Disability in Ancient Egypt

I did promise everyone, didn't I, that when I started this podcast we weren't going to just talk about Greece and Rome.  And this is our first foray in going a bit further than those borders.  For the discussion today, I have a very, very special expert guest who also happens to be a friend of mine,  I'm proud to say. Would you like to introduce yourself for everyone? 

 Yes, thank you very much, Alexandra.  I'm also Alexandra. I'm Dr. Alexandra Morris.  I'm currently a lecturer, education in ancient history at Queen's University, Belfast.  But it's a one-year post, so I don't know where I will be next year.  I have cerebral palsy and give a visual description of myself.  I am a white woman with brown, curly-ish hair, blue-pink glasses.  And today I'm wearing a red rose kind of top with a pink top underneath that and one rose earring and a rose necklace.  The reason why I have one rose earring is I unfortunately tore my ear in January.  I can't wear earrings in my other ear.  Besides that, I'm very active in the museum sphere.  I'm currently president of the Museum of Education Roundtable,  which houses the Journal of Museum Education.  And I am also one of the co-presidents of Crip Antiquity,  which is an advocacy group for deaf, disabled, and neurodivergent people in ancient world studies.  

Fantastic. So you are definitely the person to ask about this topic,  because we're going to be talking about disability in the ancient Egyptian world.   Listeners might remember our discussion with  Debby SneEd talking about disability in ancient Greece.  And what I learned from that discussion is going to very much inform my first question,  because when I asked her what's the most common question,  she actually said, 'were there disabled people in ancient Greece?',  which blew my mind because I thought that would be a fairly safe assumption to say 'yes.'  So just to make sure, were there people with disabilities in the ancient Egyptian world?  

I'm going to say a wholeheartedly yes.  We see them in abundance in various contexts, and we can talk about that.  And just to also clarify, I am technically an Egyptologist,  but my specialty is Ptolemaic Egypt, so I am familiar with Greece and Egypt,  so I'm happy to do a cross-comparative talk today.  

Just so that we can refresh everyone's memories,  what do we mean in the modern term when we say disability?  Okay, I'm going to refer to the definition that's found in an article from 2023,  which I think is one of the most clear definitions of what disability means that I've found,  especially when referring to archaeological context.  It's a complex and, in some contexts, constructed category,  which can include congenital and acquired bodily differences,  so differences that you're born with or differences that you acquire later in life,  chronic and accrued illnesses, melted illness that's in cognitive conditions,  i.e. neurodiversity, progressive and fatal diseases, temporary and permanent injuries,  and even a range of physical characteristics that can be considered,  quote, disfiguring from uncommon proportions, discards, or work marks, end quote.  

So in modern society, then, I think it's fair to say that more people are disabled than we assume.  

Yes, very much so.  

So that definition is interesting, isn't it?  Is that how ancient Egyptians understood the definition of disability,  or did they define it at all?  

They did seem to have an understanding of bodily difference to a certain extent,  and I argue in my own research that they defined it in terms of concepts known as Ma'at,  or order, and Isfet, which is chaos.  So they saw disability as being part of the kind of natural order of things  and the natural part of the universe, and they recognized that there were certain differences.  So I do say that I think they did have a category of disability,  although it's not necessarily the same as what we have today.  

OK, so we should, going forward, just bear that in mind that what we say is a disability is not necessarily the same. Whenever we see disability, and bearing in mind that a lot of people engage with the ancient world through pop culture,  we used to, aren't we, when we see historical fiction in novels, movies…  Disability is always really negatively portrayed.  We're usually seeing outcasts forced to live on the fringes of society,  reduced to poverty, you know, we're told that historical disabled people are poor,  often being made the butt of the joke.  Is this an accurate representation of ancient Egyptian society?

I would say by and large in Egypt, and again we'll get into this,  we see disabled people represented at basically all levels of society in Egypt,  from kings all the way down to poor people and everything in between.  So really, the kind of image that we've got in our heads of disabled people pushed to the edge and are always poor,  that's something that we've invented, right, because that's not even true of modern society.  Exactly, yes.  

So we can immediately get rid of that idea out of our head. Fantastic.  So when we do put those misconceptions to the side,  where as a scholar are you looking for a more accurate representation?  Where are you getting your information? What kind of sources do you use when you use all of this information?  

Okay, it's actually great because we have a variety of sources that we can look at  and we can actually cross-compare things sometimes.  So we are looking at a combination of text, artworks and actual bodies,  which is amazing because in ancient Egypt, as we know, they had mummification.  In some cases, disabled bodies that we can then study medically, which is amazing.  

That is an enviable amount of sources, and from a whole different amount of periods as well?  

Yes, we have things dating all the way back in some instances to the pre-dynastic period,  which is roughly 4000 BCE, all the way up to Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt,  which is from about 323 BCE onwards, all the way up into Roman Egypt, which was the first century CE.  

So thousands of years, a whole heap of sources, that's incredible.  I wish I had that amount of information from my own studies.  When we spoke to  Debby, she was talking about the myth of ancient Greeks and their fondness for eugenics,  throwing babies off of cliffs, and she told us that we do have a load of information  that tells us that that wasn't true, and eugenics wasn't much of an issue actually.  Is this something that is a myth when we look at Egyptians in pop culture?  Do we see ideas of Egyptians rejecting disabled people at birth?  

Okay, this is an interesting question. I would say in pop culture overall, no.  I think the general consensus in pop culture is just disabled people didn't exist.  They were not even in that, I would say.  I will say in movies like Gods of Egypt, there is a tendency to portray disabled gods who are disabled  as being non-disabled, which is interesting.  So it just kind of gets erased entirely and not really thought about,  rather than there being this eugenics idea.  

