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| - In 2023 and 2024, internet users shared photos that purportedly showed an ancient Egyptian coffin lid featuring a painting of Marge Simpson, the long-suffering matriarch in FOX animated series "The Simpsons."
Instances of the claim appeared on posts social media platforms including X (archived), Facebook (archived) and Reddit (archived).
Archaeologists discover a Simpsons like character on a 3,000 year old Egyptian mummy coffin.
byu/LiveLaugh_Worship ininterestingasfuck
Many of the posts referenced a long-running conspiracy theory according to which "The Simpsons" has correctly predicted multiple real events. For example, one 2023 X post (archived) about the discovery began: "For once someone predicted the Simpsons in stead [sic] of the Simpsons predicting everything."
Also in 2023, a Reddit user posted (archived) on the r/TheSimpsons subreddit: "The Simpsons predicts a lot, but could it have predicted the Coming Of Marge, 3000 years ago ?"
The coffin, including the painting of the blue-haired woman, is an authentic ancient Egyptian artifact discovered in 2023 in the Tuna el-Gebel necropolis around 200 miles south of Cairo, as the Egyptian Gazette reported in an Oct. 15, 2023, article that included one of the photos of the painted coffin lid that appeared in numerous social media posts. Additional photos of the find appeared in a Facebook post, also dated Oct. 15, 2023, by the official account of the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
However, the figure's resemblance to Marge Simpson was entirely coincidental.
According to the Egyptian Gazette, the painted wooden coffin belonged to a woman named Tadi Ist, who was the daughter of a high-ranking priest. Archaeologists dated the coffin to sometime during the New Kingdom period, which lasted from roughly 1550 to 1070 B.C.
As Egyptologist Jennifer Houser Wegner (who did not participate in the excavation) explained in an email, the features internet users have singled out as most resembling aspects of Marge Simpson — namely the color and style of the figure's hair, her yellow skin and her light-green strapless outfit — can all be explained by ancient Egyptian artistic conventions.
Yellow Skin, Tall Blue Hair, Green Dress
According to Wegner, a curator in the Penn Museum's Egyptian Section as well as an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Pennsylvania, the blue-haired figure actually represents Nut, an Egyptian sky deity who was frequently depicted in Egyptian funerary art.
For modern viewers, the yellow used for the figure's skin might bring to mind the signature skin tone of "Simpsons" characters — but for ancient Egyptians, the color had entirely different connotations. One was femininity: in ancient Egyptian art, Wegner said, women "are often shown with a sort of yellowish or pale [skin] color, while men are shown with reddish brown skin."
Another reason the artist chose to give the figure yellow skin, Wegner said, might have been to signify Nut's divinity. "Egyptians thought of their gods as having skin of gold — an untarnishable material," Wegner said. "So, her yellow color might be a nod to her divine material, or it may be an indication of gender, or both."
The blue color of Nut's hair in the coffin painting, Wegner said, had a similar explanation: Ancient Egyptian texts sometimes described deities "as having hair of lapis lazuli, a blue colored stone."
As for the figure's unusual hairdo, which appears to stand upright, Wegner said, "There are a number of other coffin lids that have similar depictions of Nut." One such example can be found on the inside of an 8th-century B.C. coffin lid in the collection of the British Museum, as seen in the image embedded below.
(The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.)
Although Nut's hair might appear to stand on end in examples like the British Museum coffin and the one found at Tuna el-Gebel in 2023, Wegner said the ancient Egyptian artists weren't trying to depict a tall beehive hairdo like Marge Simpson's. Instead, she said, "we really have to think of it as her long hair falling down" over her head.
In depictions of the deity that appear on the inside of coffin lids, Wegner said, Nut's body typically "stretches out over that of the mummy (like the canopy of the sky) … She sort of covers and guards the body."
In other words, from the perspective of the mummy buried in the coffin, the painted Nut would appear to be in an arched position — not dissimilar to the "downward dog" yoga pose.
For an illustration of Nut's pose from a different perspective, Wegner pointed toward a painted wooden stela in the collection of the Louvre. One side of the stela shows a bent-over Nut — here with star-spangled blue skin — framing the central scene of a woman approaching a god. Nut's hair hangs over her inverted head in the same way that the artist who painted the "Marge Simpson" coffin must have had in mind, according to Wegner.
(Wikimedia Commons/Louvre)
The green strapless garment the figure in the painting wears is "slightly unusual," Wegner said, but also has parallels in other ancient Egyptian depictions of Nut.
In other words, while the figure's seemingly upright blue hair, yellow skin and strapless green outfit might scream "Marge Simpson" to modern people, the artist who painted the image was simply drawing on established ancient Egyptian conventions for depicting Nut, a protective deity who frequently appeared in paintings on the inside of coffin lids. For that reason, we've rated this picture as miscaptioned.
We've previously investigated other claims related to "The Simpsons," including the allegation that a 1993 episode of the series predicted the 2020 coronavirus outbreak.
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