Name: エジプト学の専門家だけど質問ある？| Tech Support | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-02-12T09:50:28.000Z
Duration: 19 min 51 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Let's answer some questions from the internet.

When did ancient Egypt begin exactly, according to you?

If we talk about when the first king of Egypt actually became king, we're talking about 3000 BC.

And then we put ourselves on this timeline.

So this then would be when we change from BC to AD.

And we could say, you know, Cleopatra's really close to that.

So the pyramids at Giza are about 2400 BC.

Not only are we closer in time to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to the beginning of ancient Egyptian pharaonic history, there's even more time between Cleopatra and the pyramids than there is between Cleopatra and us.

Ancient Egypt was already ancient in ancient Egypt.

At Tsunaze asks, seriously, how did the sphinx's nose break?

Our best evidence for how the nose of the sphinx got broken comes from a 15th century Arabic historian.

And he explains that someone who was angry actually deliberately shot the nose off the sphinx.

Because he was upset that people were revering this monument from ancient Egypt, this person was subsequently lynched by other local people who revered the sphinx.

So there are also stories that Napoleon's army shot the nose off the sphinx.

We think that one's probably not right, in part because we have drawings of the sphinx from earlier than Napoleon's expedition and the nose is already missing.

Khafre, a king of the fourth dynasty, built the second largest pyramid at Giza.

At SilentUshi asks, so what did ancient Egyptians talk like?

We know a great deal about what Egyptian sounded like, in part because the last stage of the ancient Egyptian language, Coptic, was both written in Greek letters, which we can still read, and in fact, it's still the liturgical language of the Coptic church.

And so if you go watch The Mummy, you can hear much of what ancient Egypt sounded like.

We are able to phonetically reconstruct what it sounded like.

All mummy movies have somebody named Imhotep.

Imhotep was the architect responsible for designing the first pyramid built in Egypt.

At Wide Youth Styles asks, what are some ancient Egyptian medicine and tools they created that are used to this day?

Ancient Egyptian medicine was pretty advanced.

We know, for instance, that they performed surgery to relieve pressure on the brain.

We have things, for instance, like pregnancy tests in ancient Egypt.

A woman who wants to know if she's pregnant and wants to know what the sex of the baby will be should pee on both barley and wheat seeds.

If she's pregnant, these are gonna sprout, and which one sprouts first is gonna tell her whether she's gonna have a girl or a boy.

And modern tests on this have suggested that, in fact, the human growth hormone that is so increased in pregnant women does have an effect on the germination of grain.

At Ppuffnstuff asks, did ancient Egypt have bars and...

No, ancient Egypt didn't have bars, but the Egyptians were definitely very social and alcohol was part of their social lives.

We know that the Egyptians drank a ton of beer and quite a bit of wine as well.

This was mostly done in homes and even in tombs.

The underground part of the tomb might be where your burial chamber is, but the above ground part of the tomb is a party palace.

There's a festival called the Beautiful Feast of the Valley where the whole point was to go get drunk in the tombs with your ancestors.

In order to make beer and wine, we have large-scale breweries and towns from even before the first king of Egypt was present in 3000 BC.

At Princesa de New York asks, watching this video in class about what did ancient Egypt look like?

And I'm pretty sure it's just scene clips from Assassin's Creed Origins.

So when we check out the Assassin's Creed Origins trailer, there's a lot in there that's accurate from the landscape itself, this sort of green strip around the Nile, then cliffs and desert a little bit farther away.

And the monuments are very accurately reconstructed.

You can see the pyramid with a funny-shaped top.

That's what we call the Bent Pyramid at a site called Dahshur.

That pyramid is actually built by the father of Khufu, the guy who built the Great Pyramid.

The reason that is bent is because this is very early in the history of constructing pyramids.

They were still figuring out how to build perfect pyramids, and we think that this one cracked while it was under construction, and they changed the angle so that the weight at the top would not be as great.

At Rednim asks, how did King Tut manage to be so popular even though he lived such a short life?

King Tut is super popular with us because his tomb was found intact.

The discovery of King Tut's tomb was one of the archaeological wonders of the world.

If you go see this stuff in Cairo, it takes up so many rooms.

You have shrines after shrines after shrines, nested shrines built around the body of the king who's buried not just in one gold coffin, but in multiple gold coffins.

The beautiful face mask, also in gold, inlaid with precious stones that's on top of him.

But King Tut wasn't that popular in ancient Egypt.

He lived at a time that later Egyptians, in fact, wrote out of history.

He was the successor of a king who is sometimes referred to as the heretic king, Akhenaten, who introduced a monotheistic religion in ancient Egypt.

And Tutankhamun was one of the kings who returned to ancient Egypt to its original polytheistic religion and opened the temples again.

The fact that he was short-lived, not well-known in later Egypt probably contributed to the fact that his tomb was preserved.

kbronx2 asks, did you know that we can't recreate the Egyptian pyramids with modern-day technology?

Well, I guess that means maybe we weren't the most advanced the human species has ever been.

So we absolutely have the technology to recreate the pyramids.

The tools that the Egyptians were using to create these big stone blocks to make the pyramid were of two types, rough stone balls, a very hard stone, which dropped repeatedly, wear away the stone to do the major quarrying.

The fine chiseling on these blocks is being done with copper tools.

These copper tools would have required a huge workforce just to keep the copper tools sharp.

So how do you get a straight vertical side on a piece of stone?

Here you use gravity and a tool that engineers still use, a plumb bob, which is a weight on a string.

And with a weighted string just hung, you just hold it in your hand, you know that that string is absolutely vertical.

So if you're trying to get the side of a piece of stone vertical, you hold a plumb bob next to it and you just correct, you keep chiseling away at that stone until it is perfectly straight.

So it would have taken decades to build the Great Pyramid at Giza.

You need the stones themselves to be squared and you need the ground to be level.

You carve a channel in the ground and fill it with water and the water itself, again, gravity will level and you can mark that water level across your entire site.

So in the end, it's not impossible technologically to build pyramids any longer.

We choose not to build pyramids any longer.

At Sea Vanford asks, who was the best pharaoh?

Many people might say that Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid was the best pharaoh, but my personal favorite pharaoh would probably be Hatshepsut.

That's not so much, we think, because she was trying to pretend that she was a man as because this was a role usually played by men.

In her inscriptions, for instance, she is still using feminine forms of the verbs of words to refer to herself, but she's shown just like a male pharaoh.

At Salma Khan asks, watching this show called Ancient Aliens on Netflix.

Why do the pyramids of Egypt match those in Mexico?

The pyramids in Egypt don't actually match the pyramids in Mexico.

The king is buried in a small chamber underneath the pyramid in Egypt.

The pyramids as you see them today look like giant staircases.

They're a little bit rough, and that's not how they would have looked anciently.