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Afterlives of Ancient Egypt with Kara Cooney

Afterlives of Ancient Egypt with Kara Cooney

De: Kara Cooney
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  • Feeding the Aten: Akhenaten's Offering Obsession

    Feeding the Aten: Akhenaten's Offering Obsession
    Sep 26 2025

    Akhenaten physically manifested his cult to the sun, building a capital city at a break in the cliffs that created the perfect sunrise hieroglyph on the east bank, a city filled with open air temples into which the sun’s rays could reach directly. He created no statues to represent divine solar power, no intercessor between god and king; the sun’s warmth and light could not be contained in a cult statue. To honor the sun god, Akhenaten created a simple and literal system of giving back what the sun god had given to his people: his Aten temples contained thousands of altars filled to overflowing with the bounty of his people’s produce—joints of beef, oxen heads, ducks and geese, bread loaves in all shapes and sizes, onions, garlic, beer and wine.

    In this episode, Kara Cooney and Amber Myers Wells dive into the overwhelming scale of the offering tables from Akhenaten’s reign and what they reveal about ritual, power, and ideology in the Amarna period. Why did Akhenaten commission thousands of offering tables for the Aten, who filled them, where did the food come from, and what does this short-lived practice tell us about the king’s vision of divine connection versus the economic and social realities of life at the new capital city of Akhetaten?

    This is a confusing topic with many outstanding questions; please communicate your confusion, quandaries, and ideas in the comments!

    Show notes

    For more on the Great Aten Temple and Offering Tables, see the Amarna Project website, a treasure trove of information.

    Check out this image of Akhenaten offering in his great Aten Temple, as pictured in the tomb of one of his courtiers and the temple’s Chief Servant, Panehsy.

    For a statue fragment of Akhenaten holding his own personal offering table, see this piece at the Met!

    Sources

    Cooney, Kathlyn M. 2007. The cost of death: the social and economic value of ancient Egyptian funerary art in the Ramesside period. Egyptologische Uitgaven 22. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten.

    Janssen, Jac J. 1975. Commodity prices from the Ramessid period: an economic study of the village of necropolis workmen at Thebes. Leiden: E. J. Brill.

    Kemp, Barry. 2013. The city of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and its people. London: Thames & Hudson.

    McClain, J. Brett and Kathlyn Cooney. 2005. “The daily offering meal in the ritual of Amenhotep I: an instance of the local adaptation of cult liturgy.” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 5, 41-78. DOI: 10.1163/156921205776137963.



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    1 h y 54 m
  • Sex and Succession: Interpreting an Amarna Royal Family Scene

    Sex and Succession: Interpreting an Amarna Royal Family Scene
    Sep 14 2025

    CW: This episode includes discussion of sexual themes, including incest and child sexual abuse. Listener discretion advised.

    In this episode, Kara and Amber take on one of Amarna’s most famous images—the so-called “house altar” showing Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and their three daughters beneath the Aten (Ägyptisches Museum/Neues Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv. no ÄM 14145). At a glance, this relief seems to show a sweet private scene of domesticity and familial affection, but taking the time to do some close-looking reveals how the scene might covey so much more. Kara unpacks how—to initiated elite eyes, at least—the piece encodes theology, court politics, sexual and reproductive power. What might Nefertiti’s unique blue crown signal about containment of solar power? Why are the girls’ bodies shown the way they are, like tiny women but with the heads of infants? And how might a palace loyalist use such an altar to telegraph succession hopes—and anxieties—without writing a word? It’s all here, encoded in the stone.

    Along the way Kara and Amber also explore ancient Egyptian ideas of divine conception, the harem as a political machine, why Amarna “realism” isn’t exactly realism, but an idealized magical end goal, and how royal bodies carried the burden of sustaining royal legitimacy and succession.

