Tales from the Two Lands
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Tales from the Two Lands
@talestwolands.bsky.social
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Snippets from the fascinating history & culture of Ancient Egypt.

http://talesfromthetwolands.org/
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There have been so many mummified cats found in Egypt that in the 19th Century they were shipped to the UK in their thousands to be ground up & used as fertiliser. There are still a lot of cat mummies that survived, and this is one that is now in the Liverpool World Museum. 🧵1/7

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A photograph of an ancient Egyptian mummified cat. It is a long thin cylindrical object sitting on its base and leaning slightly back. The body of the mummy is wrapped with bandages to form a pattern made up of beige & dark brown sections – it consists of three squares in a row each of which is divided diagonally into triangles, and the two triangles on the vertical axis of each square are beige, the other two triangles are dark brown. The neck is wrapped so that there are alternating brown & beige stripes. The top portion of the mummy is moulded into the shape of a cat's head, with a nose, mouth, eyes and ears formed out of bandages.
November 14, 2025 at 1:21 PM
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The relief in this photo comes from the same site and time as the ram headed sphinx I posted about a couple of weeks ago – Kawa in Sudan during the reign of Taharqo of the 25th Dynasty. And it also depicts the god Amun, this time in a scene of the pharaoh offering to the gods. 🧵1/5

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A photograph of an ancient Egyptian style relief from Nubia. The relief is a pale brown colour, and consists of a central figure taking up approximately ⅓ of the horizontal space and running from top to bottom of the photo. The top part has 5 columns of hieroglyphs running vertically to about ⅓ of the way down the scene. Two columns are to the left of the figure and three to the right. The figure is shown facing to the right, and we can see the upper torso, head and headdress in the photo. The torso is human, and shown wearing jewellery: upper arm bands and a broad collar necklace. The head is the head of a ram, wearing a typical ancient Egyptian wig. On top of the ram's head its horns stretch out horizontally in a wavey pattern to the left and to the right. On top of these horns like it's sitting on a plate is a large sun disk. Along the bottom ⅓ of the sun disk is a row of rearing cobras, looking from left to right there are 4 little ones then a bigger one that is ⅔ as tall as the sun disk, then another 4 little ones. Each snake has its own sun disk as a headdress. The larger one has horns round its sun disk, which has traces of red paint.
November 7, 2025 at 1:29 PM
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This pot is of a type we call Decorated Ware which was made primarily during the Naqada II period of Egyptian history, around 5.5 thousand years ago. The name is self-explanatory & was invented by Petrie as part of his classification of pottery from ancient Egyptian sites. 🧵1/4

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A photograph of an ancient Egyptian pot of the type known as Decorated Ware. The pot has a narrow bottom and broadens out to its maximum width about ⅓ of the way down from the top, and then narrows again to an opening that is a bit larger than the base. It is a pale orange-y brown in colour, and is painted with various design motifs in a darker & redder brown. The upper half of the pot is decorated. The motifs are discussed in the accompanying posts.
October 31, 2025 at 1:05 PM
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This statue was found at a site called Kawa in modern Sudan (and ancient Kush) roughly halfway between the Egyptian border & Khartoum. It is very clearly Egyptian in style, and the Pharaoh it depicts is Taharqo (the penultimate king of the 25th Dynasty, who were from Kush). 🧵1/6

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A black & white high contrast photograph of an ancient Egyptian statue. The statue is tightly framed around the front of the sculpture with a ram's head at the top of the picture facing to our right with its horns curling towards its muzzle. The front of the body of the ram runs down the left of the picture and its front legs stretch along the bottom of the pictures. Framed protectively within the space between muzzle & paws is a figure of a man in a typical Egyptian pose with his arms straight down by his sides, and a uraeus snake on the front of his headdress. He is also facing to our right.
October 24, 2025 at 12:13 PM
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I like this large fragment of a stela because of how neat and crisp the hieroglyphs are. This was made by someone who knew what they were doing, and took the time to do it well. And the person who commissioned it was therefore a person of status & wealth. 🧵1/6

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A photograph of a piece of an ancient Egyptian stela. It is a diamond shaped piece of grey rock displayed on one of its sides rather than balancing on a point. There are four rows of hieroglyphic text running across the top of the piece to about ¼ of the way down. The rest of the piece is covered with 12 columns of hieroglyphs. It is clear that this is only a fragment of the whole, because the edges of the rock do not map onto the edges of columns or rows.
October 17, 2025 at 1:31 PM
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This is a delightful pot, painted with a drake (as in male duck, not dragon) as the centrepiece of the decoration. It’s about 16cm tall (a little over 6 inches) and was found at Abydos by the EEF (now EES) excavations in 1904. 🧵1/4

