Did the Ancient Egyptians Have Electric Lighting? - Tales of Times ...

Did the Ancient Egyptians Have Electric Lighting?
It has been widely claimed on the internet that the ancient Egyptians had electric lighting. This claim is made largely based on an extremely tendentious interpretation of a series of relief carvings from the southern crypt of the ancient Egyptian Temple of Hathor at Dendera and the fact that some Egyptian tombs and temples do not currently have very much soot on their ceilings.
Unfortunately for those who want to believe that the ancient Egyptians had electric lighting, they simply didn’t. As I will show, the reliefs from Dendera almost certainly don’t depict lightbulbs and there is a much more reasonable explanation for why some Egyptian temples and tombs do not have soot on their ceilings.
The so-called “Dendera lightbulb”
The primary piece of evidence that people like to cite in support of the idea that the ancient Egyptians had electric lighting is a set of three relief carvings from the southern crypt of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera, which depict a scene that has become known as the “Dendera lightbulb.” The relief carvings depict a giant lotus flower with the god Harsomtus arising in the form of a serpent from it, surrounded by a bubble of magical energy. In two of the three carvings, the energy bubble emerging from the lotus flower is held up by a miniature male figure dressed in a loincloth with a sun disk on its head. In all three carvings, a full-sized male figure in a loincloth stands behind the lotus flower.
Many people are convinced that these reliefs from the southern crypt of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera depict incandescent lightbulbs. They think that the stem of the lotus flower is an electrical wire, that the magical bubble around the serpent is the glass bulb, and that the serpent itself is the filament. This, however, is, quite frankly, an absurd interpretation. It is the sort of interpretation that I would normally assume to be satirical, but yet there are many people who are firmly convinced that it is correct.
If you look at the reliefs carefully, you will notice that there are a lot of obvious signs that should tip you off that they are not depictions of incandescent lightbulbs. For one thing, in all three reliefs, the snake quite clearly has eyes and a mouth. The lotus flower the snake is emerging from quite clearly has petals. It is also worth noting that the filament in an incandescent lightbulb is actually a horizontal wire running between two vertical supply wires. The filament has to be connected to a wire on both sides or it will not produce light. The snake in the relief carvings from Dendera, however, is only attached to lotus flower by its tail; its head is not attached to anything.
There is really nothing in the relief carvings from Dendera that can be sensibly interpreted as looking anything more than extremely vaguely like a modern incandescent lightbulb—or any other kind of lightbulb. Furthermore, the scene from Dendera actually depicts a well-attested scene from Egyptian mythology. The story of Harsomtus coming forth from the primordial lotus flower is well-known from surviving Egyptian texts.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of one of the reliefs from the southern crypt of the ancient Egyptian Hathor Temple at Dendera that many people (wrongly) think depicts a lightbulb
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of another one of the reliefs from the crypt of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera that many people (wrongly) think depicts a lightbulb
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of another one of the reliefs from the crypt of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera that many people (wrongly) think depicts a lightbulb
But what about the soot?
The other major piece of evidence that is often used to support the idea that the ancient Egyptians had electric lighting is the fact that (supposedly) ancient Egyptian tombs and temples do not have any soot damage on their ceilings. Nonetheless, we know that the Egyptians decorated and painted the interiors of these buildings after they were built. Since the buildings often have no windows or other openings, the insides would have been pitch black, meaning the decorators must have brought in some kind of light source, allowing them to see the walls they were decorating.
Supporters of the idea that the ancient Egyptians had electric lighting routinely claim that the Egyptians could not have used any kind of torches or fire for lighting inside these tombs and temples without getting soot everywhere. Therefore, they assert that the Egyptians clearly must have had electric lighting, because there is no other way the decorators would have been able to see inside the temples and tombs without leaving soot.
This hypothesis has multiple problems. First of all, contrary to what the supporters of the view that the ancient Egyptians had electric lighting like to claim, the ceilings of many Egyptian temples and tombs are actually covered in soot. For instance, the ceiling of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera is, in fact, absolutely caked in thick, black soot. The soot on the ceilings of Egyptian buildings, however, is mostly not from the ancient Egyptian decorators, but rather from later periods.
ABOVE: Photograph of the ceiling of the hypostyle hall of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera, which is absolutely caked in thick, black soot
As I discuss in this article I wrote in November 2019 about the real reason why Tutankhamun is so famous, we actually know that, from the Byzantine Period onwards, many people took up residence as squatters in ancient Egyptian tombs and temples. In fact, the interior walls of many of the pharaohs’ tombs in the Valley of the Kings are covered in ancient graffiti. For instance, a frustrated visitor from the Byzantine Period left a graffito in Greek on the wall in the Tomb of Ramesses IV (KV2) complaining about how he couldn’t read the hieroglyphs, saying: “I cannot read the writing on the wall!”
Some soot has also been left by eighteenth and nineteenth-century visitors and explorers, who would routinely explore the ruined temples and tombs carrying lit torches. Ironically, the reason why so many Egyptian temples and tombs have such startlingly clean ceilings is actually because those ceilings have been extensively and meticulously cleaned in modern times by skilled restoration experts.
Second of all, the light source that the ancient Egyptian decorators most likely would have used while working on the interior decorations of Egyptian temples and tombs would have been castor oil lamps, which burn clean and do not leave soot. In other words, the relative absence of soot in some Egyptian buildings that have not been opened since antiquity is actually pretty much exactly what we would expect. Once you realize that the ancient Egyptians used oil lamps, the whole argument that they must have had electric lighting totally falls apart.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a variety of ancient terracotta oil lamps from the Hellenistic and Roman Periods. Countless examples of oil lamps like the ones shown here have been recovered by archaeologists from locations in Egypt and in other countries.
