१७ मे, २०२३

"[T]he Hyksos had a custom known as the Gold of Valor, which involved taking the hands of enemy combatants as war trophies...."

"'The amputations were a safe means to count slain enemies,' said Manfred Bietak, an archaeologist.... 'They also made the dead enemy incapable of raising his hand again against Egypt in the Netherworld.'... 'Dismemberment was anathema to the ancient Egyptians, who wanted their bodies whole for a materialized afterlife existence,' Dr. Cooney said. A relief in the mortuary temple of Rameses III, at Medinet Habu, shows the pharaoh standing on a balcony after a victory not far from heaps of his enemies’ severed phalluses (12,312, according to one translation of zealous army scribes) and hands (24,625). In the temple of Amun at Karnak, a chronicle of a 13th century B.C. battle details prisoners being brought back to the pharaoh Merneptah with 'donkeys before them, laden with uncircumcised penises of the Land of Libya, with the hands of [every] foreign land that was with them, as fish in baskets.' If the tally of fatalities is to be believed, the Egyptians collected the penises of 6,359 uncircumcised enemy dead and the hands of 2,362 circumcised enemies. 'The stink must have been awful, and thus the "fish in baskets" comment,' Dr. Cooney said."

४६ टिप्पण्या:

Andrew म्हणाले...

If they were Egyptian, they must have been black (c.f. Queen Cleopatra). This is an early example of black-on-black crime. My grandma told me this.

Kevin म्हणाले...

Further studies show none of these people worked from home.

Owen म्हणाले...

Sounds like a vision of what the gender-affirming surgeons have in mind for us all.

Enigma म्हणाले...

Trophy penises, hands, or shrunken heads. What's the difference? Tribes ancient and current have kill-or-be-killed combat rewards. Soldiers today put a notch on their guns or an icon on their airplane with each enemy killed/defeated.

When living on a battlefield with rotting corpses and without daily showers, one likely gets used to the smell. Where is my frankincense and myrrh?

Humans are predators with eyes facing forward, superb projectile skills, and a historical need for a high protein diet. Eating meat facilitated the growth of our large brains: walking upright, throwing spears and stones, tracking prey over long distances, remembering the location of game trails and food caches, and speech to coordinate ambush attacks.

We are who we are. We are often proud of being successful for who we are. Killers.

Oso Negro म्हणाले...

They probably salted them.

Joe Smith म्हणाले...

"shows the pharaoh standing on a balcony after a victory not far from heaps of his enemies’ severed phalluses (12,312, according to one translation of zealous army scribes) and hands (24,625)."

So somebody either had an extra hand or one of the dead was a CHICK!!

Brought to you by 'Trans in History.'

PatHMV म्हणाले...

Interesting that the hand count was so close to being exactly double the penis count. Was there exactly one, one-armed woman, also killed in the battle?

Darkisland म्हणाले...

You know who else cut off hands?

King Leopold's minions in the Belgian Congo. They were cutting the hands off of recalcitrant slaves as late as the 1940s. It was a common punishment for refusing to work or othewise annoying the white slavemasters.

Yes, I know. They were not called slaves but they were, in ever sense of the word.

John Henry

PatHMV म्हणाले...

Incidentally, I was scrolling rather rapidly this morning, and somehow I initially read the social influencer post as part of this post, and was really disturbed to think about how modern-day social influencers might be using ancient penises and hand removal rituals to boost their viewership...

Ice Nine म्हणाले...

>'They also made the dead enemy incapable of raising his hand again against Egypt in the Netherworld.'...the Egyptians collected the penises of 6,359 uncircumcised enemy dead and the hands of 2,362 circumcised enemies.<

So I guess wanking is pretty much out in the Netherworld, too.

RideSpaceMountain म्हणाले...

I've always preferred war-brides actually. No sense taken dudes hands. They're gonna need em.

Paddy O म्हणाले...

John Henry, worse than that. They would cut off the hands of the kids of slow workers.

Belgium has an evil history

rhhardin म्हणाले...

Ghost Town (2008) (free on Amazon prime) Ricky Gervais talking to museum curator Tea Leoni about a mummy

But what's really exciting about Pepi is how they handled his organ.

- His organ?

- Yeah, his dick. I got it right here. You wanna see it?

Please.

There's nothing unusual about the phallus itself.

- Sure.

- It's the way it was stored. You know, normally, the penis and the heart are kept together and mummified along with the body, but in Pepi's case, they removed it and preserved it in this separate gold-encrusted jar.

God. I can see why he was king.

- You okay?

- Yeah. I've got to get used to looking down at a shriveled, old penis, eventually. Oh, geez. I see he died happy.

That's it. That's enough.

