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The History of Egypt Podcast

72: Letters to Ahmose

The History of Egypt Podcast

Dominic Perry

Society & Culture, History

4.82.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2017

⏱️ 36 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Busy Lives at Thebes. Personal correspondence is an exciting find for Egyptologists. It's even more wonderful when the letters come together to form a cohesive group, all related to one person. Come meet Ahmose, a letter writer from ancient Egypt... Website: www.egyptianhistorypodcast.com. Support the show via Patreon www.patreon.com/egyptpodcast. Make a one-time donation via PayPal payments.   Select Bibliography: Edward F. Wente, Letters from Ancient Egypt, 1990. S.R.K. Glanville, “The Letters of Aahmose of Peniati,”Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 14 (1928) JSTOR T. Eric Peet, “Two Eighteenth Dynasty Letters,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 12 (1926) JSTOR Elizabeth Frood, “Social Structure and Daily Life,” in Toby Wilkinson (ed.) The Egyptian World 2010. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello and welcome back to the History of Egypt podcast.

0:16.1

Episode 72, The Home Front, also known as Letters to Armoza.

0:22.5

This episode is brought to you by Dennis Nadine, Martin Cordero and Logan Brown.

0:27.8

Thank you for your support, folks, and your appreciation of the show.

0:31.3

This one is for you. The events of this episode take place in the reign of Tatmos III with no specific date.

0:48.5

If you need a chronological point, they take place roughly around 1470 BCE. Give or take.

0:55.5

In the mid-1800s, Egyptologists entered a tomb west of Luxor, ancient Thebes.

1:13.1

In the gloom of the tomb lit only by torches or oil lamps, the archaeologists found an object

1:19.5

of great value, a mummy.

1:22.1

The mummy itself was technically unremarkable, but the wrappings of the mummy were quite unusual.

1:29.4

You see, whoever had wrapped this mummy had cut a couple of corners in their work.

1:34.9

Instead of using linen as was proper, they had fixed a hole in the wrappings by covering

1:40.2

the body with a couple of sheets of papyrus paper. The papyrus had been stuck together

1:46.0

and then adhered to the body with a gum resin. As far as the embalmer was concerned,

1:51.3

this was an adequate solution to the problem. But as you can imagine, the Egyptologists were

1:56.8

excited. They carefully removed the papyrus from the body, cleaned the paper sheets, and began

2:02.5

to study them. What emerged was a pair of letters, written to and from the same individual,

2:10.6

letters which shed a bit of light on daily business going on in Egypt during the 18th dynasty.

2:17.2

Let's dig in. One morning an Egyptian

2:22.5

scribe was sitting under a tree, not far from the road. He was on the west bank of the Nile

2:28.0

River, past the farmland, but not quite in the desert space. The air was warm that morning, but the hottest part of the day

2:36.4

was yet to come. The day's work was now in full swing. The scribe sat cross-legged, balancing a

...

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