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Comment by lordleft | Hacker News Reader

> (For a sense of just how long ancient Egypt thrived, writes Dolnick, consider this: “Cleopatra came at the very end of Egypt’s imperial run, 13 centuries after King Tut, 20 centuries after the golden age of Egyptian literature, 26 centuries after the Great Pyramid.” To put it in another context, the reign of Cleopatra is closer to the year 2022 than it is to when the pyramids were built.)

The scale of ancient civilization is always astounding to me.

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As another bit of trivia, when Cleopatra and Caesar were together, they toured Egypt. They almost certainly made a stop at the Pyramids. (As much of a must-see in Egypt then as now!) But they wouldn't have known, not with certainty, who built them and when.

> But they wouldn't have known, not with certainty, who built them and when.

Are you referring to the long held contemporary debate on whether or not Khufu built the pyramids?

https://www.gaia.com/article/book-of-enoch

Or rather the fact that they were like 1800 years old by then.

By the time of Cleopatra, written Egyptian had been dead for hundreds of years. No one could read the old inscriptions. Herodotus, some ~400 years before may have had some access to records in some way, or oral tradition, and he wrote an account of Cheops (Khufu) and the construction of the Great Pyramid. An event more than 1000 years before Herodotus himself. How much of Herodotus was myth and how much history was already under debate while he was still alive, and it still is. Being able to read Egyptian gave a whole new perspective in the 19th century: Khufu's name is on the king's list at Abydos.

I'm surprised at how such information could be lost over generations. Yet, I recall having to read Shakespeare and barely being able to glean meaning from the passages despite them being written in English. If you go even farther back to the works of Chaucer, the text is essentially indecipherable for any layperson without a teacher. And that is a span of only about 600 years. I must admit that even reading the Federalist papers is a little difficult and those are only a little more than 200 years old.

It gives me a newfound appreciation for how much language changes and the challenges of conveying information across generations.

Our civilization has not collapsed since Shakespeare. Ancient Egypt's did c. 1200 BC and never exactly recovered in terms of literacy though remnants remained into early Roman times. Then it was conquered by the Greeks.

Mesopotamia was even more completely buried and forgotten. A few names in the Bible, nothing more of the history survived until rediscovered in modern times. Around 400 BC, Xenophon returning from his campaign against the Persians, marched past the ruins of a great city. He was impressed with the size of it. The walls on stone foundations 20 ft tall! They're still there today, more or less. Perhaps the Medes had built it, according to the locals. Not much was known of the Medes, to the Greeks. It may have been quite ancient.

Xenophon did not know that it was Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, last of the great Mesopotamian empires. It had been destroyed some 200 years before in the final war between Babylon and Assyria. The Mesopotamian cultural-political system sort of fell apart after. The languages of administration and history stopped being used. Written records ceased. The Persians came to rule the area. Only two hundred years and already forgotten.

Knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphs, hieratic, and demotic didn't completely disappear until a few centuries into the Christian era, evidenced by priests producing new texts in these scripts. They even produced texts in Middle Egyptian—the phase of the language beginning approximately 2,000 BCE—almost to the end of the use of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This thread is about a copy of the Memphis Decree, a text written in two forms of written Egyptian (hieroglyphs, Demotic) produced about 150 years before Cleopatra.

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