Long ago and far away. And unforgettable. July 2005
New Photos
Treasures of the Pharoahs is a stunning exhibition on at the moment at the Scuderie in Rome. Only a handful of objects, beautifully displayed and with glorious interpretation, unlike, say, the old Cairo Museum. One object in particular caught my eye.
Yes, a woman grinding grain, feeding a pharoah in the afterlife and feeding one of my obsessions. Turning hard grass seeds into flour is, as historian Rachel Laudan has so thoroughly explored calls for hard labour, the effects of which can be seen in the skeletal remains of the women who did the work. So I was surprised and delighted to notice that the woman is resting her right foot on her left heel.
That might have given her toe joints some brief respite, though it did not spare her knees. I swear I once read a paper about the skeletal deformities of some of the women's skeletons from ancient Egypt, but today all I can find diagnoses the aches and pains of being a professional scribe, along with hints that further work is under way to interpret skeletons from the workers' cemetery at the Giza. I hope that research further enriches our knowledge of daily life in ancient Egypt.
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