And Gods of Egypt, that's a Ridley Scott film, isn't it?  

Yes.  

Okay, right, okay.  What about in real ancient Egypt?  Do we see ideas of eugenics being promoted at any point?  

We really don't.  They seem to have taken the opposite approach, and this seems to be steady  to the point where we get all the way once we get into the Greek era and later.  Writers like Herodotus going, the Egyptians are weird.  They don't kill their children and they raise all of them.  What's going on here?  

Okay, so is it fair to say that now that I've spoken to you and  Debby,  and you're both telling me that this isn't really happening,  is this an instance where we've got a fairly modern idea that has grown so embedded in modern society  that we're kind of retroactively grafting it back onto the ancient world  because we assume it's good.  We like the ancient world, the bits that we've stolen from it,  so they must have been doing it as well?  

I think in that case, yes.  And I think this is also a case of us retroactively perhaps wanting to argue  that we are better as a society today than they were back then.  It's this idea of, oh, of course we've made progress  in our treatment of disabled people today.  And of course it was worse off, so that way we can feel better about ourselves as a society  where how honestly, and forgive me if I curse on this show,  shit we're treating disabled people today. And it'd be like, oh, okay, it's not as bad as it was back then,  but when that's not actually the case.  

So we are trying to make them look worse,  to feel better about ourselves instead of just being better ourselves.  

Pretty much, yes.  

Okay, that's depressing.  Let's talk about medicine, because people need medicine.  Everyone needs medicine, not just this section of society.  How much did Egyptian doctors know about disabilities?  Do we know whether they had any treatments that we might even say,  yeah, that makes sense, even with all of our modern knowledge?  

Okay, in terms of medicine, what we have is interesting.  We do have them using certain herbs and certain plant materials  to treat things like paralysis, potentially blindness to a certain degree,  but only if it's acquired blindness, from what we can see.  And the other thing to understand about the Egyptians is they believed in medicine,  but they also believed in religious practices, so you kind of use both.  And to them, religion was medicine, so I just want to highlight that.  But what we don't see, which is really fascinating,  is they don't see conditions like dwarfism as something that you treat.  It's just an accepted natural order of things,  so we don't have any evidence of them trying to treat things like that in their medical life.  So whereas we might look at something and think that needs fixing,  they don't say the same thing.   But they do recognize that there are certain things that do need treatment,  again, like acquired blindness, like certain types of paralysis, injuries, etc.  

Can we see, in the archaeological record, can we see anything like mobility aids  that, again, we might look at and think, yeah, I recognize that, we use a version of that now?  

Yes, the ancient Egyptians had prosthetics. So yes, and we know from studies that have been done on some of them,  we have examples of toe prosthetics, we also have examples of arm prosthetics,  and we also have examples of leg prosthetics in some instances.  We know from examinations of the toe prosthetics that these were functional  and used during life, in some instances.  And we also have them at price points.  I assume that if you were richer, you could get a higher quality one,  and if you were poorer, you could get a lower quality one.  We have ones that are made of cartonnage, which are basically paper mache,  that are a lower quality one, and then we have an example of a really fancy one  that is made out of wood with leather straps.  And if you want to know where these are currently,  there are two examples of toe prosthetics in the British Museum.  There is an example of a woman with an arm prosthetic  in the Durham Oriental Museum.  And there is another example, I'm not sure where,  of a woman who had both of her legs amputated  and then had, in the afterlife,  they made her leg prosthetics to put on her mummy  to take her for the afterlife, essentially.  

So do these prosthetics, are they made to look like the missing parts?  

Yes, they are very, very much so.  With the wooden one, it's literally, it looks like a toe.  They even have the little toe nail on the top,  so that way you can look, and it would look like a toe, essentially.  Wow, okay, so they're paying attention to aesthetics  as well as it being usable.  Yes, for the most part, yes.  At least with the toe prosthetics, with the arm prosthetics,  we don't know if those were actually used in life or not, unfortunately,  and that's due to the condition where this was found,  or what they, unfortunately, scientists did and archaeologists did  to the mummified remains after they were found back when they found them.  The Durham mummy, what they did, which is unfortunate,  is when they found her, they looked at her arm,  and they're like, let's try and take this off.   And they couldn't, they can't reattach it now,  so it's in with her on display next to her body.   Yeah, which is unfortunate.  But from what we know from her, which is interesting,  and she's from the Ptolemaic period,  which is again when Greeks came and took over Egypt,  what we know from her is she seems to have been born without one of her arms,  so this was an add-on, but not for her.  She used it during her lifetime, whereas with the toe prosthetics,  that was an acquired injury where people lost their toes  and then were added on and were made to be functional.  So we see both things going on here.  What we have in terms of mobility is we have canes.   We have canes and varites as well,  and we see these depicted both on art and in terms of the actual canes,  and we'll get to that a little bit later when we talk about Tutankhamun,  but in terms of other examples that we have,  there is a fifth dynasty mummified man  who's currently at the University of Pennsylvania  Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.  He had one leg that was about six inches shorter than the other one,  and they buried him in his sarcophagus with the cane  so he could use it in the afterlife.  So we have him.  We also have, in terms of artwork,  the stele of the doorkeeper Roma,  who is shown utilizing a cane.  He, again, has one leg where the musculature  is weaker than the other one,  and it's visibly weaker, like an atrophied leg,  and he's leaning on a cane for support  as he's praying to the goddess Astarte  to bring basically bonnacuts to his family.  He's shown his entire family on this stele.  

