Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza | Hacker News Reader

Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

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152 pointsdiodorus84 comments

This reminds me of a poem by Berthold Brecht:

    Questions From A Worker Who Reads

    Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
    In the books you will find the names of kings.
    Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
    And Babylon, many times demolished
    Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
    of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
    Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
    Did the masons go? Great Rome
    Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
    Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song
    Only palaces for its inhabitans? Even in fabled Atlantis
    The night the ocean engulfed it
    The drowning still bawled for their slaves.

    The young Alexander conquered India.
    Was he alone?
    Caesar beat the Gauls.
    Did he not have even a cook with him?

    Philip of Spain wept when his armada
    Went down. Was he the only one to weep?
    Frederick the Second won the Seven Year's War. Who
    Else won it?

    Every page a victory.
    Who cooked the feast for the victors?
    Every ten years a great man?
    Who paid the bill?

    So many reports.
    So many questions.

I'm torn.

Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there.

And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Private Ryan, and Eisenhower. They put 150,000 men across the channel in a single day. And nobody seems to know about the how.

Original poem: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/bertolt-brecht-fragen-eines-l...

In Our Time on Persepolis, with a rather critical take on Alexander (the Great | of Macedon): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b4z075.

13 Minutes to the Moon, a BBC production about the moon landing. A good amount of detail about the invisible work that went in to the spectacular feat: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2

> Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India

How do you know that? Leadership and management are real jobs but there's often existing demand, goals and plans that these people are employed by those around them for. I'm willing to go out on a limb and wager that's the way it always is actually. Everyone's a product of their environment and their times, standing on the shoulder of giants, workers and peasants alike.

I don't. And you're right as in his exploits did not happen in a vacuum.

A pervasive theme is that time rumbles by and great men merely cling on and go with it at the right time. The Greeks were in the mood for a rampage and off they went. An Alexander born today won't start conquering foreign lands.

And yet, I can't shake the feeling that there must me something unique to Alexander and others.

Time passes, but not everybody massages it just enough to make a change.

There are some great recent counterexamples to this. Here are two: when Steve Jobs took the helm of Apple in the early 2000s, and Elon Musk with reusable rockets and rebooting space in general.

We seem wired to rally around leaders to get things done. Most people seem to wait around to be told what to do. This makes modern people very uncomfortable (for some very rational reasons) to the point that we engage in denialism about it.

In ancient tribal societies with group sizes close to Dunbar's number, this probably worked out much better than it does now. People had direct relationships with the leader and could see clearly what was happening, and if a leader lost favor they had to face people directly. Sometimes the results were brutal.

In modern society we have systems so large with so many layers of social and economic abstraction that it's very easy for leaders to abuse their power and to hide that abuse for a long time. It's also very easy for leaders to lose sight of the "ground truth" and/or for the people to lose sight of what the leader is doing. I'm sure sometimes leaders don't set out to abuse their power but kind of "back into it" for various reasons. It gets pretty dysfunctional but when you think about it it's kind of astounding that we are able to scale at all to societies this large given our species' background.

Edit:

I also wonder if there's an ego protecting mechanism at work. When Elon Musk says he's going to build a reusable rocket, we can get behind him and work for him... but if the effort fails we can blame the whole thing on him. If we succeed the leader gets the credit, which is the part we hate, but if we fail the leader also gets the blame.

But for the most part CEOs and presidents are replaced regularly with very little effect on the stability of very large and powerful organizations. A handful of debatable counterexamples don't change that it's the majority and the norm. Of course stability and efficiency are much more transparent than disruption.

You're right in that really effective innovative leaders are rare.

Still... I am not familiar with many examples of cases where the leader was removed and not replaced and things didn't fall apart.

I would like to see more experimentation in this area though. We don't experiment nearly enough with social structures.

Yeah that's beyond my claims though. I'm only saying that they're totally fungible and things getting done don't depend that much on a specific individual.

Mmm as far as experimentation, the closest I can think of on a large scale (besides anarchist groups which never had leaders) is that in Europe when a government can't be formed, they can operate without any official leadership even though there's a caretaker government (usually the previous one, who don't have a mandate anymore) but that's kind of formal. Big cooperatives usually elect leaders, so they still have them even though they're elected and can be recalled.

It was Alexander and his father Filippos whose untimely demise left Alexander with a formidable military machine. So it is people it is the environment it is timing, a good deal of luck on top of capability and perseverance.

People followed in their leadership and did their bit, every piece of the puzzle fell into place.

It's pretty obvious from recent well recorded history that leaders with the necessary skills, motivation and right time/place fitment to actually do world changing things are incredibly rare and when those kind of people do pop up we get world changing events that would have never otherwise happened or if they did would have happened with vastly different details and consequences.

