2026-05-07 God is his Potter’ - Disability in Ancient Egypt (Kyle Jordan)

Well, wonderful. Uh, welcome back to our BAD Museum and, uh, archaeological research facility at UC Berkeley talk series. Uh, I'm Aaron Brody, uh, director of the Badday Museum at Pacific School of Religion. I'd like to take a moment to highlight our theme for this year and to briefly discuss, excuse me, how our series promotes social justice issues through meaningful dialogue. The body museum is an institution dedicated to advancing knowledge of the archaeology and history of the ancient Levant. Over the course of the last few years, we at the museum um have realized that such knowledge is enhanced by reflecting on and engaging with perspectives that have largely been ignored by modern-day society and as a result have been erased from mainstream historical narratives. The body museum particularly welcomes scholars who are presenting marginalized perspectives that contribute to creating better equity in scholarship and society more broadly. This year's series disability in the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean lists up the experiences of people with disabilities whose voices have been typically overlooked in the study of the ancient world. This program bridges the past and the present through study of disability in antiquity, its contemporary reception, accessibility, and its continuing impact today, contributing to a more nuanced, inclusive, and complete narrative of the past. So, it is my distinct pleasure to introduce our speaker. Kyle Lewis Jordan is a freelance archaeologist and curator who specializes in the study of disability in antiquity. Born with cerebral pausy, he studied the archaeology and heritage of Egypt and the Middle East at University College London's Institute of Archaeology. after which he went on to curate multiple exhibitions on disability in the ancient world and archaeology for the Asholian Museum and Pit Rivers Museum in Oxford. Uh and the ver ah this is going to be hard to pronounce but I'll I'll work on it. Uh Veril Mium Museums in St. Albams. Sorry for the butchering of that name. Alongside uh continuing to work in uh the museums and heritage sector as a curator, educator, and consultant on disability, Kyle is also independently continuing his research on disability in ancient Egypt and received a research uh associate ship from the School of Advanced Studies National Center for Academic and Cultural Exchange in support and recognition of his work. And congratulations on that. That's fantastic. Kyle's talk today is titled God is His Potter, Disability in Ancient Egypt. Uh, I'm thrilled to hand over the floor, so to speak, to Kyle Jordan. Kyle, the floor is yours. >> Thank you ever so much, Aaron. Uh, I'm just going to switch to my presenter view. Uh, yes. So, uh, does everyone see that? Is that sharing the right screen? Are you just Yes. >> Yes. >> Wonderful. Okay. Uh good morning, afternoon, and evening to those of you joining us here today from wherever you are in the world. It's an absolute pleasure to be here to deliver the final lecture in this lecture series dedicated to exploring disability in the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean. And I want to express my thanks to Aaron, the Bardday Museum, and the archaeological research facility at UC Berkeley for this opportunity to come and share with you today my thoughts on some of the evidences for disability in ancient Egypt. Over the course of the next half hour, half hour or so, I will attempt to give you an overview to our approaches to thinking about disability in archaeology and how that maps onto our evidences for disability and impairment in the Egyptian archaeological record. What I hope you will take away from this talk is not only the wealth of evidence we have, but that lived experiences of disability in the ancient world were complex and that by considering them, we not only gain a deeper appreciation of the complexity of the ancient world, but our own as well. So to give you a bit of background as to my approach as a scholar to the study of disability in antiquity, let me first tell you a little bit about um what I would like to refer to as the phases of disability in historical and archaeological scholarship. Uh this was partly already touched upon in a wonderful talk that Hannah Vogle gave in this series that was looking at abbleism within the discipline of disciplines of archaeology and Egyptology. But to just go over it briefly, I tend to break it down into three phases. One I would call a kind of dichotomy phase. And this is where in response to the growing sort of cultural and social awareness of disability as a category in the later part of the 20th century, scholars were beginning to look towards their own kind of areas of of study and think about disability for the first time. However, they were often holding it in this very dichomous mode where it was kind of always seen as the binary to enabled experience and therefore always the worst thing. So we have this initial framing of disability always being the bedrock and uh in the case of uh Henry Jack Stker history of disability antiquity as well is the bedrock of all history. So going back into the far ancient past, he's saying, "Oh, the little we do have just uh illustrates the absolute derf of the of of of existence essentially." So completely tossing it out of hand. Uh likewise, Robert Garland's eye of the beholder is uh regarding the disabled body in art and literature from the Greco Roman world as utterly grotesque. Um he holds it very much in contempt. Uh the second phase then becomes this response to that writing based on the knowledge that was created from what we refer to as the social model. This idea that disablement comes from society and from systems that are made to disable others. And so it does push back against this dichotomy in the sense that it's saying that it's not that simple, not that straightforward. Um and so there's been some great work in that space. However, it almost goes to the other extreme where it says that because there isn't a terminology or an idea for disability in the ancient world like in the ancient lexicons, therefore we can't really consider that and all we can consider is the impairments. Um, and while that is important, I think it sometimes overlooks the ways in which the experience of disability and disablement is also something that is innate to the embodiment of those impairments and those relationships that that kind of forms with communities and societies. And so, uh, where we are today is what I would refer to as the embodiment phase. And so this is um a larger with the larger infranchisement of disabled people in universities pursuing subjects like archaeology and disability studies. We're seeing an increased focus on what we refer to as the ontological experience of the body in the past. So ontology is the idea of of experience that that that sense of the body how we experience things. So in archaeology, we're starting to think more about how things might have been experienced and thus ideas and knowledge of lived experience of impairment and disability um and disablement become a framework. These for right now are mostly coming out in the form of uh edited academic volumes and thesis uh but show a growing potential for the consideration of disabled lives in the past and the and the effects that knowledge has on our present day questions and attitudes. By considering disability as a social and cultural object in and of itself, we can consider not only the systemic applications of disablement, but also theorize the disabled person's direct lived experience. Still retaining that nuance of the social cultural phase, but applying it more critically by changing the focus away from the non-disabled gaze to the disabled reality. Um so in that sense embodiment approaches disability seeking to encapsulate uh all of these experiences