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Finally, an update

13 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by kmtsesh in Uncategorized

≈ 43 Comments

It’s been a very long time since I wrote anything, so I thought I should check in. This is what happen when you have a a big stroke. I went from hospital to hospital for weeks, until April that’s when I landed at Avante Rehab Center in Chicago. It’s an excellent facility with a fine staff but I miss my independence. The stroke largely crippled my left leg and damaged my left arm, which is why I am in intensive therapy.

I am told I will walk again but it still will take a lot of work.

It may sound sadistic but I really enjoy therapy. I like to move my Limbs, and they have excellent equipment. I look forward to it every day.

i
My sister and nephew visiting me at one of my hospitals

Therapy has enabled me to stand again and I’ve already taken a few steps. It felt great!

Another form of therapy I enjoy is speech therapy. My speech was not affected by the stroke but my memory and recall were. You have helped me greatly. There are even speech therapy games I’ve put on my iPad.

Avanti is not my permanent home but I’m glad to be here while I need it. I hope to return to posting more frequently because I miss it. I think those of you who checked in and I appreciate it. I appreciate all of you. This one will be short when I look forward to talking with you again. As always I appreciate comments and questions. God bless!

Inventory Stela: Pious fraud?

04 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by kmtsesh in Ancient Egypt, Ancient Writing, Combating the Fringe, Uncategorized

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Dynasty 26, Dynasty 4, G1-c, Giza Plateau, Great Pyramid, Henutsen, inscription, Khufu, pious fraud, Saite Period, stela

Main_Photo

Every now and then something is unearthed in Egypt that can give pause to historians. It doesn’t happen all that often anymore, but the historical record can provide us numerous examples. One of the best examples is an unassuming, rather unimportant little stela usually called the Inventory Stela, also known as the Stela of the Daughter of Cheops (Khufu).

The stela was uncovered in 1858 at Giza by the Frenchman Auguste Mariette (1821-1881). Mariette was one of the titans of Egyptian studies at the dawn of Egyptology. He worked in a time when his European and American colleagues were first trying to wrap their minds around the great pharaonic civilization, digging frantically all over the Nile Valley in a quest not only to find gold but to wrest facts and details from the very distant past.

Mareitte

Auguste Mariette (1821-1881)

The historians of Mariette’s time were only beginning to flesh out the dynastic history of Egypt. Hieroglyphs had been deciphered by the Frenchman Champollion only 36 years before the Inventory Stela was excavated. Given these limitations,a little monument such as this stela was certain to cause some measure of confusion and possibly lead some folks down the wrong path.

Mariette found the stela in the rubble out front of the farthest-left (southernmost) little pyramid to the east of the Great Pyramid. These little pyramids had been made for either the wives or daughters of Khufu, the king for whom the Great Pyramid was built. The little pyramid in question is today known as G1-c (see red circle below):

giza-pyramids.gif

Pyramid G1-c to the east of the Great Pyramid

 

Each of the three little pyramids had a small mortuary temple to its east, mirroring the larger arrangement of the Great Pyramid. Each queen or daughter buried there would’ve had her own mortuary cult and cadre of priests to service her afterlife needs, just as Khufu himself did, albeit on a much larger scale. These mortuary temples today are in ruins.

G1-c Pyramid

The ruins of the mortuary temple for G1-c

It was in this jumble of ruined masonry that Mariette found the Inventory Stela. The stela is made of hard limestone. It’s 30 inches high and 15 wide, contains four registers of  inscriptions, and relief carvings of divine statues (Zivie-Coche 2002: 83). It’s the inscription that caused confusion in Mariette’s day and the inscription has become the darling of many fringe adherents, who are quick to glom onto most anything that might suit their agenda.

InventoryStela

Inventory Stela (Cairo Museum, JE 209)

The stela is in rough shape and there are numerous lacunae, but enough is intact to make sense of what the stela was for. You will come across different translations of the text on the stela, some very poor and some more on the mark. Here I provide a reliable and professional translation from Zivie-Coche’s book (ibid 85):

Live the Horus Medjed, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Cheops, given life. He found the house of Isis, Mistress of the Pyramids, next to the house of Haurun, northwest of the house of Osiris, Lord of Rasetau. He (re)built the pyramid of the king’s daughter Henutsen beside this temple. He made an inventory, carved on a stela, for his mother Isis, the mother of the god, Hathor, Mistress of the Sky. He restored for her the divine offerings and (re)built her temple in stone, that which he found in ruins being renewed, and the gods in their place.

