Some REALLY Weird Ancient Egyptian Gods

The ancient Egyptians worshipped an enormous variety of bizarre beings represented in all sorts of weird ways and who had a load of weird attributes. But I've recently come across two that really take the cake. And that's what this video is about. And it's also sort of a late Halloween thing, but I've missed the mark, didn't I? And don't forget to subscribe! It really helps the channel grow. So you can see even more interesting tidbits of ancient Egyptian history. And maybe even more! For starters, what do you think when you look at this image? It's strange, right? The guy who looks like he's wearing a bedsheet ghost costume seems so out of place in an Egyptian work of art that it almost looks like he was photoshopped into it. And he has an uncanny resemblance to certain fictional astronauts. But no, he's real. This is the mysterious ancient Egyptian god slash demon Medjed. The woman right next to him looks a bit afraid of him. And let me just say that she's very right to be. But I'll get to that later. If you're a fan of ancient Egypt or a disgusting weeb, you might have already come across this specific image of Medjed or this one. And that's because all the way back in 2012, the papyrus they're both on was part of a traveling exhibition of ancient Egyptian artifacts from the British Museum which wound up going to two art museums in Japan. Some people happened to notice the figure looking like it was covered in a tarp with just its eyes and legs sticking out and soon enough Medjed became a meme on the Japanese internet. Countless people drew art of him and he even started featuring in nice little manga strips, various games, and even got his own anime called Kamiga Minoki. He also became a part of Fate Grand Order by becoming the Berka of a body pillow bait character and he was even given his own mascot costume. This eventually made its way back to ancient Egypt enthusiasts in the West bringing attention to a god that even most Egyptologists hadn't actually heard of since he was so obscure. But who really was Medjed? Well, as far as we know, he was only ever mentioned in or illustrated in connection with a single text, chapter or spell 17b of the Book of the Dead. The Book of the Dead, which the ancient Egyptians knew was the book of coming forth by day, was the ultimate guide to the perils ancient Egyptians believed they'd face in the netherworld after death before attaining eternal life among their gods. A lot of horrible beings were thought to be in the way of that though and the Book of the Dead was meant to provide anyone who could afford it with the knowledge necessary for bypassing them, like their names. Don't be misled by his dreamy eyes. Medjed was definitely one of those fearful beings and his name literally means the smiter or the striker. Chapter 17 is one of the longest, most complex, and most frequently included spells in the Book of the Dead and only a small section of it, a prayer to the sun god Re, is actually concerned with Medjed. Here is a translation of it in abbreviated form. ...who deal out pain, who decapitate those who follow after Osiris. They shall not have power over me. I will not fall into their cauldrons because I know them. I know their names. I know the name of the smiter Medjed. Among them, who belongs to the house of Osiris, who shoots with his eye yet is unseen. The sky is encircled with the fiery blast of his mouth and he heralds the inundation slash commands the Nile god Hapi yet he is unseen. So basically, Medjed can shoot lasers from his eyes, can breathe fire, and somehow also has some sort of control over the most important component of ancient Egyptian civilization. Oh, and of course, he'll boil you alive or slaughter you in some other horrible way if you ever forget his name. Medjed has also more rarely been identified with a being mentioned just a bit later on in Chapter 17 who's also referred to as unseen. Now, this is probably why we can't see any part of Medjed apart from his eyes and legs. The other name he goes by here is devourer for millions of years and it mentions how he shoots forth filth. Fun stuff. Medjed was only ever depicted in vignettes meant to illustrate Chapter 17 within papyri containing the Book of the Dead for a pretty short period of Egyptian history between the 21st and 22nd dynasties. There also happened to be only nine total papyri in the world with these illustrations of him in them. So with all that taken together, there aren't too many ancient depictions of him out there and ironically, all the modern ones based off his appearance in the papyrus that went to Japan completely outnumber the originals. But the very papyrus that visited Japan and pushed Medjed back into the spotlight is, in my opinion, the most interesting of the bunch. It's the so-called Greenfield papyrus. It originally belonged to the priestess slash sorta princess Neseta Nebetashru, who's the woman you see cowering next to Medjed in one of the two famous photos of him. I say she was a sorta princess because her father, the high priest of Amun, Penujum II, was the last 21st dynasty high priest of Amun to act as de facto king of the area around these. His family's tomb, DB 320, which also contained Neseta Nebetashru herself and her Medjed-filled Book of the Dead wound up being where a sizable chunk of the New Kingdom royal mummies were interred in order to save them from robbers. DB 320, along with Neseta Nebetashru's mummy and coffin and some other stuff, were officially discovered in 1881. But she was found to be missing her Book of the Dead. That's because DB 320 actually wasn't discovered in 1881. It was discovered a decade earlier by a local family named the Abdel Rasuls who slowly siphoned some select items from the tomb onto the antiquities market before eventually getting caught, which I've mentioned in another video. In 1910, it turned up at the British Museum where it was donated by a widow named Edith Greenfield whose husband had purchased it before he died. I'm sure you can probably guess how it wound up being called the Greenfield Papyrus. So just think, if one of the Abdel Rasuls hadn't taken a liking to the Greenfield Papyrus and pocketed it, then it probably would have ended up in Cairo instead of the British Museum and then it probably wouldn't have made its way to Japan and Medjed wouldn't have turned into a meme. Funny how history works. This isn't to condone looting antiquities though. There are in fact three papyri already in the Cairo Museum with depictions of Medjed in them. Another three sit in the Bodmer Museum in Geneva and the remaining two are another one in the BM and one of the Museo Gizio in Turin. Okay, let's move on to our next weird being, this guy, the turtle-headed