The great man way of describing history leaves a lot to be desired but the "somebody else would have done it" crap is even worse. Remove key figures from history and then try to judge what would have happened had someone else filled their shoes and it becomes painfully obvious. Imagine 9/11 happened +/-20yr. How would the second half of the 1900s played out had Chaing Kai-shek gotten control of mainland china? Would we have gotten the napoleonic wars if Louis XVI kept the throne another 10yr? What would european history look like if church had waited another 200yr before cooking up the idea of the crusades? Imagine if the US hadn't elected an abolitionist sympathizer in 1860 but instead waited until 1872? How would recent European history look without Stalin? Etc. etc. Key details regarding when and the order in which events happen have a huge impact on history and the whims of individuals (like Alexander) massively influence these details.

I'm not here to defend the great man theory of history. I'm here to put the "it mostly would have happened about the same" theory of history in the dumpster where it belongs.

> but the "somebody else would have done it" crap is even worse

Except for that it is not so much the exception as it is the rule.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

I would say it's pretty obvious that the opposite is true: Almost all nation-states, corporations and militaries all march on perfectly fine regaardless of their leadership or management. You find only a few notable exceptions.

But someone leads. Look around you. Most leaders are really managers phoning it in.

But when the right person with the right resources at the right time is there, magic happens. All three legs of the stool have to be there.

Absolutely, in war it's not just about how many soldiers you have or what guns they carry.

You need a leader to inspire your troops. Otherwise they start thinking "what am I doing here I just want to survive and go home".

Propaganda (however it's delivered) and self-interest serve that role just fine.

You could add 'war is a racket' too

I knew the title, not its contents. Thanks.

From Wikipedia [0]:

> In the booklet's penultimate chapter, Butler recommended three steps to disrupt the war racket:

> 1. Making war unprofitable. Butler suggests that the means for war should be "conscripted" before those who would fight the war

> 2. Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it

> 3. Limitation of militaries to self-defense

Reminds me of a point Danny Sjursen made in his book Ghost Riders of Baghdad [1]. Paraphrasing (badly): Presidents, hawks, and other decision makers have no skin in the game. Their families are safe. They just rake in the dollars. In a conscript army, there is at least a chance that their sons too are sent to die. There might be an expectation that one has to have some experience before taken seriously in these matters.

Now it's just poor saps from the Appalachians. Unimportant people dying in unknown places. A small price to pay.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

1 - https://skepticalvet.com/

>Reminds me of a point Danny Sjursen made in his book Ghost Riders of Baghdad [1]. Paraphrasing (badly): Presidents, hawks, and other decision makers have no skin in the game. Their families are safe. They just rake in the dollars. In a conscript army, there is at least a chance that their sons too are sent to die. There might be an expectation that one has to have some experience before taken seriously in these matters.

Important people not having their children in the armed forces is a modern thing. There was a point in time when commanding armies in the field was an all but required resume checkbox for someone in line to inherit the throne and there was no shortage of war back then.

sharing the cost sounds like a better notion of democracy than sharing the votes

What egalitarian times those were.

That was my understanding too.

Though I don’t know when or why it changed. Was it mechanisation? Or the development of standing armies? Entrenched aristocracy?

Real Engineering did a great series on the logistics of D-day. https://youtu.be/sYXYG_F1EK0

We have shit tons of information about the fine grained details of WWII. You should look it up some time.

Never mind me, I’ve seen the Mulberry Harbour myself.

Doesn’t change the fact that it’s not part of the shared idea of that operation and over time will fall in to obscurity.

Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army was composed of many groups like Thessalians and Macedonians. Greeks were a small portion of it:

"The Greek cavalry was not considered as effective or versatile as the Thessalian and Macedonian cavalry."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Macedonian_army

You are correct.

I hesitated using “Greeks”, but then stuck with the common parlance.

Stephen Ambrose actually wrote 2 books that detail the logistics of the invasion of Normandy. D-Day and Band of Brothers.

The distinction between killing people and ordering people to kill people.

I don't think that this is an 'exlusive or' situation; The emphasis in the poem is on the small man, who is not often treated as being as part of the big picture, but who has to pay the bills, in the final analysis.

We can apply this to the present day too.

Take a huge city like New York or Los Angeles or London or Tokyo. You think of investment bankers, celebrities and entertainment industry execs, or other hotshot professionals.

But underneath all that glamor are the waiters, the cooks, the janitors, the security guards, the sanitation workers, etc. etc. who are often overlooked. But the city would utterly fall apart without them.

> It’s been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went into D-day are never talked about.

False.

Loads of books have been written about the subject. Here is a video from a video series titled The Logistics of D-Day: https://youtu.be/zpFLLGkNm7I

These are great links. I am not sure we are necessarily glossing over these details. The logistics of war/major construction/other big projects are actually heavily studied, and I'd dare say are interesting to the general public - see this book for example: The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great. I'd call it history inspired fiction, but the author goes into a lot of detail about what it could have taken to motivate various peoples to join you for war, what goes into feeding said people etc.

I do agree that for some reason this information is more difficult to obtain - I want to blame popular movie directors who are obsessed with the lone genius trope, that however doesn't reflect reality well.