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A photograph of an ancient Egyptian pot. It is round bottomed and narrows from a widest point at about ¼ of the way up towards the neck. The neck itself does not continue to narrow & is a straight sided cylinder. The pot itself is a reddish brown in colour but not much of that is showing because it is painted. The decoration looks a bit like a broad collar necklace around the shoulders of the pot (leaving the neck bare) coming to about ¼ of the way down, and there is a bib with further decoration running from this to about the widest point of the pot. The decoration is painted with a white background, and the collar part has lots of vertical blue stripes as well as a yellow, red and blue horizontal strip. The bib is outlined with blue and red lines, and the centre has a drawing of a duck with a white body, a blue head, yellow & red wings, and red legs. Surrounding the duck are a few lotus flower motifs and a basket with two eggs.
October 10, 2025 at 1:38 PM
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This jar is nearly 5500 years old, and was found at a site in Upper Egypt called Mo’alla that is about 20 miles south of Luxor. It’s best known for the tomb of Ankhtifi who lived about 1200 years after this pot was made. 🧵1/5

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A photograph of an ancient Egyptian pot. It is taller than it is wide, with a narrow based that flares out with the widest point about ¾ of the way up the pot. After that it narrows in to the mouth of the pot which is about twice as wide as the base. The point is a pale brown-ish orange in colour and has animals painted on it in a brown-ish red paint. At the top on the shoulder of the pot are scorpions, with one visible in full and the tail of another visible to the right. In the centre of the pot is a crocodile painted vertically so it looks a bit like it is standing on its tail with its four paws stretched out to the side like it's clinging on to a wall. To the right and left are three snakes on each side, again painted vertically like they are standing on their tails, They are not straight but are wiggly.
October 3, 2025 at 1:34 PM
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This toothy lady is Taweret, a protective household deity who looked after mothers & childbirth. She’s a composite creature but most of what we see here are the hippo aspects of her imagery, out of frame she also has the legs & paws of a lion and the tail of a crocodile. 🧵1/6

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A photograph of an ancient Egyptian statue in a museum. The statue fills about two thirds of the frame from the bottom left corner. It is a stone called breccia which is a brownish red with lots of creamy white splodges. Some of the white bits are quite large and many are rather small, it looks a bit like someone dropped a can of creamy white paint next to the statue. The statue represents the goddess Taweret who has the head of a hippopotamus, and we see her in profile facing to our right with her mouth partially open to display her teeth. Her ears are pinned back against her head, and under those ears we can see the vertical lines of a braided wig. On top of her head is a cylindrical headdress. The photo also includes Taweret's shoulders and chest which look quite human in shape.
September 19, 2025 at 1:35 PM
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This rather beaten up shabti once belonged to the Pharaoh Amenhotep III, who was king during one of Egypt’s greatest periods of wealth and prosperity. He was the ninth king of the 18th Dynasty in the New Kingdom, reigning from c. 1390 BCE to 1352 BCE. 🧵1/8

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A photograph of a fragmentary Egyptian shabti figurine. The piece is a pale cream colour and is the torso & upper legs of a human figure. It has arms carved as crossed on the chest at the wrists with the hands clutching tools: a flail in its left hand and a crook in its right. Below the arms the figure is covered with neatly carved hieroglyphs in columns. Each hieroglyph is filled in in blue although this is beginning to become patchy. The piece is mounted in a plastic cradle on a metal pole for display in a museum.
September 12, 2025 at 1:46 PM
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This is a canopic jar belonging to a woman called Hathor who lived around 3000 years ago in a place called Sidmant near the Faiyum in Egypt. She was a Chantress of Herishef, and there was a temple to Herishef nearby in Heracleopolis Magna (modern Beni Suef). 🧵1/5

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A photograph of an ancient Egyptian canopic jar. The jar consists of a cylindrical bottom, flaring slightly towards the top then coming in towards the centre. The lid is shaped like a human head and neck angled to face upwards and wearing a typical Egyptian headdress. The whole effect is of a head & torso. The jar is made of bright blue faience with black painted details – the features of the face & headdress, a necklace of lotus petals around the shoulders of the body of the jar, and an inscription running vertically down the front of the body of the jar. You can see that the lid is a darker blue colour than the body, and the body has parts that don't look like they are the same material as the rest (more matte and paler) which are where it was reconstructed in the 1920s. The jar is sitting on a museum shelf, surround by other smaller objects which aren't in focus.
July 25, 2025 at 1:34 PM
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Several (many?) cultures mark the construction of an important structure by burying something (or sometimes somebody) in or near the foundations. There’s more than one possible explanation for this, and we don’t always know what the reasons are. 🧵1/7

