We can never recover the past. It's gone forever. A second before now - just when you read this - has been stolen and will never, never, ever repeat itself. How then, being the immediate and inaccessible, can be what happened thousands of years ago? Impossible.
There are things we will never know. They simply escape our reach. It is not an intellectual impossibility, but temporary conditions prevent it. The distant past, for example, is one of those things. We can build a story from traces found, but it will never be recorded that, in fact, it happened that way. Only the hypothesis remains.
What was happening in Ancient Egypt is one of those things. For years we have been collecting versions that we keep in our head and with it created an idea. Here are 5 myths that you always believed certain but are not.
"Cleopatra was beautiful"
To say that Cleopatra was not beautiful, it might be true, but we would run the risk of interpretation. Despite what history - and the movies - have made us believe, the proportions and factions of Cleopatra were not at all what we would consider beautiful today. Recent studies have revealed that the "last queen of Ancient Egypt" was of short stature and abundant forms. However, it would have been his intelligence and intellectual ability that managed to conquer Julio Cesar and Marco Antonio.
"The pyramids were built by slaves"
The pyramid builders were free men, who were rewarded for their work. There were 100,000 slaves as Herodotus said, but about 5,000 people were summoned and voluntarily agreed to work. The payment used to be in kind. Zahi Hawass and Mark Lenher are two researchers who have dismantled the old myth of slavery in construction; According to their investigations, skeletons of fish and vessels were found on the circumference of the pyramid, so they support the hypothesis that they were provided with food and that it was only a temporary occupation.
"All Egyptians were mummified"
The mummification was only for those who could afford it. That is, for ordinary Egyptians, this was not an option. The purpose of mummification was to preserve the body in a recognizable state. But the process of embalming was not easy and accessible to anyone. The less fortunate were buried between animal flesh and on bandages. Finally, the bodies were deposited in the sand, where they had a natural desiccation.
"They walked on camels"
Despite the mental image we all share of a camel walking through the burning sand, these animals were not the most common mode of transportation for the ancient Egyptians. It is true that they were used for this purpose, but it was only in a late period. In fact, they were donkeys who were used to transport small distances with cargoes to trade. However, the main means of transport was not land-based; To go from one city to another along the course of the Nile, Egyptians of ancient times used boats built with boards shaped by more than 30 people.
"Only men were Pharaohs"
Women could also reign in Egypt. The official story considers 7 women who were on the throne - counting Cleopatra, who was Greek - Tausert, Nefertiti, Ahhotep I, Hatshepsut, Neferusobek and Nitocris, although the differences were never eliminated, women had equal rights to men.
According to Matt Elton, in an interview with the BBC, misunderstandings about Ancient Egypt lie, essentially, in their sources. According to him, this information comes essentially from four: the Bible; The ancient Greeks; The nineteenth-century French scholars and German historians in the twentieth.
Be that as it may, the past will always be a mystery that to know and understand it, we can only rely on hypotheses formed by archaeological findings.
