rythyme

[rythyme]

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.

[rythyme]

I think I'm going to remember this phrase every time I cook for the next five years

[rythyme]

Our youngest kitten is so funny, I overslept my alarm for a lecture so I was lying in bed moaning how I need to track someone down and get their notes, and kitten was worried about the noise so he came up to me and started doing biscuits on my belly.

Now I have plenty of dough to make biscuits with, so I didn't mind, but I also hadn't eaten breakfast and my stomach started making sounds.

The sheer ALARM on this poor baby's face. Eyes wide, ears pinned back, looking at me in horror. Then he starts kneading faster. Ofc, my stomach and intestine start doing more noises. Kitten is distressed! Horrified! He probably thinks I'm dying and his tiny CPR is the only thing keeping me alive.

Eventually I can't keep my laughter in anymore so I get up and my stomach stops and this BABY starts meowing and cuddling up to me like he really did save my life and was overjoyed I made it by the skin of my teeth.

And then I got up and he went over to his food bowl and started meowing twice as hard.

[rythyme]

au where jet doesn’t find out that zuko and iroh are fire nation and when he runs into the gaang he goes ‘oh by the way this is my new friend lee. we met on the ferry ride over here!’ and the gaang and zuko just like awkwardly stare at each other for a really long time

[rythyme]

this photo is so cunt

[rythyme]

Shit man, this wizard war is fucked. I just saw a guy clap his hands together and say "the ten hells" or some similar shit, and every one around him turned inside out, had their tibia explode and then disappeared. The camera didn't even go onto him, that's how common shit like this is. My ass is casting frostbite and level 2 poison. I think I just heard "power word:scrunch" two groups over. I gotta get the fuck outta here.

[rythyme]

'Moonlight on a Medieval Village'. Charles Rollo Peters. 1862-1928.

[rythyme]

getting laid on ask jeeves dot com

[rythyme]

ameircans talking about red note like they have never spoken to anyone from another country ever about anything

[rythyme]

Outsource your disappointment electronically.

[rythyme]

I have a lot of feelings on how indigenous groups who didn’t build permanent structures like cities aren’t seen as being as sophisticated as ones who built large cities, without accounting for the fact that maybe it’s in our values systems to leave as light of a footprint as possible and it’s important that our structures are easily taken down or fade with the passage of time because it’s easier on the landscape, but ya know.

[rythyme]

[rythyme]

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[rythyme]

Just tried to play an ancient flute and it started filling the room with this awful miasma that wont go away