So at certain points in the ancient world,  we are seeing art in a very idealized way then,  and I'm definitely thinking,  I mean, I've spoken to Mike Beer about Augustus  and the statue of Prima Porta  that shows him very tall, very muscular,  at the prime of life, and then Mike told me  he was quite a weedy guy and quite old at this point,  so art can sometimes lie to us,  but what you're saying here is that  they weren't trying to hide anything.  They weren't trying to idealize themselves.  

To a degree, no, and from what we see,  and if you talk to other Egyptologists,  they will say, yes, of course the Egyptians  are trying to idealize themselves,  but what we are seeing time and time again  in terms of the single people  is stuff they aren't,  and they are portrayed as having these limb differences,  that you're portrayed as having various  physical differences in the art,  and we see this in continuity  from the pre-dynastic period all the way up again  until the Roman period,  so this is over thousands of years.  The Roman period, I just do want to highlight  another example of a mobility aid  that we see from the Greco-Roman period.  We think that this was found in Alexandria,  and this is also currently located in the British Museum.  It is a little statuette of a child.  You don't know the child's gender, unfortunately,  because of the clothing and hand style,  but they are shown using a three-wheeled walker. This was identified originally by disability advocate  Keith Armstrong, who is unfortunately now deceased,  as being a possible disabled child.  I looked at this during my doctoral research  and confirmed this.  It seems to be, not to retroactively diagnose anything,  but it seems to be an older child who has cerebral palsy  based on the posture and musculature,  if you look very closely at this kid,  who is using this as a mobility aid.  This is fascinating because it is a mold-made piece,  so this was produced for mass consumption  for whatever reason, we don't know why,  and I argue that the reason why we don't know the child's gender  is you could get it painted and customized  to be whatever you want it.  

Aha, so you're buying the basic terracotta shape,  and then you can add details to it afterwards to personalize it.  Wonderful.  Okay, that's incredible then,  so we are definitely seeing already through the art  that this is an accepted part of life.  

Yes, very much so.  What are we ashamed of or to feel shame about?  Which I think is important for us to think about. So let's talk about quality of life  when we're talking about the shame  that we might expect ancient Egyptians to feel.  Were ancient Egyptians with disabilities  ever barred from taking an active role in society,  or were they marginalized in the kind of way  that we might expect Egyptians to marginalize people with disabilities?  

All right, from what we see from this,  the answer seems to be no,  but again depending upon what source you look at,  the answer maybe that maybe this was a little bit mixed back then.  The reason why I'm going to say no to start off with  is again when we look at art,  when we look at tasks, when we look at everything else,  we for the most part see disabled people  being integrated into various aspects of everyday life.  We have them as musicians.  We have them as priests.  We have them as pharaohs.  We have them as workers on pyramids.  We have them pretty much…  We have them as doorkeepers as we saw with Roma.  We have them pretty much everywhere.  The evidence, however, that says maybe things were a little bit weird  of us is we do have a couple of textual sources.  One is from the Roman period,  and I forget what the man's name is,  but I know that Jane Draycott has written an article on him  where he is complaining to various officials  about constantly being harassed  and people trying to take over his farm,  and he's saying because he's visually impaired.  But he keeps writing these letters to them and complaining,  so it seems that they are either taking him somewhat seriously  or he feels that he has the gumption to complain  and that they will actually do something about this.  In an earlier time period,  and this again can be read two different ways,  we have what are known as the instructions of Aminope,  which date, these are basically wisdom literature  that it's a hieratic text.  We think it dates to about the 12th dynasty,  which is the oldest example of this,  but basically what we have on this is the instructions.  I'll read it to you and explain what this are.  Now, what these are are wisdom literature,  and what these basically are doing is instructions from a man to his son  on how to live a good life.  So you can take this phrase  and the fact that he's telling his son,  like, don't do this, don't be bad to disabled people,  maybe means that there is some society  that this is going on, but it's not good to do.  So that is another example of mixing,  but that's what we have for that, basically.  

That does sound slightly familiar to modern society, doesn't it?  Because for all of our civilization that we say they civilized,  there are certain members of society who are often pretty hostile  towards people with disabilities,  because there are assumptions about faking it  or accusing people of being work shy  or being reluctant to provide accommodations.  So we possibly are seeing certain people being hostile,  but it's by no means everybody.  

It seems the societal norm is not to be  because he's telling his son not to do this, essentially.  

OK, so that's interesting.  So we can kind of recognize that kind of warning to be kind.  

Yeah, and again, this very much depends upon  where you are in Egypt's history, too.  If you get into the Ptolemaic period,  and this is my hypothesis, I propose,  with my doctorate and again in my first book,  what I am arguing we are seeing in Ptolemaic Egypt,  which is fascinating that I don't think anyone else was put together,  is we are seeing disabled work backgrounds being put in charge of things  on an economic, social, and religious level  through policies that the Ptolemaic are doing  where they are giving these men land grants  to have them come to Egypt and move to Egypt and settle in Egypt,  and also ensuring themselves a new military class  by saying, if we give you this land,  then your sons have to serve in the military going forward,  which then creates another class of disabled work  that tries to repeat the cycle.  

OK, so there is a kind of definite policy of looking after people.  

To a good degree, and they got this to connect back to Greece,  Alexander the Great and his father Philip have started this,  and they just kind of take this policy and amplify it,  which is fascinating.  