Interesting discussion/poem though - perhaps if we did a better job at reflecting the importance of all the moving pieces of the machine we'd have a better a priori idea of what it takes to create something big.

Edit: Here is something I watched recently about what it takes to feed 6000 miners somewhere in Mongolia - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-Vvw3Cy_Rw

The Egg, by Andy Weir.

Which reminds me of a quote from Agatha Christie's "Death on the Nile":

“Take the Pyramids. Great blocks of useless masonry, put up to minister to the egoism of a despotic bloated king. Think of the sweated masses who toiled to build them and died doing it. It makes me sick to think of the suffering and torture they represent."

Mrs. Allerton said cheerfully: "You’d rather have no Pyramids, no Parthenon, no beautiful tombs or temples—just the solid satisfaction of knowing that people got three meals a day and died in their beds."

The young man directed his scowl in her direction. "I think human beings matter more than stones.”

Modern:

Elon Musk builds the best rockets, and cool cars.

Linus Torvalds created GNU/Linux. (Well he corrected on several occasions that he did not built Linux, he only started it).

Higgs discovered Higgs boson. Einstein created Theory of Relativity.

Putin attacked Ukraine.

Alexander did not 'conquer' India, and it's a pity this gets repeated so often.

> His army, exhausted, homesick, and anxious by the prospects of having to further face large Indian armies throughout the Indo-Gangetic Plain, mutinied at the Hyphasis (modern Beas River) and refused to march further east. Alexander, after a meeting with his officer, Coenus, and after hearing about the lament of his soldiers,[5] eventually relented,[6] being convinced that it was better to return.

The history of India is rarely covered at all in the Western world, and the most often repeated summary of Alexander's campaign is the "no more worlds to conquer" bit from Die Hard which is a misquote of English poets. The English view of India is not unbiased.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_campaign_of_Alexander_t...

Alexander was Great at murder.

> The documents are laid out like a modern spreadsheet

> a wonder of the ancient world

Very slightly OT, but it's a shame history has been divided between "Ancient Times" and "our era", because it's obvious we are contemporaneous to these people who wrote down their daily activities in a journal and kept track of what was owned to whom on a paper table that looked like a spreadsheet.

Not just contemporaneous: we are the same.

We use coinage and alphabets, transmute rocks into metal, have near-universal literacy, fly through the air like birds, bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies, walk on the Moon, transplant hearts and kidneys from one person to another, and bring forth plentiful harvests within glass temples in frozen wastelands.

We craft elephants of iron that swallow us when we wish to travel from one city to another. Upon arrival, they disgorge us unharmed. They run five times as fast as the fastest horse.

Eleven years ago, we finished building a tower that is five times as tall as the Great Pyramid; building it took only six years and 22 million person-hours (so perhaps 1000 people, the size of Merer's aper, though unlike Merer's workers they were enslaved). It's not defensive (towers are almost useless for defense now); it's mostly luxury housing. In two centuries it will be gone.

We turn night into day whenever we wish, making travel at night just as easy as travel in the day.

Only one in 100 children die before age 5 now, a number that was around 20 throughout all human history until a century ago. Most people who are born live threescore years or more. But many fewer people are born compared to our population (which is 250 times bigger than in Merer's time), because now people do not become pregnant unless they want to, usually. Most people do not raise their own children any more; they put them into state institutions except for evenings, weekends, and summertime.

When someone is badly injured or sick, we put their body into a state of temporary death, cut it open, fix the problem, sew them up like a torn sweater, and bring them back to life; it's so commonplace that people sometimes choose to undergo this procedure for cosmetic reasons such as having bigger breasts.

To speak to one another, we often use the power of lightning, invisibly leaping through the air, to convey our thoughts to one another, even though we may be on opposite sides of the earth. We have put thousands of new, tiny moons in the sky because they help this system work better. Usually when we write, instead of using ink, we write in letters of lightning. It's easier that way, because the letters disappear and reappear whenever we wish.

95% of the world's work is now done by servants made of metal such as the elephants I mentioned. For example, almost nobody washes clothes anymore, and we can all listen to music more perfect than any human can play, whenever and wherever we wish, played for us by these metal servants. These servants do not eat food; instead they are fed on lightning made from the black blood of the Earth. Doing too much of this sort of thing is changing the weather and melting the glaciers, so now we are teaching these servants to feed on sunlight instead.

Most countries, especially the militarily strongest, no longer have kings.

We have the same kind of paintings Merer had, but also a different kind of paintings that glow, move, and speak. Sometimes people sit for hours watching these incredibly lifelike paintings, laughing and crying. Sometimes they show us things that are happening right now, far away, and sometimes they show us things that happened in the past, or that never happened.

Most houses no longer have fireplaces. Most people no longer know how to make fire; they have tiny tools that make fire for them.

But sure, basically nothing has changed, because we still use spreadsheets.

This is the single best comment I have ever read on HN.

