Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio. Hi, my name is Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: this is the Artifact, a short form series from Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind, focusing on particular objects, ideas, and
Speaker 1: moments in time. If you look at ancient Egyptian artwork
Speaker 1: starting around the early New Kingdom period so about b c. E,
Speaker 1: you might notice a weird recurring feature. Sometimes people have
Speaker 1: little cones on top of their heads. They don't look
Speaker 1: like hats exactly. They're a little small for that, usually
Speaker 1: about the size of a drinking cup, but turned upside down.
Speaker 1: When I see them, I think of a huge, rounded
Speaker 1: alligator tooth. Sometimes they're white all over. Sometimes they're pale
Speaker 1: with red and brown colorations that look like inverted flames.
Speaker 1: In paintings and ba relief spanning more than a thousand years,
Speaker 1: you can find them in all kinds of scenes. People
Speaker 1: wear the cones when they're worshiping the gods or playing
Speaker 1: musical instruments. Cones appear on the heads of men who
Speaker 1: are being prepared for funerary rituals or receiving a blessing
Speaker 1: from the king. Sometimes they show up in scenes of
Speaker 1: childbirth or on guests being welcomed and served at a feast.
Speaker 1: People are even shown with these head cones and other
Speaker 1: planes of existence, for example, while hunting or fishing in
Speaker 1: the afterlife. For decades, Egyptologists have debated what these objects were.
Speaker 1: One of the most popular hypotheses is that the cones
Speaker 1: were actually lumps of perfumed ngwent. So imagine a softball
Speaker 1: sized conical mound of animal fat infused with a fragrant
Speaker 1: resin like mirr. As the cone melted under the sun
Speaker 1: or from the body's heat, it would turn into an
Speaker 1: oozing bath of sweet smelling grease that infused the hair
Speaker 1: and the scalp. This fragrance was meant to cleanse the
Speaker 1: person both physically and spiritually, to make them fit to
Speaker 1: interact with the gods. The Danish egyptologist Lisa Manicky discusses
Speaker 1: evidence for the unguin interpretation in her book Sacred Luxuries, Fragrance,
Speaker 1: Aromatherapy and Cosmetics in Ancient Egypt from Cornell University Press.
Speaker 1: Quote paintings and reliefs from the beginning of the New
Speaker 1: Kingdom and On show men and women with a lump
Speaker 1: of solid unguin perched on top of their head either
Speaker 1: on a bald skull, on the hair, or on top
Speaker 1: of a wig. There is little doubt that the material
Speaker 1: is supposed to be scented matter, for in some contexts
Speaker 1: we see servants carrying bowls of the same white mass
Speaker 1: streaked with red or yellow, whilst at the same time
Speaker 1: they position it on men and women seated at a banquet.
Speaker 1: She writes that these images are sometimes accompanied by texts
Speaker 1: that mentions placing a scented resin on top of the head.
Speaker 1: But one difficulty with any physical explanation of the cones
Speaker 1: is that, despite how often they appear in art, no
Speaker 1: one had ever found physical evidence of one. In the
Speaker 1: absence of physical examples from archaeology, some experts came to
Speaker 1: a different conclusion. Maybe the cones never existed as three
Speaker 1: dimensional objects at all. Instead, maybe they were an artistic convention,
Speaker 1: a symbol like the halos of saints in medieval Christian artwork.
Speaker 1: There was no need to assume that Christian saints and
Speaker 1: martyrs literally wore wide brimmed gold hats. Instead, the halos
Speaker 1: told us something about the hidden qualities of the person.