OK.  We have spoken about people potentially being slightly hostile,  which again, you know, we see in modern society.  What I also see in modern society in discourse,  particularly with the culture wars of the current moment,  there is always something that is being used to create discussion, arguments.  And in our current world,  we see people perhaps pushing back against this because they have sympathy,  but that sympathy comes out as pity.  And it's saying, I sympathise because this is a bad thing,  and it's not necessarily productive.  I mean, it's kind of infantilising, isn't it?  Can we see this kind of Egyptian society where there are a number of people  taking it upon themselves to feel bad for another person?  

Thinking up there, this question,  I guess part from what we can see,  and I'm saying no here because we don't really have any evidence  of that happening from what I know of,  in that it just doesn't exist from what we have from our evidence.  We see disabled people being taken care of in the afterlife,  in terms of preparation.  Can we see them working and being useful to society  in various employment opportunities in Egypt?  We don't really see any elements or otherwise  where people are like, oh no, the poor disabled person,  we should not have them do things or anything like that.  

Yeah. Okay.  I mean, that's another interesting point to make, isn't it?  Because I think that the modern assumption that pity comes  because we feel bad for someone without ever asking,  well, do you feel bad?  Should I be feeling bad if you don't?  So it's interesting that that seems to be missing.  I mean, we're pretty terrible at assuming that everyone with a disability,  if they could, would choose to be what we call normal  because we think that it's a problem that needs to be fixed.  So for disabled people in Egypt, can we see, I don't know,  prayers to a god, will you please fix me?  Or someone saying, I wish I was born normal.  What is normal in Egypt?  

This is an interesting question.  And as a disabled person, very much relate to everything you just said.  And that's this assumption that, yeah,  I want to totally be cured of my cerebral palsy.  No, I don't.  In Egypt, again, we have this weird dichotomy.  We do have various ostraca and prayers from like the temple of the moon  where people have had acquired blindness where they're like, please fix me.  I don't want to be blind.  Why are you making me blind?  What we don't see is, again,  in terms of disabilities that you're born with, any of that going on.  So there seems to be this very much distinction between if you have acquired something,  then the expectation is, please fix me.  But if you're born with something, there does not appear to be that expectation.  They see it instead, again,  and perhaps it's being part of this idea of ma'at or part of the natural order of things.  And therefore it should be that.  I'm referring back to the wisdom text.  God is, what was the exact quote?  Sorry.  The man is clay and straw, the god is his builder.  So therefore, God made you on his powder's wheel  and he made you how you're supposed to be.  So therefore, you're how you're supposed to be  and you shouldn't want to care in that case.  

Okay.  Now, you have used the term,  and I'm glad you put the quotes around it, useful to society.  And we do kind of measure worth in society by how productive someone can be.  In ancient Egyptian society,  were people with disabilities able to have careers,  not just because they were expected to be productive,  but because they were capable and found it intellectually fulfilling?  

I think, again, there's a combination of both things going on,  depending upon the disability type.  We see people, again, with blindness,  or they were partially excited with visual impairments,  who are appearing in artwork as musicians,  which is something, if you have a visual impairment, you can totally do.  We also see people with dwarfism working in various capacities,  but they might have been limited by what they could do in certain cases,  because either the king really liked them,  so they made them part of the official palace in certain roles,  or they maybe inherited things we don't know.  We see this in the example of...  There are good examples of people with dwarfism in the Old Kingdom.  It's Seneb, it's the main one,  who was a high priest of the Pharaoh Khufu,  who built the Great Pyramid, so we have him performing a Khufu funeral.  So he's a high priest.  We also see other people with dwarfism working as servants,  which, again, maybe because that was a thought that was open to them at the time,  because we like, potentially, to have people with dwarfism as servants,  because they were linked to the gods,  and we'll get to that in a little bit,  so they were therefore thought very highly.  So if you have a whole bunch of them as your servants,  this is great, you're very prestigious.  We also see people with dwarfism working as wardrobe assistants to the king,  pyramid workers, et cetera.  So we see them at various levels.  OK.  And this isn't just because, you know, pressure to make yourself productive,  this is because it's just a part of life that everyone can take part in.  OK.  Do we see any accommodations being made so that people with disabilities can join the workforce?  To a certain degree, again, yes.  What we see here, again, going back to the musicians example,  you don't need to see them be able to play music.  What we also have in terms of artwork,  and I forget where this tomb is, but this is a fascinating example,  is we see a bunch of people going out and surveying land,  and we have potentially what might be a man with blindness or a blind man  who is a land surveyor who is being leathered around.  He has his head on a little boy, his hand on a little boy's head,  who's leading him around in the field on one side,  and he has a rope stretched out on the other side,  so it seems between the two of the things he's helping to survey the land,  but he's also having that aid to get around, too,  in the form of a mobility assistance or sighted guide in that case.  Again, we see various examples of servants and things like that  with pains and other mobility aids.  I don't know if that's necessarily the combination or not,  but we also see, from the poor end of society,  people perhaps self-medicating, so to quote, with alcohol.  We have an example of a man who has also from the Deprea Aolescence  who died, we think, according to Dr. Michael Zimmerman,  who's a paleopathologist, from cirrhosis of a liver,  and his theory was, well, maybe he's self-medicating with alcohol  because he can't afford the high-quality pain relief meds to alcohol.  OK, so if someone was richer,  what kind of pain relief could they receive if they had chronic pain?  We know that they use lotuses to relieve chronic pain,  so you would have high-quality plants, opium poppies,  opium lotuses, potentially marijuana.  OK.  Yes, we have drugs, and you could also get your religious stuff too  in the form of amulets and other things.  