Of course you won't see it glorified by HN folk, cause they're entirely elsewhere vibrationally. Too busy complaining. "Well, someone has to complain! Someone has to keep others accountable!" they cry. May be true, maybe not, but when all we do is complain, nothing gets done. Not for lack of effort and busyness, but for lack of faith and goodwill.

On the contrary, if no one complaints nothing will happen. Moaning always comes before invention. Its just not the moaners themselves who make anything happen but they are very much part of the delicate balance. You could invent something without moaners but no one would recognize it.

Take this one for example:

> bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies

The amount of moaning we still have to do about this? If we fail at that task, this fire stuff will be sure to be the end of us.

I suppose that in a sense any non-playful attempt to change the state of affairs, whether directed at technical progress or not, is rooted in a "complaint": you imagine a possible future and judge that the current state of affairs is worse by comparison.

And you cannot simply ignore the present when you do this. Any attempt to bring that future about necessarily begins by taking stock of the resources available in the present: if you try to hike to a mountain peak without taking your gaze from that peak, you will stumble and twist your ankle. But that is not a judgmental, condemnatory way of perceiving the present; it is a factual evaluation of the means available to you in the present, similar to the factual evaluation of the possibilities that exist in a possible future.

So I don't know that I agree with your thesis that progress is rooted in dissatisfaction, though many people do.

> The amount of moaning we still have to do about this? If we fail at that task, this fire stuff will be sure to be the end of us.

This comment suggests to me that you do not yet adequately appreciate the risks of pervasive surveillance and precision-guided munitions, by comparison with which the risks of thermonuclear warheads pale.

Thank you! FWIW it has 50 upvotes, so I guess several people liked it. There's a lot of stuff somewhat like this in Dercuano, Derctuo, and Dernocua (http://canonical.org/~kragen/dernocua) and in particular the story of Lao Yuxi in Dernocua is especially similar to it in nature.

I have to say I usually regret commenting here on Character Assassination News, more or less for the reason you say. I think it's an unhealthy, self-destructive habit of mine.

Other recent comments of mine you might enjoy, though some of it is certainly "complaining":

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327736 (calculating the energy cost of the lowest-tech-possible way to do atmospheric carbon capture, upvoted to 7)

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29880287 (offering a particularly clean formulation of binary search, downvoted to -1)

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28926494 (trying and failing to estimate the relative externalized environmental costs of using a plastic bottle and washing a glass one, upvoted to 20)

4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29505838 (on the historical development of the "willful infringement" doctrine in patent law, including citations to caselaw and law review articles, and in particular how reading patents can expose you or your employer to treble damages; upvoted to 2 points and flagged)

5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29697411 (on why metallurgical research is still more or less driven by experiment rather than computation, upvoted to 74)

6. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28660097 (my dismaying epiphany, based on empirical data, that I'm only about three times as fast writing things in Python as I would be in C, despite extensive experience in Python, and that it's often probably not worth the drawbacks. Probably a modern C alternative like Rust would be better; upvoted to 3)

7. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29815027 (on beating SciPy mathematical optimization algorithms on a circuit design problem in under 250 milliseconds with just a list comprehension, unvoted at 1)

8. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29144119 (a list of the biggest unanswered questions in physics today, upvoted to 10)

Other recent comments of mine that I thought were good but didn't make it into the top 8:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750891 (just quoting the Tipitaka on the list of games the Buddha would not play, upvoted to 25)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29704120 (on ways to generate the Sierpinski triangle, to which I would add http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/skitch#!@12rr[t[m@.5t]f...])

