Why Did Pharaohs Wear Bowling Pins- - YouTube

Hello and welcome! I'm the Pharaoh Nerd and this is your one-stop shop for all things related to ancient Egypt. If you're new to Egyptology and you've looked at any depiction of any pharaoh, I'm sure you've wondered exactly this. What the hell is on their heads? Well today I'll answer that very question in depth and I'll explain why exactly they wore such things as bowling pins. And even if you're a seasoned Egyptophile, I'm sure you'll encounter bits of information you've never encountered anywhere before. And even you Romaboos watching are probably going to be interested by the depictions of Roman emperors in these very crowns. Although there were 10 basic types of royal headdress, we'll only be covering the two most significant ones today, but in the next couple of weeks I'll come out with a video going through the other eight, which are just as interesting in my opinion. So without further ado, let's begin. Let's start with the oldest and most significant of the bunch. The white crown or hejet, which means the white or bright one, so not so far off from what we call it, signified that the pharaoh was the ruler of upper or southern Egypt. And the red crown or deshret, which means, shockingly enough, the red one, signified that he was the ruler of lower or northern Egypt. It was also called the nut or net or whatever, which refers to an important lower Egyptian goddess named Neith who was depicted wearing it. The two crowns were also referred collectively as the two great of magic and I'm not even gonna pronounce that. Now I know the upper and lower Egypt stuff is sort of confusing, but they're called that because the Nile flows from south to north, which means upper Egypt in the south is upstream compared to lower Egypt in the north, and lower Egypt is downstream from upper Egypt in the south. I hope you got that. Anyways, both crowns first appeared in the pre-dynastic period, the period before Egypt even first became a unified nation. And it was the first unified nation, by the way. Although no crowns have actually survived the tests of time, they're speculated to have been made of fabric, leather, or even woven reeds. The protuberance ending in a spiral affixed to the red crown was likely formed by twisting a piece of linen over something stiff, like a copper wire. Although both principal crowns seem to have emerged in upper Egypt, given that it became politically centralized way before lower Egypt, the red crown seems to have appeared earlier than the white crown. The earliest known depiction of the red crown is in relief, on a pottery sherd from a period in the broader pre-dynastic period called Nakata 1, which was around from approximately 4000 BCE to 3600 BCE or BC or whatever. It's named after the type site of Nakata in Upper Egypt, which just so happens to be where this very sherd was discovered. The red crown is assumed to have originated as the headdress of the rulers of Nakata. This makes sense not only because the sherd was found there, but the color red was associated with Seth, who you might know as the Devil God, but he had other functions. For example, he was the patron deity of Nakata. But we have to take into consideration the fact that until the old kingdom, so the age of the pyramids, the red crown was actually most frequently called the green one, which may support the idea that it was made out of reeds. The color change probably occurred so that the red crown or the green crown or whatever could become the antithesis of the white crown, so that both crowns embodied the Egyptian concept of duality, where reconciliation of opposing forces was the ruling principle of the universe. Think order and chaos, death and rebirth, such important facets of their society, etc. No one really knows why this thing has such a weird-ass shape. To me, it looks like a monkey being buried alive, ass up with only its tail left free wriggling around in a skate park ramp, but I'm sure other scholars have equally valid interpretations. But the curly protuberance that resembles a monkey's tail at the front of the crown might be connected to bees, you know, like a bee's tongue, and bees happen to be heavily associated with the kingship through the royal title Nesut Bidi, which means he of the Sajan Bee, but is often translated as King of Upper and Lower Egypt, with the bee representing Lower Egypt and the Saj plant representing Upper Egypt. It always preceded the pharaoh's pre-nomen in writing. Uh, the pre-nomen was his throne name that he assumed upon taking the throne. The curly protuberance may also be a highly stylized ostrich feather, which was the symbol of the concept of ma'at, i.e. order as opposed to chaos, which we just covered. So even though it came from well within Upper Egypt, the red crown started representing the king's dominion over Lower Egypt when Egypt was first unified by Narmer. I know that's a lot of Egypt, but just One of his immediate predecessors was the Scorpion King, famously played by Dwayne John Roxon, and he's depicted on what's called the Scorpion Macehead in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in the white crown. So why is it important? Well, another section of the macehead which hasn't survived the tests of time may have bore a mirror image of King Scorpion in the red crown, making it quite possibly the earliest ever example of a depiction of a king wearing the red crown. But the earliest depiction of a king wearing the red crown to have actually survived and that actually exists is on the Narmer palette. The white crown appeared