Right, OK.  Yeah.  I mean, I find that interesting  because I've used medicinal marijuana,  and it's just that connection.  So we've kind of touched on it a little bit already,  particularly with veterans.  I think it's really important for everyone to remember, isn't it,  that anyone can become disabled at any point.  You know, if you were born able-bodied,  that's not necessarily how everything is going to go until the day that you die.  So for people who became disabled in the ancient world for various reasons,  what kind of help could they ask for, receive,  or was this something that you were expected to deal with yourself?  

I think in terms of Egypt,  it is more something that you were expected to deal with yourself.  Again, that shift since we get into the later Greek and Greek-Roman period,  where we again have these active societal interventions of,  oh, you've been disabled by war, please don't settle here.  But in terms of earlier things,  we basically see them either trying to get treatment,  as we saw with the ostrich prayer from the Temple of Amun,  where they're going to these religious sites  going to the gun, going, please cure me of my blindness, please do anything else.  But we also do have examples of doctors performing things.  Again, we get us from various tomb inscriptions and artwork  where they're doing things like performing eye surgery and things like that.  So there is this medical understanding too that you need to go  potentially get things, if that makes sense, if you can, or if you want to,  and not necessarily any kind of welfare state.  

OK, so that's, I mean, one of the hot button topics right now, isn't it,  is who should be paying for medical care.  So this is something that you would have to be able to afford medical care.  This isn't doctors working out the goodness of their hearts.  

No, I would say no.  And we see this also again in the example of the prosthetics,  where we get prosthetics of various qualities.  And again, the theory behind that is you pay for what you pay.  

OK, when we were speaking to  Debby,  she suggested that disability was such an everyday part of Greek society  that they were absolutely comfortable with having a deity who had a disability.  Egypt is also a huge pantheon of gods, huge diversity of deities.  Can we see any disability in their gods?  

Yes, we have multiple gods with disabilities in ancient Egypt.  They are Bas, who is a god with dwarfism,  Paiikos, who is also a god with dwarfism.  And in my own original research, I also argue that  Harpocrates, who is the form of the god Horus,  is also disabled and has cerebral palsy as well.  What is fascinating about them,  and I'll run through each of them so that we can get to this,  Bass was a protective deity,  and he was basically, he's a protector of households  on a particular mother's children and childbirth.  So he's a protective deity, and he again has dwarfism.  Pataikos is another protective deity who has dwarfism.  He's associated, he's a form of the god Ptah,  who is associated there with the kind of craftsman gods,  so we see kind of a parallel.  But again, he is protective.  He is represented exclusively in the form of little protective amulets,  so the wearer to protect from evil and chaos,  i.e. that force of sight.  And then with Harpocrates, he is also very much a protective deity.  And he, more specifically,  is the kind of later Greco-Roman god or form of Horus,  who is the god of silent secrets, confidentiality,  and again a protective god.  So all these are gods with positive facility issues,  and they were also used in healing contexts.  

Right. Okay.  So, yeah, they're disabled and associated with healing, which is fascinating.  Because I'm thinking back to being dragged to Sunday school as a kid,  and the Christian god is a perfect god, and we are all in his image.  That's not what we're seeing in Greece or Egypt.  We're seeing that… it's the negative connotation, doesn't it?  It just disappears as soon as you see a deity  who doesn't look what we would consider now to be perfect and ideal.

  No, not at all.  And what's really fascinating about them, too,  is the form of Harpocrates and Bes have both a male and a female form.  So they're not even the same gender all the time, either.  

Wow. Okay.  So that completely turns everything about what we consider ideal on its head.  It's all just a matter of perspective.  

Yes.  

Fantastic. 

 Very much so.  And just to add on a little bit with that, with this two genders thing,  what is really interesting about Harper and Harpocrates  are often the perfect alter ego in the healing context,  but when they do, what we see is that it's only their male form,  for whatever reason, the female forms don't appear together,  and they're in those healing contexts.  So it's something I'm still working through in my research and why that is,  but I think I have a very specific connotation there.  

Whilst you've touched on gender, let's talk about families,  because even now we hear constantly in discussions about family planning  to avoid disabilities or to prevent disabilities being passed on,  et cetera, et cetera, which is, again, coming back to the eugenics.  Do we see, in ancient Egypt, people with disabilities having families  and they're not keeping this in mind,  I can't have children because I don't want to pass on this?  

We do not see that at all, essentially.  We see, again, in terms of integration,  disabled people marrying non-disabled people and having kids.  We see this with Roma's family,  where he's married to a non-disabled wife and they have kids.  We see this with Seneb, who is a man with workism,  who is married and has at least three kids to two non-disabled lives.  And what's really fascinating about Seneb, too,  is his name in ancient Egyptian means healthy,  so his parents or whoever looked at him and saw that he had workism,  and it's like, yeah, we're naming you healthy.  

Fantastic.  I really want this discussion to get people thinking about  how we approach disability in modern society  and showing a different way of thinking  and a different way of building our society  with all the kinds of people in it that there always have been, right?  Because this is something that previous societies have always had to deal with,  and we could actually be taking quite a lot of positive advice from them.  Now, we can't really discuss disability in ancient Egypt  without mentioning Tutankhamun,  because for most people, if they've heard of one Egyptian with a disability,  it's going to be him. He is so famous.  Can you tell us a little bit more about his lived experience  and how scholars and archaeologists have been able to work out  what impairments he had and how they were treated, accommodated,  what his lived experience was?  