from the various models of disability. Um and in that way we need to not confine ourselves to just one way approaching the evidences we find for disability and impairment in the ancient past. This also helps us to engage with one key aspect of disabled people's lived experiences in the present moment which is that the complex nuances of how we feel and experience our body minds that is body and mind both in relation to ourselves and others. For sure we reject the seeing of our bodies in a purely medicalized view yet our embodiment may still require significant medical attention. Likewise we may acknowledge that many of our disablements are socially constructed and can be dismantled and should be. But there is also space to consider how even with such barriers removed, our body minds will remain the same and so our social and cultural experiences will still present differently to others. With all that out of the way, I always feel it's relevant as well when starting these talks to remind people about when, where, and what we are when we're talking about ancient Egypt. It's worth bearing in mind that this is a both geographic and temporal space that uh spans almost 6,000 years. So our archaeological record is quite vast. But that means we have to consider all of that time and all of that change that was being experienced. So there is no kind of one uniform way of approaching the idea of disability for example because there have been a multitude of cultures that have settled in the Nile Valley over those 6,000 years. So when we approach the evidences we have to consider that kind of um those modes of transition and transformation between cultures. Uh we also just have to bear in mind that the Egyptians as a whole as a collective are experiencing a world that contrary to what we may imagine is not static. You know, it's not fixed in one place. The Nile River does not stay the same for 6,000 years. Every year, right up until the building of the NASA Dam in the in the in the 1950s, 1960s, it's flooding every year. So, that the channels are changing and that affects people's lives and as a result also affecting their bodies. It's it's a it's a risk. It's a danger. uh as well as with the for uh the the the wildlife that is living there like hippopotamuses for example as you can see on the on the screen and this is something that the ancient Egyptians were particularly culturally attuned to right so that kind of manifests in how they're also interpreting themselves and their relationship with the natural world around them so I think that's just worth bearing in mind as a foreground when we're going in to talk about um disability in ancient Egypt specifically that this is the cultural context in which we're finding them and that again because of the span of this time there's a lot to kind of get through and can't be just um neatly prescribed in one way or another. Lastly, I just want to touch upon uh the title of this talk, God is his potter. This comes from a a passage of uh what we refer to as wisdom literature in Egyptology. Um and this particular piece comes from what is known as the instructions of Eminem hope. So this uh was first penned we believe sometime near the end of the new kingdom. So Egypt's power in the world is declining. Uh things are changing rapidly. There is there's a kind of degradation of the central authority of the king. Um and so uh elite people and non- elite people in first waves of the of the land are trying to figure out what comes next. And so Aman Hope is writing to his son to kind of give him moral instruction on how to deal with these vastly changing times. And one quite uh commonly quoted passage from those instructions is chapter 25. Uh and it reads, "Do not laugh for the blind man, nor taunt a dwarf, neither interfere with the condition of a disabled person. Do not taunt a man who is in the hand of God, nor scowl at him if he ers. Man is clay and straw, and God is his potter. He overthrows, and he builds daily. He impoverishes a thousand if he wishes, but he makes a thousand into officials. Um, and what I think is really important to take away from there is that the term god, lecher, lord in ancient Egyptian, it can refer to the divine as in Horus, Rah, Amun, those uh chief gods. But it can also refer to the king. And later on in this talk, we'll touch a bit about the role of the king um with the body in ancient Egypt. and in particular with disability. But just hold on to that idea. God is his potter. He overthrows and he builds daily. So all of that out of the way, what evidences do we actually have? Well, I'm going to run through some examples with you. Going back to the earliest times in ancient Egypt when communities are first starting to form. One of the earliest kind of practices that we see in the creation of bo images of the body are the creation of what we refer to as p-ynastic ivaries or p-ynnastic figurines. Um and what's notable amongst them is that across uh their production we see so many examples of for example people with dwarfism as you can see on the uh left and on the right. Um but also we find images for example of um what uh for example in the center in the uh top uh right we have a woman um showing possible kosis so a slight curvature of the spine. We also have examples of individuals whose limbs because some of these ivaries they're they're made in one single piece but some are made with detachable limbs. So we have examples of ones where limbs can be detached. Um but also they're not shown as just being static as as being in in just one single uh kind of mode or or or position. Uh we do find examples like in the bottom right of the center of um people with dwarfism in roles such as giving child care and and and giving um uh yeah child care. Sorry, I don't know why I got caught up on that one. But the point is is that it does show that not only are they being incorporated into communities and recognized within communities, but they are playing an active role in these communities. And so it's about creating identities and these identities continue to be carried forward such that when these practices of creating ivaries um evolve uh to creating these very ornate examples which we find from the city of Hieropoulos which is the city of the falcons. So where kingship in ancient Egypt really begins. Um these ivaries were buried around early kind of representations of the king. Um and what they show is um beyond just the embodiment is this idea of a shared identity um around the king with these rippled hairstyles, these kind of wigs that they're wearing, the wigs that kind of later go on to be the symbol of of of the elites. Um, and so it's showing that not only are these communities again recognizing embodiment, but they are going out of their way to incorporate them into this new identity. And uh, on the left here, I have an example of what's known as the stealer of Nefa, uh, which comes from the first dynasty. So when kingship actually becomes established, Nefa here uh which literally means beautiful uh at the top of his stealer we see the um ideoggram for a little person uh deng uh he is the first known courtier named Cortier in um in ancient Egypt which I think is quite cool. Um, so you can see how this kind of leads on and these this is this is a continuing practice. And as we go even further, what's noteworthy is that this then culturally evolves over time because like I said, remember this is 6,000 years of history. So the Egyptians are reexavating their own history as they're responding to say the flooding of the Nile and and the shifting sands. So they're finding these older images and they look at them and they go, "Wow, those are our ancestors. We should, you know, we should bring this back. we should connect with them. And so these representations of dwarfism in particular are quite noteworthy because they lead to the development of the idea of the god Bez. Bez uh is a part man, part part