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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): I'm Dr. Alexandra F. Morris. I am a white woman with brown shoulder-length curly hair, and red glasses and brown eyes, wearing a black rose top with a matching rose necklace.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): My talk today is focused on disability in ancient Egypt and ancient Greece.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): and Macedonia, with some relevant detours to earlier material in both of their histories.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): I figured I'd start by telling you a little bit more about me and how I got started in this research area, and then we'll cover some concepts to ensure we're all on the same page, and then we'll get into the actual material.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is just a content warning that there will be human remains shown in this presentation, as well as some ableist language as a demonstration of poor scholarly practice.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): I grew up wanting to be an Egyptologist, but disability didn't occur to me until my first graduate program, where


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): I encountered incredibly bad ableism. I am…


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): a disabled Egyptologist who happens to have cerebral palsy and speech dyspraxia, and the attitude at the time of that particular graduate program was I was their first ever disabled student, so they didn't know what to do with me, and didn't want to be bothered trying.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): It just so happened that at that program, in the museum that was attached to the university where that program was affiliated with, there happened to be 3 remains of a mummified man from 6th Dynasty, 5th Dynasty Egypt.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Who had a leg that was 6 inches shorter than the other one. Who was buried with a king.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And the cane was apparently used during his lifetime as a mobility device.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, I was reflecting on what was going on with me, saw him, realized that this was not something that had been well studied, and from there on had my research topic.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): I start with him, because this is where disability history tends to always start, with real bodies and real lives. Every object that you will see today stands for people whose names we have lost, except for instances where I name folks.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Some of the people we will meet today are kings, most are not. All of them deserve to be studied as people who lived, worked, and mattered, rather than as medical curiosities.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Our overarching question for today, though, is why this history has also been told so badly, and what it looks like when we tell it properly.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Before we go further, a quick orientation, because we're going to be moving across a very, very long stretch of time. Egyptologists tend to divide Ancient Egypt into periods. The kingdoms, were times of strong central rule, and intermediate periods were times when power was divided, broadly speaking. So that generally means a period is when a foreign power came in and took over, or for some reason, the South


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): government collapsed, whereas a kingdom is when the ancient Egyptians, the native ancient Egyptians, were in control and ruling.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): My particular time period of specialty is from the Argeid to the Ptolemaic period, so that's from roughly 332 to 30 BCE, and that's from the time period of the conquest of Alexandra the Great to the death of Cleopatra VII.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Okay.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And again, before we go further, we need some shared vocabulary as well.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, when I talk about disability, I am using the definition offered by Hannah Vogel and Ronica K. Power in 2023. They define disability as a complex and, in some contexts, constructed category, which can include congenital and acquired bodily differences, so things that you're born with, as well as things that you acquire later in life.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Chronic and acute illnesses, mental illnesses and cognitive conditions, neurodiversity, progressive and fatal diseases, temporary and permanent injuries, and even a range of physical characteristics that can be considered disfiguring, from uncommon proportions to scars or birthmarks.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is deliberately broad because disability is not one thing, and we can find evidence for almost all of these in the past.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Second, ableism. Ableism is prejudice and discrimination against those with disabilities, as well as the favoring of non-disabled people over disabled people. Third, disabilism. This is a closely related concept, but slightly different.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Disabilism is the set of assumptions and practices, conscious or unconscious, that leads to disabled people being treated differently and unequally because of an actual or presumed disability.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): I want us to keep these in the back of our heads, because disabilism is often about what people assume to be the norm.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Disabilism is about what we then do to people who do not fit us. We will see both of these at work in the ancient world, and more often in modern scholarship about it.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And just some other things, just in case people don't know.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): These are two different models of disability that we'll meet again and again today. The first is the medical model. This diagram is from the Disabled People's Organization Inclusion London. Basically, it shows how it works.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The disabled person in this model is the problem, and around them are all the things they supposedly cannot do. Cannot walk, cannot see steps, and also the language used here also reflects this model. Our talis-bound, they need cares. The response is to always fix, cure, or manage the individual.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And the other thing to note is that under this model, disability is often seen as a personal tragedy, and the person must change or fix themselves to fit into the world.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Our next model is the social model, and this was developed by disabled activists in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, and turns that around. It separates two ideas.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Impairment in this model is an individual's, Physical, sensory, or cognitive difference.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And disability is the name for the social consequence of having an impairment. People with impairments are disabled by society, by stairs, without ramps, by information in only one format, and by attitudes. If disability is made by society, then society can theoretically change it and remove it.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This distinction matters a great deal for us in ancient history, because it means that we must not assume that an impairment in the past led to exclusion. Whether it did depends on the society, and that's exactly why we as ancient historians have to investigate rather than presume this. And I just want to note a caveat with this model as well. This model is great, but it does not necessarily take into account


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): lived experience very well with my disability, cerebral palsy. You can throw as many, accommodations at me as you want. You don't change how my brain communicates with the rest of my body.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Okay.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And this is just a note about language before we move on to, as well, language tends to be where bias shows first, and I have two example sentences, and we'll see that a lot of historians prefer the first set as opposed to the second set. So as an example sentence here, I have Hufais just suffered from a congenital deformity that limited his movement, as opposed to Hafais just had a congenital mobility impairment, which is more neutral.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Both of these describe the same God. The first tells you exactly how to feel about him. He suffers, he is deformed, and he is limited. The second is, again, more neutral and simply describes him. I will be using that second kind of language.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): But again, other historians have adopted towards the first.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The other thing to note is there tends to be a choice between disabled person and person with a disability. Many in the disabled community, particularly in the UK, prefer a disabled person, because under the social model of society that disables us. Others prefer person-first language. Both of these are acceptable, and the best practice is to ask.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): If you'd like more detail about this, the Short Guide to Disability Terminology that Debbie Sneed and I wrote for the Society of Classical Studies is linked on this slide.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Now, moving on to why this matters.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Here are two passages that are by respected historians. The first is Angelus Trinatos writing in 2005 about war in the holistic world, so this is war during ancient Greece, essentially.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The ancient Greek Empire. So the quote is, the greatest Western war is to often battle, the greatest suffering is to survive but be disabled. Although numbers of casualties are often given by Hellenistic historians, we get no information about their treatment or about their future life.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): There is no way to estimate the percentage of crippled soldiers who lived as a burden to their families.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Notice the assumptions that are in this paragraph.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The greatest suffering is to be disabled. Wounded soldiers are crippled, and without any evidence at all, he imagines them living as a burden to their families. Chang Zhao submits we have no information about their later lives, and he is filling that gap with a modern stereotype.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): As we will see, the evidence suggests something very different. The second is Toby Wilkinson writing in 22-22 about ancient Egypt.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And he says, Those who are lucky enough to survive such scourges might still be scarred for life.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Deformity is not often depicted in Egyptian sculpture and painting, the purpose of art being to portray an ideal state of affairs, but skeletons and remains tell a different story. Several build tell-toe signs of hernias and spinal tuberculosis, which left sufferers with hunchbacks and twisted spines.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In the pre-diagnostic cemetery of the Dhamma in Upper Egypt, two skeletons with the latter disease were uncovered, in each case accompanied by powdery representations of the deformity.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): These seem to be rare examples of sufferers celebrating their disability. In a similar vein, the stealing of a doorman from the late 18th dynasty shows him with a wisted right leg, and with a foreign foot supporting himself on a long stick.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Again, look at the vocabulary here. We have scourges, scarred for life, deformity sufferers, hunchbacks and twisted spines, and Wilkinson even describes the pottery figures buried with people with sorbenous sproculosis as rare examples of sufferers celebrating their disability.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): But he gives us, again, no reason to think that those burials were rare. This rarity is an assumption, not a finding. These are not fringe writers, these are mainstream historians, and that is the point. Ableist framing is the default, and it shapes what historians think they see.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And I just have another example here on the left. This is a reconstruction of King Philip II, who we'll meet later, to show just how ridiculous that first quote is.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Because he was a soldier, and he was also king.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Moving on, this is not new.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is Mark Amard Ruffer, one of the founders of paleopathology. The study of diseased nature remains. In 1911, he publishes on dwarves and other deformed persons in ancient Egypt. The title alone, again, tells you the framework. Disabled people were grouped as deformed purpose.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): To form persons, objects of medical interest, not members of the society, and he also uses other really bad terms on this as well.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And this persists.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is the opening of Christian Laius' Introduction to Disability Antiquity, one of the foundational collections in the field.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): It is a valuable book.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): But, the language in this is absolutely atrocious.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): I'm not gonna even voice these out loud.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Other than to say that these are slurs.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And I've underlined this on the slide. Terms… these are terms that disabled people have long asked scholars to retire, appear without comment in the first pages of a volume meant to set the agenda, and are repeated a grand total of 42 times throughout this book.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): I show you this not to single anyone out, I show it because if our vocabulary still carries these assumptions, our interpretations probably do too. So now, let's shift to testing that against the evidence, starting…


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): with… some other examples. So, just as a final example of the scholarship here.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And then we'll shift to our actual physical evidence.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is…


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): by Robert Garland, who also wrote one of the other foundational talks for the field. This is the introduction to the Eye of the Beholder, published in 1996, and is still one of the most cited books on disability in the Greek and Roman world.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): He writes.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In the comfortable, overprotected, middle-class world of Britain in which I grew up, I was spared the distress and embarrassment of having confronted the formed and disabled in the school classroom.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Life has been more challenging for my son, Richard, who went to school in New York State in the early 1990s, where it is the policy to integrate even severely disabled children into nursery schools.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Again, looking at the language here, disabled children are the deformed and the disabled, sharing a classroom is described as distress and embarrassment, something Garland was spared. By growing up in an overprotected Britain. Inclusion in New York schools is presented as a challenge for his son, not as a right for a disabled person. And I have to say, at the time that this was published, I was also growing up in New York State, and I was 6 years old, and I was in a


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Full mainstream classroom.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): I, again, not quoting this to attack one author, I am quoting it because this is the lens through which much of the field first looked at disability in antiquity. If a historian experiences the presence of disabled children in the classroom as a problem, it is not surprising that he finds it easy to believe that ancient societies removed them.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, now let us shift to our evidence and see what it actually tells us, starting with the most famous family in Macedon in ancient Greece.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, the Argyid dynasty is the royal family of Macedon. It includes Philip II, his son Alexandra the Great, and Alexandra's half-brother, Philip III Aridaeus.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): It is remarkable how many disabled people we can name in and around this one family. The ancient Macedonians, like the Greeks, seems to have recognized three broad kinds of disability, congenital disability, i.e. disability you're born with, acquired disability, and war wounds.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Philip II actually belongs to ward in one of these categories. He was born with what modern specialists describe as underdevelopment of one side of his head, which pulled his jaw off-center. He then acquires a series of war wounds throughout his life.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): He lost his right eye to an arrow in 356 BCE, he shattered his right collarbone around 345. In 339, he took further wounds to his arm and leg, and these injuries limited the use of his arm and left him with a permanent mobility impairment for the rest of his life.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): We also have material evidence from the royal tombs of Regina. The consensus now, though this is still somewhat debated, is that the remains in Tomb 2 are Philip's. Buried with him is a pair of greaves, bronze leg armor, and will…