demon. Out of all the human-animal hybrids the ancient Egyptians wound up creating, this guy has to be my favorite because its head isn't just a turtle's head, it's a turtle's whole body, half shell and all. This turtle-headed underworld demon first appeared in the New Kingdom. The turtles always played a small but unique role in the Egyptian worldview. The main species of turtle the Egyptians had access to was Trionyx triunguis. It has a long tubular nose, it pokes up through the water to breathe, almost as if it was sucking air in through a straw, but it can remain without oxygen for up to 10 hours. This allows it to lead a shadowy, secretive existence away from the water's surface. As such, the ancient Egyptians viewed it with fear, suspicion, and hostility, made all the more justifiable by the fact that the biggest females of the species can grow up to four feet long and are big enough to devour juvenile crocodiles. Nowadays, it isn't found in the lower reaches of the Nile, but it can still be found in Nubia and Sudan. Trionyx was, in turn, eaten by the ancient Egyptians from the pre-dynastic period to the Old Kingdom. Turtle carapaces have been found left as funerary offerings in Old Kingdom tombs, which has led to theories that they were used as shields or left over from rituals where turtles were richly slaughtered that were probably just left as food offerings. Turtles were depicted relatively frequently in a variety of ways during the pre-dynastic period, through pallets, figurines, and even vases, and during the Old Kingdom, they were made into amulets. These objects were probably made in order to invoke its help as an ally against the dangers represented by its species, which is also probably why turtles are featured on magic wands and other magical instruments made during the Middle Kingdom, along with a bunch of other strange creatures assembled to ward off evil. It's also been claimed that every animal the Egyptians caught in the waters of the Nile or out in the desert was treated as an incarnation of the evil chaos god Set and were seen as being under his influence, so maybe that's why they had so much antagonism towards it. But after the Old Kingdom, turtles stopped being eaten because of how impure and mysterious they were. They also became antagonists of the sun god Ray because of this and were seen, along with snakes and crocodiles, as a danger to him during his nightly journey through the underworld in his solar bark. One spell in the Middle Kingdom coffin text, the forerunner of the Book of the Dead, even states that humans eating ---- was equivalent to raw eating turtle, despite it reportedly tasting like rich veal. Inscriptions on New Kingdom coffins and tombs even wish death on turtles in favor of Ray, and in at least one of these hieroglyphic inscriptions, it's shown with its neck broken, so it could do no harm, even if just in hieroglyph form. In one Theban tomb from the 19th dynasty, TT 157, a turtle is even shown being harpooned by the tomb's owner, a guy called Nebwenenef. The same motif is found way later on in the Greco-Roman temples of Edfu, Esna, and Philae. As I mentioned before, it was in the New Kingdom that this odd turtle-headed demon was invented. Some of the earliest and most striking depictions of this type of demon are these two wooden guardian statues found in the Valley of the Kings. This one was likely found in and then stolen from KV 57 when it was first discovered in 1908. The tomb of Horemheb, last pharaoh of the 18th dynasty. It looks like it suddenly twisted its body 90 degrees to lurk at an intruder, eh? Pretty eerie. This other one was found all the way back in 1817 in KV 16, the tomb of Horemheb's successor, Ramses I. As all things do, they both somehow ended up in the British Museum. Turtle-headed demons continued to live on for a while after this, unlike Medjed, albeit they were rarely seen. Like Medjed, they acted as underworld guardian demons, often shown protecting the third gate of the underworld. Here's one depicted inside the tomb of Ramses III, KV 11. After the New Kingdom, turtles just by themselves were never really depicted again unless it was in a form intended to localize the evil within them so they could be destroyed. Yeah, the ancient Egyptians really didn't like turtles. This might also have something to do with the fact that they were associated with both Set and the serpent god of chaos and evil, Apophis, since the turtle is sometimes used as a determinative hieroglyph in his name. The turtle-headed demons, on the other hand, were meant to keep watch over mummies by being depicted on coffins and sarcophagi during the Third Intermediate and Late Periods. On some 21st and 22nd Dynasty coffins, a turtle demon is shown marching in processions of apotropaic deities, the order of which seems to stay pretty consistent. One's even on the sarcophagus of the 21st Dynasty pharaoh Sucenes I. The reason I'm not calling these turtle demons by a particular name like Medjed is because they seem to have different names, and there are even male and female ones. The turtle-headed being Sheta is mentioned in Chapter 83 of the Book of the Dead in a strange line about clothing yourself like a turtle. I am grown as a plant. I am sheltered as a turtle. Even though it's about turning yourself into a bird. The ancient Egyptians are confusing that. One variant is depicted on a 25th or 26th Dynasty outer coffin in the Metalhavmuzit in Stockholm, belonging to a woman named Isisirdus, and she's called the Lady of the Lake. Maybe this is why the other Lady of the Lake never showed her face to King Arthur. It seems like she wasn't a usual guardian demon, though, since she doesn't appear in spells connected to the protection of underworld gates, and that instead, she was just meant to protect the body of the deceased. A unique and much more obviously female turtle-headed demon also appeared in the Ptolemaic Period. Other turtle-headed demons are shown illustrating Book of the Dead Chapter 144 on two Ptolemaic papyri from Thebes. This chapter is about seven particular gatekeepers, and the turtle-headed one is actually called The One Who Eats the Excrement of His Rear. This is actually a name which dates all the way back to the Middle Kingdom, where it's found in Coffin Tax Spell 1102. So that's where I'm going to end off the video, because I don't think it can get any better than that. I hope you enjoyed. I know it looks like I haven't uploaded in a while, but I actually did upload a video about Zahi Hawass's bizarre Egyptian archaeology reality show, and despite all the work I put into it, it was unfortunately at the receiving end of a copyright strike. But I do have some interesting stuff planned for the near future, so stay tuned!