man with dwarfism, part lion um who becomes very prevalent from the middle kingdom onwards and he is often associated with the protection of mothers and infant children in the household. Um, and what's so special about him and why I love him so much is that he while he is seen as a minor quote unquote god because he doesn't have his own temple. He is very present in the material world of the ancient Egyptians. He takes the form of many many things from jewelry to uh cosmetic pots as you can see on the slide there to bed posts to door frames to feeding bottles for children to the pots that hold the very essential grains that feed everyone. He appears everywhere from you know the lowliest household to the the realm of the king the opening slide and and here I have this tile of Bess from the palace of Ramsey's II at Pamesa. This is from one of the private apartments of the of the king uh and his family. So you see that for everyone in Egyptian society, this protective uh image of Bez becomes incredibly important. Um and the fact that you know they incorporate the the disa what we would recognize today as the disabled body into that shows that they don't immediately come with these um preassumed assumptions about the capacity and capability of the disabled body as we do in the present um and with like those early scholarships I mentioned in the in that kind of dichotomy phase that would assume that this was an outlier. Well, no, it's not an outlier. It's actually something that's very much um culturally ingrained and considered in in the Egyptian mind. Going a bit broader though, how can we see other examples of disability in um Egyptian art? So uh a recent study by professor Samar Kamal of Minia University in Egypt recorded an estimated 83 represented disabled figures in documented old and middle kingdom tomb scenes and artifacts representing a range of embodied physical and sensory impairments across a variety of professions. So some are on the screen here but I'll read them out. So we have herdsmen and farmers, dancers and musicians, serving staff, metal workers, lever and rope makers, servants, but also high status roles including priests, local governors, overseers, and supervisors. So, um, what that can kind of give us an impression of and tell us is that not only are they being recognized and their bodies being encoded in these ideas of, for example, with dwarfism and bez the idea of care, but they're also um demonstrating how in Egyptian society uh where a lot of emphasis was placed on the idea of collective um kind of stewardship and action towards uh the the the greater good, the idea of art, uh justice and all good things. Um disabled bodies and we can imagine by extension minds are being included in this in a variety of positions. Um so that gives us another clue that um disability in ancient Egypt isn't just something that is passed off hand. It's something that is very much committed to memory. And that's the other thing that we can take away from the fact that so many of these kind of divergent bodies are being encoded into the memorial memory of the ancient Egyptians through their tomb scenes. While these are not usually public, right? They are they are from within the tombs. So, you know, living people would not be seeing them once they're closed. The idea was that because they have now been encoded in this and there are they are therefore the witness of the divine means that the Egyptians wanted this to be remembered for themselves for their own spirits and minds but for the divine as well. Um, and of course I should um recognize um that we can also look at bioarchchaeological remains. Um, and I've only listed a few examples here because if I was to list them all, we would be here all evening. But suffice to say this also gives us a good indication of the presence of people with dwarfism or the presence of people with embodiment such as um cranial dimmorphism or pots disease or um cerebopaly even in the case of a woman of a woman known as geet um who I gave a talk about a few years ago. Um but I mentioned these bioarchchaeological remains as well because just like how Rachel Kalisher in her talk for this um series about the um burials in Megiddo. Uh she mentioned how we do have limits to our bioarchchaeological evidence. One is that obviously they are very heavily skewed towards the physical the things that are not encoded not just in soft tissues that do not remain but also in the mind which also cannot remain. But it's also the fact that um in Egypt's case specifically the altercation the altercation uh alterations sorry of the body um are also important to remember. You know these are not the people who lived. They have been transformed through the process of mummification into the blessed dead. Their organs have been removed. They have been bound into cartonage into the mummy wrappings. Um so they are a new being. So while we can absolutely take some learnings away from them, we cannot draw too many quick conclusions because they only give us a fragment of their lived experience and their past. And so if we just read them based on those few encoded signs, then we tend to take a very medicalized view. And then we also run the risk of drawing too many quick conclusions about their um their their burial and their and and how how they were understood by their communities. I use the example here. These two pots on the very far left side are from the burial of two unsexed individuals with uh pots diseased. A very early burial from the Adima necropolis. And the archaeologists who excavated them drew the very quick conclusion that because these pots were broken or or misshapen that they were meant to parallel the uh buried individuals quote brokenness or misshapeness. But again, that's taking a very modern lens view to the idea of a normal body and therefore their bodies being um unnormal for lack of a better term when actually for all we know these were just the pots that were ready to hand because we find many examples of broken pots in burial contexts and in others that were still put to use. So the fact that there is this uh you know easy parallel does not make it uh the actual case. And there's also something um that I want to touch upon in this idea of encoding these these bodies into memory isn't just um to show how they are incorporated into the order of all good things. It also gives us an idea of what's something that um uh Mason Trader touched upon in his talk about the idea of affordance um when he was talking about care for example and how affordances are are kind of a two-way thing in in which both the community and the individual with the lived embodiment plays a role in shaping how they move and go about the world in his case with his archaeology. But in in in our case looking at the evidence we can also think about that again in the terms of the roles that people are playing they could show signs of affordance. So the fact that uh for example on the left here we have this um copy of a plastic of a young man with a curved spine who uh we believe is meant to represent an an overseer because he in his uh hand that's down by his side it's got a drilled hole which probably would have held a staff of authority. Um, and these statues as well, they're usually made for for people who hold quite a degree of of authority. They're they're they're kind of commemorations for their own burial. Um, so it shows there that however his embodiment came to be, whether that was um uh from birth or whether that was developed over the course of hard labor and therefore the the kind of the degradation of his of his stature was the result of that. he is still being put into other positions to to contribute to that work um and being given that affordance to to enact that work. In the same way when we think of say the blind musicians uh that was mentioned um by Eric Harvey in his uh talk about blind Mesopotamians uh that also shows a sign of