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Left grieve in this is about 3.5cm shorter than the right, and it bulges outward to fit a badly healed shin. In other words, what we have going on here


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Is his armor was made to fit his impairment. This is an accommodation.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, possibly, it's this move from fighting on foot to fighting on horseback, which historian Richard Gabriel has noted. Animals as mobility aids will come up again today.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): How did Philip feel about his disability? Here, the evidence is more uncomfortable. We have literary attacks. This is from Demetriuson.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Writing about him, quoting, says, Since he had only one eye, Philip would grow up angry if… Philip would grow angry if anyone spoke of the Cyclops and his presence, or used the word eye at all, end quote.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): His portraits tell us a similar story. His coal coins and gold medallions show him his profile from the left, his uninjured side.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Lighter marble baths are idealized, but if we look at a tiny ivory head from Virginia that is only a few centimeters high.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And that's in the top center of your screen, between the reconstruction of him and the Golden Valiant.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): It shows scarring around the right eye and the face that is not symmetrical. It was made for an intimate family setting, and is probably the most accurate portrait of him we have. So, Philip shows us something that will reoccur all…


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): pretty much throughout this talk. Ancient attitudes to disability were mixed, and disabled people themselves disagreed about it, just as they do now. A king could be sensitive about his eye, and still be the king who unified Greece.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): As Philip did.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Two kings later, makes this point even sharper.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Antagonus I surngother Philip, and lost an eye in the siege of Perth Theseus in 340. After Alexander's death, he became one of the most powerful of the successors, and his surname, Mamathamus, means the one-eyed.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Pliny, the historian Pliny, tells us about the court painter Apelles, who painted Antigonus in three-quarter view so that the missing eye would seem to simply be out of the picture.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): He writes.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Apellis also painted a portrait of King Antagonus, who was blind in one eye, and devised an original method of concealing the defect, for he did


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): A likeness in 3 quarter, so that the feature was lacking in the subject, might be thought instead to be absent in the picture, and only show this to the part of the face which he was able to display as unmutitated.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Yet, we see again that the impairment is mentioned in Antagonist's very name.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So we have an interesting kind of…


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): tension going on there. Perseus I of Bentanthia in northern Anatolia, again, was also given the name Colas, the lame. The historian Memnon tells us how. Memnon mentions


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): that Perseus broke his leg when he was hit by a stone while climbing a siegel out at Heraclea. Perseus…


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): put his own portrait on his coins. Early in his reign, what's interesting to note, is that he faces in both directions.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): However, later, he seems to only face one way. One has to wonder whether, like Philip and Antigonus, he chooses to show only one side.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): However, what these two men show is that a war-acquired disability could become part of a royal identity. It was a sign of having a thought, as they both mentioned it in their phone names. Whether you wanted it to be depicted in images of you, however, seems to have remained another question.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And this brings me to the man who was at the center of my current book, which is a biography of Philip III Ardeas.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The basic facts here that we know about him is that Aridaeus was the son of Philip II, and a woman from Melissa in Thessaly, her name is Felina. He was Alexandra's older half-brother.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): He lived from about 359 to 317 BCE. When Alexandra dies in Babylon 323, the infantry acclaimed Aridaeus king under the name Philip.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): He rules jointly with Alexandra's infant son, Alexandra IV, until he was king, killed on the orders of Alexandra's mother, Olympias, about 7 years later in 317 BCE.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The ancient sources describe him as having some kind of mental impairment, never specified.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Plutarch even supplies us a cause. He says Olympias damaged the boy's mind with drugs. That story, however, should make us cautious. It tells us more about how ancient writers saw Olympias than about Eridaeus, and they were trying to portray her exa- in this…


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Instance as being very manipulative.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is where method matters, and this is the method of the biography that I'm writing. We have to keep these two things apart, what the ancient sources actually say, and what modern historians have inferred from them. When we do that.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): A lot of the familiar picture of Aridaeus turns out to be inference, so we should avoid, when we think about him, two easy stories. One is the old character of the Idiot King, a puppet with no part in his own life. The other is a rescue that claims more for him than the evidence allows.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The more honest position that we have from him is that Aridaeus may well have relied on others, and this is entirely compatible with his having agency.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Dependency and agency are not opposites, as most disabled people know today. Most kings also depended on someone.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Two episodes show Wireless Mothers.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The first is that Pixidorus Affair 337 BCE, Philip II arranged to marry Aridaeus to the daughter of Pixidorus, the ruler of Caria in Asia Minor.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): That would have put Aridaeus in line to control the very region Philip planned to use for his invasion of Persia.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Alexandra, for some reason, sees this match as a threat, and he secretly offers himself as the groom instead, and according to Plutarch, told the Carians that his brother was mentally deficient. Philip was furious, and he exiles several of Alexandra's friends as a result.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Whatever else this tells us, though, Philip seems to have thought Arideais fit to marry, to produce heirs, and to hold a strategically vital position.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The second episode comes after 323 BCE. This is after Alexandra's death. Alexandra's funeral carriage was meant to go back to Macedon, but it was diverted to Egypt by Ptolemy.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The officer in charge of it is named in the sources as Eridaeus.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Historians have long assumed that this was a different Ereideus, but the sources do not draw that distinction. As historian Justina Monte has pointed out, historians of this period have invented duplicate people with the same name before.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In my book, I argued that we should at least take seriously the possibility that this was the king himself.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Either way, the point stands here, in that historians, or prior historians, have been so sure Aridaeus could do nothing that they created a second non-disabled Aridaeus to do it. And considering his staff, which is the other fascinating piece about him, Olympias has him killed. If he were the harmless figurehead of modern accounts, it would have been easier to keep him alive and roll through him, so she seems to have continued to see


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): as a threat up to the point of having him killed.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): What is, again, also fascinating him is the Egyptians at least treated him as a legitimate pharaoh.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): On the slide here, I have his cartouches. Only royalty had their names written inside a cartouche.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And beside them is a photograph of his granite Shrine, Ernios at Karnac, taken by Maxine Duchamp in 1849. The shrine stands beside the sanctuary of Hatshepsut. Its inscription says that Philip restored a decaying structure of Thutmoses III, who was a prior pharaoh.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): On its walls, and this is the close-up that you can see on the upper right.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): He wears the Aethev crown and the white crown of Upper Egypt, holds the second supper of authority, is purified and crowned by Thoth and Horus, and kneels before Amun to receive life and confirmation of his kingship.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): There is also a basalt water clock, a klapsidra, now in the British Museum, from about 320 BCE. It shows Eridaeus as Pharaoh in the red crown of Lower Egypt, offering wine to men and to Sekhmet.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And second is the Galless of War, and you have to remember that this time period was a time period that was filled with warfare after Alexandra's death, as various successors vied for control.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So he is shown in this position as actively protecting Egypt.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And just also on this slide is that there are coins minted in his name across the Greek world.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Ptolemy controlled Egypt during these years, yet the monuments are in Philip's name.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Whatever the realities of power, the Egyptians recognized Eridaeus as king, and as a living god. They gave him a recognition that modern historians have largely withheld.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This same bias may affect how we read these small ivory heads that we met with Philip II from Virginia.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): They are usually identified as Philip II, Alexandra, Olympias, and Philip's parents.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Amatos and Eurydice.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This identification leans on the ancient historian's Pausanias' description of statues by Leocarius in the Philippian Olympia. But those were golden ivory statues at a different site, and they don't survive.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): When we look up the faces very, very closely, only one male figure is bearded and that is Philip.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In nematodes' generation, grown men wore beards. The clean, safe, and fashion begins with Alexander. So why would Philip's father appear as a beardless youth? I have suggested that this figure instead could be Ereudeus, a young, unmarried man of Alexandra's generation, and that the second woman could be one of Philip's daughters.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): That would make this the immediate royal family, it is a hypothesis, but it is also worth asking why it has not been considered, and whether the answer is that Aridaeus was assumed to have been unworthy of a portrait by modern-day historians.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Herapolis was Alexandra's cousin, moving on to other people outside the immediate Macedon Romo family. He was Alexandra's cousin and childhood friend, and he was educated with him at Mesia under Aristotle.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Arian tells us that Alexandra made him treasurer, since, quote, his body was unfit for warfare, end quote.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Modern historians generally take us to mean that he has a mobility impairment, perhaps buttfoot.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): However, when he again gets interesting, you look at what Alexandra did. He does not exclude Harpalis, he gives him one of the most important jobs in the empire, and later made him a satrap, i.e. a provincial governor. Harpalis then, of course, repays him.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): By embezzling from the Treasury more than once and fleeing to Athens.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is a story about character, and not about disability. And interestingly, it is how the historians usually tell it. Hartless is judged on what he did, not on his body.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The images I have on this slide show how Harpalis and the companions have been imagined in film, and what's interesting about this in film is that Harpois is usually rewritten to be non-disabled, even when the ancient historians say that he was.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Moving on, again, broader from Alexandra out to elsewhere in ancient Greece.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In 330 BCE, on the road to Persepolis, Alexandra's army met a group of prisoners. The Persians had trained them as craftsmen and had cut off whatever parts of their bodies their work did not need. Hands, feet, noses, and ears. Some had even been blinded.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The ancient historian Diodorus puts their number at about 800. The ancient historian Curtis Rufus gives the fullest account.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): He says that Alexander wept with them, and he offers them a choice to return to Greece with an escort and money, or to stay and be provided for. They end up choosing to stay, with the Persian families they had built, rather than face verticule at home.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Disability scholars such as M. Miles have described this as the first recorded case of disabled people being given this decision over their own future and recognized as having agency.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Now, again, when we look at how modern historians have treated this, It has been cold.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): A metaphor?