When studying and interpreting an inscription like this one, the student is obligated to follow it to the letter and not insert information that doesn’t belong. Therefore, it’s critical to start with a reliable and modern translation.

Fringe adherents have abused this inscription in all manner of ways. They have an obsession with trying to establish that the pyramids and Sphinx are thousands of years older than anyone thought and were built by some nebulous, unproven, and lost advanced civilization that existed there prior to the Egyptians. Or maybe it was aliens. This stands foolishly against modern science and the evidence from carbon dating that shows these pyramids and temples were erected around the very time we always thought (Bonani et al 2001).

So in taking the stela at face value, it would seem the Sphinx and pyramids were already there when Khufu came along. The inference is, he just repaired things and took them as his own. You will see this preached time and again in fringe literature. You will even see fringe writers claim the inscription “proves” Khufu found the Great Pyramid itself already in place, even though the inscription nowhere says that.

Referring to the inscription above, you can see where it clearly states Khufu was supposed to have “(re)built the pyramid of the king’s daughter Henutsen beside this temple.” This is the little pyramid designated G1-c, built, as mentioned, for one of Khufu’s wives or daughters, The temple in question is today’s jumble of ruins out front of G1-c that was originally the little pyramid’s mortuary chapel. The chapel in the inscription is referred to as “the house of Isis, Mistress of the Pyramids.” In other words, it was a chapel dedicated to Isis, the great mother-goddess.

What we know today is that the old mortuary chapel really did become a temple to Isis, but not in Khufu’s time (Dynasty 4, c. 2500 BCE). On archaeological grounds, the conversion to the temple can be dated to some time in the Third Intermediate Period. We can narrow it down to the reign of Psusennes I (1047 BCE-1001 BCE), in Dynasty 21, based on his cartouche found in the ruins (Petrie 1883: 65). By the time of the Third Intermediate Period, the monuments on the Giza Plateau had been abandoned for many centuries.

In Mariette’s day the stela was already causing confusion because of its inscription. Flinders Petrie felt the stela was either a refurbished copy of a very old monument, or “more probably an entire invention” (ibid 49). Others, such as Maspero, believed the stela should be taken as an historical document (Maspero 1894: n. 364-65).

So, is the stela from the Old Kingdom or from some later time? A great deal of time has elapsed from the days of Mariette, Petrie, and Maspero, and thus we have the benefit of generations of steady scholarship and concerted studies. We have learned a tremendous amount since those distant days and have greatly refined our abilities to interpret and understand things like the Inventory Stela.

This being the case, certain features on the stela present immediate problems. For one thing, in style and form the stela is not of the type one generally sees from the Old Kingdom. That’s immediately noticeable. That might possibly be explained away in some manner, but there’s more.

A notable problem is the name Haurun in the inscription. This is a reference to the Great Sphinx. Haurun was originally a Canaanite god and one of manifestations of Baal. Egypt did end up assimilating this deity, as it did numerous foreign gods and goddesses, but Haurun did not end up becoming part of the Egyptian pantheon until the New Kingdom—many centuries after the time of Khufu. Only at some later time was Haurun associated with the Sphinx, to the point that it became a name for the Sphinx. How this occurred is not known, but it may have been the presence of Canaanite workers living in the area; perhaps they identified the Sphinx with their deity Haurun (Wilkinson 2003: 108). But to be certain, referring to the Sphinx as Haurun is a noticeable anachronism; we don’t even know what the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom might have called the Sphinx.

Similar anachronisms appear on the stela. As mentioned, the stela includes relief carvings of divine statues. This is the “inventory” portion of the stela. It’s a listing of statues that were once featured in the little temple to Isis. This goddess herself presents an immediate problem, as does the mention of Osiris: neither of these deities appears to have been part of Egyptian veneration as early as Dynasty 4. Neither appears in the Egyptian pantheon  until the end of Dynasty 5. For that matter, the title attributed to Isis on the stela, “mistress of the pyramids,” is nowhere else given to her in Egyptian history.

We can say the same about some of the other divine statues on the stela, including the mention of such deities as Nephthys, Harendotes, and Harmokhis. These did not exist in the pantheon in Khufu’s time.

