In June of 2021 the Metropolitan Museum of
New York shared a photograph of one of their Egyptian artefacts on Twitter that
subsequently went on to create a lot of ribald twatter, and this “nudge, nudge,
wink, wink” hilarity then spread to other popular social media, such as
Facebook and Reddit.
At that time, I vaguely noticed the
sniggering on a few Facebook history groups and moved on, because it really was just an
opportunity for people to have a bit of a laugh at something that looked like a penis..... Cue smutty jokes about ancient
Egyptian sexual peccadillos.
A year later my daughter was idly scrolling past another of these memes doing the rounds yet again on Twitter and foolishly
pointed this out to me …. immediately receiving a brief bout of my infinite
potential for pontification.
But this time I considered taking it on. Not because I have issues with smutty humour, btw.
Go ahead, snigger
away at the idea that people from an ancient culture might have indulged in creative sexual
intercourse, honestly not my concern, and I totally get that for a few of you out there this is just a gag, and I should lighten up ....
Which is basically why I hadn't bothered with it until now... but it is also
difficult not to resent the suggestion that I and other archaeologists
can't differentiate between a salad vegetable and a penis.
And, to add insult to injury, this meme won't die a decent death, again probably because there might be a penis. Yet memes like this reinforce views that passive aggressively undermine the general public's faith in expertise.
Therefore,
this post is aimed at those individuals who might actually believe the
idea that archaeologists are incapable of recognising a penis,
and because it also provides a convenient
opportunity to explain why first impressions of ancient artefacts can be
somewhat misguided.
An explanation of why the ‘looks-a-bit-like’
method is amusing, yet dodgy af.
Why this object is not a penis (to an
ancient Egyptian), or for that matter, a dildo:
1. The Egyptians
practiced circumcision; It is unlikely that they would omit the head of the
penis if they were intending to make a penis, which we know they had no
problem with representing: For example gods with erections, naked
statues, erotic papyri, fecundity figurines and wooden votive penises that were left in temples…
 |
A votive penis from the chapel of Hathor at Deir el Bahari, New Kingdom.
|
Royal Ontario Museum 907.18.900.1. Image (c) ROM.
And yes, archaeologists are somehow able to recognise the wooden ones.
 |
The god Amen-Min, Louvre Museum, N3544.
|
Late Period. Image by RAMA @ Wiki.
All were circumcised. If the model was a ritual/funerary/domestic
accessory type penis it would be their idea of realistic, not yours.
 |
The hieroglyph for penis and male related activities from Kom Ombo
|
temple, Ptolemaic Period. Image Thorpe117 @ IMGUR.
2. It is fragile: The museum model is made from
Egyptian faience, which is a vitreous material that was the immediate precursor
to glass. This silica (sand) based composition is more fragile than stone and it is a
lot more like a light coloured ceramic with a glaze, or an early glass….
Faience was porous, glassy and could
break easily.... and yes that thought ought to make one whince just a little bit.
 |
Food models from the tomb of Amenhotep II. New Kingdom.
|
Image (c) Wiese & Brodbeck 2004.
3. It is too small: The Metropolitan Museum artefact
is only 9.6 cm, or 3.78'' long, which is not the smallest of
the examples of these in museums around the world, some can be as small as 6.27 cm.
(2.4'') long…
I am not sure what your expectations of penises are…
 |
Faience phallic votive figurine, Late Period.
|
Image (c) British Museum, EA90380.
Why archaeologists identify them as
cucumbers:
Context, it is super important:
1. These models are
found in tombs or in foundation deposits under important buildings. It was reasonably common for Egyptian
tombs and buildings to have been provided with food offerings, often made
of faience and smaller than lifesize.
The Met Museum object was
found with other model artefacts (image below) in a pit at Lisht in the Middle Kingdom
cemetery near the pyramid of Senwosret, it is unclear whether these were in a
tomb or part of a foundation deposit.
 |
The Met model with other food models from Lisht, Middle Kingdom.
|
Metropolitan Museum. Image Hayes 1959.
2. They are normally
found with other model foodstuffs and offering bowls, because food offerings
were essential provisions for the tomb and the afterlife.
The Met Museum model was
found with another similar model, plus a model jerboa, a little cat, tiny human
servants, and more food, like grapes, figs and grains. A similar set of these in the
Louvre (below) incidentally comes with model offering bowl, figs, grapes and
peas.
 |
| Egyptian faience food models from Heliopolis, Middle Kingdom. |
Louvre E14188. Image Caubet & Pierrat-Bonnefois 2005.