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A photograph of an ancient Egyptian artifact. It is a piece of Egyptian alabaster (a stone that is more correctly called calcite by geologists) which is a smooth cream colour. It is shaped into an oval, and it is displayed standing upright on one of the short ends in a perspex museum holder. There is an inscription running from the top edge vertically down to about ⅔ of the way from top to bottom. This is in faded black ink and includes a king's name in a cartouche. Below this in modern handwriting is a museum accession number in a darker black ink running horizontally.
July 11, 2025 at 1:30 PM
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This palette was found in the Main Deposit at Hierakonpolis, near where the more famous Narmer Palette was found. Both date to around the time that Egypt was first unified, c. 3100 BCE, when the art style had not yet standardised into the more familiar canon of Pharaonic Egypt. 🧵1/9

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A photograph of an ancient Egyptian stone palette. It is a flat oval in overall shape and made out of a dark stone. It rests in a clear plastic museum mount and behind you can see the fuzzy image of another museum visitor. At the top of the palette were carved two dogs, one of which (on the right) has been damaged so it has no head. These two dogs have their head and shoulders sticking up from the oval and their front paws extend across the top and are clasping each other's paw. The body, hind legs and tail extend downwards on each side of the oval framing the rest of the decoration. Within this frame is a confusing jumble of animal shapes some of which look like real animals and some of which are imaginary. The images are discussed more in the accompanying posts, but in brief they mostly consist of large felines attacking antelopes & gazelles in the top half of the piece. Below this are a smaller selection of beasts, a griffin, a bull, a gazelle, a giraffe and an animal headed man playing the flute.
July 4, 2025 at 1:34 PM
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I find these sorts of detached coffin or mask faces really rather striking, I think it’s the juxtaposition of the well modelled features of the face with the fact that there’s nothing else there (except in this case for a peg to attach it to the coffin). 🧵1/7

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A photograph of a face from an ancient Egyptian coffin. The face is roughly semi-circular in shape with a square wooden peg extending from the flat top of the piece. It is painted a reddish brown, with the eyebrows painted black. The eyes are outlined in black as if it was wearing makeup, and the eyes themselves are painted white & black. The nose & mouth are the same colour as the rest of the skin but are modelled very finely. Because of the angle that the face is positioned it looks like it is staring pensively downwards with a slight smile on its face.
June 27, 2025 at 1:47 PM
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To my eyes there is something jolly about this hippo, but to the original makers & owners it would’ve been rather more fearsome – somehow the hippo has made it into modern visual culture as a bit jovial or perhaps even cuddly, and this example seems to me to laugh in delight. 🧵1/5

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A photograph of an ancient Egyptian clay figurine of a hippopotamus. It is a reddish brown in colour with slightly darker dappled bits. It faces to our right, and has a wide open mouth where the top jaw is intact but the bottom jaw has broken off. There's also a prominent ear and skin folds modelled on the top of the head. It sits on a museum shelf, and the the backdrop to the display is a replica of a piece of very old ancient Egyptian art so just behind & slightly above the hippo is a drawn figure of a crouching person in a red colour.
June 13, 2025 at 1:33 PM
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This little pot comes from the Faiyum in Egypt, and it dates to the Late Period around 2500 years ago. It’s made of clay, and is a little under 20cm (or just over 7 inches) tall. The face & arms turn it from an ordinary pot into a depiction of the god Bes. 🧵1/6

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Photo of an ancient Egyptian clay pot. It is a beige coloured object, with a bulbous oval body narrowing to a thin neck with a flared rim which is partially broken. The pot is decorated to look like a face, with the features moulded into the surface of the bulbous part of the pot. It has two small round eyes with prominent eyebrows above. The nose is upturned so much that it's practically just a pair of nostrils, below which is a small mouth slanting down to the irght. There are a pair of lines coming diagonally down in an outward direction from the nostrils on each side like the grooves in one's face. At the sides of the pot are two small ears level with the eyes, and below them little arms with bent elbows so the hands are on either side of the grooves of the face. The pot is sitting on a glass museum shelf, and at the base of the pot you can just about make out a label stuck on the pot but can't see what it says.
June 6, 2025 at 12:51 PM
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This lovely little object is a bracelet, dating to the 1st Dynasty of Egypt around five thousand ago. It’s upside down in the view we have in this photo, each of the beads is a serekh (a palace facade motif, the rods) with a falcon (the smooth rounded bit) sat on top. 🧵1/6