Yet another problem exists with the mention of the “king’s daughter Henutsen.” She is supposedly the royal daughter for whom the little pyramid, G1-c, was erected. While the pyramid was certainly built for one of Khufu’s royal women, daughter or wife, there is no evidence contemporary to Khufu for a daughter named Henutsen (Dodson and Hilton 2004: 53). She’s an invention for the narrative.

Everything considered, then, this stela cannot date to the Old Kingdom. So to what point in time can it be dated?

We’ve seen that the little temple to Isis was first established in the Third Intermediate Period, probably Dynasty 21. But the stela itself is much later. The Giza Plateau fell into ruins after this period and sat abandoned for a number of centuries, until Dynasty 26 (664 BCE-525 BCE). This is also known as the Saite Period due to the capital city of the time: Sais, in the Delta. Egypt itself had been much diminished by then, but there was a brief resurgence under the powerful king Psamtik I Wahibra. This king restored much of the stability and power of Egypt, at least internally, and a lot of attention was given to Giza, which experienced a renaissance.

The stela is of the style and form of the Saite Period. While many of the deities mentioned on the stela were unknown in Dynasty 4, they all would’ve been familiar to the Egyptians of Dynasty 26. The stela was simply part of the plan to bring grandeur back to Giza.

Most scholars today agree that the Inventory Stela dates to Dynasty 26. Therefore, the stela can be thought of as a pious fraud. The Egyptians had their own sense of history, but this must not mean we should believe they viewed history the way we do. Their perspective was far removed from our own (Zivie-Coche 2002: 87-88). They were not trying to pull one over on anyone but were, indeed, honoring the past and the memory of one of their great, distant monarchs, Khufu.

This is a lesson in critical thinking. We have to view things in context and dig deeper. The stela tells us everything we need to know. It is the mistake of the fringe not to dig deeper but to jump to conclusions based on a thin veneer.

I welcome comments and questions, and thanks for reading.

——————————————————–

Bonani, Georges et al. “Radiocarbon Dating of Old and Middle Kingdom Monuments in Egypt.” 2001.

Dodson, Aidan and Dyan Hilton. The Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt. 2004.

Maspero, Gaston. The Dawn of Civilization: Egypt and Chaldea. 1894.

Flinders, Petrie. The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh. 1883.

Wilkinson, Richard H. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt. 2003.

Zivie-Coche, Christiane. Sphinx: History of a Monument. 2002.

 

Reality interrupted

26 Friday May 2017

Posted by kmtsesh in Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

It sounds like a cliche but it’s the truth: my life will never be the same. All because of a couple of little organs in my back.

I’m departing from my usual modus operandi to do something different. No history article here, and no combating of bad science and the fringe. I’m going to use this article to share some personal information about myself, which I generally don’t do. But in writing this I’m hoping anyone who reads the article can take advantage of my cautionary tale.

It actually started a very long time ago. Sometime around my mid-twenties I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. I am now fifty. I adjusted well to the disease and lived for many years with no problems. I took my insulin, tried to watch my diet, rarely bothered with regular doctor visits, and went my merry way. Are you listening, readers with diabetes? Many people have the disease. And everything in this paragraph describes many folks’ experiences with diabetic.

It started to change in the spring of 2014. I was going blind. I had developed serious hypertension (high blood pressure) and it, together with diabetes, was attacking my eyes. The technical term for this is bilateral diabetic retinopathy, which means the disease was damaging the retinas in both eyes. Well, I rather had to go to the doctor for that. I spent the entire summer and much of the fall going to Northwestern Memorial in Chicago to undergo extensive laser surgery and numerous other treatments. This included three invasive major surgeries to my eyes and even injections in one of my eyes. That wasn’t fun.

Northwestern did an amazing job restoring my vision. It will never again be perfect, but it’s pretty good again. But this article isn’t really about my vision treatments. It was only the first sign, which I should’ve taken more seriously. I had a battery of blood tests for the first surgery and they were concerned about my kidneys. The bloodwork showed they were not performing optimally. My primary physician—yes, I was regularly seeing a doctor now—emphasized that I see a nephrologist, a doctor specializing in kidney care.

So I rushed to the nephrologist, right? A smart person would’ve—but I wasn’t being smart. I skipped it and hoped for the best. My vision continued to improve but thanks to the appalling disaster that is our health-care system in the United States, I eventually lost my health insurance. I could no longer afford regular visits with a doctor.

