Theinfinityarchivist - The ♾️ Archivist

Andrei Rublev (1966) directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

Smokey the Bear Fire Safety poster mock-up

1974

found this on pinterest, thought of tumblr

part two of 'bonsai's stolen memes'

You know what? I'm sick of it.

I'm sick and tired of pretending I don't want to float in

✨Cherenkov radiation✨

Look at that shit, it's perfect. I bet it feels amazing on the skin and organs. I bet it revitalises the pores. I bet it tastes incredible.

Don't listen to authorities, look at that colour, nothing that pretty could be bad for you.

I want the forbidden swim.

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.

No idea what this lil thingy is but id die for it

i learned about a stupid looking bird today and i cant stop laughing

its called a crested satinbird (cnemophilus macgregorii)

As the influence of the nation’s transgender individuals continues to encroach on the freedoms of the U.S. populace, sources confirmed Tuesday that increasingly powerful trans person Tori Randall is now capable of using every single bathroom in the country at once. “Tori has become so trans that she can enter every single bathroom in the continental United States simultaneously, and there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do to stop her,” said Cincinnati city officials in a statement echoed by officials in thousands of other towns and cities across the nation, where every single stall in both public and private bathrooms is being currently occupied under the formidable capacities of the single trans individual.

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Ears are ready for take off