A complete lack of historical and archaeological evidence
The Temple of Hathor at Dendera was constructed during the Hellenistic and Roman Periods of Egyptian history. These are actually quite well-documented periods of Egyptian history. If the Egyptians were using electric lights during this time period, we would expect to find some historical documentation of it. Instead, electric lighting is never mentioned anywhere in any ancient sources.
Furthermore, if the ancient Egyptians really had electric lighting, we would expect to find extensive archaeological evidence of this. Not only would we expect to find examples of lightbulbs themselves, but we would expect to find extensive mines for the precise minerals needed to make the filaments for the lightbulbs, large numbers of workshops dedicated to manufacturing lightbulbs, massive power plants to generate electricity to power the lightbulbs, extensive networks of electrical wires used to conduct electric current from the power plants to the lightbulbs.
Instead, we find absolutely none of these things whatsoever. Although the complete lack of evidence does not necessarily prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the ancient Egyptians did not have electric lighting, the total absence of all the things from the historical and archaeological record that we would expect to find if they did have electric lights gives us strong reason to believe that the ancient Egyptians probably did not have electric lighting.
Meanwhile, while no archaeological evidence has ever been found for electric lightbulbs in ancient Egypt, archaeologists have actually excavated ancient Egyptian oil lamps in large quantities. There is no doubt about the fact that the ancient Egyptians had oil lamps. Therefore, we must ask ourselves the question: “Which is more likely: that the ancient Egyptians used oil lamps, which we know they had in large quantities, or that the ancient Egyptian decorators used electric lights, for whose existence have absolutely no archaeological or literary evidence whatsoever?”
I think most reasonable people will conclude that the ancient Egyptians had oil lamps but not electric lighting, because that is what the historical evidence indicates. Those who are of an Ancient Aliens inclination, however, will doubtlessly continue to insist, despite the complete lack of evidence, that the ancient Egyptians had electric lighting.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a modern replica of an ancient terracotta oil lamp dating to the time of the Roman Empire. While many such oil lamps have been found by archaeologists, archaeologists have never uncovered the slightest evidence of electric lighting in ancient Egypt.
By the way the ancient Greeks didn’t have laptop computers either…
A very similar example to the so-called “Dendera lightbulb” is an ancient Greek funerary stele dating to around 100 BC or thereabouts that is currently held in the Getty Villa that depicts a wealthy Greek woman reaching out to touch an object held by one of her child-slaves. The object held by the slave is most likely either a shallow box, a mirror, or a wax writing tablet. The object in the slave’s hands has two holes in the side. These are most likely drills holes from where a bronze or wooden fixture of some kind—or perhaps another piece of marble—would have originally been attached.
An elaborate conspiracy theory about the stele was published in an article in the British tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail in February 2016, claiming that the object held by the slave child in the stele is actually a laptop computer and that the round holes in the side of the tablet are USB ports. This is, of course, the sort of ridiculous nonsense that one can reliably expect from The Daily Mail. In any case, since then, images of the stele have gone viral on the internet, with many people claiming that it does indeed represent an ancient Greek laptop computer.
There is, of course, no logical reason to think that the object in the stele is a laptop. We have no evidence that the ancient Greeks had laptop computers and no laptop computer from ancient Greece has ever been found by archaeologists. The closest thing we have to an “ancient Greek computer” is the Antikythera mechanism, which, as I explain in this article I published in December 2019, is only technically a “computer” in the broadest possible sense and is nothing at all like a modern digital computer.
When I first looked at a photograph of the notorious stele, my initial guess was that the object in the slave’s hands was probably a wax writing tablet, since it looks very much like writing tablets depicted in other works of Greek and Roman art, which are often hinged wooden boxes with wax on the inside. On the other hand, Jeffrey Spier, the senior curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum, says that it is probably a shallow box or a mirror.
ABOVE: Photograph of the ancient Greek funerary stele in the Getty Villa depicting a wealthy woman looking at an object—probably a shallow box, a mirror, or a wax writing tablet—held by her slave
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Author: Spencer McDaniel
Hello! I am an aspiring historian mainly interested in ancient Greek cultural and social history. Some of my main historical interests include ancient religion, mythology, and folklore; gender and sexuality; ethnicity; and interactions between Greek cultures and cultures they viewed as foreign. I graduated with high distinction from Indiana University Bloomington in May 2022 with a BA in history and classical studies (Ancient Greek and Latin languages), with departmental honors in history. I am currently a student in the MA program in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at Brandeis University.
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One thought on “Did the Ancient Egyptians Have Electric Lighting?”
You are basing your article purely on the bas reliefs from Dendera? What about the countless other hieroglyphs showing what appear to be pairs of waist-height, glass-globed lamps emitting light or some other form of energy? How do you explain their purpose? Where are the artifacts in museums that explain what these are? The reason people expect they had electrical items is that the explanation for these floor-standing lamps has not been stated or proven. Artifacts similar to those in the hieroglyphs have not been displayed to the public. If chemistry was well known so far back, why rule out the knowledge of electricity? Why do you assume only incandescent light? What about fluorescent? Several fluorescent objects similar to those in the hieroglyphs have been created and proven to work. Have you tested any of these possibilities? If you don’t know the truth, have an open mind and stop writing articles with no solid foundation.