He must have had huge hands.

- No, no.

- Yeah.

ColoComment म्हणाले...

Mutilations and horrific murders also took place not that long ago in the Rwandan genocidal events between Hutus and Tutsis. We "civilized" humans are not all that separated from those old Egyptians, et al.

https://thesentinelproject.org/2014/04/07/remembering-the-rwandan-genocide/

Jaq म्हणाले...

This is the recorded battle in which the nation of Israel entered written history. (Israel Stele) They raided Egypt bent on plunder.

Ampersand म्हणाले...

Of course people then were different from us. Right?

baghdadbob म्हणाले...

Sounds like they could have used some Sheepdogs.

Mark म्हणाले...

It is believed that the Hyksos were in power in Egypt at the time the Israelites were welcomed to come and move there. It was after the Hyksos were overthrown and a new dynasty took over in Egypt that the Israelites became disfavored and were then reduced to forced labor.

F म्हणाले...

Paddy O:

I worked for several years in Congo. My assistant was Belgian. She seemed like a nice enough person. But I was there for the massacre in Kolwezi -- not a good time to be there. (It was Zaire then.)

Aggie म्हणाले...

I guess a few of them won't be fooling around in the Netherworld, either.

William म्हणाले...

There's not much to recommend the human race. I'm reading a book about Renaissance Florence at the time that Leonardo and Michelangelo were both living there. The city authorities used to publicly transport prisoners to the execution site. En route, the prisoners were tortured by removing bits of their flesh with hot pincers. The event drew large enthusiastic crowds. This kind of environment produced Leonardo and Michelangelo. Go figure.

SJ म्हणाले...

is this possibly where the British euphemism "tallywhacker" originates?

n.n म्हणाले...

Planned Prisonerhood (PP)

Kassaar म्हणाले...

When Adoni-Bezek ran away, they chased him and captured him. Then they cut off his thumbs and big toes. Adoni-Bezek said, “Seventy kings, with thumbs and big toes cut off, used to lick up food scraps under my table. God has repaid me for what I did to them.” They brought him to Jerusalem, where he died. - Judges 1:6-7

Roger Sweeny म्हणाले...

Reading Thomas Parkenham's Struggle for Africa, I learned that cutting off hands also happened outside The Belgian Congo, done by both blacks and whites.

Josephbleau म्हणाले...

“the prisoners were tortured by removing bits of their flesh with hot pincers.“

Well, it kept them from feeling bad about having to go first.

HoodlumDoodlum म्हणाले...

1 Samuel 18:25-27

25 And Saul said, Thus shall ye say to David, The king desireth not any dowry, but an hundred foreskins of the Philistines, to be avenged of the king's enemies. But Saul thought to make David fall by the hand of the Philistines.

26 And when his servants told David these words, it pleased David well to be the king's son in law: and the days were not expired.

27 Wherefore David arose and went, he and his men, and slew of the Philistines two hundred men; and David brought their foreskins, and they gave them in full tale to the king, that he might be the king's son in law. And Saul gave him Michal his daughter to wife.

Josephbleau म्हणाले...

I wondered where the expression eat a bag of dicks came from.

HoodlumDoodlum म्हणाले...

SJ said...is this possibly where the British euphemism "tallywhacker" originates?

The Wikitionary suggests tallywhacker is more commonly American, from British tallywag, which was an 18th century slang for penis and 17th century slang, in plural, for testicles.
Wag is from Old English wagian, which meant wag or shake. Tally is unclear but likely from Latin talea, a stick or rod used to record via cuts and which was usually split (keeping a receipt of half), so tally takes a meaning of counterpart or matched part.
Tallywag then takes on a notion of a matched pair of jiggling/jostling testicles, and tallywhacker evolves from that to mean penis. Just a possibility.

The history of tally sticks and other old and ancient methods of accounting is fascinating; this YT video on the importance of medieval notched sticks is good.

Josephbleau म्हणाले...

I can imagine an old man pointing to his wall telling the grand kids, “And I got that one at the battle of Ball’s Bluff.” “ There was fockers to the left of me and fockers to the right of me, but these fockers was Mesherpotamians.

Greg the Class Traitor म्हणाले...

The point of collecting Hands / dicks was to get a count of enemy killed, since soldiers were given a bonus for the number of enemies they killed.

Apparently Egyptians were circumsized at the time. So they started out paying for hands. but you could cut the hand off of a fellow soldier and turn that in for payment. So they switched to dicks, because they could tell a chopped off Egyptian one from a chopped off non-Egyptian one.

All of which has been well known for at least decades

Rocco म्हणाले...

Aggie said...
"I guess a few of them won't be fooling around in the Netherworld, either."