a bit later than the red crown. Although it's one of the most important symbols of Upper Egypt, the earliest known depiction of it is actually from a site in Lower or Northern Nubia called Kastul. It's this, a limestone ceremonial incense burner found in a tomb dating to around 3150 BC, which is roughly contemporaneous to the Nakata III period. Remember Nakata I? Well, this is a bit after that. It was found with other prestige objects that likely belonged to a long-forgotten king of Lower Nubia. As you can see, he was once seated on a boat amidst two other boats, one holding a kneeling prisoner. It's probably a representation of a ritual that involved a royal procession by boat to a palace and it's mirrored in some of the other objects we're about to talk about. Now the fact that this object is from Nubia doesn't mean my statement about the red and white crowns originating in Upper Egypt is wrong per se. It's possible that late pre-Dynastic Nubian rulers and early Egyptian pharaohs both shared similar royal symbols, and it's also possible that the Nubians who carved this incense burner were attempting to mimic Egyptian symbols, given that their rulers wished to emulate their neighbors to the north, whose burgeoning power was evident. The Upper Egyptian city of Neken, also referred to as Heracompolis, where the Narmer Pallet was found, in fact, was in close contact with Kustul, which may suggest that the white crown actually originated there. The second earliest depiction, the earliest from Egypt, is on an ivory ceremonial knife handle likely from Upper Egypt, although its exact provenance isn't known, and it's of slightly later date. On its recto, you can sort of make out a guy in the white crown seated on a boat surrounded by another procession of boats, and this figure also holds the first depiction of the royal flail known. It's pretty interesting. And in addition, there are two registers of people on the other side, the verso, the upper one approaching towards and the lower one kneeling before, some sort of structure. The lower register probably consists of kneeling prisoners, which sort of reminds you of the prisoner guy on the Kustul incense burner, eh? This knife handle, which isn't your regular kitchen knife handle, is likely contemporary with a rock-cut inscription near Aswan at a place called Nag al-Hamdullah, attributed to Narmer by some scholars but lacking his name. As you can see, the gentleman here is wearing a tall pointed headdress, which very well may be a schematic drawing of a headjet or a very similar crown. The good old Narmer palette demonstrates that the white crown was seen as more significant than its red counterpart, given that the depiction of Narmer wearing the white crown is significantly larger than the depiction of him wearing the red crown on the back. The intimate association that white crown enjoyed with the royal line of Heracompolis, which played a decisive role in the unification of Egypt, probably caused this, and as it happened, the white crown retained its superiority over the red crown throughout Egyptian history. Okay, so now that we've gotten the crowns as origins sorted, let's go through the rest of their development. But there isn't much to say, they remained pretty much exactly the same all the way until the Roman period. They were worshipped, oddly enough, as manifestations of the heraldic goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt, the latter being Nekbet, the vulture goddess whose cult center was El-Kav or Nekeb, on the opposite side of the Nile from Neken, which actually makes a bit of sense now that I'm thinking about it. After all, the white crown was likely created on the opposite river, right? But anyways, the heraldic goddess of Lower Egypt was the snake goddess Wadjet, whose cult center was located at Buto in the delta. Crown-worshipping aside, from thutmose IV reign onwards, during the mid-18th dynasty of the New Kingdom, Egypt's glory age, which is like 1600 years after the unification of Egypt in the period we were just talking about, both crowns can be combined with the Nemez headdress, which I'll cover quite soon and is basically just what you see King Tut wearing on his famous funerary mask, and are actually rarely depicted alone from the 19th dynasty onwards. But eventually, as with all the other pharaonic crowns, the last heads they were depicted being worn by were owned not by pharaohs, but Roman emperors in the guise of pharaohs on temple walls. I tried to find the latest depictions of emperors wearing these and here's what I found. As far as I could see, the headjet was last depicted by itself on Augustus' head in a depiction of him adoring Isis in Dendera Temple in Upper Egypt. During his reign, the Hypostyle Hall outside back wall and the east and west walls of Dendera were being built, but frankly I don't know exactly where this scene is located among all that. The red crown was last depicted on an emperor's head by itself a while later during the 3rd century crisis under the short-lived emperor Trajan Decius who ruled from 249 to 251 on the west wall of the temple of Laetopolis or Esna, also in Upper Egypt ironically enough, you know, given that the red crown was supposed to represent Lower Egypt, whatever. This also happens to be the very last depiction of an emperor as pharaoh and to an extent any pharaoh I've found by this point. So that was my analysis of the origins and history of two of Egypt's most iconic emblems. Stay tuned, more crown videos and more exciting, fascinating videos on ancient history are coming up soon. Goodbye!