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29842158 (on the energy balance of industrial agriculture, current phosphate reserves, and the degree of sustainability of current nitrogen fixation and phosphate extraction practices)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28678098 (on how to use coverage reports to improve software quality, upvoted to 21)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28592961 (a set of shitty shell scripts that constitutes a superior substitute for the YouTube Web UI, although right now youtube-dl and ytdlp seem to be getting throttled)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28333404 (complaining about line-extension fraud: "Pyrex" that isn't borosilicate, Saran Wrap containing no Saran, Sudafed without pseudoephedrine, and Western Digital's shingled disk drives, upvoted to 12)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28185545 (on how it's a problem that 90% of startup founders' jobs are storytelling, upvoted to 14)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29844706 (explaining why electrolytic hydrogen production with renewable energy is a viable option, though see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29857648 for some process efficiency issues)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401159 (on why web hosting providers should not censor terrorists, upvoted to 28; see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401109 on the history of liberalism, upvoted to 9 but with a followup downvoted to -1 and another upvoted to 8)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28611769 (on the problem of nonlinearity in hedonic utilitarianism, illustrated with the Cheesecake Factory and Michelin stars, though someone mistook it for an attempt at a Grand Unified Theory of Restaurant Hedonics; upvoted to 18)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834530 (on when rationality is or is not valuable, in particular on the importance of honoring Galileos rather than Maos)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28635172 (a perspective on electronic payment in Argentina and the tradeoffs of living there)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28721065 (on the history of refrigeration and the ice trade, upvoted to 10)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28509068 (on why reasoning from fictional evidence is unreliable and has historically led to bad conclusions, also coincidentally mentioning heart and kidney transplants, upvoted to 8)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29833195 (why it is impossible for China to be exporting its coal in the form of Bitcoin: it imports coal and doesn't export Bitcoin, and the whole Bitcoin network uses only 0.3% of China's energy consumption)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28441895 (on whether it is possible for the humans to learn algebra, upvoted to 8)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28613812 (on common misconceptions about Bayesian statistics)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28362300 (on the relative path losses of active and passive sonar and what that implies for submarine warfare, upvoted to 9)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28440912 (on what sorts of extraterrestrial life could potentially evolve to be intelligent)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29774257 (on the economic structure of why Google Search is no good any more)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28591650 (on including generalized lattice operators in programming languages, and the cognitive HCI aspects of programming language grammar design, upvoted to 8)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29735228 (on how Winnie-The-Pooh still is not in the public domain in many countries, apparently against the wishes of the Milne family)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28466492 (on some simple DSP for mouse wiggle detection to increase mouse pointer size in 12–18 instructions, upvoted to 2)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712106 (on companies fraudulently claiming to use two-factor authentication)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28467260 (on the history of tracked vehicles in polar exploration)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29671402 (on user interface design for algebraic-notation calculator programs)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29558779 (on using pencil and paper as a user interface for computer programs by way of a camera)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29557929 (on FTDI's unprosecuted criminal vandalism of their customers' customers' customers' hardware)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29557730 (on the problems of archival and preservation of computerized documents such as HyperCard stacks)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29504940 (on murder in Oakland)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29477589 (a very short retrospective on the EPIC 2014 video and modern journalism)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29476060 (on why we should eliminate copyright; more detail in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29559952)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29332777 (on the mineral resources used in modern electronics)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29321232 (on why you should still pay attention to P/E ratios of stocks)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29286058 (on why the University of California's decision to drop standardized test scores as an admission criterion is unpopular with the ethnic minorities they have benefited)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29171793 (on whether Perl was born at JPL or at Unisys)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29158664 (trying to figure out how much nuclear power PRC is actually building)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29152453 (complaining about people commemorating my dead friend's birthday by speculating that if he were alive he would support their political viewpoint, one which he steadfastly opposed his entire life)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29144483 (on how the time gap from scientific discoveries to their technological deployment has or hasn't changed over the last century)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29143312 (on what would enable unfunded physics experimenters to make significant discoveries, getting into the nature of the historical interplay between theoretical and experimental physics)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29136343 (on social mobility and social justice in the Roman Empire)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29072399 (on why nuclear reactor development, and some other aspects of progress, stagnated after 01960)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28937181 (on the non-glorification of violence in US popular culture by contrast with the Iliad)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28885057 (an overview of data structures used for efficient implementations of text editors)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28878848 (comparing the relative costs of tracing GC, reference counting, and manual memory management; see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28878635)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28853236 (on Jacque Fresco's utopian Venus Project and the resulting Zeitgeist Movement)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733282 (on why it is bad for journalists to use "hacking" to mean "computer crime", which propagates confusion and fear of us)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731861 (on the benefits of notation as a tool of thought)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28679454 (what an urgent new feature with a short deadline on a software project might consist of)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28679139 (on which software project process practices are really valuable in my experience)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28678845 (on why frequent releases in particular are very valuable)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28588402 (a totally wrong comment about oxalic acid for rust removal that prompted an excellent reply)

All of those things and more are described in ancient texts that we consider mythology. The only thing we can be sure of is that our stuff will leave little more than a trace given enough time. What silly stories they would make [say] after the next ice age?

If only we could see, just once more, those 5000 kg African elephants run though the desert pulling a multi ton brick (or the vimanas if that is what they used)... see, once more, how those ships are loaded and how they are build.

But just their spreadsheets isn't so bad. The logistics alone is enough to impress us.

I suppose that when we have a tradeoff between longevity and literally any other useful feature of an artifact, we generally sacrifice longevity; at a 3% annual discount rate, if you can make a durable good last forever instead of 40 years, the extra NPV is only about 44% (or lower if the scrap value is nonzero), and for a substantial number of things we use an even higher discount rate than 3%. Even so, the remains of our civilization would be impossible to avoid seeing for many millennia if it collapsed. Numerous recognizable artifacts would survive for hundreds of millions of years if humanity died today.

I mentioned that the Burj Khalifa will be gone in a century or two; because it's built in a place with corrosive groundwater, it relies on cathodic protection to prevent corrosion in its foundations, and even its above-ground structure will spall due to the corrosion of the steel frame in a few decades, but the crumbled chunks of concrete will remain visibly artificial for hundreds of millions of years. Similarly no lathes and almost no papyri have survived from Khufu's time, but lathes clearly date back at least to Old Kingdom Egypt, before hieroglyphics, because we have the turned stone vessels they made.

