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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3297 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 2, 2023

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Barbara Mertz' Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs (2009 edition), a fantastically written history of Ancient Egypt. Last year I had also read Jan Assmann's The Mind of Egypt, a more scholarly text focusing on its self-image and its conceptions of the world, history, and power. My combined impressions were as follows:

  1. For being a Bronze Age kingdom ruled by literal god-kings, Ancient Egypt looks surprisingly nice. Sure, they had their share of dispotism, chauvinism, and imperial warfare, but I haven’t found anything like Assyrian brutality on prisoners, Roman blood sports, Greek slave economy and rampant misogyny, or Aztec mass human sacrifices. For the standards of antiquity (which are very low to us), it seems an actually pretty decent place to have lived as a commoner.
  1. The development of culture and worldview looks so strangely like a coherent arc. First there’s Ancient Kingdom pharaohs, who look so aloof and self-sufficient in their divinity. Then the kingdom collapses in rebellion and civil war, teaching the rulers of Egypt that they have responsibilities towards their people; Middle Kingdom pharaohs care a lot more about justifying their position with philosophy and theology. That era collapses too, with an invasion and occupation that teaches them that the rest of the world exists, too; and the New Kingdom is defined by imperial engagement with the great powers of Asia. Eventually the state model of the Bronze Age becomes unsustainable and Egypt fades into a province of distant empires, ruled by fatalism and detachment. This honestly sounds like the kind of satisfying storytelling that one should be most skeptical about in history; I wonder how much this understanding is due to scarcity of records, pareidolia, and my own ignorance, and in what proportion.

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