Yes, of course.  And I'm going to start out by prefacing this,  for saying Tutankhamun is still very controversial,  and you will be a anthropologist who are still in the mentality of,  well, he wasn't the perfect man. How dare you say he wasn't stable? That being said, and this again has been determined at various points  through a combination of actual nautical scans of his body,  as well as looking at evidence from his tomb,  we think at this point that he might have had 12 foot,  which is where your foot kind of turns and bends at a weird angle,  Kohler's disease, which basically causes bone death in your foot  and it's quite painful.  Possible scoliosis is more controversial,  and maybe with some Egyptologists,  you'll be like, oh, he doesn't have this.  This was an embalming mistake. That's why he has scoliosis. I am not one of them to believe that.  We also think he also might have had a mild cleft palate as well. So that's what we think he had.  And we think he possibly died from an infected broken leg.  

So that would have been incredibly painful.  

Yes.  

Do we see anything from his tomb that gives us a clue  to how he was managing all of these conditions and his pain?  

Yeah, this is again, my research was an article that I published back in 2020.  What I did was look because all the time,  there's evidence about his disabilities was just coming out.  And I looked at, I was like,  what's looking just came from a disability perspective  and see what we can find there.  We have various things in his tomb that point to disability.  If you are willing to look at them and actually see them and consider them.  But again, not all Egyptologists are willing to.  He was buried with over 131 walking sticks,  some of which show signs of having been used during his life.  One is referred to in an inscription on it as being his favorite cane  because he picked it from the leaves themselves.  .  There are Egyptologists who will say that,  no, this is just a sign of his status.  He became so therefore given to him importance or not mobility.  

Okay.  I mean, if it's showing signs of wear, then...  

Some of them are.  Not all of them were,  but he also had over 131 of them.  

So they gave him extra.  

Yeah.  

You'd have spares, wouldn't you?  And I'm guessing you'd want to take some brand new ones into the afterlife with you.  

I'm assuming so, yes.  So we have 131 canes.  We also, I mentioned before,  so this is our pain relief.  

So the pictorial images in a tomb are really important, right?  Because they're personalized.  So if we're seeing a plant that was used for pain relief so often,  that really is pointing us in one direction, isn't it?  

It really is.  And in terms of other evidence from his tomb as well,  if Carter originally found his tomb and the furniture in his tomb,  his chairs had straps on them.   Before I came along and looked at things with a disability lens  and again, this really doesn't make sense,  and I'm being critical here.  The two theories were,  these were signs to tell people not to sit in his chairs.  Again, this man is a living God.  That makes no sense.  I mean, that's kind of, that's implied, right?  And this other theory was,  well, maybe this is how they carried the chairs around.  And that, you know, maybe makes a little bit more sense.  But if you look again at artistic representations  of how they're carrying chairs around,  they're carrying them around by the bottom of the chair,  and there are no straps,  and the straps are located on the top part of the chair. 

So we're talking about which is more plausible.  They've invented a new way of carrying chairs just for this specific period,  or it's actually pointing to being more useful.  

What I argue is they are essentially a seatbelt on the chairs.  

Right. Which, I mean, it makes more sense.  

They go around, they wrap up here,  and they kind of look like a harness.  

Okay. And he's a king.  So again, they're not trying to hide this.  This is a part of his presentation.  

To a degree, yeah.  What is fascinating talking about his presentation  is in terms of the artwork.  And again, there are controversial things here,  but when you really look at his artwork,  he is shown as either sitting down,  being carried and supported by those around him,  or walking with a cane.  There are very rare depictions of him doing things like hunting in a chariot,  but other than that, and that's like one or two examples,  in all the images we have of him sitting down,  being carried by those around him,  or being supported by those around him and not so.  

Okay. And again, thinking about the importance of these pictorial images,  I am assuming that if he felt like he needed  or wanted to give a different presentation,  he could have presented himself as able-bodied,  not needing anything,  but he's presenting himself in a way that he feels is the most fitting.  

To a degree, yes, or whoever we compare the artwork to.  And when we compare the artwork,  and this is the fascinating thing,  we think the same artist worked on his tomb,  that worked on the tomb of Ay,  who was the king who took over after him and his advisor.  When we have Tut, we have canes,  and again we have people holding him up.  When we look at the same artist who did Ay's tomb,  we don't have as many canes,  and there's none of that, let's basically hold him up going on.  

Right.  So instead of thinking he sat down because he's a king  and he can have leisure,  when you look at other rulers,  if that was the case, you would expect to see it across the board,  but you're only seeing it here.  

Critically, yes.  But again, there are other ways of telling us to have gone through,  and actually there are some other depictions of Pharaoh  or something sitting down like him,  but then if you actually go and look at the sources,  these are very, very fragmentary pictorial representations  where maybe we have a couple of groups left out of the entire image,  and then they've kind of reconstructed it to be like,  yeah, so first that person,  unless it's only ever been looked at by one or two people.  When you see these other scholars  who seem to have a vested interest in denying  all of the evidence that you're showing me,  is this something that you see them denying  just when it comes to Pharaohs or Egyptians in general?  Why do you think they have such a vested interest  in presenting able-bodied Egyptians only?  I think it ties us back to,  this is where the eugenics comes in.  The history of the field,  our field was founded in part by Eugenicist Francis Galton  in conjunction with W.M.F. Winters-Petrie,  who was Galton's kind of best friend.  So there is a lot of thread that has continued down,  unfortunately, in the field.  And in terms of other evidence  that we have from Tutankhamun's tomb too,  in terms of these medicinal type things,  because I also did a deep dive  of all the botanical remains of this tomb,  we have them providing, again, plant materials  that are used to treat what we think he had.  There's a great deal of them  that were pain relief.  There were also ones that were fever reducers.  And if he died from an infected broken leg,  yeah, you're going to need that in the afterlife.  But if you look at their placement in the tomb,  it meant that rather where he went in the tomb  in the afterlife, he had access to these.  The other thing which is fascinating  is researchers have looked at his daughters  who were found in the tomb with him.  This was two stillborn daughters, unfortunately,  depending upon who, again,  which Egyptologists believe these were either twins  or one girl was slightly older than the other one,  but we don't know.  But one of them, again,  when you look at her skeletal remains,  seems to show signs of having spina bifida.  And the spina bifida is genetically linked  to club foot, so that makes sense  if he had club foot.  But again, there are Egyptologists  who look at these remains.  No, that's an embalming error.  That's why she has them.  And it's like you can't have it both ways.  