affordance because this example here in the uh top right um is from an ostrich. So it's like they are they're a sketch basically of what would then go onto the wall. It's not just the fact that um his eyes are shut and therefore closed. Um he's also very hunched over and he's showing folds to his skin and that's usually a sign of age in ancient Egyptian art as well. So, so the fact of like this is probably something that was on set and and now he's kind of transitioned into this new role. He's found a new place um in this role as a musician. Um and this is again backed up by the idea um a concept in ancient Egypt which is a concept of affordance which is the staff of old age. This comes from a much earlier piece of wisdom literature. Same same category as that one I mentioned earlier this the the the wisdoms of aman hope but this is from the instructions of Toteep. Tarotep was a vazier. So he was like one of the highest officials of the land and he is essentially asking the king to to to be allowed to retire. And in his opening kind of um speech to the king of why he needs to retire, he is listing all of these reasons why he needs to retire. You know, his body is feeling weaker, his eyes are getting blurrier, his ears are getting uh deaf. Um there are moments he cannot recall. You know, he's he's losing his memory, the bones are aching. um and he asks to appoint this staff of old age. Um and so what that is in the context of the of the literature is that he's talking about his successor in this case his son. He wants to uh appoint someone who can then take on his roles. But there are a number of things we can draw away from this. One is that um the staff is both the idea of of of that kind of support structure that transition away from that form of work um and passing on that uh that knowledge to the next generation or the next person. Um but it also can take the literal physical form of the staff and in Egyptology there has been this kind of push back this resistance to uh when we talk about staffs and staves because they are used as symbols of authority. Right? So some Egyptologists will say but that's all they are you know that and and then so when we look at them and we find them say in burials um be that from individuals right up to King Tuten Carman as you can see an example on the on the right uh we're often told oh but they were just symbols so we shouldn't think about them in their use which is a bit strange to me because as archaeologists we know that objects are multimodal you know they can be both things at the same time and that's also another thing is that when we talk about old age in ancient Egypt that is not marked by an age category like it is for us today. You know when we have an idea of oh you retire by 68 in the case of the UK for example and that's what makes you old. In ancient Egypt age is marked by the body. So all of these things that Toteep has just listed are a sign of his old age. It doesn't actually say what physical age he is. So anyone can become old by the by the transformation and changes of their body over time. And so these affordances both in the kind of uh cultural understanding of that need to transition when someone is no longer in in in enabled by the by by their work but also that physical manifestation of the staff and in particular with Tuton Carman's it's quite um striking and poignant because his as you can see on the screen there are shaped in the form of enemies. In this case it's presented as someone that we would describe as Nubian. Um, and that's an affordance for him in the performance of kingship because kings traditionally wore sandals in the form of enemies. But because he had a congenital clubed foot, um he could not wear those types of sandals. He actually had speciallymade sandals for him as a do as a um a paper from Dr. Alexander Morris um told us very recently. Um but he could use his walking sticks to throttle his enemies instead. So they even give affordance to the king in that performance of his power. Um so this idea of affordance is not a modern thing is is the sum of what I'm saying. However, I ended on that um idea of throttling the enemy because I do think we need to hold space when talking about disability and disablement in ancient Egypt to also think about the king himself and his right to maim. Um I wanted to include this especially after listening to the wonderful talks by Julio Ramatswana and Karina Guerrero in this series. Both of whom in in their own ways touch upon this idea that we call in disability studies the politics of debilitation. Right? How how bodies are debilitated by um power and whatever form that takes to to exert to exert it. And in this case we see that very prevalently in the formation of kingship in ancient Egypt. The earliest representation of Pharaoh, the Nama pallet, is a representation of the king about to strike his enemy and trampling his maimed enemies. Um, and those um figures I mentioned earlier, those ivaries, you know, the idea of detachable limbs. Um, that is meant to evoke the idea that the king can change the body at whim. And so this takes us all the way back to God is his potter. He can make a thousand if he wishes, but he can also he can make a thousand impoverished if he wishes. That's very significant. That's in his power to do so to channel that chaotic energy. Um though, and this continues on throughout Egyptian history, but I want to draw particular attention to Kakmway. Kakmway like Nama before him is a unifier, right? In the second dynasty, he uh unifies the south and the north of Egyp, lower and upper Egypt again. Um, and we don't know why there was a division in the first place, whether those policies just kind of separated naturally over time or whether there was civil conflict. But what we do know for sure, um, by Kaway's own dedication and it's also, um, just as a a fun aside, Caraway, this statue here is the first ever statue of a king as well. So, it's poignant that the first ever representation of a king and the first ever statue of a king both show these signs of trampling and destroying the enemy. On this statue, he numbers how many northern enemies he he crushed. 47,29. Now, as Eric Harvey pointed out in his talk about Mesopotamian uh Mesopotamia and how their numbers can be exaggerated, they can often be easily um timed by a route. For example, 47,29 to me feels a bit too specific. And even if it is not the exact figure, there is another thing we have to keep in mind. And I I thought about this after listening to Huli Rama Swana's talk the idea that the enemy as a classifier is not just a combatant. You know in in his talk he mentioned how in modern conflict today 30 about 35% of casualties are children. So I think we as scholars when we look at these images of king and we look at these images of him smiting the enemy we have to take that focus away not just on the king in his display of power but thinking about the ramifications of that on the maimed on the enemy who is the enemy and what happened so all of what I've shared with you has predominantly focused on the body but I also want to take some time to think about um the mental mental health in in in the ancient world or the idea of the mind um and where we might get some idea of that as well. So Egyptian medical papyrie compiled records of medical treatments which provide a list of observed symptoms guidance on treatment and outcomes tell us that the ancient Egyptians not only observed outward physical harms to the body but also deeper psychological ones. In the Ebis Papyrus, one section is often referred to by Egyptologists as the book of the heart and speaks of symptoms such as the narrowing of the heart. Because the ancient Egyptians believe the heart was the center of one's mind and memory, this is often inferred to suggest experiences of melancholy and depression. These depressive episodes were sometimes put down to malevolent spirits and influences from