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): A sheer rhetorical virtuosity.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): For the sake of it, probably fact-fictitious, and a fiction worked up by Curtius, end quote.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Yet, these same scholars rely on Curtius elsewhere as being a reliable historian.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): As the historian Guy McQueen Wadros observed, historians who scour discourses for every example of Alexandra's cruelty pass over this humane act in silence. There is no consistent reason to dismiss this one episode, except it does not fit in the assumption about how disabled people were treated, so modern-day historians generally just discard it.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This assumption also breaks down when we look at Alexandra's army as a whole.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is the argument of a new chapter of mine called Earned of Mercy. Its starting point is economic. Phillips II's army depended on the following. This is a box of infantry made up of… using the Sarissa, which is a pike, which is up to 6 meters long.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Using it well took sponsor years of drilling and practice.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And a trained soldier was expounced up to replace, so it made sense to keep wounded men alive and useful.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Philip, as the historian F.S. Mattian has noted, organized his army doctors better than any ancient Greek state.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Some ancient Greek states also supported disabled citizens.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Athens paid a pension, we know, of one obel a day to citizens who were disabled and too poor to work. We know about this from a speech by Lysias written for a man accused of faking his disability to claim it. So, we also have that rhetoric going on even back then.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): As historian Justin Biggie has shown, the speech lets us hear him describe his own access needs.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): He walks with two crutches and burrows horses for longer journeys.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): To his accuser, this horse proved that he was able-bodied rather than being recognized as a mobility aid.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): To him, it is simply another mobility aid.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Philip's innovation was to build care like this into the Army itself.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Alexandra inherited that system and stretched it across Asia.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Arian tells us that after the Battle of the Granicus, he visits the wounded, examine their injuries, and let each man tell his story. When the Persians killed him, you know the way to the six Macedonians, left behind at Issus, the army was outraged.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): These men were not stragglers to be written off, they were part of how the army worked.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And, when Alexandra founded new cities, he settled them with veterans who could no longer fight.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Alexandra says this about Alexandria and the gyarxes in Central Asia. These men held garrisons, kept the supply lines open, and let the army keep moving.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And again, compare this to what other modern-day historians have said. Robin Lane Fox, who writes out of the Issus, Alexandra, quote, abandoned all stragglers and invalids, or…


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): To quote Chinatus again, Stenatis' soldiers living as a burden, end quote. The evidence points the other way.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): An opus in 324 BCE, Alexander called a mutiny by pointing to his own scars, saying there was no part of the front of his body left unwounded. He then sent thousands of veterans home with their pay and a bonus. Wounds were badges of service.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The Ptolemies.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): whose founder, again, Ptolemy I, had served under Alexandra as one of his generals, turned this into a system. In Egypt, soldiers received land grants, called clericies, in return for continued service.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The holdings stayed tied to military status, so a man who became disabled kept his land in his standing.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The Egyptian professional soldiers the Makamoy, were also tied to land, as historian Chris Shell Fisher-Wevert has shown. And historian Ella Karev's work on papyri shows that following impairments were routinely recorded as identifying features in official documents.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Disability was written into administration in ancient Egypt, in Ptolemaic Egypt. The result, I argue, was a class of disabled veterans who held land, local office, and royal family and royal favor. In Ptolemaic Egypt, therefore, the disabled became the elite.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): One more episode shows the limits of all of this.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Kalanos was an Indian philosopher, one of the aesthetics that the Greeks called Gymnosophists, who traveled with Alexandra from India.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): At Susa, aged about 73, he found himself failing.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Rather than live with an impairment that would change his way of life, he chooses to die on the funeral pyre. Alexandra begs him not to.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): But when Catlinos would not be moved, Alexander had Ptolemy build the pyre. This painting that I have in the background by Jeanne Baptiste de Champagne in 1672 shows Alexander receiving the news.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Kalanos believed it was better to be dead than disabled.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Alexander and the Macedonians did not.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Here we see two cultures' ideas about the disability meeting and disagreeing. And once again, as with the mutilated Greeks, Alexander respected the disabled person's decision even when he personally disagreed with it.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): But Catlinosa's view was not unique.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): There is a well-known claim in today's society that the Greeks themselves killed disabled babies. I want us to now look at that claim carefully and evaluate the actual evidence that we have for and against this.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, if you've heard one thing about disability in ancient Greece, it is probably this.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The Spartan, the Spartans either killed or threw disabled babies off a mountain. It appears in textbooks, documentaries, and popular history. It is often stretched to cover the whole Greek world, so let us do what historians should always do, and look at the evidence for and against this.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, an evidence for infanticide.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is the key text. This is from Protarchs Lycurgos.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And he basically says, a Spartan father brought his newborn to a place called the Leshy. The elders of the tribe examined the child. If it was sturdy, it was raised and given the share of land. It was not. It was taken to the Apothea chasm at the foot of Mount Tarte.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Tagitas. This is a vivid passage.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): But consider who wrote it and when.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The historian Plutarch is writing about the turn of the 2nd century CE, roughly 700 years after Lycurgus is supposedly to have lived. He opens life by admitting that about Lycurgus, quote, it is not possible to say anything that is undisputed, end quote.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Put, Plato, and Xenophon, both other historians and philosophers, both discuss Lycurgus as a lawgiver, and Xenophon writes a whole treaty on the Spartan constitution. Neither mentions such a law. It appears nowhere else.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And Plutarch was not writing history as we understand it. His lives are moral portraits meant to give an impression of a man's character.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): He is also known to use disability metaphorically for rhetorical effect.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So this is a single, very late source, written for moral purposes, about a figure even its author thought was half-legend.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The second tax usually cited is Plato's Republic.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In this, Socrates proposes that children of the best parents be raised in the special nursery, while the children of inferior parents, or if any deformed children of good parents, be put away in some mysterious, unknown place.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): But again, when we look at what the Republic is, it is not a description of Athens as it was. It is a thought experiment about an ideal state. Greek society as Plato would build it if he could, not as he knew it. If anything, the fact that he has to propose this suggests it was not the normal or standard practice.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This matters. As historian Justin Biggie points out, eugenicists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Francis Galton, read these utopian passages as if they described real Greek practice, and then used them to justify their own programs.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Aristotle says something similar.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): He says, quote, let there be a law that no deformed child shall be weird, end quote. But again, let's look at the grammar of the sentence.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Let there be. This is a proposal. In this part of the politics, Aristotle is designing the best possible city. He is not describing one that exists, or existed.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And notice too, that the same passage worries about parents who are too old or too young. It is a program of state control over reproduction, and it is just as hypothetical as the passage we just looked at.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So the three most quoted texts


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): are one late moralizing biography, and two philosophical utopias. This is a very thin foundation for a claim about how Greeks actually behaved, and the reason why I think it has come to such popular consciousness


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): It's because it is our modern society finds it easy to believe based on our own practices.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The other main source of evidence that we have for infanticide in ancient Greece is a myth.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The most famous exposed baby in Greek myth is Oedipus, shown here in Johannheimer Cleric's painting of his discovery.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): But look at why he was exposed. It was NOT because he was disabled. It was because of a prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother. His ankles were pierced before he was left on the mountain, and his name is usually explained as swollenfoot.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In other words, Oedipus becomes disabled because he was exposed, not the other way around.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): He then grew up, was raised by a royal family, and became king.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): If anything, he is evidence that a disabled man could rule. So much, then, for the case in favor. What does our other side of evidence look like?


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, evidence against… Infanticide in ancient Greece.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): We actually, again, have a lot of it.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): We're starting with doctors.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The Hippocratic writings, so, from the physician Hippocrates, from around 400 BCE onwards, discuss many conditions that someone could be born with.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): No Hippocratic writer ever says whether parents should kill or raise a disabled baby. What they do instead is describe disabled people living and working. Here is a passage from the Treatsie on Joints.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And basically, in this, it describes people who are, quote, weasel-armed from birth, meaning they had some… a shortened upper arm and lib difference. The writer explains what they can and cannot do with it. They cannot raise their arm above their ear, but they can saw, they can swing an axe, and they can dig.


237
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is a description of disabled adults doing manual work. They were raised, they grew up, and they had jobs.


238
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This same treat C.


239
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Describes how to treat clubfoot.


240
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Congenital locomfort, the writer says, is mostly curable if treated, Early.


241
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And I also have an image there on the slide of what looks like.


242
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): the treatment… For Clubfoot


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): It's to manipulate the foot gently back into position, bandage it with sow and soft linen, and fit a sole of leather or lead.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): It is a careful patient process over a long period, and it is not far from the method used today to treat this.


245
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Why would a doctor write detailed instructions for treating condition in newborns if those newborns were routinely killed? You do not write a treatment plan for babies that nobody ends up keeping.


246
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And what I have on the right here is just a statue of a young man.


247
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Who, despite other things going on, seems to have had this treatment for clubfoot, because if you look closely at his sandals, one of his feet is bandaged up, like described, whereas the other one appears to just be a regular sandal.


248
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Finally, in terms of evidence we have, again, for the keeping of disabled infants in ancient Greek society, we have archaeology.


249
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In the Athenian Agora, there is a well known as the bone well, dated to about 165 to 150 BCE. It held the remains of at least 459 infants. It looked exactly what the infanticide story would predict.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In 2018, archaeologists Maria Liston, Susan Rothroff, and Lynn Snyder published a full study of the remains. What is surprising is that most of these babies died within the week of birth.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The causes were overwhelmingly natural. Premature birth, low birth weight, infection, hemorrhage, and conditions such as cleft palate and hydrocephalus.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In the ancient world, babies who died that young often had a liminal status.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): They were not yet full members of the community, and they were given informal burials like in this well. It does not mean that they were deliberately killed.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Two cases stand out, from this. One infant showed signs of having, unfortunately, died from abuse. Abuse happened in the ancient world as it does today, and we should say so.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): But another more interesting case was another child who was 6-8 months old and had hydrocephalus, a buildup of fluid on the brain.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Hydrocephalus is progressive. A baby with it does not survive 6 months without care, so someone had to feed and look after that child for as long as they could, knowing what was coming.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): A feeding bottle like these, these are on the left-hand side of your screen, next to that, infant's skull.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): We're found in the well itself.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Some sellers have argued that such bottles held sour milk or had a purely ritual purpose. There is a lot of effort, again, to avoid the obvious explanation. As historian Debbie Sneed has shown, these bottles release liquid slowly, without the baby needing to suck on them to get the nutrients. This is exactly what a modern bottle for a baby with puff palate does.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And at least 7 infants in the well had cough pallets. A feeding bottle is an assistive device, and this one was buried with a child it belonged to.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): It is worth adding that in Egypt, as Egyptologist Rosalie David.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Rosalie David, rather, has noted, infanticide seems to have been essentially absent into the Roman period.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): I have argued that this connects to Ma'at, the Egyptian idea of causing balance and order, which destroying a child would have violated. Historians of Ptolemaic Egypt have remarked on the absence of instantacide, as if it were surprising. But what does it say about us that we assume that it was the default?