    Show notes

    Object entry on Google Arts & Culture

    For more on the commodification of women’s and girl’s bodies, see:

    Episode #69 - Bodies and Power in the Ancient World

    Cooney, Kathlyn M. 2025. Body power in the ancient world: patriarchal power and the commodification of women. In Thompson, Shane M. and Jessica Tomkins (eds), Understanding power in ancient Egypt and the Near East, volume I: Approaches, 104-135. Leiden; Boston: Brill. DOI: 10.1163/9789004712485_006.

    For more on harems in ancient Egypt, see:

    Episode #41 - Power and Politics in the Egyptian Harem

    Cooney, Kathlyn M., Chloe Landis, and Turandot Shayegan 2023. The body of Egypt: how harem women connected a king with his elites. In Candelora, Danielle, Nadia Ben-Marzouk, and Kathlyn M. Cooney (eds),Ancient Egyptian society: challenging assumptions, exploring approaches, 336-348. London; New York: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781003003403-31.

    For the Amenhotep III conception scene discussed in the episode, see:

    Krauss, Rolf. “Die Amarnazeitliche Familienstele Berlin 14145 Unter Besonderer Berücksichtigung von Maßordnung Und Komposition.” Jahrbuch Der Berliner Museen 33 (1991): 7–36. https://doi.org/10.2307/4125873.



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    1 h y 35 m
  • Being a Priest in ancient Egypt: Power, Ritual, and the Divine

    Being a Priest in ancient Egypt: Power, Ritual, and the Divine
    Sep 4 2025
    Egyptian priests didn’t just waft incense and mutter incantations; they had to run the cosmic machine, make sure the sun rose and set, the Nile rose and receded as appropriate. From feeding the gods to managing temple estates, priesthood sat where divinity, money, and monarchy intersected. It’s not that the Egyptian priests were so simple-minded as to believe humans were needed for grand actions of cosmic continuance, but rather they realized pleasing the gods would bring the best version of divine power into the human world—whether that best version was copper (Hathor), wheat and barley (Osiris), inundation (Sobek), healthy children (Isis), or miraculous craft (Ptah). The Egyptians thus knew they had to create a perfect habitat to pull the gods into their human spaces. First the god needed a body, a sacred statue made of precious things like gold, silver, electrum, precious stones, glass. Then that body needed a grand house, the temple. And the divinity would have to be carefully cleaned and anointed, fed the best bread and beer, wine and beef, duck and lettuce. The gods had to be dressed in fine linens, entertained with dancing and music. Without such magnificent bribery, they wouldn’t be pulled into the realm of the human, we are told, and they wouldn’t bestow their gifts. This was a give and take world, after all. Divine-human quid pro quo. When you tug on the priestly thread of religion in ancient Egypt, the garment unravels into issues of restricted knowledge, kingship, patriarchy, money, land, and power. Let’s start with the basics: what was a priest in ancient Egypt? When you think of an Egyptian priest, think of a specialist, someone set apart and equipped with bespoke and unusual knowledge of how to connect with the divine. He could read and write; he had thousands of incantations memorized. He knew the movements to make in front of the shrine, how loudly or quietly to speak, when to raise or lower his eyes. He held restricted knowledge that few had—spells that woke the god, calmed them, provided the conditions for their transformations—because in the end every god was representative of a life and death cycle that had to be renewed. Osiris had to be transformed seasonally, the sun god daily, the goddess yearly. Never forget that his knowledge of texts and spells made him privileged. It gave him power and access to those with political, economic and military power. And in ancient Egypt, these worldly powers were combined with religious powers such that the pharaoh was the highest of high priests atop a hierarchy descending down to his chief priests, lector priests, and on to the lowest wab priest, all of them helping to run the whole sacred-human game. But alongside the rituals that sustained the gods and the cosmos came bureaucracy, taxes, the constant search for income to keep the temple open. Priests didn’t just chant incantations and carry out their religious duties—they managed vast estates, redistributed offerings, and, in many cases, enriched themselves. They also needed to pay / feed their employees, other priests. When the state pulled their financial support, they invented a number of income creating schemes, including animal mummies and votives available for purchase. Selling a couple thousand of those a year would set a Late Period temple up well. So, were the Egyptians devout? Absolutely. But not in the way we think of “belief.” They didn’t sit around wondering if the gods were real. Divinity was everywhere—the sun on your skin, the river rising or not, the fate of your harvest. You got up in the morning and did your rituals because if you didn’t, the whole system might collapse. It wasn’t a question of faith. It was survival—pull the gods into your man-made temples or suffer the consequences. So go hug a tree, light a candle, pull a tarot card—make your own connection to the spirit world. The Egyptians would tell you it’s not about belief. It’s about participation.Show Notes* Forshaw, Roger. The Role of the Lector in Ancient Egyptian Society. Archaeopress, 2014. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvqc6jxb. Accessed 1 Sept. 2025.* Sauneron, Serge. 1960. The priests of ancient Egypt. Translated by Ann Morrissett. Evergreen Profile Book 12. New York: Grove.* Wilkinson. 2000. The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt. * Lazaridis, Nikolaos. 2010. Education and apprenticeship. Edited by Elizabeth Frood and Willeke Wendrich. UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology 2010 (October), 14 p., 2 figs [ills].* Haring, Ben. 2007. Ramesside temples and the economic interests of the state: crossroads of the sacred and the profane. In Fitzenreiter, Martin (ed.), Das Heilige und die Ware: Eigentum, Austausch und Kapitalisierung im Spannungsfeld von Ökonomie und Religion, 165-170. London: Golden House.* Haring, B. J. J. 1997. Divine households: administrative and economic aspects of the New Kingdom royal memorial temples in western Thebes. Egyptologische Uitgaven 12. ...
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    1 h y 3 m
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Absolutely love this podcast. I’ve learned so much. The depth and the freedom around every subject. It’s an adhd woman’s (like me) dream. Thank you!