the other world who became unwelcome guests in the body or heart of the patient and had to be expelled by a combination of prayer and herbal remedy which may in turn suggest the ancient Egyptian physicians recognized psychosmatic illnesses. In some instances, these cruel spirits could be the wandering spirits of the undead who were unsuccessful in their journey to the afterlife and thus seek to exact their anger on the living. This is one of the many reasons why the ancient Egyptians went to such great lengths to ensure a successful journey for the deceased, including the in the production of heart scarabs, amulets inscribed with magical instructions to ensure that the heart did not betray the deceased by painting them in an ill when it was time to be weighed against the feather of mart. Again, this idea of universal good or justice. The idea that your own heart could betray you gives us a very clear indication that the ancient Egyptians both recognized and directly experienced doubts of anxiety, inner turmoil, and self-doubt. This is further illustrated by the rich poetic pros often known as the discourse between a man and his soul in which a nameless man struggling to understand the hardships of his life and the perceived injustices of the world around him has an argument with his own soul about the point of living. While not a direct expression of suicidal ideiation, the story is a reflective discourse on the meaning and suffering, the meaning of suffering, sorry, in human life. Its conclusion is open-ended. The man and his soul ultimately agreeing to face both life and death together, regardless of what the man chooses to do next. So to bring our talk slowly to a close, I want to just touch upon finally some case studies where we can kind of bring all of these um evidences together, these examples and start to think about okay well then how can this help us to understand the lived experiences or or cultural um attitudes of of of the people who lived in the past. So I'll start with again this idea of commemorative art and we'll look at two examples. The first on the left is a statue of a man with dwarfism who we know as Sen. His name literally means healthy. Um and it also shows him seated beside his wife Senate and with two of what would ultimately be three of his children. This statue comes from his um masturb tomb in the Giza um necropolis. He lived during the fifth dynasty during the reigns of Kufu and um and his son um and he was a priest but also he was an overseer of um all of the palace um courtiers who who had dwarfism. He was also um an overseer of the granaries. So he was and cattle. His his master tells us that he had 10,000 herds of cattle. Again, that number probably is an exaggeration, but it gives weight to the idea of his importance. Um, and in his representation of himself, we can see a very clear symmetry. Symmetry is very important in um, Egyptian art and iconography. Um, but traditional interpretations of Egyptian art and iconography would say that disabled bodies are asymmetrical and therefore don't fit. But very clearly here they are making an effort to create that symmetry with um his family cuz his children are taking the place where um in in mirror to to their mother mother's leg. So it completes the picture but also in his master batum um in representations of himself we don't only see him performing the role of overseer in mirroring with his his wife performing the role of caregiver to his children. Um but we also see him uh doing elite pastimes like sailing on the Nile. Um and in one scene he is on the barge and while that is being driven by others attendance uh he is parting the reads. So he is playing an active role still in the driving of this bark. Um and that again kind of goes back to that idea of affordance. Um on the on the right uh we have a stealer of Roma the doorkeeper a much later representation. Um and he is uh making an offering to the goddess Estarte. Now again um traditional readings of this have said that well he's not Egyptian because he is giving a gift to a non-Egyptian god. Uh that is a gross oversimplification of how um the ancients felt about the identity of deities and where their realms started and ended for one thing but also just by looking at it you can very clearly see that he is presenting himself much like Senb in his own context in a very Egyptian way. He is in perfect symmetry with uh his wife and with his child uh in giving the offering, but also he is presenting himself in that Egyptian sky in that Egyptian style with the skirt um and and and with the um the the beaded necklace for example, let alone the fact that the inscription is in hieroglyphs and that this dedication was put um along a processional route along with many others from across Ross um the Egyptian community of his day and these processional roots dotted with the stealer were about commemorating the the offering to the gods and this kind of collective um engagement. So very obviously just like with Zenb they um Roma is seeing himself as part of this collective whole and is commemorating himself as such. Another case study I want to touch upon is this idea of prostesises because we do get some examples of these from the bioarchchaeological record in the remains uh because they are often buried with them. Um and like I said earlier you know bioarchcheological uh remains can be hard to decode and we have to be careful and particularly with prosteses what's so noteworthy about them. Uh so in one case we have um this lady uh here uh who is only unfortunately known in in in the catalog of the Durham Oriental Museum where her remains currently reside as Dorom 1999.32. I prefer to call her the lady of Akm. Amim was the town that she came from in Upper Egypt. She lived around the late period possibly early to so going into the Greek period. Um, and she's quite um unique cuz she um had a prosthetic hand um which you can see on the bottom image there unfortunately has been hacked off from the body. Um and that's a whole other thing. Maybe ask me about that. But um the importance there is that it's made of cartonage. It's being made of the very same materials that are um part of her reconstitution as a divine being. So there's this direct uh correlation with the myth of Osiris. this idea of becoming the new being and the new limb that is being given to you is a new limb. It's not seen as a direct uh one for one for the limb you lost which is why I put prosthetics in uh quotations because prosthetics uh today are very much meant to be a one for one for you know being able to work and do other activities and etc. But in the ancient world these prosthetics aren't necessarily meant to fulfill that role. They're not there to allow someone to necessarily do all the things that they used to do with their old hand or in or in the other example on the screen here um with their own foot. Uh the cartonage toe is quite famous, but studies have kind of concluded well a wearer probably wouldn't have any extra stability with this. So it's not a very functional prosthetic, but maybe that wasn't the point. Maybe the point was to demonstrate that transformation of the body, that that reconstitution of the body with its new forms. Lastly, I want to talk a little bit about uh a man named Gas Galis Herogynes. Uh Herogynes was a Roman citizen who lived uh in a town known as Karanis, which is in the Fume. Uh he is a native of Antipololis. I've mispronounced that, but the the city that was dedicated to Antonius um after he died. Um so he actually has um kind of presence in several places. Um but what's noteworthy about him and we know this from tax records and uh um tax receipts and and petitions uh that he was uh a blind man who lived at the time. He had inherited um land from his his father and his uncle. And in his petitions, he is uh reaching out to the to the governor of Egypt to say that he is being mistreated um and targeted by the locals