That's a lot of embalming errors  for someone who's embalming a royal family.  The best of the best of the embalming world,  I'm assuming.  

Theoretically, yeah. 

I mean, for that argument to stand up,  how many embalming errors do we see  on mummies of non-elite people?  

We don't see that many.  Like, this is the thing.  Like, when it's them, it's an embalming error.  When it's anybody else, oh, it's disability.  

So this is, I mean,  it's a very deliberate mangling  of what seems to be...  I don't know.  I mean, they may be believing  that this really, really is an embalming error,  but again, the exact same  being used for both,  it's just weird, it doesn't make as much sense.  

No.  CT scans, I'm reading the exact quote here.  CT scans indicate  that the elliptopology had actually  been the result of the embalming process.  That's in relation to the daughters.  And then if we look at  Tut,  or an example of him,  and this is the thing, it's the same  evidence-based too, quoting  Paracetaminozaki-Galapagos,  full-bodied PC scans reveal  the damage from the king's rib cage,  and indicate that the curved spine  resulted not from disease,  but from embalming error.  

Right.  I'm going to  not say what I'm thinking right now. If the idea of eugenics has been  embedded in Egyptology from the start,  and it really is,  it sounds like you have  stepped away from the crowd  in really quite a transgressive  way and said, hang on a minute,  let's look at this differently.  Let's look at it with clearer eyes.  Why do you think it's taken this  long?  Why are there not people before you  who are breaking away from the crowd  and saying, hang on a minute?  

I  don't know the answer  to be honest. I don't know  if it's because  there is this  tendency, and it's connected to  the kind of worship power  Carter at the end will be all  of what power this should be,  even though we know from his  practice, he was not necessarily  the best archaeologist  that there was, and had a  very vested interest in making  money from this discovery.  But again, there's  not questioning him. One of the  beds, as an example of this,  which found in his tomb,  is very clearly, if you look  at it, and it's not disability-ridden,  but I'm just going to do a sample of  the goddess to wear  it. She is a  goddess of rebirth, a  hippo head, a crocodile tail,  and lion legs.  It's very, very  clear that this is what this is.  However, it has been described  and identified by Carter  as being the goddess Ammit,  who is a destroyer goddess  who has a crocodile head,  hippopotamus body,  and lion tail.  This was not  questioned  until 2021  by another Egyptologist,  which also very early career,  Madeline Schultz, who came on,  took a look at the bed and said,  wait a minute, this is very clearly  this. This is not the other thing  what is going on here.    

OK, that's interesting  because I think, you know, when I was a very  baby undergraduate,  you know, like first year,  one of the first things I was told  was, do not be afraid  to question the scholars who have gone before  you because ideas  change and they can be wrong sometimes.  But, you know, here  we're looking at the complete opposite.  Do not argue with what's gone  before.  

It seems to be an impressive assumption. We're still  using typologies of  pottery that were put out  by Flanders Petrie in the  1890s in the field.  We seem to be very, very, very  slow to progress in the field.  And the kind of the engine of E is  we are 20 to 30 years  behind everyone else who goes in ancient world studies.  So there's that understanding  of this. And then  in terms of why me, why did I change it?  I was disabled  in a field that  honestly is also not very great at disability inclusion.  So I looked at this evidence and was  like, hold on, wait a minute,  what is going on here?  And my study for my first master's degree and that came  about very, very much  through circumstances.  I was  treated, and I don't mind  blaming them, horribly  during my  first master's degree.  In terms of disability  discrimination and everything else.  And their excuse was, well, we've  never had a disabled student before.  So we don't know what to do with  you. So therefore, basically, just  go away. And it was  that  that made me study  this because I was like, wait a minute,  this is what's going on  with me. And that mummified man  who I told you about earlier  was in  the museum that was detached that you  started looking at him,  looking at me, and just going, wait  a minute, what do we have  for disabled people in ancient Egypt?  That's where this came from.  And it's not just  me, it's also other scholars  too who were also very  early in their career and have dealt with  similar things in terms of  oh, you can't present at this conference  because you've studied disability  and we don't want you here.  And oh, you publish this thing on  Tutankhamun and we don't want this, et cetera.  

I mean,  there are a lot of words  that I could be saying to those people  but they're not for polite  company. 

I know. I can't,  yeah. 

So for  those people pushing back, why  would you say to them about why  it is important, what you are doing,  what you are studying, how you are  approaching all of this evidence  from a new way? Why is it so important  that you're doing this?  

I think it's important that I'm doing  this and others to while doing  this with me. It's a  more complete picture of what life  was actually like in  ancient Egypt. Number one,  we have a completely  incomplete understanding if you look at  ancient Egypt from a  solely non-disabled perspective.  Secondly, it is  we talk all the time about wanting to  make the field more inclusive.  By shutting this perspective  out, you are definitely not  making the field inclusive.  And I'm sorry, there are  disabled and do have disabled students.  And you will be having  disabled students. So  by shutting this perspective  out, you are also saying to these  people, we don't want you  in this field. We don't belong  here.  