What would be left of our own vimanas 4500 years from now if they are left out to weather? The steel parts will surely be just rust. I suspect that the aluminum and titanium parts, if not "looted" by "treasure hunters", will survive for that period of time with only a logarithmically thicker layer of hard protective oxide. The inconel superalloys of the jet engine gas turbines will not weather, though some lesser stainless steels will cease to be so stainless over such a timespan.

The polymers vary widely: cellulose acetate and most of the elastomers are inherently unstable and will degrade into a nasty goo in only a few decades, while PTFE (teflon), polyimide (kapton), polyethylene, polypropylene, and I think PVDF (kynar) are stable over geological timescales. Other organic polymers are in between; in particular I think the glass-fiber-reinforced epoxy circuit boards will last millennia without difficulty, and though the phenol-formaldehyde thermoset used for single-sided circuit boards is also a thermoset, I suspect it might only last a few centuries. PVC has to be mixed with stabilizers to avoid spontaneous degradation in a matter of years, and I don't know how long those stabilizers will last. Surely the naugahyde business-class seat cushions and the polyurethane seat cushions will become as brittle as a mummy; perhaps they will crumble into dust even without disturbance.

Also stable over geological timescales are the glass in the instrument panel and the hair-fine copper wires of the wiring harness, though those, too, will tend to attract treasure hunters. The silicon chips may not still be operable 4500 years from now (due to Flash decay, dopant diffusion, and tin whiskers) but the microscopic patterns on their surfaces will remain, protected by a thick layer of amorphous quartz. The harsh acids today's treasure hunters use to remove their gold bond wires leave the passivated silicon unharmed.

In the playground of my elementary school, I collected thousands of shards of the painted pots from the lost civilization of the Anasazi. They bore abundant silent witness to the perfection enjoyed by the art of pottery in that ancient civilization before its collapse, even devoid of the ephemeral leavings of soups and seeds they once held, and of course lacking any writing. Many of the timbers of the Anasazi survive aboveground, but few places are dry enough to permit that; but the carpentry Eythra 1 well from 7000 years ago, before the Copper Age, was found to have wedged tenons: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

So I feel safe in asserting that neither the Anasazi nor Khufu's subjects nor the heroes of the Mahabharata knew any art capable of building vimanas. I'm less sure of the settlements predating Jericho and Çatalhöyük: today most of them are under tens of meters of water, and Atlit-Yam seems to have escaped notice for thousands of years despite being in the harbor of Haifa, right in the cradle of civilization. The Antikythera Mechanism survived in a recognizable, if not operable, form, despite two millennia of brine; how many other such paragons of the mechanical art have been lost?

All of what you're describing happened after the Industrial Revolution, and most in the last 20 years. Yet the cutoff between Ancient Times and "our era" (?) happened 2000+ years ago, for some reason.

Also, we don't fly "like birds". We are flown, crammed into metal tubes that are more similar to ancient galleries carved in mountains, mentioned in the OP, than to any bird.

Edit: As a matter of fact I don't understand your response (or your tone). I didn't say that nothing had changed since the building of the pyramids. I said we're the same, and is that in dispute? Has human nature changed more in the last 4,500 years than in the 500,000 to 1,000,000 years of its evolution? Or in the last 100 years? Because we drive cars?

I think you're both right. We live completely differently now, but it's not clear that our essence has greatly changed.

In particular, that our values have changed is wonderful. But that's a cultural development. I'm convinced most of the people I've known would have shrugged at slavery like most Romans did, had they grown up with it. (Maybe they would have questioned it as children, but by adulthood they would have choked those questions down.)

The modern, western world still had slavery as recently as 150 years ago, so that too is not really a marker to differentiate between our era and antiquity.

Not to mention all the wars and genocides of the last two centuries, unprecedented in scale and ferocity, which make it hard to pretend we are morally better than any previous generation.

As I mentioned, the Burj Khalifa was built to a significant extent with slave labor, being completed only ten years ago, while the Great Pyramid probably was not, despite what the Greeks thought two thousand years later. In the United States there are some two million prisoners, most of whom also perform slave labor, as did the victims of GULAG.

Perhaps the Khwarazmians would disagree that the genocides of the last two centuries were unprecedented in scale and ferocity.

Undoubtedly Khufu's subjects would be aghast if you shrugged at damming the Nile; perhaps the Romans would be aghast if you shrugged at oral sex, conscientious objectors, and female bosses instructing male employees; Hindutva activists today are aghast if you shrug at eating hamburgers, to the point that they may lynch you if they catch you slaughtering a cow. Some of our moral values are of course the correct ones, slavery being actually objectively immoral unlike those other examples, but generally people only know their culture's value system, not the objectively correct one. And some of our moral values are definitely not the correct ones.

AFAICT, the cut-off for "ancient" is the fall of the Roman Empire. Basically ~395 CE. Likely due to European civilization needing to rebuild post dark ages.

This is certainly problematic for many reasons, the largest being that civilization went along uninterrupted outside of Europe.