in Kanis because of his impairment or that they are taking advantage of it because of his impairment. And that's significant for a number of things. One, it shows us that obviously things weren't all hunky dory. There are there are nuances and complexity to the lived experiences of disabled people in the past. Um and that is obviously something that can be um relatable to today today's experience but it's also shows one that he clearly had a support network around him in his family and in his attendance that he was getting the support to write these petitions each time but also for himself. It shows a very clear idea that he rep recognizes his blindness not as a sole part of his identity because he also identifies himself as this Antwine citizen as a Roman citizen as someone who has the rights to to petition the governor but his blindness is clearly a very core part of his of his representation. uh Elare Rev's talk in the series did talk about how um the the description of a person by their physical uh impairments could be some sort of a biometric, but the way in which he's giving his um his account and his description of himself doesn't really match that same formula. So, it's very clearly something that he is choosing to give to his um to to the people who are transcribing his his words for these petitions. So there's a multitude of ways in which we can infer his story and I find it very powerful as a disabled person living in today that despite the challenges that he was clearly up against some quite horrible ones. Um he was not only prepared but willing and driven to fight his cause. So to conclude uh what I hope my talk has demonstrated is in not only just the wealth of kind of potential and evidence is we have for thinking about disability in ancient Egypt but I also hope that this talk along with all the talks that have happened in this amazing series have given us a chance to really think about and appreciate what disability means not just to our understanding of the past but to who we are today. Um, and I hope that the overall conclusion we can draw from it is that by exploring it and by critiquing it and and considering those nuances, um, we have a deeper appreciation of what it means to be human. Thank you, >> Kyle. Thank you so much for that stimulating talk. Um, I'm still processing, I mean, not just all the wonderful theoretical information and data and case studies that you presented, but you did also such a wonderful job of weaving in the previous scholarship presented in this series. Um, thank you. It really was >> uh such a great way to to wrap up, you know, a full academic year's worth of um of scholarly insights into this important topic. >> Um we do have some time for questions and answers. Uh and I'm thrilled to see a very uh robust um live audience. Um that's something that we we typically don't experience. Um, but I'd like to invite um audience members uh if some since you're in the Zoom room, uh if you have questions uh for Kyle, for our scholar, um you can uh um turn on your video, unmute yourself, and you can ask them directly. If you're a little shy, you can put them in the chat, I believe. Um, and uh I'm gonna open up. I think the chat is open to everybody. Um, aha, I think we have our first question. Um, this is from Brian, uh, one of our viewers. >> And Brian's question is, when military service led to disability, uh, was there special support provided by the state? I'm assuming that's the Egyptian state. But >> um yeah, that's Brian's question. >> That's a great question, Brian. Um so thinking about the ancient Egyptians, if we if we are to kind of um take the archetypal idea of the ancient Egyptian as being in the Feronic period, um because military service was up until kind of later periods wasn't a professional service. It was something that you would be conscripted into during the winter months. There wasn't really a sort of professional soldier class with the exception of a few um generals that we get names for in the New Kingdom period who seemed to kind of take that role exclusively, but it doesn't seem to be something that that permeates down into the everyday cuz people are also working in in as as farmers and as artisans in their day-to-day lives as well. So, we don't get many evidences um that I can think of for ancient Egyptians specifically if we're thinking of feronic Egypt. However, when we go into the tomic and the Roman period um more broadly um we do know that there were provisions given to uh military veterans like in in Rome's case across the empire uh veterans were not only um for their service they were given the land but they were also given a a pension essentially and quite uh notably quite a few of those veterans did settle in Egypt um because Egypt was seen not only as obviously the bread basket of the Roman Empire. So it was a great place to situate someone who could then oversee those those allotted lands and investments in which case you know uh Gasis Herro's kind of inheritance was from his father and uncle who had also served in the in the military and gained their Roman citizenship that way. Um, but it also ties in with how ancient Egypt kind of or Egypt as a place rather kind of going into later periods is romanticized almost in a way as this place of healing and and and rest and and recuperation. Um, I hope that I hope that answers your question. >> Uh, uh, wonderful. Let's see. I think that uh Jasmine has a question and she's going to ask it directly. >> Hello Kyle, nice to see you. >> Hi Jasmine, love to see you. Thank you for coming. >> Always a pleasure and this was great. Um to everyone else just to explain Kyle and I know each other um outside of Zoom world. Um, I just wanted to say that I really loved your comment that um, you know, the the staff of old ages is linked to sort of the physical experience of the body and um, sort of degeneration happening and that it's not linked as we would think of it to like a numerical age. Um, and I wondered if we could talk a little more about say life expectancy in ancient Egypt, how that might change how we think about aging and therefore also disability. >> Mhm. No, absolutely. It's it's a really uh pertinent topic I think especially when we come to interpreting um bioarchchaeological remains because I I'll I'll I'll use one example. Uh I mentioned the lady known as Ghet who I gave a talk about a few years ago and one of the things that struck me almost immediately was that because she had been diagnosed with cere cerebral palsy a lot of the initial interpretations of her um assumed a very uh diminished existence like she was the survival of the weakest in one in one example. This was ignoring the fact that we could also tell from her bioarchchaeological remains that she lived well into her 60s which for ancient Egyptians is quite an advanced age. You know the average life expectancy. Bearing in mind this is also a very difficult thing for us to calculate in the first place because obviously we can only work with the remains that we have which are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the remains that would have ever been. So we can never get a truly accurate idea of what life expectancy would have been like. But we estimate that a woman's average life expectancy would have been somewhere in the realm of 25 to 30 years. So in our modern times very short time span and it is a very short time span but 60 um which again to us is still relatively short um is is actually quite advanced. So the fact that she reached that age doesn't only speak to the fact that she was accommodated and cared for and loved but the fact that she herself had a willingness to live contrary to how it was interpreted in in the initial by archaeological reports that she did not see herself as survival of the weakest clearly not um she lived quite a full life. We can we can we can dream to imagine. And this is where I think by incorporating uh lived