a gap in it,

which represents the horizon

over which the sun rises every day.

[bells chiming]

I think this landscape is supposed to combine

two different places in Egypt, but I'm not entirely sure.

In the foreground, we have a totally impossible boat.

We have no depictions of boats that look like this.

We have no remains of boats

that look like this from ancient Egypt.

We have a really good idea

of what boats look like in ancient Egypt

because we do have them carved in relief scenes on temples.

We even have the remains of ancient boats.

For instance, we excavated a boat

still in excellent condition near the Great Pyramid.

The way background, we have an urban sprawl.

And from this distance, for buildings to be this tall,

these must be skyscrapers.

What are we looking at?

Cincinnati?

But what's funniest to me in this scene

is really this pyramid.

We absolutely have the pyramid of Khafre here.

It was the second of the very large pyramids at Giza,

so it never existed without another big pyramid there.

And by the time the top

of Khafre's pyramid looked like this,

there were, in fact, all three pyramids at Giza.

Where are the other pyramids here?

Here, we have an urban setting.

You can see from the marketplaces

that this is a place where life is taking place.

However, we're out in the desert,

which is not where most cities were.

And we are looking at buildings that themselves

don't look like the urban fabric of ancient Egypt.

These are stone-carved buildings.

They're really dense.

We would expect people to be living in mud-brick houses.

Here we seem to be in the courtyard of a temple,

and this is maybe one of the things

that is not so off in one of these videos.

This might be something like a festival

in a temple courtyard.

A time when ordinary people

were allowed to come into the god's precinct,

at least into the forecourt,

if not actually into the rooms where the god himself lived.

But let's not talk about what the crowd is wearing

and what the crowd itself actually looks like.

This has nothing to do with ancient Egypt.

[bells chiming]

Here we are clearly inside a temple,

and the temple is big stone architecture.

There is some light coming in, but it's quite dark.

We have a lot of sculpture on the sides here,

and elements of this are relatively accurate.

In particular, I would note

that we're on a very straight axis here.

So we are walking down the middle of the temple

towards what looks like it's a statue in the back room,

which is small.

And this is the basic structure of Egyptian temples

from at least the New Kingdom onwards,

where we do get the god being resident in the temple

and manifest in a statue that is in the back.

And this is on a very straight axis

because the Egyptians are concerned with the god

being able to walk out of his temple

and take part in festivals.

The straightness also mirrors the rising

and setting of the sun every day.

[bells chiming]

Really, what is going on with the ears of this cat?

The more I look at this, the more ridiculous this is.

When we do have cat statues later,

they don't look anything like this.

They look more like cats.

That's all the AI slop for today.

Thanks for watching.

[light gentle music]