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): As Sneed concludes, killing disabled infants was not the rule in ancient Greece, even if we cannot say it never happened. It supports the opposite. Disabled children were treated, fed, and raised. Some of them, as we are about to see, also appear in art.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Let us now turn to a disability that runs through the rest of this talk, and the one that I have myself.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Cerebral palsy.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Cerebral palsy is a disability that affects movement, balance, posture, coordination, and motor skills. It is usually, then not always, caused by damage to the developing brain, before birth, during birth, or shortly afterwards, and it is often associated with premature birth.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Today, it is one of the most common disabilities you can be born with, and the most common physical disability in childhood, affecting roughly 4 in every thousand births worldwide, and that being said, these disabled children then presumably grow up to be disabled adults like myself.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): There are several subtypes.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And the way cerebral palsy shows itself varies a great deal from person to person. Some forms are very visible, others are hard to spot unless you know what to look for. That point matters for what follows, because modern pregnancy and birth care did not exist in antiquity, cerebral palsy was almost certainly common, and so we should expect to find it.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And those several different subtypes are your muscles could be overly rigid, or your muscles could be overly, floppy, or you could be like me, where you have a mixture of types.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And before long, I just want to say, we do find it long before the Ptolemies.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The earliest case on the slide is Gehazet, and she's on the right here. She is a woman of high status from the 13th Dynasty Egypt, buried at Draba Naga in western Thebes. She was about 5 feet tall and moved to 50 year older.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): 50 years old, or older, rather.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): When a team led by bioarchaeologist Sandra Lush, Stephanie Panzier, and Andreas Nierlich examined her skeleton, they found that her teeth and jaw joint were worn much more heavily on one side, and that her left hand shows signs of, again, being hyperextended inflection.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Together, these led to a diagnosis of cerebral palsy. She was given an elaborate upper-class burial.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And we know from historical records that she was part of the Pharaoh's court, and she was married to a judge named Amini.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): From the 19th dynasty, there is the pharaoh Sipta.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Again, the unusual position of his arms and hands and his mummified remains has led some to diagnose cerebral palsy, although some others have argued for polio.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Herodotus describes the Chroninthian noblewoman Labda as born lame, with her feet turned outwards like the Greek leather Lambda. She became the mother of the tyrant, Chilepsius.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And we also have the Hippocratic writers of the 5th century BCE linking difficult and premature birth to children who later bore a distortion of the mouth, eye, hand, or neck.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, cerebral palsy was recognized, described, and lived with at every level of society in ancient Egypt and ancient Greece.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Okay, these are some of my favorite objects,


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is all actually one object on the slide. In the center is a terracotta figure in the British Museum. This is probably from Alexandria, dating to the 1st century BCE, to the 2nd century CE.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): It shows an older child using a walking frame. This frame has a triangular base and a wheel at each corner and the bar to hold.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The struggle of head tilts slightly to one side, and the knees bend inwards on one leg is more musculature than the other. These features are consistent with cerebral palsy, and again, I have a reference for those there on the lower right… on the lower left, rather.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This figure was made in a mold, which means it was mass-produced. There was a market, therefore, for images of the disabled child shown carefully and with care.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Someone also had to have designed and built that walker, and something else that's really interesting to note is that the walker has three wheels, like the self-moving wheel tripods that the disabled god Hephaestus builds in the Iliad. It is possible those famous automatons are better understood as walking frames.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And the other interesting thing to note about this figure is that this child's gender cannot be ascertained, so I argue in my own research, because there is evidence that this figure was painted, that it was a possibility that you could go buy and then get it painted to be customizable to be whatever gender you wanted.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And this brings me to my next example of cerebral palsy.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Which is Harper Cradius.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And this is a mythological example. Harpercrates is a Greco-Egyptian god. He's a child, form of Horus, which he names means Horus the child.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): He was the son of Isis, and depending upon the myth, the heir of Osiris, or the son of the Ptolemaic god Serapis, he was the god of secrets, confidentiality, and silence, the embodiment of hope, and the newborn son.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): He was also protectors of mothers and children, and connected with the solar cult of Toscopyrus, and with the mortuary cult, and with the cult of Seraphis.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The crucial piece of text on the bottom of the slide here, in bold, is Plutarch describing Harper Cradius as, quote.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): prematurely delivered and weakened his lower limbs, end quote. It is worth noting that Plutarch's lifetime overlapped with that of the Roman Emperor Claudius.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): who many historians and doctors now believe had cerebral palsy, and this may have shaped how Poptarch described him. But when we look at the art, which is earlier, the signs are definitely there, of this god definitely having CP.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And I should say how I came to see that. I noticed these features because of my own embodied experience of cerebral palsy. Most of the poses I am about to show you are ones medical professionals recognize as signs of CP, and they are also ones that my own body knows and experiences on a fairly regular basis.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, to read these figures, it helps to know what we are looking for. On the left is a diagram of what physiotherapists call crouch gait, which is one of the most common walking patterns in CEP.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The hips and the knees stay bent, and the ankles fucks upwards. On the right is a photograph of a child's legs, showing the same thing. The knees turns inwards and tops, while the lower legs and feet flow outwards.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Keep these two images in mind, both knees are there not bent enough to be sitting, and knees turning inwards, weight carried on evenly, one side being stronger than the other. We are going to see all of these again and again in images of her Pakrades.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, here's just my first set of images here.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): These are bronze figures of Harper Critters standing in the classic pose of his finger to his lips.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The gesture, like the sidelock of hair, was an Egyptian sign of childhood, and it comes from the hieroglyph used to write the word for child.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Figures like these were maids in bronze, copper, terracotta, and glass, often from molds, which tell us that they were popular, everyday religious objects. They were protective amulets and statues for temples, shrines, and household shrines.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): At first glance, he looks non-disabled, but if we look closely at the legs in almost all of these.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Many of the figures described in museum catalogs are bent, or even sitting.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): If you look closely, though, the knees are not bent far enough to be sitting. They are slightly bent and turned in exactly as the crab skate we have just seen. And I have an actual, example here that I have marked sitting.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): That is what a genuinely seated Harper Critias looked like, with the seat surviving and his hands resting differently. So his hand is flat out in that example, as opposed to being straight down in those other examples, where he appears to be standing.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, the impairment in all of these seems to be clearly shown, it's just simply not recognized, and I also really like this example from the Petrie Museum in the middle here, where his head is tilted to the side as well.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Herpocritis is often shown as a baby being carried or nursed by his mom, Isis. Some of these figures show an infant whose body looks entirely typical, others do not.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In several Greek-style figures, Isis hold Harpakrides on her hip. His knees are bent inwards and touched.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And flare outwards at the lower feet.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In a knockinged, pigeon-toed position, typical of infants and young children with cerebral palsy. His whole body is limp and falls into an S shape, and he does not seem to be able to hold up his head.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Again, I have a matching diagram here from a physiotherapy, clinic, shows what this looks like in the real baby. Hypotonia, which means low muscle tone.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In another group, we have Harper Cradius sitting on Isis' lap while she offers him her breast. Isis sits perfectly straight. Harper Critias, however, is leaning over to one side, his arm… left arm bent, his left hand turned inwards.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): One side of the body appears to be weaker than the other, again, and that is the typical sign of cerebral palsy. So, and the other thing to note is we have more Greek-looking examples and more Egyptian-looking examples here, and the signs seem to be the same.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Another large group of figures, all show Harper Cradius sitting or half-crawling, with his legs out to one side. Most of these are terracotta and mold-made. He often holds a cornucopia.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): A goose or a jar, and lithuses on the feather reef on his head.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And again, we have the floppy child seating position here, and then we have the figures.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And it's worth noting that many infants with CP never crawl on the usual 4-point way or crawl at all. They use whatever limbs are strongest, or skip crawling altogether. Harpercritius is never shown fully crawling. He half sets, as we can see here, and half crawls, often dragging one leg folded in front or behind him, while the other sticks out at an angle.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And we see more examples of that, or we'll see more examples of that in a minute.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): When he sits, his legs go out to the side in what is called a wide-based posture, which helps compensate for poor balance in weak core muscles.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The other thing to note about those examples, and we'll see this again in other examples, is that he does have lotus flowers placed in strategic locations. They refer to the silver god Nefertum, but the Egyptians also, we know, use lotuses for pain relief.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And pain is common in CP, especially the, form where you have more rudid muscles.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This drawing, again, is a reference post. It comes from a manual for therapists, parents, and community workers caring for children with cerebral palsy. I include it because it shows in the modern teaching drawing a child in exactly the sitting position we have just seen in the terracottas, and will continue to see in the terracottas.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Ancient artists were not making medical diagrams, but they were observing real children, and they showed what they saw so, what they saw faithfully. Though the modern therapist's illustration in the 2,000-year figure can sit by side by side, as we'll see, and look relatively the same. So that was the pose, these are the figures.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): These are Harper Cradius Terracanas.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): From various museum collections worldwide, you can see the same features, the wide-based setting position, legs to one side, one leg trailing, and the slightly limp-leaning posture.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): I also want to point out the two objects at the bottom right here. These are molds. Figures like these were produced in large numbers from molds like this, which means, again, that there was a mass market for them. People wanted larger images of this god, and were willing to pay for them, and a body that looked like the bodies of children they knew.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And again, we have lotuses in these figures, again, placed on his head here as well.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In the Hellenistic world, Harpercrates was also combined with Greek gods.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): As Harper created his arrows here on the left, he keeps a standing pose.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Sometimes, with his fingers to his lips, but he gains wings on this pose. The figure on the left is a Harper Cradius leaning against the support outside.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): It's interesting here is looking at how he stands. Again, we have one leg being relatively more muscular than the other, and he puts most of the weight on that stronger leg. We also have a gold, pendant of Harpacrades Eros, that shows us the same thing. His left leg is the stronger one, and both knees are, again, turned inwards.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Even when Harvikradius is blended with the Greek gods, the signs of cerebral palsy remain, and even when the medium of the figure changes, as we see here with the bronze figure.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Or the more metal figure, the pose remains as well.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): These are plaque stone objects to sit by, small steel ice showing Horse the Child standing on the backs of crocodiles and strangling snakes in each hand, in a pose that echoes the god Tyicos, whom we'll meet later. The head of bass.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Protector of women and children in childbirth, and children often appears above him, and the rest of the surface is covered in magical texts. Sipai were used in healing, water was preserved over them, collected, and given to patients as part of their treatment.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Interestingly, the Herpocryuses on these figures has moat canes, Or mobility aids.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And on the right here, we just have, Harpercrates among the major gods, being given offerings by Ptolemy IV and Arsenome III, king and queen of Egypt at the time. And what's interesting is Harpercrates here, and the goddess behind him is again offering him a cane, perhaps as a mobility aid.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And the Ptolemies want to be associated with his cult, is what this means as well. So he was a major Egyptian deity.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Sold mold-made terracotta, so Carpocrates as a statue inside of a Rodocene, so these are essentially statues of statues of Harpacrides.