Academia  has been designed to be  quite exclusive  for a number of  marginalised groups. And it is  every single time I see a group  being marginalised, it makes me angrier.  So I'm really happy that I can  have this conversation with you and  correct some of this narrative  that they've been peddling for centuries.  Where would you  like to see your  field move next? What are you  planning on for your next big  project? Are there some new  piles of evidence that you've not looked at  yet? 

Okay.  In terms of evidence and  where I'd like to go personally,  I would like to use the ones  you've embodied more.  And using kind of this disabled  perspective more and seeing where we can go.  As I said, this is very  new. We just  last year published  the first ever full-length book  on disability in ancient Egypt  as a subject.  In 2020, you find  it, which is, yeah.  So there's lots of different  avenues that go down with  us. In terms of what  I'm doing and hoping to  look at, I'm trying to  take a deeper dive on some of the  Ptolemaic evidence because there is a  lot there that still needs to be  unpacked. There is a lot  in terms of how  we're displaying this material,  if we're displaying it at all,  in the museum context, and  how we talk about it.  That is doing, and I'm not  the only one doing this. There are some other scholars  who are doing this, which is great.  One of them is Egyptian, which is  amazing. So there's evidence for that.  There's potentially looking at  other disability  types because the evidence that we have  primarily is all physical  disability-related and not just because of the  evidence we have, but if someone wants  to take a deeper dive into other things  like mental illness,  then the avenue is  there, if they want to.  There's basically endless  possibilities because this is such a  new field.  So really, for any students who are  listening and who are wondering  where can I work where I am really  doing ground-breaking  research, I'm not just looking at the  same subjects that have been  done again and again and again.  

This sounds like it's a really  inspiring  place, full of potential  for creating truly  original work.  

Yeah, very much so, and there's lots  of different avenues that you could take it to.  But the  thing is, the caveat is you will have  to deal with pushback from those who are over in  the field, but you can take it.  

I mean, I love a bit of pushback. It's why I  created the podcast.  Okay, so  to finish then,  if there's one main  takeaway that listeners remember  from this conversation, what is the main  thing that you hope everyone remembers  moving forward so that the  next time they watch a documentary  or read a book, they can keep something in the  back of their minds to  remember?  

Okay. I think  in terms of things to remember,  A, disability  exists greater than the ancient world  in terms of context of Egypt  and Greece. And B,  disabled people  were not necessarily mistreated  by societies.  It is our modern society  that thinks treating people  with disabilities badly is okay.  And we are imposing our cultural  view of that onto the past.  We really should be switching that  and taking their lead.  Yes.  

Which is  I'm not sure that  for every listener listening to this right  now, that that's what they were expecting  from this conversation.  So I am really, really glad  that we've been able to  show a version  of a world that did exist where  things were done differently that we  could replicate now if we just  changed our minds on a few things.  I think in this  current climate where we will see  people with  political power and with large  platforms try and use  ideas from history  to promote  their own harmful  ideas,  which we are seeing all the time,  we can now, on this  topic at least, say,  aha, but I know that you're not  telling me the truth.  

I would say so.  Yes. 

 Which is wonderful. That's so important.  Being able to  question what we're  hearing and to be able  to interrogate those who are saying it  is such an important skill.  So we're really grateful to you for coming  on to talk about this.  Thank you so, so much.  Now, you're the pioneer, so  usually I ask people, if you  want to know more about a subject, where should you  be reading? I mean, I'm guessing  it's pretty much your book.  It's my two books, and  if you like copies of them, just let  me know because they're expensive.  Because they're academic books.  The other scholars to flag  in terms of ancient Egypt  up to this point are  Naveen  Zakaria, who is the Egyptian  lady that I mentioned.  And her full name is  just looking her up  because she has a middle name and I'm trying to remember  what it is right now. And she's doing  a lot of really great work  on this from a museum perspective  and from trying  to get an Egyptian reckoning  of what this is.  It's looking up her whole name.  It is Naveen Lazar Zakaria.  It's her name.  She is currently  at Ritzburg University in Germany  and is also working  for the Ministry of Tourism and  Cypriot in Cairo.  And her most recent article that came out  is Unveiling Hidden Histories, Disability  in Ancient Egypt and its Impact on Today's  Society. How can disability  representation in museums challenge  societal prejudice?  So she's a name teller.  In terms of other Egypt focused  people, there is also  Hannah Vogel, who is my co-editor  on the one book, but she's also been  doing some really great work on disability  otherwise. She  has had, in terms  of her publications, I think  another must-read publication.  I never remember what her name is.  Recognizing Inequality, Ableism,  and Egyptological Approaches to Disability  in Bollywood Capsules. And that's  where that definition of disability came  from, which is her article. And the other  main teller at this point,  who has basically shifted  away from academia and is  trying to move things full-time in  museums now, is Kyle Lewis  Jordan. So he doesn't necessarily have  any publications now, but he's trying to  move things from museum perspective.  

Yeah, fantastic, because public engagement is  so vital. So it's fantastic  to see. I mean,  it's really unusual for  a scholar of the ancient world to be able  to say, I was there when  a new subfield was  created. So this is amazing.  

And we're the subfield, and just also so  people know, this is still so  new. We're trying to figure out what  to name it!.  

Wow, okay. Stay tuned.  But it's really  wonderful  that so early in this  field's history, you're  already reaching out and getting this information  out to the public. Thank you  so much. It has been an utter,  utter pleasure.