"Antiquity" is conventionally considered to end about 1500 years ago, though this really only applies to Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_antiquity

The reason for this is the very sparse historical record from the European Dark Ages. Scholars in the High Middle Ages like Petrarch could look back on their own recent history, and then a vast gap of mostly unknown, and then the impressive cultures of Antiquity among whose ruins they lived. We know more about the Dark Ages now than we did then but still not that much.

Here you can see people flying like birds without being canned in metal tubes: https://youtu.be/rvQ9DjJNal0 https://youtu.be/-C_jPcUkVrM https://youtu.be/gtvCnZqZnxc https://youtu.be/UYi9r2eiUhU

It seems likely that we have changed. I suspect Merer's workers, even if they had grown up in modern civilization, would not tolerate being employees, being disarmed, and having their children taken away for education; and probably more of them were dyslexic than in modern populations. But I don't really know.

Generally the rule is that domestic animals are stupider, smaller-skulled, more submissive, weaker, more neotenous, less aggressive, fatter, lower in testosterone, less sexually dimorphic, and possessed of smaller teeth than the wild type (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_syndrome#In_anim...). Modern humans have these traits to a very notable degree compared to, as you allude to, chimpanzees and even Neandertals or Denisovans; but perhaps we have also been substantially domesticated over the last 4500 years, maybe even over the last 2000. Not because of driving cars, but because of having kings. Are we the Eloi? I don't think Wells thought of the aristocracy as the Morlocks.

Even if your genes were the same, would you be the same person if you had grown up never seeing an alphabet, never driving a car, two of your siblings dying in childhood, and never hearing of a government (like most of the world in Merer's time) or at least of a democracy (like Merer's workers)?

This would be the case if I was born in the countryside around Paris in 1400 or almost anywhere in the world around the same time.

As recently as 1840 still, France had a king (as did much of Europe), there were of course no cars, phones, etc., and over 60% of the French population could not sign their name.

Again, everything you are talking about in your original response relates to the very recent past, and that wasn't my point. I would agree the world changed beyond recognition in the last 50 years (although I would disagree it had much effect on us as a species).

But my original point was that the separation of history in "antiquity" and "our era" is arbitrary, and that we can relate to people from 4,500 years ago as well as our great great grand parents -- and perhaps more.

I see! I think you're right that change has been very fast recently, very much faster than anything innate about us can change, and of course that post-Renaissance Europe was in many ways very similar to Classical Antiquity. That's why it was called the "Renaissance", after all.

But there was a fairly sharp break between Late Antiquity and the Dark Ages, which I don't think is really arbitrary, except in the sense that it was only a local phenomenon and so only appears if your focus was Europe. It wasn't as big a change as the last century or two has been, but it was a big change. The progression of the Middle Ages was much more gradual, but it too eventually produced enormous changes, and certainly the Reformation and the consequent introduction of the Westphalian form of state were enormously consquential.

My great-great-grandparents were probably born around 1860, mostly in the US. So not only had they heard of governments, they knew about democracy and literacy, though some of them probably weren't themselves literate. They traveled and shipped goods by railroad, which was of course made of metal smelted from stones. They bought and sold things with coins and even paper money (though not fiat money). Some of them probably drove cars, though I've only heard definite stories of their children, my great-grandparents, doing so. Some of them made phone calls. Glass was mass-produced in their lifetimes, though greenhouses were still only for the rich, and steel-framed skyscrapers were built. They knew many illnesses were caused by "germs". Hot-air balloons were a century before their births; some of them may have lived to see not only heavier-than-air flight but also the Great War. I don't know if any of them ever underwent anesthesia, but it became widespread for surgery in their lifetimes.

So, I don't know that it's true that I can relate to Merer as well as to my great-great-grandparents. Merer didn't have iron, coinage, flight, germ theory, anesthesia, mass production, and so on. He probably didn't know the Earth moved or that the stars were suns. He might not have known the Earth was round. Even the Polynesians hadn't yet learned to navigate over open ocean. He didn't have wheeled vehicles; chariots would be introduced centuries later by the Hyksos.

I really love this comment, thank you

Wow this belongs in the comment museum, excellently written and insightful. It reminds me of the The Body Rituals of the Nacirema[1]. I wish more people wrote things like this, it gives a dash of objectivity to how things are.

I agree with both you and GP though, in some ways things really haven't changed at all despite these technological changes. If you can't see the constancy too then I don't think you see the big picture. All of this that we have is a product of the same work that began back then, all for the same reasons. You have to abstract to see the constancy. I think you really miss out if you don't see what GP is saying too.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacirema

I agree.

Well, except for the parts that were compliments to me, which I don't have enough objectivity to pass judgment on.

Thank you.

> But many fewer people are born compared to our population (which is 250 times bigger than in Merer's time), because now people do not become pregnant unless they want to, usually.

Ancient people had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium_(antiquity) for the same purpose. They likely used it up to extinction.

Aye, and in the last century a huge fraction of the planet's biodiversity has been lost. But I don't think it's clear that silphium and similar herbal drugs constituted an oral contraceptive with effectiveness on par with the Pill.