344
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): These are ones that show him seated in a shrine, often carried by priests.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Inside the shrine, we see him in that same wide-based position, where his legs to one side, holding a pot or a cornucopia.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In one example, the shrine rests on the carrying pole, shaped like a Lewis column, with an altar and an offering beneath it.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): These figures matter for two reasons. They show the signs of cerebral palsy once again, and they give us a glimpse of real religious ritual. The Egyptian tradition of carrying the god statue out of the temple of procession for the public to see was still alive in the Ptolemaic period under Greek rule.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This brings us to the people who served Harper-Creaties.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): On the left, Is an interesting figure,


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is interesting because this is a priest of Harpacrades, who appears in a long robe, who's holding a basket on his left forearm, and what's interesting about him is we notice that both hands here are bent very, very sharply downwards.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Against his body. And that hand positioning closer resembles what we see in the remains of Gehazet and the memory of Shipta. Gehazet's remains here, I have, again, as a comparison.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And not every priest's department is shown this way, but the pattern shows a real possibility that people with similar impairments may have been recruited or chose to serve these disabled gods. We cannot say whether they had special access because of their disability, or simply entered the priesthood like anyone else.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And I… we also have an interesting example here, and this relates to my earlier point.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): of a Harpercrates dressed as a Macedonian soldier as well.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, we're seeing the God being created, perhaps, in the image


356
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Of these disabled war veterans, too.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Harpacrades also had a female form, Harpacratus, and her figures repeat the same poses.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): As we can see here, in one painted pottery figure, she holds her fingers to her lips in a cornucopia, wearing a Greek tunic and the double crown of Egypt.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Despite the long dress, you can see that… you can see that she stands with a wide stance, her knees bent, and turned inwards on her left leg larger than her right. We also have another terracotta shows her seated with her legs to one side, another one here shows her riding a ram in exactly the position Harpercrates took on the goose in the earlier,


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Image, with one leg trailing behind the other.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): I also have an example of her leaning her arms on an altar, perhaps for stability.


362
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And carries part of the Middle Kingdom text, The Instructions of Keddie, which praises the sedentary life of the scribe over physical labor. Read that with her impairment in mind, and that choice of text may not be an accident.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): It is striking that the two female gods who have female counterparts, Bass of Bassett, who we'll meet later, and Harpercrates of Harpacratus, are both disabled. The Egyptians seem to have understood dwarfism and cerebral palsy as permanent,


364
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Congenital parts, or parts that these gods were born with, of who these gods were, whatever their gender.


365
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And again, just noticing lotuses appearing on some of Harper Critias' societies here as well.


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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Harpercrates was not only a Ptolemaic phenomenon, these objects, again, that I've collected from various museums worldwide, taken from the late Ptolemaic period into the Roman Empire and across very different media. We have a seal, fans, amulets, gold plagues, and a carved gemstone.


367
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The scale is different, the materials are different, and the artistic style moves between more Egyptian and more Greek, but the poses, again, are recognizably the same.


368
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Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): These examples stretched across the timeline for still, from the New Kingdom Phaiance Amulet, which is the earliest example I found, through the Third Intermediate and Late Pyramids to Late Ptolemaic and Roman figures.


369
01:04:23.961 --> 01:04:29.090
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Several show Isis nursing the infant Horus, a motif with a very long history in Egypt.


370
01:04:29.621 --> 01:04:38.860
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Again, the point of these is continuity. The way the infant's god's body is shown is consistent across well over a thousand years and changes the ruling culture.


371
01:04:39.151 --> 01:04:59.451
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And I also really love this Roman image, because it shows him seated directly on the lotus, again, with the affected leg pointing outwards. And we have to remember that lotuses were, again, were used by the Egyptians by pain relief, so they are applying them to his head and to his legs, which are the two affected parts of his body, if you remember Plutarch's quote.


372
01:05:03.581 --> 01:05:10.570
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Now, here are two more seated figures, one Ptolemaic Roman, shown with its mold, and one Roman.


373
01:05:10.571 --> 01:05:27.761
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The mold, again, is the important thing. These were not one-off commissions for an elite patron, and this was not, as some Egyptologists have tried to argue, an artistic mistake. They are deliberately creating him in that pose, and this also shows that that pose is not the sign of wear from the objects either.


374
01:05:30.101 --> 01:05:38.830
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): But again, these were made in quantity, which means that the image of the disabled gods was a familiar, everyday sight in homes and shrines during this period.


375
01:05:39.041 --> 01:05:40.670
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Or during these periods.


376
01:05:45.721 --> 01:05:57.830
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): On the left, we have a late Ptolemaic fans figure of Harper Cradius. In the center is a case of some of the Witch's objects at the Field Museum in Chicago, photographed by Karen Clovelards, and on the right is a say-period plague.


377
01:05:58.551 --> 01:06:00.450
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): plaque, rather.


378
01:06:02.321 --> 01:06:12.901
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And what's interesting to note about this is the Chicago example. Karen has an example of a Harper Cradies where they tried to build that Harper Cradius a seat.


379
01:06:13.591 --> 01:06:23.751
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And if you look at it, that really doesn't look right. This is probably one of those standing harpac radiuses that should be standing and is not, because the seated position doesn't work.


380
01:06:26.201 --> 01:06:34.770
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): But I also include these, these museum cases deliberately. Objects like these are often on display, the material is there, it's just no one's recognized it.


381
01:06:35.321 --> 01:06:40.330
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is another museum display of Isis and Horus, or Isis Harbaccrates, from Durham.


382
01:06:42.911 --> 01:06:58.280
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This presents mother and child as popular family gods of the lay period, which they were. What it does not mention, the label here in the case, is anything about the child's body that silences the normal state of affairs and museum interpretation, and is something that we can change if needed.


383
01:07:00.721 --> 01:07:10.421
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): These late-period bronze and faience groups, photographed by Julia Winrich, thank you, Julia, again, show Isis and Throne of Harpocrates, surrounded by other gods.


384
01:07:10.721 --> 01:07:16.731
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And these came from Germany. Harper Cradius is the center of the family of the gods, and not on its margins.


385
01:07:17.071 --> 01:07:26.841
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And what's also really interesting about these examples is Herpocretius is seated in these examples, but we have the god Bess, surrounding and protecting Herpocrates' legs here.


386
01:07:28.051 --> 01:07:38.180
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And his hat, in this example, he's wearing our best mask. And we also have him seated directly on images of lotuses and papyri, which, again, are used for pain relief.


387
01:07:38.551 --> 01:07:43.601
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So we see them on the back here, where they're touching his head, and he's skated on there, and we see them on the side of the throne there.


388
01:07:53.811 --> 01:07:56.801
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is a museum wall case of amulets.


389
01:07:57.351 --> 01:08:01.810
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And I end this part of the talk with it because it makes a simple point of this all.


390
01:08:01.861 --> 01:08:22.961
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): These are very small objects that are very, very detailed. Again, this is not a artistic mistake, and I also just want to point out that museums already have this material in their collections, and much of it is on display. Disability is not missing from the ancient record. It is a question of identifying it, and having people in their room who know what they are looking at.


391
01:08:24.511 --> 01:08:29.380
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): To test whether these features in HarperCrates are deliberate, we also need comparison.


392
01:08:29.540 --> 01:08:41.190
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): What did Egyptian artists do when they showed a mother and infant who were not disabled? We have some examples from the Broken Museum, which are some of the best examples from much earlier time periods.


393
01:08:41.521 --> 01:08:50.181
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): On the left is the Old Kingdom Alabaster statue of Queen Anchus Mary II, holding her son Pepe II, who came to the throne as a child.


394
01:08:50.580 --> 01:08:57.821
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): On the middle… on the right, is a Middle Kingdom statue of a woman with child. This is a princess nursing her son.


395
01:08:58.490 --> 01:09:12.761
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): When we look at how these children are sewn, Pepe sits upright and compact on his mother's lap, his body is straight and controlled, like a very small adult king. There is no limpness, no S-curve, no leaning to one side, and no turned-in knees.


396
01:09:13.001 --> 01:09:28.311
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Egyptian artists could show an infant's body as fully operate and symmetrical when they wanted to. This makes the different treatment of Harpercrates all the more meaningful. And what we have here on the right is an infant who is actively engaged with breastfeeding, unlike Harpercrates, who does not seem to be.


397
01:09:31.431 --> 01:09:40.741
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And this is one more comparison. This is a… again, a knewing princess nursing a child from the Middle Kingdom to Second Intermediate Period, shown from several angles.


398
01:09:41.051 --> 01:09:46.040
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Again, the child is held close and compact, and the figure is balanced and symmetrical.


399
01:09:46.891 --> 01:10:01.080
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): If we again compare that to the figures of Isis Nursing Harpercrates, the difference is clear. When artists showed Harpercrates with his heads unsupported, his body falling into an S shape on one side weaker than the other, they were making a choice that is not seen here.


400
01:10:05.281 --> 01:10:23.290
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In a new chapter, Mirror Mirror, I look at something further. In the Ptolemaic period, Harpercrates was also shown as a soldier. On the 2nd century BCE terracotta shaped like a shield, as we can see here. He wears the equipment of Egyptian machinimos, a short tonic, leather straps, called terracottes.


401
01:10:23.291 --> 01:10:32.400
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): A rectangular shield and a sword. Elsewhere, he rides a horse in the Macedonian cloak and curios, sometimes wearing the Macedonian Kazia hat.


402
01:10:33.371 --> 01:10:47.511
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): He also rides skis, and in one case an elephant, the greatest weapon of Ptolemaic armies. In many of these, again, his impairment is not hidden. His legs bend in an F shape, or one trails behind him, or he leans forward against the horse's neck.


403
01:10:47.701 --> 01:10:50.191
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Why would a disabled God


404
01:10:50.581 --> 01:11:00.420
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): child God be dressed as a soldier? Again, recall the veterans who I mentioned earlier. In Ptolemaic Egypt, soldiers towered land, and many were disabled by their service.


405
01:11:00.921 --> 01:11:18.370
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Jedrazarski has…zek, rather, has argued that the Makimoi took part in the cults of Harpercrates and Bass, these cheap, portable figures could travel from garrison to garrison, and they argued that they showed a god whose body mirrored the bodies of the soldiers who bought them.


406
01:11:20.481 --> 01:11:26.670
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Turning now to mobility impairments in Egypt itself, before we turn to the Greek god Hephaestus and Jagusoleus.