3. The model was green: These models usually have a green-turquoise glaze, the most common colour for faience in Egypt, but often this glaze has worn away over time. You can even see traces of the original glaze on the museum object, but most has faded leaving the creamy coloured faience core underneath.
Ancient Egyptian penises would only be green when they are attached to a god of regeneration, human penises were the colour of human males, reddish-brown, pale or white would normally be more likely to indicate the female body.
 |
Faience offering set from Lisht in the Metropolitan Museum.
|
Image (c) Met Museum, 15.3.125-130.
4. Diet: The ancient Egyptians ate varieties of the vegetable Cucumis (melo
L. var.), from the cucumber and melon family. They listed these vegetables
among food offerings on the walls of tombs and in medical texts.
.jpg) |
Offerings on a Middle Kingdom coffin.
|
From Steindorff 1901.
Cucumis melo seeds and other plant remains have been found in Egyptian archaeological
contexts dating from the Predynastic period (ca. 3200 BCE) to the Roman
era 3000+ years later.
The faience models also resemble the cucumbers
from food offering scenes painted on coffins, or temple and tomb walls.
 |
| Food offerings from Deir el Bahari temple, New Kingdom. |
Photo (c) Bruce Allardice.
5. Finally, the looks-a-lot-like method of identification: When these artefacts still have the original glaze, they actually most resemble varieties of cucumber or pickling melon. There are unambiguous examples of these faience models that are clearly a long greenish gourd-like vegetable.
 |
Model from a Late Bronze Age tomb (84) at Enkomi, Cyprus.
|
Image (c) British Museum, 1897,0401.1204.
Some of these models are also false vessels, hence the hole in one end.
 |
| Model from a New Kingdom tomb at Sedment. |
Image (c) Penn Museum, E15436.
What you do with your pre-glass, miniature cucumber is of course entirely your own business, but it is nonetheless still a model vegetable.
Conclusion
I guess the point of my writing this post is that while some of us may appreciate a joke after a sweaty day spent processing a bazillion Iron Age ceramic sherds in the middle of nowhere, archaeologists as a species do not use a photo from a museum in order to draw conclusions about the identity of an artefact.
They may have done so over 100 years ago when science was significantly less fussy about accuracy than now, and there was a lot less evidence available, but that sort of sloppy thinking has been binned long ago, although I cannot say the same attention to detail applies for pseudoscience publications, clickbait sites and social media.
Instead, archaeologists gather the available evidence, and when context, text, representation, colour and material all point in one direction, then conclusions may be drawn. And you may be confident that if they get this wrong some bright spark further up the food chain will point it out over a beer at the next conference, or in a peer reviewed paper, because we are a tough audience to please and disproving other people's theories is an occupational requirement.
Therefore, according to the evidence given above the Metropolitan Museum artefact is most likely a funerary food offering model of an ancient Egyptian variety of cucumber or melon.
Andrea Sinclair
Nov. 2022
Images
Thanks to Bruce Allardice and the museum digital collections, plus:
Caubet, A. and G. Pierrat-Bonnefois 2005, Faiences de l'antiquite: de l'Egypt a Iran. Louvre Editions (fig. 70).
Hayes, WC. 1959, Sceptre of Egypt I. Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 225).
Steindorff, G. 1901, Der Sarg des Sebek-O: Ein Grabfund aus Gebelen. Spemann, Berlin (pl. II).
Wiese, A. and A. Brodbeck 2004, Tutanchamun, das goldene Jenseits (p. 161).
But don't just trust me, look these up:
References
Bisognin, DA. 2002, 'Origin and Evolution of Cultivated Cucurbits'. Cienca Rural 32: 715-23.
Germer, R. 2008, Handbuch der altägyptischen Heilpflanzen. Harrassowitz (Cucumis melo L: pp. 242-44).
Manniche, L. 2002, Sexual Life in Ancient Egypt. Kegan Paul. (circumcision pp. 8-9)
Pinch, G. 1997, 'Offerings to Hathor' (wooden penises as votive offerings to the goddess p. 146).
Pinch, G. and EA. Waraksa 2009, 'Votive Practices'. In UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, J. Dieleman & W. Wendrich (eds) - http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz01nfbgg
Robins, G. 2007, 'Male Bodies and the Construction of Masculinity in New Kingdom Egyptian Art'. In Servant of Mut: Studies in Honor of Richard A. Fazzini, SH. D'Auria (ed), 208-15.
de Vartavan, C., A. Arakelyan and VA. Amoros, 2010, Codex of Egyptian Plant Remains. SAIS (Cucumis sp. pp. 89-90).
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