Sunday, February 23, 2014

"At first glance, Katy Perry’s latest music video, the Egypt-themed fantasy 'Dark Horse,' seems to bear little resemblance to actual Egyptian history — but you might want to look twice"

Time:
Full disclosure: when I called up some Egyptologists to ask them about Katy Perry, I was fully expecting them to trash the video. The inaccuracies in her similarly-themed performance of the song at the Brits have already been pointed out, and fans who are sticklers for history were turned off the video. But the reality was very different.

“I find this really very wonderful, but I’m willing to bend my formal standards,” says Robert K. Ritner, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago. “Whoever put this together actually knew something about the myth of Cleopatra. There are a number of features in here that I could use in class.”