407
01:11:28.191 --> 01:11:47.441
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Tutankhamun is perhaps the best-known disabled pharaoh. Studies of his mummified remains, including the 2010 genetic and CT study led by Zahi Hawass, concluded that he had a club foot and bone disease in his left foot. Over 100 walking sticks and staffs were buried with him, many of which show signs of use.


408
01:11:49.001 --> 01:12:04.021
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): I have put him besides Philip II here deliberately, both for rulers of mobility impairments. Philip had armor made to fit his injured leg and fight on horseback. Tutankhamun had his sticks and was buried with chariots. Yet, these two have been treated very differently.


409
01:12:04.101 --> 01:12:14.210
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Philip is remembered as a warrior king who joins a part of his story. Tutankhamun's reconstruction, by contrast, has sometimes been used to present him as pale and printable.


410
01:12:14.341 --> 01:12:24.791
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And what's also really striking about this image is instead, instead of showing him as, like, this really powerful king, the artist here chose to depict him in his underwear.


411
01:12:25.651 --> 01:12:29.910
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The evidence is comparable, therefore, and the framing is not.


412
01:12:30.801 --> 01:12:42.801
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And I just also really want to note, another interesting piece from Putin Common's tomb, as that the chairs in his tomb were found with these linen straps on them that Carter tossed, so they unfortunately don't survive.


413
01:12:46.301 --> 01:12:53.961
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And before I came along, the two leading theories about these straps were that they acted as a do-not-sit sign to tell people not to sit in the king's chairs.


414
01:12:54.671 --> 01:13:01.361
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Or that they were used to carry the chairs, and neither of those theories really make sense. I argue that these were perhaps harnesses.


415
01:13:01.851 --> 01:13:11.941
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): designed to either secure Teuton common or, cushions to the chair to help with his mobility and him sitting upright in the chair. And I think that makes more sense.


416
01:13:16.251 --> 01:13:31.841
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And as for why the chair theory doesn't make sense, we do have other depictions of the ancient Egyptians carrying things to a tomb. This isn't really a funerary scene, and we see this person here carrying the chair around by the bottom of the legs with no straps. So that's why that theory doesn't make sense.


417
01:13:35.021 --> 01:13:47.021
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Okay, on the right is one of the most famous disability images from Egypt. This is Castilli of Roma, a doorkeeper from the late 18th Dynasty. This is also the figure,


418
01:13:48.051 --> 01:14:06.040
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): who we'll come to in a minute, Roma is shown making an offering here with his wife and son. His right leg is shortened and wasted, and his foot is held at an angle, and he supports himself on a long staff. This is the stele that Toby Wilkinson earlier described as the doorman with a waist of white leg and a deformed foot.


419
01:14:06.041 --> 01:14:09.231
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Roma has traditionally been diagnosed with polio, though.


420
01:14:09.231 --> 01:14:26.850
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In some cases, like his, though, cerebral palsy, as argued by esophagologist Aidan Dodson recently, may actually fit the evidence better, and the question is still debated. What is not in question is that he commissioned a fine Steele with his family, his work, and his impairment all on display for eternity.


421
01:14:27.421 --> 01:14:37.050
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And this is just also to note that this is another example where we have someone using cane as a mobility aid. Kane as a mobility aid that we saw.


422
01:14:37.491 --> 01:14:46.410
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Earlier, and we just saw Tutankhamun also potentially using Gaines as mobility aids, because he was buried of over 131 walking sticks in his tomb.


423
01:14:57.481 --> 01:15:17.270
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And going back to Tutankhamun, what's also really interesting about Tutankhamun's tomb is that lions were representative of the pharaohs, and what we have in Tutankhamun's tomb is we have lions with their own little mobility aids of sorts. These lions are leaning on the ancient Egyptian glyph for stability.


424
01:15:17.511 --> 01:15:19.890
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): We see this on Footen Common Stone.


425
01:15:20.421 --> 01:15:24.611
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, even the lions and his tomb are given their own willow canes, and I find them adorable.


426
01:15:28.951 --> 01:15:35.341
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And also, this is with the Tutankhamun, this is a ring that's in the British Museum.


427
01:15:36.271 --> 01:15:40.490
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And I argue that this perhaps shows personal agency on Tutankhamun's part.


428
01:15:41.171 --> 01:16:00.870
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This ring, instead of having this nice, wavy glyph here, that's the traditional sign for Ann, has, for whatever reason, a man with a cane substituted as that N glyph. So, this, again, could be Tutankhamen making a personal choice to show him with his mobility impairment on rings that were meant to be given out to the public.


429
01:16:04.901 --> 01:16:12.920
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is Cecilia of Interf, overseer of the fortress from about 2000 to 1988 BCE, now on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.


430
01:16:14.121 --> 01:16:18.080
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This… there is a disabled figure in here.


431
01:16:19.931 --> 01:16:27.351
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And I'll get to where that is in a minute, but the important point here is that a man of rain commemorates himself and his household in stone.


432
01:16:28.121 --> 01:16:36.021
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And whenever a disability appears on monuments like this, it appears as a part of life that someone chose to record, and it is very, very common.


433
01:16:36.271 --> 01:16:55.861
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, here's the man with the mobility aid here, shown at work leading the animal in the same register as everyone else. His impairment is recorded, it does not remove him from the scene, and this is so common that we unfortunately don't know what this man's name was, because he's just a random worker who's bringing the Antifa and his wife offerings.


434
01:16:59.291 --> 01:17:01.821
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Moving on, back to Greece.


435
01:17:02.121 --> 01:17:16.991
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Accommodation was built into public spaces, too. Again, archaeologist and classicist Debbie Sneed has shown that Greek healing sanctuaries where many disabled visitors were expected had far more ramps than other sanctuaries.


436
01:17:16.991 --> 01:17:26.641
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): At the Sanctuary of Asclepios of the Epidarios, at least 11 permanent stone ramps were built onto 9 separate structures. The Great Sanctuary of Olympia had 2.


437
01:17:31.931 --> 01:17:42.901
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is just another interesting example that I've come across in looking at things. This red figure, Pileche, which is a storage chart, shows a child being taught to walk.


438
01:17:43.721 --> 01:17:54.360
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And what's interesting about this is I'm looking at this child's musculature, and I'm not sure that this is a child at all, this may be an older disabled adult, but that's not confirmed yet.


439
01:17:54.491 --> 01:17:56.301
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): But this is in the Brothers Museum.


440
01:17:59.641 --> 01:18:18.101
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): But I just want to emphasize here again, disabled children also grew up in the ancient world. We find disabled adults in figurines, in burials, in portraits painted from mummified remains, and on gravestones commemorating them. These are people who were raised with full lives and were remembered.


441
01:18:18.101 --> 01:18:22.290
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So these are various examples. We have our priest example in Gehazit from earlier.


442
01:18:22.291 --> 01:18:37.011
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And these are two new examples. We have a man here who has… seems to have some kind of facial difference from a famous mummy portrait here, and we have a child depicted on this grave stone with, again, using a cane as a mobility aid here, and they seem to have some kind of limb difference as well.


443
01:18:37.101 --> 01:18:38.540
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In their lower limbs.


444
01:18:39.051 --> 01:18:40.751
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Moving on to gods.


445
01:18:42.181 --> 01:18:57.571
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Now, to the gods. This is the east friest of the Parthenon, which is, again, one of the most famous, buildings in Greece. Current between 438 and 432 BCE, this is now in the British Museum. Seated among the Olympians, the vicious gods of the forge.


446
01:18:57.571 --> 01:19:01.141
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): and a craftsman. In MIF, he has a mobility impairment.


447
01:19:01.141 --> 01:19:18.000
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Homer calls him the crook-footed god, and in some versions he was born with a clubfoot. Here, we see him sitting beside Athena, at the very center of Athenian civic religion, on the most important temple of the city as an equal, and he has his mobility aid here tucked under his neephist arm.


448
01:19:20.361 --> 01:19:29.961
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This vase, which is in the Museum of Vienna, dates to about 530 BCE. It shows Cephistius riding a donkey with his feet, again, clearly turned.


449
01:19:30.171 --> 01:19:47.740
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The donkey is a mobility aid, like Philip II's horse. In other images, he uses a crutch or rides a winged wheelchair. And when we think about his role, this is also really interesting. Hephaestus makes Seuss's thunderbolts, Athena's Aegeus, the chariot of the Sun, and the thrones of Olympus.


450
01:19:48.581 --> 01:19:54.070
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The non-disabled gods, therefore, depend on the disabled god for everything that gives them power.


451
01:19:54.601 --> 01:20:03.780
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is a striking thing for a society to imagine, and it echoes Alexander's disabled veterans keeping his empire running behind the front lines.


452
01:20:05.791 --> 01:20:24.870
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Hephaestus, keeps his importance into the Hellenistic period. These are all copper coins, these are all from the British Museum, and they come from cities across the Mediterranean. They usually show him as a bust with a craftsman's, conical cap and tongs. Almost all of them, he is on the obverse.


453
01:20:25.381 --> 01:20:43.511
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The most important side, even when the goblin reverses Zeus, there's one example here that shows him seated on a stool of what appears to be a club foot, and we also have examples here of his helper gods, who are believed to have dwarfism, known as the Kibiri, who also appear on these coins sometimes with him as well.


454
01:20:45.961 --> 01:20:54.760
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Coins are about the most public images that society produces, and the disabled god, or multiple disabled gods, as we can see here, were on them.


455
01:20:56.551 --> 01:21:05.770
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And, going back to our infanticide discussion, if Sparta really killed disabled babies, how do we explain that to Selaus II?


456
01:21:06.121 --> 01:21:25.040
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): King Adeslaus II. He was born with one leg shorter than the other and was short in stature. His impairment was raised as an argument against his succession, but he became king of Sparta anyway around 398 BCE over his nephew, who was disqualified for supposedly being a bastard.


457
01:21:26.041 --> 01:21:36.130
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): He went through the Spartan military training, led campaigns in Asia Minor and Egypt, and lived into his 80s, and Xenophon writes an admiring biography of him.


458
01:21:37.931 --> 01:21:42.380
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): To the point where some historians believe that Xenophon may have been in love with him.


459
01:21:42.731 --> 01:21:52.240
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Plutarch also tells us of a Spartan named Dominius who specially made sandals for his feet were stolen. His response was to wish that they feather the thief.


460
01:21:52.271 --> 01:22:07.630
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): A later version tells the same story of a musician from Delphi named Dorian, whose sandal for his club foot was stolen at a dinner party. Whether or not either of these antidotes is true, it assumes disabled people with custom footwear are out at social events and jokes about it.


461
01:22:08.371 --> 01:22:14.591
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In a society that killed every disabled infant, there would be no autofocusalius, and no joke.


