In George Orwell's novel, 1984, the memory hole is a system used by the Party to destroy documents and alter history, ensuring that the only reality is what the Party dictates. The protagonist Winston Smith's job involves receiving original documents that he is required to alter according to strict instructions. Once he has rewritten history according to the Party's requirements, the original documents are shoved into the memory hole and incinerated. It's as if the past never happened. It symbolizes the control of information and the past, erasing any evidence that contradicts the Party's current narrative.
During the political purges of Joseph Stalin, he attempted to erase some figures from Soviet history by altering images and destroying film. Trotsky was a founder of the Soviet state, the first commander of the Red Army, playing a major role in the Russian Civil War, and he was a long-standing member of the Politburo. Stalin viewed him as a leading competitor for power, and once he came to power, ordered Trotsky's name and image to be thoroughly erased from Soviet history.
On May 5, 1920, Lenin gave a famous speech to a crowd of Soviet troops in Sverdlov Square, Moscow. In the foreground were Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev another person who had fallen from favor. The photo was later altered and both were removed by censors. Stalin had written glowingly in 1918 about the revolutionary contributions by Trotsky but he denied their special value by 1924. The Trotsky that Stalin had written about glowingly in 1918 ceased to exist.
Hannah Arendt states that the “chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed; it is always in danger of being maneuvered out of the world not only for a time but, potentially, forever.” Attempts to rewrite history for political ends are not merely a product of the last couple of centuries. There was an ancient precursor of the Stalinist technique of rewriting history by cropping political figures from photos when they fell from favor the Egyptian Pharaoh, Hatshepsut.
Since his boyhood, Champollion had dreamed of seeing Egypt with his own eyes but had never been able to afford an Egyptian trip. (His enemies delighted in mocking him for posing as an expert on a land where he had never set foot.) Finally, in 1828, he made it. He was thirty-seven years old. At every juncture along the way he had read inscriptions carved into temples, tombs, and monuments. (It should be noted that he was the only person in the world who could have done so.) Then, in June 1829, while reading inscriptions at the site called Deir el-Bahri, near the Valley of the Kings, he found himself bewildered. He found mentions of a king he had never heard of.
This bearded king was in the usual dress of the Pharaohs but the nouns and verbs were in the feminine, as though a queen were in question. For example, a message carved into a temple wall carried a warning: “He who shall do her homage shall live, he who shall speak evil in blasphemy of Her Majesty shall die.” The warning itself wasn’t a surprise. The surprise was the forthright declaration of just who was issuing the warning — Her Majesty.
Egypt had had female rulers — Cleopatra would be the most famous — but nearly all of them had been married to a pharaoh or ruled in the name of a royal prince too young to take the throne. Who was this unknown ruler? The mystery would not be solved until a century after Champollion’s death. For nearly twenty years, Egypt had been ruled by a female pharaoh — not just the wife of a ruler but a pharaoh in her own right — whose existence later rulers had tried to delete from history. This was Hatshepsut.
The clues that Champollion had spotted were so subtle that others may have missed it but by this point he had come to a deep understanding of Egyptian grammar. He found that Egyptian took great pains with gender distinctions. In Hatshepsut’s temple, Champollion had seen that the word for king was followed by a feminine marker, the bread loaf hieroglyph that stood for the sound t. That tiny change transformed the familiar word "king" to something bizarre which startled Champollion.
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