Speaker 1: A holiness that was invisible to the naked eye was
Speaker 1: revealed in painting. Could it be that the cones served
Speaker 1: a similar purpose within Egyptian religious psychography. But Incember twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: a report was published in the journal Antiquity by Anna Stephens,
Speaker 1: Karina E. Rogi, Yolanda E. M. F. Bosch, and Gretchen
Speaker 1: our Dabs, and this report added interesting new evidence to
Speaker 1: help answer the mystery of the cones. This evidence takes
Speaker 1: the form of two recently excavated graves from the ancient
Speaker 1: city of Akatatum, now known as Amarna. Amarna plays a
Speaker 1: strange and interesting role in Egyptian history. It was something
Speaker 1: of a religious boom town created by the eighteenth dynasty
Speaker 1: pharaoh Akatan, who tried to change the official religion of Egypt,
Speaker 1: forsaking its long time polytheistic pantheon and replacing it with
Speaker 1: what is sometimes considered an early example of monotheism or monolatry,
Speaker 1: the special reverence for and worship of only one god,
Speaker 1: in particular, in this case, the Sun deity Aten. When
Speaker 1: Accinatin struck out to cement his new religion, he founded
Speaker 1: a city to become the home base of the Otton cult.
Speaker 1: This city was a Marna. One of the reasons a
Speaker 1: Marna has been important from an archaeological standpoint is the
Speaker 1: quality of its cemeteries, where we can find evidence of
Speaker 1: how common people of the time, and not just rich
Speaker 1: elites with elaborate tombs, were laid to rest and commemorated.
Speaker 1: It's two of these common graves from a Marna that
Speaker 1: are the focus of the twenty nineteen study. What Stevens
Speaker 1: at all described in the report are the graves of
Speaker 1: two fourteenth century b C. Egyptians who were buried wearing
Speaker 1: head cones, the first three dimensional head cones ever discovered.
Speaker 1: The more intact example measured about eight centimeters in height
Speaker 1: and ten centimeters across. The cones were cream colored and brittle,
Speaker 1: with what the authors described as a silky feeling exterior surface.
Speaker 1: They were ridden with little tunnels made by insects over
Speaker 1: the cent trees. The cones were not solid, but hollow,
Speaker 1: and criss crossing patterns on the inner walls indicate that
Speaker 1: the wax domes were probably shaped around an inner core
Speaker 1: made of textile Spectroscopic analysis revealed that the cones were
Speaker 1: made of biological wax, almost certainly bees wax. These discoveries
Speaker 1: didn't seem perfectly consistent with either of the two interpretations
Speaker 1: we've previously discussed. Obviously, these were physical, three dimensional objects
Speaker 1: and not merely an artistic convention like a halo. As
Speaker 1: for the unguint interpretation, Stevens and co authors found no
Speaker 1: chemical or physical evidence that these cones would have melted
Speaker 1: into the hair and released perfume. They seem more like tiny,
Speaker 1: rigid wax hats. Speaking to Colin Barris for an article
Speaker 1: in Science, Lisa Manicky mentioned the possibility that the cones
Speaker 1: worn by the people in these graves were dummy cones.
Speaker 1: If the true cones were in fact melting lumps of
Speaker 1: animal fat infused with expensive perfumes, it's possible that less
Speaker 1: wealthy members of society could attempt to imitate the appearance
Speaker 1: of the cones without the olfactory function. It's also possible
Speaker 1: that the kinds of cones worn with the grave clothes
Speaker 1: would be different from what was used in life. So
Speaker 1: what can we conclude from this discovery? A lot of
Speaker 1: questions remain, but the authors of the study claim that
Speaker 1: at the very least, the analysis of the Amarna graves
Speaker 1: quote confirms that three dimensional wax based head cones were
Speaker 1: sometimes worn by the dead in ancient Egypt and that
Speaker 1: access to these objects was not restricted to the upper elite.
Speaker 1: Beyond that, they say that the cones may have had
Speaker 1: religious significance related to fertility, and that they could reasonably
Speaker 1: be interpreted as part of quote a suite of personal
Speaker 1: accouterments deemed appropriate for use in a range of cell
Speaker 1: librations and rituals for and involving the living, the dead,
Speaker 1: the autun and other deities, which, as they acknowledge, doesn't
Speaker 1: narrow things down too much. In his article for Science,
Speaker 1: Barris also quotes run Njord of Emory University, who raises
Speaker 1: the critique that sometimes modern scholars can read too much
Speaker 1: religious or afterlife significance into artifacts from ancient Egypt. It's
Speaker 1: worth keeping open the possibility that these were just little hats.
Speaker 1: Tune into future editions of the artifact each week, hosted
Speaker 1: by either Robert or myself. As always, you can email
Speaker 1: us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.
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