experience, you know, into our interpretations and bringing in people with these lived embodiment themselves to help inform our reading of these bodies um and and these evidences. I think that will give us a more nuanced appreciation for the realities of living with these embodiment. Because I'm not saying it's all hunky dory either, but what I am saying is that it doesn't take away from a person's willingness to live and embrace the fullness of life. Absolutely. I completely agree. I think Gessa is such a fantastic example, especially because you you know that she she lived so long and so you can have no doubt at all about how important she she was in life. Um I I would just want to add if I may to that the sort of recognition that in in those sort of bioarchcheological evidence there's things like you you see a lot of sort of osteoporosis and things that we associate with much um who are quite a bit older >> and they're appearing in people who are in 30s and 40s. Mhm. >> So it seems to me like >> we have to adjust our idea of sort of the prevalence of of dealing with um you know impairment in your everyday life. This could be pretty widpread and that just changes the >> the meaning of it in it's normal, you know. >> Absolutely. >> Just part of the community. >> Exactly. >> Thank you, Jasmine. Um, we have two more questions that are queued up uh from Ben. Uh, Ben asks, oh, looks like we have a third question even. Uh, are there So, Ben asks, "Are there examples of things such as walkers, wheelchairs, or other accommodations besides pro prosthetics? Do you know if there are examples of these in the new museum at Giza?" >> Thank you, Ben. That's a lovely question. And so to take that in two parts, um I'll say right now that I have not had the pleasure to be to the Grand Egyptian Museum. So I can't say for sure what is and isn't there. I know that for example, Cineb is there and that uh young young man with the curved um spine um the overseer is also there. So I know those representations is there. As as to uh what accommodations are there, I'm not sure. I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't plenty of staffs and staves there. Like I talked about, we find those quite often. And so those would be the most common form of accommodation we find. Um walkers is quite interesting because Dr. Alexander Morris has done a great um a lot of great work on the um Greco Egyptian god Hypocrates who is a is kind of a synchronization uh with Horus the child. So the the infant Horus who is vulnerable to his uh to his evil uh uncle set and so is being hidden away by Isis and protected by Bez as well. Um there are some uh Greco uh Greek um or tomic sorry um uh statues and and figurines that uh she has interpreted um quite uh well interpreted I believe with this kind of frame around him to assist him to walk. So the possibility of there being a walker is not improbable. uh although I don't think we do have any living uh living um extant examples um in the present moment and that would likely be because of the material uh wheelchairs. No. Um however um one thing I didn't point out is that in one of my slides about the disability in Old Kingdom art we do have one gentleman riding a a mule in a in a kind of crafted specially crafted seat. So there is the possibility that um animals were used to support and assist people in moving from place to place. Although how prevalent that was, we also can't tell because again those seats would have also been made of very um easily biodegradable material. Um but if we look just very quickly beyond ancient Egypt um with again taking that idea of wheeled chair um while physical ones would not have existed um if you look at representations of the god Heristos from ancient Greece his winged chariots take on the appearance quite well of wheeled chairs and thinking about um uh kind of how we incorporate that into our into our work today. Um it's quite fun to think about how when you bring those representations forward to people with mobility impairments or with uh assisted um uh kind of applications one way or the other, they love to look at them and and to imagine themselves in in that in that space. Um and it's not about saying that that is definitively what it is, but it opens up that world to them and that's wonderful, I think. >> Thank you so much. Well, there there are a bunch of uh other questions, so I'm just going to move right along. Uh let's see. I don't want to skip over anybody. Uh ah uh Brian um sorry, Brian, I don't want to butcher your last name, so I'll just call you Brian has a question. There are examples of petitioning a deity to address a disability, such as to clear vision. Mhm. >> Was there a particular deity understood as tutillary for those dealing with long-term disabilities? >> Another great question, Brian. Um, in short, there are a number of deities that would have been petitioned for kind of um chronic or long-term health uh conditions. Uh, one would have been Tot, the god of wisdom, uh, Jihuti as he was known um to the ancient Egyptians. So, the Ibis of the god. um along with his many wisdoms he helped in the kind of it is imagined to have helped in the development of of kind of medicine. Uh so you see quite a lot of petitions are to him. Uh but Isis is also um a very uh common god that is used in petitions uh because she is the god of magic and magic he as it was known in ancient Egypt is kind of the raw power of of all living things. Right? So it courses through you. So her ability to reconstitute things is quite well known. And even in the in the in the battles of Horus and Set where they disable themselves, she reconstitutes his body in in kind of taking the milk of a gazelle to to pour into his um eye sockets when his eyes are ripped out by set. The the new eyes become their own thing. and his old eyes in some variations, one becomes the literal eye of Horus, that mythological symbol that that oversees everything. But another version is that his eyes become uh the lotus flower and the lotus flower is is used in medicinal um kind of in in in kind of like pain management in pain relief. Um so there lotus power as a symbol. So there's that connotation there as well. So yeah, predominantly Tot and Isis, but you will see other names of gods pop up because um there isn't a hierarchy of gods in in ancient Egypt in the in in as strict a formula as there is in say the Greco Roman world even though that again is also not as entirely structured as we might first assume. But um so you will find other names mentioned because there will be local kind of deities that someone might want to petition. But yes, generally um Isis tot and sometimes as well Imo IMHoteep the the deified Immoteep is also because he was he was kind of mythologized and famed for medicinal treatments. >> Fascinating. Wow. Thank you. Um let's see. Um I think the next question is from Chelsea. Chelsea says, "Hey, Kyle, my question would be if there is any evidence for prosthetics being made for military applications to enable soldiers >> um who had been disabled in battle that allowed them to continue serving? >> If so, would they have been made to be a sort of multi-tool?" >> Excuse me. Uh, hi sis. Um, great question. Um, so none from ancient Egypt. Uh, I'll just say that up front. But we do have some from the ancient Mediterranean. And because this is a talk about the ancient Mediterranean, I can include them. Um, so we don't have any extant examples. So physical examples that we have to hand, but they are mentioned in the sources. Um, and so a general uh of ancient Rome in the second Punic War whose name I'm afraid escapes me right now. I apologize. I'm I'm quite tired of I've been on a kind of tour of talking for the past three days. Um, so you'll have to forgive the the absence of his name, but there was a very famous uh general um who uh was was famed for the fact that he lost his uh right arm, his forearm to his hand in