Egyptologist Answers Ancient Egypt Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

- I'm Professor Laurel Bestock.

Let's answer some questions from the internet.

This is "Egyptology Support."

[light upbeat music]

@FHHuntress asks,

"When did Ancient Egypt begin exactly according to you?"

Ancient Egypt's really old.

If we talk about when the first king of Egypt

actually became king,

we're talking about 3000 BC.

And then we put ourselves on this timeline,

that would be an even 5,000 years.

So this then would be when we change from BC to AD,

and we could say,

you know, Cleopatra's really close to that.

So the pyramids at Giza are about 2400 BC.

Not only are we closer in time to Cleopatra

than Cleopatra is to the beginning

of ancient Egyptian Pharaonic history,

there's even more time

between Cleopatra and the pyramids

than there is between Cleopatra and us.

Ancient Egypt was already ancient in ancient Egypt.

@Tsunaze asks, "Seriously, how did the Sphinx's nose break?"

Our best evidence for how the nose of the Sphinx got broken

comes from a 15th-century Arabic historian,

and he explains that someone who was angry

actually deliberately shot the nose off the Sphinx

because he was upset

that people were revering this monument from ancient Egypt.

This person was subsequently lynched by other local people

who revered the Sphinx.

So there are also stories

that Napoleon's army shot the nose off the Sphinx.

We think that one's probably not right,

in part because we have drawings of the Sphinx

from earlier than Napoleon's expedition,

and the nose is already missing.

The Sphinx depicts the King Khafre.