As it happens, and as I now know, soon after I couldn’t report to the doctor on a regular basis, my blood pressure was creeping back up. I could see this on the little blood-pressure machine I use at home, but a machine doesn’t treat blood pressure. It only alerts you to it. I went on my merry way, again.

The symptoms were starting to show. I was getting more and more tired. I was drifting off to sleep at work, which was something I never did. I was putting on weight and my legs, ankles, and feet would get swollen. I had a serious cough and felt heavy. I have a medical background from training as a paramedic many years ago, so I certainly had an idea what was wrong: kidney disease.

It all came apart last November (2016). One morning upon climbing out of bed to get ready for work—I promptly collapsed like a bag of potatoes to the floor. I could not get back up. I was conscious but not very alert. It’s difficult to describe the experience. I had almost no awareness of the passage of time. I remember thinking that I need to text my boss to let him know I wouldn’t be coming in, and I managed to snag my phone from the edge of my desk, but I couldn’t make my fingers work. Meanwhile, the phone eventually started to ring, and I suspected it was my boss calling to check on me. I couldn’t operate the phone to answer, and was surprised to discover I could barely even talk.

I thought I was having a stroke.

At some point I heard a knock on my door, but I couldn’t answer. A few more knocks, and then I heard the jangling of keys in the lock. I live in an apartment building and the handyman, Mike, came in to check on me. My boss had called the apartment management, so that’s why Mike was at my door.

Mike found me sitting there on the floor. He asked me some questions and I understood everything he said, but I could only nod or give a thumbs-up. I couldn’t talk or move. I could only sit there on the floor, staring at my desk, like some sad version of performance art.

Mike called 911.

Everything that transpired from there resulted in a long and epic journey, as they say. Mike told the paramedics that I’m diabetic, so the first thing they did after putting an oxygen mask on me was test my blood sugar. On a normal adult male without diabetes the blood-glucose level should be roughly between 80 to 100 (going from memory here). My blood sugar was usually around 120, which is high but not terrible for a Type 1 diabetic.

That morning, as I sat slumped on the floor, my blood sugar was 26. To this day I’m amazed I never passed out.

The ambulance rushed me to Weiss Memorial, which is nearby my place in Chicago. There they put me on oxygen with epi. That opened my airways right up. I really liked oxygen with epi! And then they did a full blood panel. One of the things they test for in a diabetic is creatinine, a protein that builds up in your body but that healthy kidneys will flush out. The creatinine level in a healthy male my age is between 0.8 and 1.3 (mg/dL).

There in the ER at Weiss Memorial, my creatinine was over 10.

My kidneys were shot. They still have some function, and almost every doctor and nurse I meet asks if I’m still peeing. I still am, which must show some kidney function, but there may come a time when I will stop peeing altogether.

I had to go on dialysis. I spent eight days in the hospital undergoing batteries of tests and scans, and started dialysis almost immediately. For the short term a surgeon implanted a catheter that stuck out of my neck so they could wheel me down the hall to a little room for dialysis. Soon before I was finally discharged from Weiss Memorial, they moved the catheter to my upper-right chest, just above my nipple. And there it sits to this day.

After getting home I immediately started dialysis in a clinic similar to this one:

Clinic

There, every Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday, I sat in a chair for four hours so my blood could be circulated through a machine and filtered. That’s what the catheter is for: so I could have my body connected to the machine. I’m not much for selfies, but here’s a closeup of my chest I took while sitting in one of the chairs last December:

My Chest

Apologies for my pasty-white flesh. You can see the white bandage on my right chest. Underneath that is where the catheter enters my body, into a major blood vessel. From there it goes into my heart. From the white bandage you can see two tubes descending: one tube sends my blood out and the other sends it back in, freshly filtered. A healthy person has two kidneys that do this filtering very well, to scrub out excess fluids and waste products like creatinine. But I’m now one of those folks whose body needs help with this.

Needless to say I now have a nephrologist. I actually met him when I was admitted to the hospital. I like him quite a lot. From the start he thought I would be a good candidate for a different kind of dialysis. When you sit in a chair in a clinic for several hours to have your blood cleansed, the process is called hemodialysis. That’s what I was experiencing since November. You can do this at home, too, but hemodialysis can lead to unpleasant side effects. Numerous times while in the clinic I experienced some of them: especially low blood pressure and epic cramps. And I do mean epic. Largely because of these side effects, if you do hemodialysis at home you need to have someone with you while you’re undergoing treatment. This option wouldn’t work for me because I live alone.