Love

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I started listening to this podcast after a re-read/re-listen to “The Good Kings.” I just love how the podcast is accessible to non-academics while still being deep, thought provoking and informative. I’m a middle school history teacher, and this podcast helps fuel my historian fire! Also, I love that this is ancient history by smart women for smart women.

Obsessed

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March 2023 REVIEW: I started listening to this podcast over a year ago and have kept up with it ever since. Episodes are released about twice a month and either answer submitted audience questions or host a quest speaker from the Egyptology or wider Humanities field. There has even been a book club discussion on the Amelia Peabody series! Dr. Kara Cooney does a great job of connecting her Ancient Egypt expertise to our modern realities, and this podcast highlights topics that might not be possible in traditionally academic spaces.

This podcast is for enthusiasts of Ancient Egypt, members of academia or with Humanities backgrounds, and readers of Cooney's body of work. So glad to be re-reviewing this in celebration of Women's History Month, March 2023.

Feb 2022 REVIEW: I loved Kara Cooney’s nonfiction trade book “When Women Ruled the World” and am so glad I found her podcast “Afterlives with Kara Cooney”. Kara and her host, PhD candidate Jordan, have a healthy medley of discussions about academic life and expectations, modern US politics, and of course Egyptology! Founded during the pandemic as a way to spice up virtual learning for their students, this podcast is topical and engaging.

I am a woman in STEM, so it was refreshing to witness academia from a humanities perspective. Episodes are an hour or two long, so this was great to have on while completing hands-on laboratory and workshop tasks. I don’t agree with all of their opinions, but I don’t see our differences as a bad thing. This is exactly the type of podcast I needed; these intelligent women are informative, approachable, and chill.

This is also great hype for Kara’s new book “The Good Kings”, which is high on my To Read List. I recommend Kara’s work to those interested in Egyptology, coffin reuse, power in Ancient Egypt, Ancient Egypt kingship, archaeology, anthropology, ancient history, strong female authors, feminism, US politics, and history trade books.

Excellent History Academia Feminist Podcast

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