Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/24/marge-simpson-seen-on-3500-year-old-egyptian-coffin.html
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I notice she even has four toes on her right foot (as a proper Simpsons character should) instead of five. I wonder if that is intentional or someone just couldn’t count.
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Contributed by Allan Rose Hill.
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Have you ever seen such exquisite ushabtis?
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Uhhh, why are there 4 toes on her right foot?
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Egyptians did it!!
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I knew the Simpsons had been around for a long time, but I didn’t know they dated from Ancient Egypt!
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Perhaps AI was the real reason for the Late Bronze Age collapse. This is a little late, but maybe some of it was still running in Egypt, painting coffins… 
And a very well preserved papyrus. Imagine how much more interesting these excavations would be, though, if the relatives had put in a 20 page “Passages from the Life of Tadi Ist” scroll in there as well, and not just “Yet Another Copy of The Book of the Dead”.
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The original Ancient Egyptian concept of the hour, wnwt, was expressed as a division of the night into twelve parts. This was later extended to a division of the day into twelve parts, but these were seen as complementary concepts, not one period of 24 parts. If the sun was up, it was Day (and Ra was looking over the world). If the sun was not up, it was Night (and Ra was defending the world against Apep). I can’t read Hieroglyphics, but top to bottom left to right, they are numbered 1-6, 7-12, and the glyph N14 (wnwt = hour) is visible each time. So they are the twelve hours, but I don’t know enough about the symbology to know whether they’re the hours of the day, the hours of the night, or representing both.
Marge in the middle isn’t Marge, it’s Nut (Nwt, pronounced closer to “noot” than like the thing eaten by squirrels). The theory was that Ra-atum, the sun, created Shu (the air) and Tefnut (moisture); they married and had Nut (sky) and Geb (earth). Unfortunately, Nut and Geb loved each other so much that there was no room to fit between them, so Shu stood between them holding Nut up and apart from her brother/husband. Before that was achieved, though, she had four children: Osiris, Set, Isis, and Nephthys (later tradition adds Horus, sort of, it’s complicated. The Horus you’re thinking of is the son of Osiris and Isis).
So what does this mean?
It means that Tady Ist was sent into the afterlife by parents who loved her. They might not have been able to afford the best artists, but her dress had a depiction of (I think, from the solar disk crown) Isis on it, and on the lid of her sarcophagus was Nut… and symbols were believed to become real in the afterlife. So she was sent into the next world with Isis as her protector, and rather than being in a small box, she was under the wide loving sky, to enjoy all the hours of the day and night.
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You’re not missing much, all the episodes after 739 BCE kind of sucked.
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I’m genuinely surprised by that
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I wonder how long it will be before this is incorporated into an episode. I also assume that someone is claiming this is definite proof of time travel.
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The Simpsons not only foresaw all possible future events, they transcend time itself! All hail Bart! All hail Marge! Homer? Oh yeah, him too, i guess. D’oh!
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Paging @anon94804983
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It suddenly turned into a hideous soap opera from 332–30 BCE, with completely unbelievable story arcs and plotlines so loaded with incest, racism, cruelty, greed, betrayal, and family members’ murdering each other that HBO would turn it down. An example via wikimapedja:
“In 88 BC Ptolemy IX Philometor Soter II again returned to the throne, and retained it until his death in 80 BCE. He was succeeded by Ptolemy XI Alexander II, the son of Ptolemy X. He was lynched by the Alexandrian mob after murdering his stepmother, who was also his cousin, aunt and wife.”
I’d seen it said that Ptolemy XI wasn’t hanged, but instead torn to pieces by the angry mob on a dock, as he attempted to flee ship-wise.
The Ptolemies’ actual history makes the Tudors & Game of Thrones look like Sesame Street and The Mickey Mouse Club.
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Because it’s the Simpsons
I’m more worried about the foot with five toes.
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Right: it really should be the other way around.
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I interpreted that as the seal of the Great Pumpkin
(but really, that dress is spectacular.)
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