He Saw Too Much

They're like handbags your honor

Merry go round broke down 🎠

(Close ups under the cut)

Blblblblbblbl

Have you seen this post?

You probably have. It currently has over 120,000 notes, largely because of this addition.

Of course it's going to get reblogged, this kind of unsourced factoid does numbers on here. But something about it wasn't quite right.

A bit of searching turned up the origin of the "fact".

Alright, so it's someone who posted this on reddit 4 years ago and somehow ended up in the search hits. And the post confuses the electric eel (from South America) with the electric catfish (from the Nile, which the Egyptians would have known about).

Reminder: this is an electric eel (Electrophorus electricus). It is from South America. (image from Wikipedia)

And this is an electric catfish (Malapterurus electricus). It is from the Nile and would have been familiar to the ancient Egyptians. (image from Wikipedia)

And then of course people were speculating in the notes to that post about trade routes between South America and Egypt. Excellent scholarship everyone.

At this point I was ready to call it another made-up internet fact that gets reified by people repeating it. But something was still bothering me.

An ancient Egyptian slab from 3100 BC. What could that be...

Oh.

The Narmer palette. It's the goddamn Narmer palette. (image, once again, from Wikipedia)

So where is this "angry catfish"?

It's not the Egyptian name for the electric catfish.

It's... Narmer. It's Narmer himself.

Narmer's name is written as above (detail of top middle of the palette), using the catfish (n`r) and the chisel (mr), giving N'r-mr. The chisel is associated with pain, so this reads as "painful catfish", "striking catfish", or, yes, "angry catfish" or other similar variants, although some authors have suggested that it means "Beloved of [the catfish god] Nar".

So.

Where does this leave us?

It would appear that this redditor not only confused electric eels with electric catfish, but also confused a Pharaoh's name with the name of a fish. And then it got pushed to the top search hits by a crappy search engine and shared uncritically on tumblr.

In short, "the electric eel is called angry catfish" factoid actually literacy error. Angry Catfish, who ruled upper Egypt and smote his enemies, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

Also the Arabic name for the electric catfish is raad (thunder) or raada (thunderer).

References

Afsaruddin, A., & Zahniser, A. H. M. (1997). Humanism, culture, and language in the Near East: studies in honor of Georg Krotkoff. Eisenbrauns.

Clayton, P. A. (2001). Chronicle of the Pharaohs. Thames & Hudson.

Godron, G. (1949). A propos du nom royal. Annales du Service des antiquités de l'Egypte, 49, 217-221.

Sperveslage, G., & Heagy, T. C. (2023). A tail's tale: Narmer, the catfish, and bovine symbolism. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 109(1), 3-319.

we should talk about water more often that shit is crazy

“I know I am cute" 

(意外と可愛い - りぼん日記から)

Time to see if tumblr supports a post with 28 images.. (aka, long post warning)

Hi guys! been a little while since I shared Hellopaint doodles!!

(an excuse for me to post lazy art XD) /j

Here are a bunch from today and yesterday!!

DJ trying its best and struggling at crafting time with Sun:

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Music Man being fruity as ever:

love them sm grr

Mini!!!

Some drawings for @wakebymoonsleepbysun, our token DCA liker 😁:

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And now all the drawings I did yesterday as well:

hypothetical where I wanna learn to DJ but mostly to spend one-on-one time with DJMM only for me to have to fake sucking at it so that I can have more lessons 😁

extra:

Uh just casual simping, nothing to see here, go on, keep scrolling:

Me as a mini music man that wakey drew me as a little while back

DJ getting the best kind of compliment, A compliment from a little old lady:

*collapses on the floor* I DID IT THAT'S ALL OF THEM OMG

Every day I learn something baffling about Massachusetts