462
01:22:14.891 --> 01:22:16.541
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Or a story like this.


463
01:22:17.911 --> 01:22:24.940
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Okay, our next section is on blindness and visual impairment, beginning in Egypt and ending with Homer and the vine figures of Riegmeth.


464
01:22:26.271 --> 01:22:36.241
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Blindness is part of Egyptian myth at the very top. When Horus felt his uncle Set for the throne, Set tore out one of his eyes, or in some versions, both.


465
01:22:37.001 --> 01:22:42.660
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And Seth was Horace's evil uncle, who had stolen the throne in an Egyptian myth.


466
01:22:42.731 --> 01:22:59.160
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Horus, in other words, in these myths, hadn't acquired, apparently, a war wound. In some versions, the eye was restored. It then becomes the legeot, the eye of Horus, one of the most powerful protective symbols in Egypt, and we see examples of this here on the left.


467
01:22:59.781 --> 01:23:01.961
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And some more examples here in the middle.


468
01:23:02.741 --> 01:23:11.811
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, most of the objects on the slide are wedge-all omelets made of faence, gold, glass, and semi-precious stones, and available to people of very different means.


469
01:23:13.391 --> 01:23:15.541
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): We also have…


470
01:23:17.781 --> 01:23:27.220
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Other examples of blindness on this slide here. We have… this is an egmon mummy. Ek mommuns were also, associated with a blind dog.


471
01:23:28.731 --> 01:23:31.141
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): We also have…


472
01:23:32.091 --> 01:23:48.300
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This Faea mummy portrait, which is from the Roman period, that's currently in the map, that shows someone, a young man who seems to have had eye surgery. He's missing the lashes on his one eye, and there's, like, kind of a line coming out of his eye here, and his facial muscles are slack on that side.


473
01:23:51.431 --> 01:23:57.351
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And we also have an Ostracong from the Temple of Kumun here, which is from the… currently in the Broken Museum.


474
01:23:57.831 --> 01:24:09.030
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Which, and this is an interesting difference, seems to represent acquired blindness, because in this, someone is praying to the god Knum to restore their vision and sight.


475
01:24:09.581 --> 01:24:12.961
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And basically says, God,


476
01:24:13.411 --> 01:24:25.290
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The gods caused me to see darkness by day, please basically help me fix this. And we think that this was, perhaps, acquired blindness from working in the dark tombs associated with Egypt.


477
01:24:25.691 --> 01:24:34.201
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So there seems to have been an understanding medically that acquired blindness could be fixed, whereas we don't see that with congenital blindness in Egypt.


478
01:24:35.091 --> 01:24:39.930
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And this example here on the right, or the center here.


479
01:24:40.061 --> 01:24:50.300
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Is a blind musician, and we, again, think he's blind because he has a singular straight line for his eye, as opposed to that nice full frontal eye that we see in other musicians.


480
01:24:50.431 --> 01:24:52.601
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, blind harpists…


481
01:24:53.091 --> 01:25:03.221
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): by musicians above all harness, appear in Egypt, ancient Egyptian art from the Middle Kingdom onwards, and tomb paintings and models. This is from the tomb of Nabamun from the 18th Dynasty.


482
01:25:04.231 --> 01:25:12.731
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Artists, again, mark their blindness clearly, for example, by drawing the line as a single line or closed eyes, we can see nicely here.


483
01:25:12.891 --> 01:25:20.960
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Instead of the usual wide-open eye. Depictions continued through the Armano Revolution, when art and religions changed dramatically, and into the Ptolemaic period.


484
01:25:21.811 --> 01:25:27.150
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Some Egyptologists, such as Lisa Manicki, have argued that this blindness is purely symbolic.


485
01:25:27.151 --> 01:25:48.640
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Tied to the harpist role as the voice of the gods, but that does not show… explain why harpists is sometimes shown sighted, sometimes in the same scenes, or why other musicians are also sometimes shown blind. And I pulled this image out from the Tomb of Navamun, because we can see this example here that very clearly shows us. We have a blind harpist in this register, and a nice sighted one in the register below him.


486
01:25:51.631 --> 01:26:01.521
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The simpler reading, therefore, seems to be the right one. There were blind musicians in Egypt, artists distinguished them from sighted ones, and music was the respective profession they could follow.


487
01:26:03.121 --> 01:26:09.110
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Blindness, too, was associated, to some degree with


488
01:26:09.571 --> 01:26:24.711
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): other prominent people. This is the Apotheosis of Homer. This is a marble relief by Archelaus Supreon, made from about 225 to 205 BCE, probably from Ptolemaic Egypt. It shows Homer traditionally blind.


489
01:26:26.691 --> 01:26:38.900
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Being crowned and honored by the greatest of poets. Behind it are coins from Smyrna, one of the cities that claimed him, that, again, show the seated poet and the papyrus, fragment of his work.


490
01:26:39.361 --> 01:26:43.881
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The most celebrated poet in the Greek world is believed to have been the blind man.


491
01:26:47.121 --> 01:26:55.101
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So this papyrus fragment is a fragment of the Amosie, which, again, is one of the most famous poems. And he is not alone.


492
01:26:55.611 --> 01:27:12.321
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is a list on this. Greek and Egyptian myth is full of blind figures, seers like Tiresias, poets and musicians like Demochitis and Themis, gods like Plutus, the hunter of Orion, Phoenix, the mentor of Achilles, and the soldier of Pezalus, who was blinded in battle at Marathon.


493
01:27:12.331 --> 01:27:28.820
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): They all fall into a few patterns. Some traded sight for prophecy, some were blinded as punishment, some had their sight restored, and many were musicians. Some of those were liar or harp players, which may echo the Egyptian practice of training blind people as musicians, or it may be a tribute to Homer.


494
01:27:28.821 --> 01:27:38.030
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): For more on this, I recommend Markel Awards, Blindness and Spectatorship in the Ancient and Modern Theaters, as well as the, zines


495
01:27:38.031 --> 01:27:43.470
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): that DARC has produced. We have one on Ancient Egypt and Disability, and one on Ancient Greece and Disability.


496
01:27:44.431 --> 01:27:53.690
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, myth gives us disabled people as godseers, poets, and craftsmen, and this legacy does not stop in antiquity.


497
01:27:57.491 --> 01:28:14.361
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, moving on to our next disability. Dwarfism is the most frequently depicted disability in Egyptian art. People with dwarfism appear in at least 50 Old Kingdom tombs alone, working as metalworkers, foremen, carers of animals, and hostiled officials, and there are gods of dwarfism, too.


498
01:28:15.721 --> 01:28:21.791
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): These amulets show Taikos, the form of Ta, the creator god of Memphis and patron of craftsmen, shown with dwarfism.


499
01:28:22.011 --> 01:28:29.700
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Herodotus, who gives us the name, compares these figures to the Greek god Hufius, another disabled god of craftsmen who we saw earlier.


500
01:28:30.681 --> 01:28:47.751
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Taikos appears in three main poses, first documented by Finders Petrie in 1914, whose own collection is part of the story. He stands on the box of crocodiles, stand with shangling snakes, and he stands alone with his fists at his side, or he has several heads to watch over the wearer in every direction.


501
01:28:47.811 --> 01:28:53.150
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): They are protective amulets, mostly in blue or green faience, made from the New Kingdom into the Roman times.


502
01:28:53.791 --> 01:28:59.070
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This first pose, again, shows a disabled god defeating Chaos and Restoring Order, or Ma'at.


503
01:28:59.391 --> 01:29:08.771
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Far from linking impairment with evil, as later cultures, as we see often did, the Egyptians linked dwarfism with the divine and with perfection, and that belief survives into Greek rule.


504
01:29:11.021 --> 01:29:21.480
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): These are figures of Bass, the god of women, music, children, and childbirth, and protector of households together with figures of people of dwarfism.


505
01:29:22.231 --> 01:29:24.071
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And this is…


506
01:29:24.721 --> 01:29:30.851
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): We're not people with dwarfism. On this slide, we have a young temple boy wearing one of these amulets that depicts the boss.


507
01:29:35.371 --> 01:29:49.261
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Best is usually shown with a lion-like face on the proportions of a person with dwarfism, sometimes with bowel legs. He is enormously popular, and remains so into the Roman period, and this is the sheer variety of things that he can find him on on this slide.


508
01:29:49.391 --> 01:29:53.201
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): He appears on amulets, vessels, furniture, and household object.


509
01:29:56.691 --> 01:30:14.300
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And I just want to point out something else interesting. Bess is often depicted on ancient Egyptian feeding bottles. These were the equivalent of the ones that I talked to you earlier about, that Debbie Sneed, had researched in relation to the agar of bonewell. So we have a disabled god being depicted on these feeding bottles as well.


510
01:30:14.841 --> 01:30:20.790
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And this is just an example of Bazette, who is, again, his feminine form. And again, down here, as well.


511
01:30:21.271 --> 01:30:23.761
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And she is again depicted with dwarfism.


512
01:30:25.781 --> 01:30:43.451
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Finally, in terms of depictions of dwarfism, we have Seneb, who's from the Old Kingdom, who's around the 5th dynasty BCE. Seneb was a person with dwarfism and a high-ranking official at court and in the priesthood. He was married to Sennites, a non-disabled priestess, and they had children.


513
01:30:44.361 --> 01:30:57.021
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is a beautiful statue of them. This is a family statue. Snip is sitting cross-legged beside his wife. Below him, where a non-disabled man's legs would be at the sculpture, has placed two of his children.


514
01:30:57.021 --> 01:31:14.521
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Their composition is balanced, and his body is neither hidden in this nor exaggerated. Statues like this are why I disagree with scholars who claim that people with dwarfism holding office cannot have been common. The evidence says owned otherwise, and what's also really beautiful about the images in his tomb…


515
01:31:15.491 --> 01:31:24.511
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): are the ancient Egyptians tended to depict people with something called hierarchical proportion, and this means that the biggest person was depicted as the most important.


516
01:31:24.701 --> 01:31:38.550
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And the tomb, artist here adapted thus the Seneb by making him the biggest person, and therefore the most important person, while still keeping the proportions of him being a dwarf person.


517
01:31:39.581 --> 01:31:56.540
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And they gallery around this really beautifully, because obviously you can't have him and his wife being depicted in the same scenes then. So what they did instead, which is really creative, is they have her depicted in scenes underneath him where she's mirroring what he's doing, and they're both shown as providing for their family.


518
01:31:56.541 --> 01:31:59.641
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So here he is meeting with three officials when he's heated.


519
01:31:59.791 --> 01:32:04.441
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): There, and here she is underneath, caring for the three children.