Apparently there is a separate Netherworld for the Nether Regions.

PM म्हणाले...

John Henry @ 9:11 (9:11!)
King Leopold's Ghost was a difficult, sickening book to read.

takirks म्हणाले...

And, yet... People will argue that David Grossman has an accurate view of human behavior, in that there's some sort of "innate reluctance to kill".

The juxtaposition of this story with the earlier one where our host cited Grossman as some sort of authority is just... Priceless.

re Pete म्हणाले...

"...and soon the situation there

Was all but straightened out

For he was always known

To lend a helping hand"

Sheridan म्हणाले...

Let's see. 6359 penises from uncircumcised people and 2362 hands from circumcised people. Those pesky Jews got away with keeping their dicks while the other guys lost theirs! And the Jews probably lost only one hand keeping the other for jerking-off! If I'd been an ancient Egyptian I would have been pissed-off too.

Narr म्हणाले...

Don't leave out the joy of corpse-buggery, per Mailer's "Ancient Evenings" and some reports about Turks as late as the Crimean War.

Krumhorn म्हणाले...

I've always preferred war-brides actually. No sense taken dudes hands. They're gonna need em.

Hahahaha...that's funny! Laslo Spatula couldn't have done it better.

- Krumhorn

Richard Aubrey म्हणाले...

Personally, I'd not want to convince the enemy to fight to the death.
It was said that the Germans on the western front, WW II, surrendered more easily--relatively speaking--than on the eastern front.
And the Japanese....

Narr म्हणाले...

IIRC, the worst of the atrocities in the Congo were while it was under Leopold's personal ownership, and the Belgian government took over in 1908 after a worldwide outcry.

John henry म्हणाले...

Pm, I agree about king leopold's ghost. I read it 20 years ago when it came out and it haunts me still.

Conrad is a favorite writer of mine and I reread him frequently. I just reread heart of darkness earlier this year. It is autobiographical with Charlie Marlow subbing for Conrad.

In an article about the book Conrad said he had to tone it down considerably as Noone would have believed the real level of the horror.

Even so heart had some troubles with publication.

"the horror. The horror"

John Henry

Josephbleau म्हणाले...

Vachel Lindsay if Springfield IL was one spooky poet, but not pc.

HOO, HOO, HOO.
Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.

rcocean म्हणाले...

Some American Indian tribes would put out the eyes of their slain Enemies, so they would be sightless in the Next world.

In the ancient world there were no POW camps. You either got released, ransomed, killed, or made a slave.

Was King Leopold the bad guy people make him out to be? Were the so-called atrocities exaggerated? I'd need more objective information.

rcocean म्हणाले...

The obession with King Leopold just shows how the Publishers and the media can get people to focus on a particular event and ignore others.

Funny how no one talks about the thousands of Russian slaves worked to death by Stalin to build the Moscow-Lennigrad canal in the 1930s. Guess thats too boring.

takirks म्हणाले...

FWIW, I've recently seen a fairly detailed refutation of the claims about Leopold II. Can't remember where the hell I read it, unfortunately, or I'd cite it here.

No idea about the veracity of it all, but the claim was made that most of the "de-handing" was done not on orders of Leopold or any Belgians, but on the people they were using as proxies to rule areas outside of the direct control of the Belgians, and that what they were really guilty of was not supervising those proxies sufficiently.

I dunno. I really don't; I have no doubt that a few generations hence, there will be apologia galore for Pol Pot, Hitler, and Putin, all of whom will have stepped through the mirror of general horror and into "historical figure" like Ghengis Khan. Whose atrocities were actually innumerable enough to have produce real climate change across Eurasia, I might add, and who today is seen as a funny old man who was very successful at passing his genes on to the rest of the world. Nobody talks about the rapine and pillage that are implied by that fact.

I don't doubt that horrible things happened in the Belgian Congo. I'm just growing increasingly suspicious of the twinned enterprises of "monster creation" and "de-monsterization" we've got going. Mass murder is mass murder; I don't see where that makes anyone anything other than a monstrous human being, regardless of whatever else they accomplish. And, yes... Ghengis Khan was more than just the calamity of his age, and he was responding to generations of abuse by the Chinese (and, others...) who'd been stirring up trouble on the high Asian steppe. Dude still slaughtered enough people to cause climate change, and he likely non-consensually intercoursed enough women to make his genes still discernible in today's genome across much of Asia...

Narr म्हणाले...

One of the best things about Althouse blog is how often we're reminded of things that "nobody talks about."

I'm not sure when the last rip-snorting exchange was had in re the Great Khan, but I'm pretty sure the Vozhd gets shout-outs here.

And it's also true that nobody has been told not to talk about those topics, which is another best thing.