conflict uh with Hannibal, the very the very Hannibal who marched over the Alps with his elephants. Um he was captured several times by him actually and scarred and maimed by him in several ways. Um and um thank you Debbie Marcus Sergio Silus. Um but rather than quit the field when he lost his dominant hand, the one that would usually wield his uh his sword, um he had a prosthetic fashioned. Um so Roman prosthetics, examples that we do have like the capua leg are often made of wood and then they're kind of um plated for lack of a better term with bronze. Um so his was um plated just like that where we're told. Um and so that was fashioned to his shield. So the the the right hand became his shield arm and he learned how to fight with his with his left. So that was an example of where he himself made the act of choice to go back to the battlefield cuz he was like I heard no damn bell I'm going back. Um so we do have examples of that from the ancient Mediterranean but again not in ancient Egypt's case because um again there wasn't a sort of professional soldier class for most of feronic history um to the same degree as there was in Roman society which was very much the backbone of Roman society was the was the soldier. Um >> yes he did a Jamie Lannister Jasmine. Yeah absolutely. Um, okay. I I think uh because of the weariness of our speaker who's just uh done an amazing job answering questions, we do have one last um well, it's actually two. Um >> I'm happy to do two, don't worry. >> Okay, there's from the same uh uh uh audience member, Miranda says that um she has two questions. Miranda, do you want to um ask them yourself or would you like to put them in the chat? >> Hi. Uh yeah, can you hear me? >> We can hear you. Great. Yeah, go for it. >> Thank you so much for a fantastic um for a fantastic lecture. Um, I'm visually impaired and I'm just um delighted that um the struggle with bureaucracy has existed since >> Roman times um because that's something that I really experienced. >> Yeah. >> Um but I have two questions. One is I work in education at the Asholian Museum with my guide dog >> and I recently received Yeah. Um, I recently received a question from a nine-year-old who wondered if they had guide dogs in ancient Egypt, and I didn't know the answer, and I figure you are the best person to ask. You already kind of answered this about the use of animals as um mobility aids, but I wondered if you had any evidence for uh sensory disability animals. >> Uh, so that's wonderful. First of all, um I actually worked for the Asholian a few years ago, so it's lovely to meet someone who's also in that same context. I I created a exhibition um about um disability in the ancient Middle East. So um we should separately uh get in touch. Um I'll I'll I'll message you my email in a moment cuz I'd love to hear about the work you're doing. But anyway, to answer your question, while we can't like on the top of my head, I can't say here is a definite example of someone with a guide dog in ancient Egypt. We do have evidence for there for that existing in the ancient Mediterranean. Again, we have on wall. Yeah, we have uh wall paintings. Um I can't believe if I can't remember if this specific wall paint painting is in Pompei or if it's in another Roman city. Uh but we do have examples of a blind person. Um yes. Yes. Thank you, Debbie, once again being my savior as a classicist um with the more exact example. But yes, we do have artistic representations of people being guided by dogs and that I what I can say about that is that you know um because uh the kind of the cohabitation of of dogs and humans we've evolved alongside each other so long that it is not out of the question to be able to imagine um dogs guide dogs in in in our parliament existing. There wouldn't there wouldn't have been a structure to them today like there is with training and things like that but They would have been man's best friend as they've always been. So yes, I can only imagine that blind people probably did have the companionship of of animals to assist them. Uh >> yeah. Uh your second question. >> Yeah. Um, a lot of cultures make a connection between wisdom and age. And I was wondering given the Egyptian correlation, um, or the Egyptian conceptualization as age being marked by the body, >> uh, could there be something there regarding disabled people serving as ritual specialists. Um, I wondered if you had any kind of input on that, disabled people working in wisdom professions. >> Yeah. No, absolutely. That's a wonderful question, Miranda, and I think a great place to kind of wrap up and end because I think what we can kind of infer from all of this is that because disability is something that can be congenital, but can also be something that accumulates over the course of someone's lifetime, develops over the course of someone's lifetime. And if we take this idea of age in ancient Egypt for example being marked by the body or transformations of the body and mind because we should remember as well that Tahoe um mentions forgetting um the idea of of losing memory or losing track of things um that you know that is something that is experienced and encoded and embodied um through that kind of interaction with the lived world. So what I mean by that is just as you were saying um the the disabled body becomes a mark of wisdom. Uh it becomes a sign of of that survival and that and that capacity and also that ingenuity to survive as well. That's the other thing I I think when we talk about affordances like we like we did in the talk, we also have to remember that that shows an ability to invent different ways of doing things to show that sort of way of of thinking around things and coming up with new ideas. So when we think about that, we can think about how, you know, when we think about wisdom in in in any space or time, um why do we always automatically assume an abled um you know, predominantly white or predominantly masculine presenting body? Why is that wisdom not encoded on the disabled, on the non-white, on the um on the on the feminine or or or non-binary body when very clearly throughout history those those have existed and have played a key role in in the development of wisdom. And I think we'll leave it there. >> Wow. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you um for um persevering through the exhaustion. Um, again from the questions and answers, I've just really learned so much. Um, it's just been um an incredible way to wrap up this series and an incredible honor um to to learn from you today, Kyle. Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much. Well, and uh just by way of concluding um this presentation, I'd like to uh tell the audience a bit about our next talk series. There'll be a bit of a hiatus for the summer. Um but we will resume uh with a new series in September. The title of that series is, drum roll please, affordability in the iron age, household, regional, and interreional economies in the Levant. Uh that series will feature 12 scholars from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East sharing their research uh into the economies, trade, and interactions in the late Iron Age. Um so that's um late first millennium uh from a variety of ancient Levventine cultures and also uh once today's talk is up on the Badday museums uh and the archaeological research facility at UC Berkeley's YouTube channels, I'd like to ask viewers to please follow the QR code that will be posted uh below in the comments section in order to support uh future presentations like the one we've just enjoyed today. I'd like to thank today's speaker, Kyle Jordan. Uh, and also to thank uh the museum staff uh and the staff at the archaeological research facility uh at UC Berkeley. Uh it's been a wonderful uh again a wonderful year uh of um free online uh talks from uh our experts uh and also to thank our audience uh and I hope to see you all back in September. Thank you.