520
01:32:06.631 --> 01:32:19.781
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And this is just, again, just shows him in various poses, being depicted, again, with the proportions of dwarfism. He's meeting with officials here, he's going around on the boat of the Nile here, he's being carried in the litter here, and he's again meeting with three officials here.


521
01:32:22.261 --> 01:32:24.921
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Okay, moving to a Greek example now.


522
01:32:26.271 --> 01:32:45.050
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): We do have other Greek examples of people with dwarfism as well. This is the Popalos Kor from about 530 BCE. Korai were statues of young women, were dedicated to Athena on the Acropolis by the dozen in the 6th century, and they are usually treated as being a generic type.


523
01:32:45.651 --> 01:33:00.471
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): What we have here is a right. On the right, it's a core that does not fit that type. She's labeled as Acropolis 683 as her catalog number, and Marukuoku Lui, she's known as the Red Slippers core.


524
01:33:00.581 --> 01:33:02.781
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): From about 510 BCE.


525
01:33:03.631 --> 01:33:22.311
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Again, classicist Debbie Sneed and Erin Lawrence Roseman have recently argued that she is a realistic representation of a young elite woman with dwarfism, and probably that of a real person. Her head is just under a fifth of her height, when most Koroi are about a sixth.


526
01:33:22.311 --> 01:33:30.191
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Her legs are short and her back is deeply swayed, and the sculptor carved her anatomy in unusual detail, down to the tendons of her hands.


527
01:33:30.631 --> 01:33:38.331
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Her red shoe… pointed shoes and soon sleeves follow Etruscan fashion, imported luxuries that advertise her family's wealth.


528
01:33:39.441 --> 01:33:53.881
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): She has stood on a shared base of a smaller statue, and the inscription on that base reads, This dedication, Lace dedicated thus to Athena from his first fruits. Eucharius dedicated this to Athena as a tif.


529
01:33:54.091 --> 01:34:10.531
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Sneed and Lawrence Roseman argue that Lysias and Eucharist are most likely a married couple, depicting… dedicating statues of their two daughters to Athena. Urio's scholars called Cora's proportions grotesque, blamed clumsy workmanship, or decided she must be a servant.


530
01:34:10.581 --> 01:34:18.591
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The symbol we're reading is that her parents paid for a lava statue of their disabled daughter, and set it up among the finest dedications in the city.


531
01:34:21.061 --> 01:34:23.511
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Back to the ancient world into dwarfism.


532
01:34:23.511 --> 01:34:44.060
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): On the left, we have a dancing figure of a man with dwarfism from Ptolemaic Egypt through the 332 to 150 BCE, and on the right is a bronze statuette of a man with dwarfism with inlaid silver eyes from the 1st century BCE or 1st century CE. Scholars have often filed figures like these to undergo tasks, but there is nothing caricatured about either dwarf


533
01:34:44.061 --> 01:34:49.780
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Of dwarfism itself, these are careful of often affectionate images of real bodies.


534
01:34:51.931 --> 01:34:59.960
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Going back to Bass again, the most important figure with dwarfism in Egyptian religion is the god Bas, protector of households, mothers, and children.


535
01:35:00.101 --> 01:35:14.760
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): In my own work, I trace how under the Ptolemies, Beth was traced as a Macedonian soldier. Terracadas show him with Macedonian, Gaulish, Roman, and Egyptian shields, in the Kazi, a hat or a Greek helmet wearing Curious cavalry boots and a cloak.


536
01:35:15.331 --> 01:35:25.181
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Other types show him on horseback, crushing a Gaulish warrior beneath his horse. It probably refers to Ptolemy II's victory of the Galbotians in the 270s BCE.


537
01:35:26.231 --> 01:35:39.380
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): One flash from the Fayum, that's again now in the British Museum, shows Best in full Macedonian armor, mounting a kneeling horse. I read this as Best as Alexandra mounting Bucapolis, the horse said to kneel only for him.


538
01:35:39.381 --> 01:35:52.791
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Best keeps his bowed legs. Long-term writing changes the bones and muscles of the legs, so for a cavalryman, those bowed legs may have looked very familiar. The gods, again, looked like the men who potentially prayed to him.


539
01:35:54.061 --> 01:36:00.000
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Moving on to more, really exciting things. People in the ancient world


540
01:36:00.371 --> 01:36:15.491
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): also made prosthetics. In ancient Egypt, we have a woman named, who lived from about 950 to 710 BCE, had her right big toe amputated in replace of a painted wooden toe that she wore in life, and you can see this on the upper left.


541
01:36:15.701 --> 01:36:32.541
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): that had leather straps that fixed it to her foot. When research led by Egyptologist Jacqueline Finch discussed replicas of ancient probe prosthetics toes of modern prosthetic users, they found them to be fully functional and in some ways more comfortable than modern options.


542
01:36:33.601 --> 01:36:51.491
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): From the Hellenistic period itself, the Oriental Museum in Durham holds the mummified remains of a wealthy woman who died around 250 BCE. She was born without the lower part of her left arm, and her embalmers gave her a prosthetic arm of when an imposter painted to match her skin.


543
01:36:51.491 --> 01:36:59.990
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): For decades, the museum wrongly identified her as a male priest because her burial was too rich for staff to imagine that it belonged to a woman.


544
01:37:00.281 --> 01:37:12.590
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And unfortunately, in examining her, they took her arm off in a way that it cannot be placed back on her body, so now it's displayed alongside her mummified remains in the coffin, which you can see here.


545
01:37:16.731 --> 01:37:31.941
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And this is just another example of another toe prosthetic from Egypt. This is of lesser quality than the one on the top, so it shows that they were also potentially making prosthetics of varying quality for people of varying backgrounds who could afford varying things.


546
01:37:32.281 --> 01:37:44.881
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And finally, another prosthetic is in Italy. We have the copula leg from about 300 BCE, which was an artificial leg of wood and bronze, which is buried with its owner, who's perhaps a veteran.


547
01:37:45.561 --> 01:37:50.731
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): However, that unfortunately no longer survives, because it was destroyed in World War II.


548
01:37:51.471 --> 01:37:59.411
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And this is just another close-up statue of that woman from the Durham Oriental Museum, so you can see her full body and coffin.


549
01:38:04.121 --> 01:38:25.891
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And bringing this to today, why does this matter today? Disabled people today are reclaiming this history. The Apothe is a New York theater company founded in 2012 by Greg Mosgala, a disability arts activist with cerebral palsy. He chose the name of the place where Prutarch says Spartan babies are left to die to push back against the idea that disabled people are disposable at birth.


550
01:38:25.891 --> 01:38:27.520
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): This is admirable.


551
01:38:27.521 --> 01:38:41.410
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): But again, as I argue in my own work, the name also shows how deeply the infanticide myth has taken hold, even within the disability rights movement. Meeting disability studies scholars have repeated it too, and the myth does harm.


552
01:38:41.851 --> 01:38:54.381
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): It implies that disabled people were once killed, and should be grateful now to simply be allowed into society. The historical reality is that we were always part of society, and have always been here.


553
01:38:54.481 --> 01:38:58.760
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And it is modern-day society that is treating us horribly.


554
01:38:59.591 --> 01:39:12.811
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And decided that we can be excluded. For a more famous example, in the UK, Gray Eye theater Company was founded in 1980 by the disabled actor Nabil Chabon and Richard Thomason.


555
01:39:12.811 --> 01:39:22.890
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): It describes its work as radical theater placing access at the heart of our work. Their name comes from the gray eye of Greek myth, sisters who shared a single eye between them.


556
01:39:22.891 --> 01:39:29.390
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Here, the classical reference is both respectful and accurate. As Chabon put it, they were in the business of myth-breaking.


557
01:39:30.681 --> 01:39:49.641
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And to kind of wrap up, Martha Rose puts it best in Her The Staff of Oedipus in 2023, one of the first books that engages with disability studies and ancient history, she says, our assumptions about disabled people today have colored our reading of the ancient world.


558
01:39:49.811 --> 01:40:00.391
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And then those skewed readings then prop up modern discrimination by giving it a false historical precedent. And that circle is what I have been trying to be breaking in my own work.


559
01:40:01.471 --> 01:40:03.291
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): So, in conclusion…


560
01:40:04.261 --> 01:40:14.461
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): To draw everything together. In the ancient world, disabled people with them thrived. They were kings, treasurers, soldiers, craftsmen, poets, and gods.


561
01:40:15.551 --> 01:40:22.921
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): They were represented in art, without stigma, on coins, temple freezers, shrines, and mass-produced terracottas.


562
01:40:23.421 --> 01:40:38.460
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Philip III Erideus and the Argyid dynasty more broadly shows how ableist and disablist assumptions have shaped modern history writing. Eridaeus was recognized as pharaoh in his lifetime. Modern historians invent a second man to do what they assumed he could not.


563
01:40:38.661 --> 01:40:52.950
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): And reception has strung between extremes. Nicholas Nestro's novel Empire of Ashes, which is a historical fiction book, turns him into an autistic genius who is the real man behind Alexandra's victories.


564
01:40:52.951 --> 01:41:00.100
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The caricature and the rescue make the same mistake. Both replace the evidence of a story about disability, and that's not what we should be doing.


565
01:41:01.101 --> 01:41:10.690
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The mutilated Greeks show the same bias at work. This is an episode that is dismissed by some historians as fiction, apparently because it shows compassion towards disabled people.


566
01:41:10.871 --> 01:41:16.331
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): When it is described by numerous ancient historians, and they don't question anyone else.


567
01:41:16.471 --> 01:41:19.220
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Other historical episodes as being fiction.


568
01:41:20.241 --> 01:41:28.451
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): It is also striking that some figures like Philip II and Harpois are written about without obvious bias, while Ardeus and the Miloaded Greeks are not.


569
01:41:29.561 --> 01:41:33.820
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Kalanos shows us competing cultural ideas about disability in the ancient world.


570
01:41:33.981 --> 01:41:49.611
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): The decisions of disabled people were respected, and policies that began with Philip II's economic calculation produced, in Ptolemaic Egypt at least, something that may be unique. A disabled elite of veterans who held land and local power, and gods who looked like them.


571
01:41:50.051 --> 01:41:51.241
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): Finally.


572
01:41:52.131 --> 01:42:10.420
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): All of this, I hope to show, is an example of why disabled perspectives are needed in scholarship. Many of the objects we looked at today are in museum stores and footnotes for a century. Their meaning did not change. What changed was who was looking, and the ability to recognize things. Thank you.


573
01:42:11.111 --> 01:42:18.340
Dr. Alexandra Morris (she/her): If you have any questions, my email is AFM1290 atoptimum.net. Thank you very much.