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Mona Lisa cat nest 😭

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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.

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Typical void creature 🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛

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Exploring the World's LARGEST Power Ranger Convention | Power Morphicon 2024 (youtube.com)

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No love for K'ppar?

I just realized something.

The spell to restore a spirit to its body takes a quasar diamond. There were three in the world. One was used to restore Aaravos, and one was used to restore Ruunan. That leaves one left.

And what spirit do we know about that needs to be restored?

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framing is everything

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happy new year earth gamers!! ⭐🌈

watch it with those fireworks, okay? careful you don't blow yourselves up! (that's torgue's job)

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your unreliable narrator fucking bit me

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ii | iii | iv

next one will be oc based

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easy. lmao

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Happy Holidays from all of us at SEGA!

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Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith dir. George Lucas | 2005

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Re-watching the Battle City arc, and all I can focus on is the utter insanity of being a regular person trying to do your regular person job in the Yu-gi-oh-verse

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Why tf is the Jedi Temple on Coruscant? That’s like the fucking Vatican being in Vegas?

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Footage from a 2013 Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D promotional event.

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