So basically everything is amazing and nobody is happy

Perhaps happiness is not produced by amazement alone.

Perhaps, but there is one thing that I'm sure of, that it is not produced by complaining either.

By writing in this style, you try to imagine what an ancient person who sees the world today would describe it as.

I do not know exactly why, but this style of writing is profoundly alienating to me. I think it's because it sounds like it is before our "rational turn" during the enlightenment and renaissance.

I don't mean this in a bad way, but I think your utilization of it is not compelling on its own for your point.

I don't think it is bad that it is alienating to you, although I hope that didn't cause you to suffer. Conveying the alien nature of antiquity (and, by implication, of the future) was much of my purpose in thus employing ostranenie.

In the sense of: People in ancient times were also people with needs, urges, dreams, hopes etc. You are right. Looking at ancient people and describing them like a different species makes no sense at all.

However believe systems make a huge difference as well. As a child I had problems placing myself into the shoes of my grandfather who was a Nazi, went to the eastern front and had values that differed immensely from what my parents told me was good and right. But we shared at least some common cultural knowledge and social practise. Ancient people can feel foreign because their lived cultural practise, believes etc differ from ours hugely. Not being able to put yourself into the shoes of someone who e.g. lived in a feudal system is normal — you need to be very well informed to be able to imagine how life felt to someone like that, nevertheless is still worth to try of course.

Do you think ancient implies a different species or what? Some tech is very old.

The nobleman Ankhhaf, mentioned in these texts and described the article as the ostensible project manager of the pyramid at Giza, was the subject of a truly remarkable bust:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankhhaf_(sculpture)

Amazing. The fact that this survived is awesome.

Another example, only very slightly later, is this:

http://www.globalegyptianmuseum.org/record.aspx?id=14910

It's somewhat rare to find such realistic depictions in ancient art and I find any such works extremely arresting.

The fact that documents from the building of the pyramids can still be dug out of the ground is MINDBLOWING. The vast, vast majority of ancient texts only survive because people copied them for thousands of years.

It makes me think about how many texts might still remain but are lost when someone builds a road or apartment building. In India, for instance, where there are thousands of palm leaf manuscripts rotting in temple basements because there is essentially no funding or support for preservation.

Egypt is special because of the incredibly dry desert conditions. How many other places are there like Egypt where a tremendous empire existed for thousands of years surrounded by an environment so dry that it could preserve papyrus for 4000+ years?

This also greatly contributed to the preservation of the Pyramids themselves.

The great North African deserts come and go in extremely long cycles however. At some point a wet period will return and much of the preserved artifacts will be severely degraded or erased.

3 tremendous empires, depending how you count. Egypt, Greece, Rome...

Greece and Rome hardly count. They aren't surrounded by incredibly dry deserts where paper or papyrus would last for 4000 years. Would it even last a year in Italy or Greece? Doubtful.

I mean both Greece and Rome operated Egypt as a major part of their overall empire. So Egypt was, for hundreds of years, not an Egyptian Empire

Website seems to be down at the moment, here's a snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20220111060057/https://www.histo...

Perhaps @dang can change the link to the blogpost shared by zerforschung at the bottom of the thread which is written in English?

https://zerforschung.org/posts/djokovic-pcr-test-en/

This is so frustrating, they were renovating not building.

Anyone who can remotely work with numbers and has seen a building made with rocks should be able to calculate how much time IN THEORY the Great Pyramid needed from foundation to pinnacle. Let's say it's not that number (supposedly 30 years since that's how long that kheope guy reigned), remember you are actually a common person not an archeologist that needs slaves for 24/7/365 every day and night with every weather or invasion just to match the timelines.

Then you need to add another large support staff to farm, care and replenish the first group.

Then you ask yourself, how it is possible to raise blocks at dozen of meters? How you can use Pi without knowing it, or earth dimensions, or the true north and maintain right angles and orientation for hundred of meters? Just how do you make the base perfectly straight without opticals?

And then you seem to notice that there are wonderful internals: how do you project them to fit before the externals? what about the black stones? How is it possible to cut (carving Mohs scale of 7 is impossible with iron, which they did not have), transport from the nearest hundred miles caves, raise about a hundred meters and assemble 70 tons blocks of granite so precisely than not even a sheet of paper can fit into the contact points?

And only after that, falling in the rabbit hole, you have to admit there was a previous advanced civilization.

Isn't it some sort of cement and the blocks were cast in place?

That's the theory that makes the most sense. I think some of the blocks have lines that show where they seemingly ran out of cement that day and came back and finished it later.

As noted elsewhere the Pyramids were not built by slaves, they were built by the best craftsmen in the kingdom.

Second thing to note is the Great Pyramids didn't spring up from nowhere. The Egyptians spent hundreds of years building bigger and bigger Pyramids, refining the techniques. Long enough they were able to look at the older ones to see how they weathered as well as having written records of the many mistakes along the way.

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