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A photograph of an ancient Egyptian bracelet on a glass shelf in a museum. The bracelet is laid out flat, and consists of 13 main beads and two beads at the ends where the bracelet would be fastened when worn. These 15 larger beads are strung on two threads and each bead is separated from the next by two very much smaller round spacer beads, one on each string. The main beads are roughly a flat rectangle in shape, half the bead (further away from us) is divided into four rods running lengthways. The other half of the bead is a rounded schematic bird shape with the top of the head towards us and looking like it is perched on the lower half of the bead. In front of the bracelet is a museum label telling us what this is and where it's from (discussed in the accompanying posts), and behind the bracelet are another two museum labels for the objects behind the bracelet.
May 30, 2025 at 1:29 PM
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My first photo this week is of irrigated fields in modern Egypt, neat rectangles, with straight irrigation channels dividing these rectangles into smaller sections. Everything at right angles, everything organised and ordered. 🧵1/6

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A photograph of some fields in Egypt. Stretching away towards the back of the photo are a series of rectangular fields, some brown earth, some green, some yellow. The closest field to us has straight lines where it has been ploughed, the next field has a series of squares separated by water filled ditches, behind that is a green one. This sort of pattern repeats twice in the photo (tho sometimes the green area is yellow), and there is a straight track running into the distance alongside the right hand side of these fields. on the right of that road you can see more regular rectangular fields. All that breaks the order is a pile of yellow straw (?) (presumably harvested from a yellow field), and if you look closely there is also a bird in front of the first green field.
May 23, 2025 at 1:50 PM
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These little hedgehog shaped pots are around 2,500 years old, dating to the Late Period of Egyptian history. They are a type of pot called an “aryballos” which (as the name suggests) originate in Greece around this time or a little earlier. 🧵1/6

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A photograph of three pots shaped like hedgehogs sitting in a row running diagonally into the photograph. The faces on the three pots face to our right and at the top of each is the neck of the pot growing out of the back of the hedgehog. The one closest to us is green-y blue in colour & has a damaged face, the other two are more intact and are an off-white colour. The pots sit on pieces of museum foam.
May 16, 2025 at 1:20 PM
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Nakhtefmut was a priest in Karnak around 900 BCE and this is a close up of a scene on the cartonnage coffin that he was buried in. It was found in the Ramesseum at the end of the 19th Century CE, and given to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge where it now lives. 🧵1/6

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A photograph of a close up of a scene painted on an ancient Egyptian coffin. The lighting is quite dramatic with dark shadows at the left hand side of the frame, and the white background of the coffin standing out to the centre & right. The scene we are looking at is brightly painted and has a hieroglyphic text at the top, to the right is the central panel of the coffin where we can see two birds with outstretch wings framing the edges of our scene. We can only see the bottom half the top bird, and it is holding a shen ring in its foot. The bottom bird is wearing a sun disk. The scene we are focused on has three figures to the left hand side facing & walking towards some objects at the right hand side. The leading figure has an ibis head and raises his hand towards the objects. Directly in front of him is a table with a large lotus flower, and behind that is the Abydos fetish which is a pole with a blue & white striped object on top wearing a ureaus and a crown with two plumes. It is supported at the bottom by two tiny male figures wearing white crowns, and behind is figure is a tiny jackal sitting on a shrine. Behind this object is a blue & white stripey pole, and behind that another pole this time with a small platform on top on which stands a small bull wearing the same crown as the Abydos fetish. This last pole is supported by an ankh hieroglyph which has hands to hold the pole. Behind this is a snake, looking a bit like a ureaus snake but with the body running vertically up the scene to frame the scene.
May 2, 2025 at 2:01 PM
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These are the last of my photos from my trip to Egypt in 2016, and I’ve got two small albums here from travelling back towards Cairo from Middle Egypt. First we visited a small set of tombs called the Fraser Tombs: photos.talesfromthetwolands.org/index.php?/c...

