with Leanna Boychenko
Today we’re speaking with Leanna Boychenko, Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Loyola University Chicago. One of her main interests is Ptolemaic Egypt and the cultural and literary connections between Egypt and Greece. She has written a chapter entitled “Spawned from the Nile: Egyptian Monsters in Graeco-Roman Culture” for The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth.
A section of the Papyrus Bodmer 100 (1077–943 BCE), with the Egyptian ‘demon’ Medjed the Smiter at the center. Public domain.
Dr. Boychenko, how did you first get interested in studying classical antiquity, especially monsters?
For as long as I can remember, I have loved Greek mythology. As a kid, I read and re-read D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths and a bit later, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. I first became interested in monsters specifically when my mother and I took a class on John Milton at UCLA the summer after 11th grade. My mother had started college right after high school, but she was working full time and had no familial support and ended up dropping out. She went back to complete her degree in her forties and asked me to take the Milton class with her (she was in cancer treatment at the time and wanted some encouragement). I was happy she finally had some family on her side and, frankly, I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting than reading Paradise Lost in a college class!
In Book 2 of Paradise Lost, Satan encounters his daughter, Sin, at the gates of Hell. Milton describes her as a beautiful woman from the waist up, but as being all snakes and hell hounds from the waist down. In other words, she is a lot like the Greek monster Scylla. Here are illustrations of each, so you can see the similarities based on the literary descriptions:
At left: Scylla. Detail from a red-figure vase from Boeotia, Greece, dated to between 450 and 425 BCE. Public domain. At right: Satan, Sin, and Death. Engraving illustrating Milton’s Paradise Lost, by Thomas Rowlandson and John Ogbourne, 1792, after William Hogarth. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
It completely blew my mind to see the influence of Greek literature and mythology on later works (what we call Classical reception) and the connection sparked a deep interest in me. Now, I teach a mythology class with a focus on women and gender in which we explore the depiction of monsters and discuss why they are so often female! I also teach a class on how marginalized groups are represented in Greek and Egyptian literature, and in it we consider questions of what defines an ‘outsider’ and how being perceived as an outsider can turn into being viewed as a monster.
How did you end up focusing more specifically on ancient Egypt and its interactions with Greece and Rome?
In The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth, I write about Egyptian monsters and their influence on the classical world. My love of Egyptian monsters is a bit serendipitous: as I was approaching the end of graduate school, I took a class on hieroglyphs for fun—there are very few Egyptology programs in the US, and I thought it might be my last chance to learn something new. I had no idea it would change the trajectory of my research and influence the rest of my career!
What was the ancient Egyptian conception of the “monstrous”? It seems to have been very different from the Greek and Roman concept, and certainly very different from our modern conception.
For the ancient Egyptians, a balance between order and chaos was necessary for the world and its inhabitants to continue the cycle of life. This need for chaos complicates the concept of the monstrous and the roles of “monsters,” since entities that seem like outsiders are also essential insiders. Some divine creatures have monstrous characteristics (for instance, being hybrid creatures composed of different animals, threatening travelers in the Underworld, or even being called the “enemy”), but are both dangerous and benevolent. On top of that, ancient Egyptian had no distinct word for “monster.” All divine creatures, even those designated by scholars as “demons” are called by the same Egyptian word, nTr, meaning “god.” There is still so much to learn about Egyptian monsters!
In my chapter for the Oxford monsters handbook, I discuss some Egyptian demons and their roles in the underworld. But here I’d instead like to bring up an amazing Egyptian demon that I couldn’t quite fit into my chapter. We know very little about him, except his name and what he looks like: Medjed the Smiter appears to have thrown a sheet over his head, Halloween-ghost style! There are eyes on the sheet (and eyebrows!) and his legs stick out below. As far as we know, Medjed did not influence ancient Greco-Roman culture, but he has influenced modern Japanese culture, becoming a meme after a museum exhibit in 2012 displayed vignettes from the Greenfield papyrus, in which he absolutely steals the show.
Above: A vignette from the Greenfield papyrus, 1077–943 BCE, sheet 76. Medjed is depicted at center left, with both feet facing right. Public domain.
For details on Medjed in anime, see Rodrigo B. Salvador, “Medjed: from Ancient Egypt to Japanese Pop Culture.”
Leanna Boychenko is a faculty affiliate of Loyola’s Institute for Racial Justice and serves on the steering committee of the Women’s Classical Caucus. Her most recent publication is “The Hymn to Delos and Callimachus’ Blame of Thebes.” Mnemosyne 2023, 77.2: 263–82.