But the other form of home-care is called peritoneal dialysis. I was a good candidate for this. It doesn’t require someone to be with you. Inside your abdomen is a stout lining called the peritoneum that holds your stomach, intestines, and other abdominal organs in place. Along the way some brilliant researcher discovered that the peritoneal lining can filter blood just like a dialysis machine does.

To prepare for this I had to undergo yet another surgery, this time at St. Francis Hospital. The surgeon implanted a new catheter in my abdomen, which extends from my body to the left of my navel. Back at my dialysis clinic a nurse attached an extension (transfer set) to it so I could use the catheter with their specific machinery. It looks something like this:

CatheterPlacement

No, that’s not a photo of my body. I’m not that sleek and curvy, but you get the idea. The coiled end sits deep inside my abdomen and the brunt of it, with the extension the nurse put on, sits outside my body.

True to my luck, however, sometime soon after the catheter was implanted, it got badly kinked inside my body. I had to undergo yet another surgery to have it fixed. The surgeon couldn’t explain how it got kinked so badly inside me but is confident it won’t happen again. The surgeries were not at all pleasant but at least the catheter started working.

As I write this article, I’ve just completed four full days of training to use the equipment inside my apartment. On this, the fifth day, two nurses came over to my apartment to watch me prepare the equipment for tonight’s treatment. I’m done training, and it went well. Three different nurses trained me at the clinic, and they were terrific. From now on, every two weeks, the clinic’s chipping department will be delivering fresh supplies to me. I took this photo so you can see most of the supplies piled inside my apartment:

Supplies

Hopefully I won’t need anything in that closet too soon, but I don’t think I will. These boxes are just the solution bags that will be filtered through my peritoneum, so my blood can be cleaned. Every night I will use two 5,000 ml bags and one 3,000 ml bag. The solution is basically a form of sugar water that pulls the accumulated toxins through my peritoneum, as well as excess fluids my weak kidneys can no longer flush out. All of this drains into bags on the floor. Here is a photo of the machine:

Machine-Cycler

The machine is called a cycler. It’s not large but is quite heavy. I’m thankful for the handy-dandy cart that was designed especially for it. The lit-up screen gives you directions for proper set-up and takes you step-by-step through the process, to get it going. On top and to the left and right are the solution bags that will fill my peritoneum and flush out—the drain bags are there on the floor, to the left.

I’ve been training all week on this device, so I can tell you the fluid that enters the waste bags looks a lot like weak urine. You empty the bags into the toilet or a sink. They drain pretty quickly.

All of this is called peritoneal dialysis. This is my home treatment. Eventually they will remove the old catheter that’s still in my chest. I look forward to that because I am not allowed to get it wet. Since it was implanted last November, I have not been allowed to take a normal human shower. I take sponge baths instead. I miss showers and want to take them again.

Thanks to the cycler (the machine in the above photo) there’s really not much chance of screwing up and harming yourself. The machine basically won’t let you do that. But the process involves a lot of connections with tubing, and the single-greatest risk with peritoneal dialysis is infection. Specially, peritonitis. I want to avoid that. So I wash my hands carefully, use hand sanitizer, wear a mask, and let none of the connections touch the floor.

My first full treatment is tonight. I have the machine ready to go, so it waits till I connect my catheter before bedtime. It will run overnight, as I sleep. The process really does work. Together with the hemodialysis I was undergoing in the clinic, this whole process has turned my health around. I breathe clearly. I sleep quite well. I have much more energy during the day. There is still some swelling, but not nearly that much. I have lost over thirty pounds. My bloodwork is looking pretty good lately.

Dialysis works.

But it’s really not something you want to do unless you have to. It takes a lot training, commitment, and discipline. This is now my life. This is my new reality.

So take it from me, people, and learn from my mistakes. Take care of yourselves. Eat healthy, get exercise. See your doctor regularly. If you have a disease like diabetes, make sure you keep it under control. And did I mention, see your doctor regularly?

I wish you all good health. Thanks for reading.

Under Construction

04 Saturday Feb 2012

Posted by kmtsesh in Uncategorized

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This is a brand-new site. I’ve just begun building it, so it will be under construction for a while. I hope to attract readers in the near future, so please bear with me for the time being!

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