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A photograph of the entrance to an ancient Egyptian tomb set into a cliff face. The entrance itself is in the top right hand quarter of the photo, and there are steps carved into the cliff leading towards the entrance. About the centre of the photo, where the stairs turn a corner, a woman dressed in blue stands next to a signpost waiting to guide you into the tomb. The whole scene is pale yellow-y grey except for the woman.
April 25, 2025 at 1:57 PM
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This is a piece of one of those busily decorated yellow 21st Dynasty coffins, with every bit of it covered in vignettes and protective symbols. It has no provenance, but it is now in the Ashmolean Museum (or at least it was when I photographed it in 2018). 🧵1/6

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A photograph of a piece of an ancient Egyptian coffin. This a single slightly curved board from the side of a coffin set upright with the decorated face towards us as if it were still part of a whole item. The background of the decoration is yellow, and the motifs are painted on to it in blue, black, white & red. At the top of the piece is a strip with alternating feathers & snakes. Below this is a rather busy scene with 7 deities, 6 of them standing or sitting on a boat and one behind the boat. They all face to the right, and as we look that way we see 2 rows of 4 ba birds one above the other pulling two ropes attached to the front of the boat to pull it along towards the right. A ba bird is a bird with a human head, and all of these birds are drawn with their bodies facing to the right but their heads craned round looking back towards the boat. The birds have bird legs, but as well as their wings (which are folded on their backs) they have little human arms which extend up & backward to pull the ropes. The are several short bits of hieroglyphic text above the heads of the deities.
April 11, 2025 at 2:01 PM
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This rather imposing looking gentleman was called Roy (or Roma-Roy) and he was the high priest of Amun during the later part of Ramesses II’s reign & into the reigns of the next Pharaohs. His brother Bakenkhonsu and his father Roma had been high priests before him. 🧵1/5

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A photograph of an ancient Egyptian statue. The statue is made of black granite, and is photographed slightly from below so presents an imposing image. The man is portrayed sitting in a squat with his knees up in front of him and his arms folded on top of his knees, we are seeing him face on. The arms are about ⅓ of the way down from the top of the photo, and the head behind them is slightly out of focus due to a fairly narrow depth of focus. This adds to the sense of presence. In front of his legs he has a sistrum, which is an ancient Egyptian instrument that is like a rattle. The instrument stands to the full height of his lower legs, and the handle is shaped like a female face with cow ears and a long wig. Above the face the sides of the sistrum curve like cow horns.
April 4, 2025 at 1:29 PM
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I rather like the way the Ashmolean had this beaker displayed in 2011, it’s against a replica of a piece of Predynastic Egyptian art (from Hierakonpolis Tomb 100 I think) and lined up with gazelles of some sort surrounding the beaker with its central Barbary sheep. 🧵1/6

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A photograph of a predynastic Egyptian vase. The vase is made of clay which is a dark terracotta colour, and is decorated with a design in white. It is a tall slender vase which narrows towards the neck then flares out again. At the narrowest point and at the base the decoration consists of two rings of white triangles, one pointing up and the other pointing down. In between on the face we see are animals. The central animal is a Barbary sheep, which has a cross hatched body, a long neck with long hair on its underside, a head with a long nose and two long horns coming from the top of the head between the ears. Around it we can see three other animals, which are dogs. These are smaller than the sheep and have shorter neck with no long fur. Their ears are longer and perky, and their tails are short and also perky. Each dog is shown wearing a collar with a knot that protrudes at the front of the neck. The pot is displayed in front of a replica of a rough contemporaneous wall painting, and the object is positioned so that 3 gazelles on the background seem to stand within the vase.
March 28, 2025 at 2:46 PM
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Egyptian culture isn’t self-contained and isolated from the world, at various times it spills out into other nearby places and sometimes it sweeps back in from those places too. This vulture statue is part of that mixing and diffusing of cultures. 🧵1/8

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A photograph of part of an ancient Egyptian (or Nubian) statue of a vulture. The statue is made of black granite, which makes the detail in the carving a little difficult to pick out in a photograph. Not all of the statue has survived, and this portion is the head plus one shoulder (and partial wing). The head faces to the left and it's the wing nearest us that survives. You can see just above the wing that there is a broad collar necklace carved into the shoulder of the bird.
March 21, 2025 at 3:08 PM
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A few weeks ago I shared a photo of one of my favourite pieces of Predynastic pottery, a bowl with hippopotami on the rim. It’s not the only example of this sort of bowl, here’s one that’s currently in the British Museum (I photographed it in 2014 when it was on display). 🧵1/7

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A photograph of an ancient Egyptian bowl. The pottery bowl is a reddish brown, and roughly shaped with a deep centre & a flared rim. On the rim are 5 little models of hippopotami, the one closest to us is in profile facing to the left, the one a little further to the right faces away from us. Then there is one about a quarter of the rim away at the left facing in to the bowl, and two at the back with their backs to each other facing to each side. Between the one closest to us and the one a quarter away to the left there is a very flat crocodile modelled on the rim just slightly raised up from the otherwise flat surface. It faces towards us, with two pairs of limbs splayed out on the rim and a tail that stretches away to the further away hippo.
March 7, 2025 at 2:36 PM