The important thing isn't that you promote the best worker; the key is that it isn't possible for the ambitious-but-incompetent to game their way up.
Edit: Wait, that was promoting.
(Also, if people are interested in randomness in antique decision making, me & my wife made a simulator of an ancient lot oracle unearthed in modern Turkey: https://sortesalearum.com)
The sad thing is, I feel that this method may actually produce better results than whatever popularity voting schemes we're currently using.
(It's somewhat enshrined in modern-day RNGs used in simulation and forecasting models.)
Michael Schulson's 2014 Aeon essay, "How to Choose" remains at the top of my best reads of the past decade:
... It makes sense that it should have taken Dove some 15 years to realise that randomness could be an asset. As moderns, we take it for granted that the best decisions stem from a process of empirical analysis and informed choice, with a clear goal in mind. That kind of decision-making, at least in theory, undergirds the ways that we choose political leaders, play the stock market, and select candidates for schools and jobs. It also shapes the way in which we critique the rituals and superstitions of others. But, as the Kantu’ illustrate, there are plenty of situations when random chance really is your best option. And those situations might be far more prevalent in our modern lives than we generally admit. ...
<https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>
Examples include swidden farmers in New Guinea, China's I Ching, the Athenian Greek elections (more a lottery than today's FPTP precise-count balloting), Renaissance Italy's Doges, and contemporary college admissions, with references for further reading.
https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/curiosities/alectriomancy-fort...
A few years ago I'd thought that the US Supreme Court might benefit by both expansion and selecting by lot the judicial panel for any given case. This would throw far more uncertainty into the outcome of any given Supreme Court case, as well as the capacity to throw the court in the benefit of one party or the other for years at a time. That's been proposed by others.
Another possibility might be to apply a similar approach to legislation, with an expanded Congress closer to the 30,000:1 constituent to representative ratio initially in the US Constitution rather than the 616,000:1 ratio presently in place. That would result in a House of 11,000 members, however.
(I'm willing to accept that this might prove infeasible, though I'd still like to see approaches enabling greater direct representation.)
What if, as with the Supreme Court reform proposal, legislative votes were based on a subset of representatives, again allocated by lot from amongst members? Again, though outcomes would over time average to partisan representation, any given vote might, or might not, favour the majority party.
One possible consequence: given the impossibility of guaranteeing a known outcome in votes, legislation might be written to more broadly consider overall views. This could avoid exremes, though it's worth noting that extremes gave rise to both highly discriminatory and civil-rights-reform practices. Some extremes seem less bad than others.
There's also the probable outcome that the locus of control would shift elsewhere. I'd still like to see some discussion of such concepts.
these tablets are close to 4000 years old.
being possesed by gods was an in thing, a believe demons were a prechristian idea as well, so if witch, and demon could be interchanged somehow, i think that fits the era.
A citation is needed to disprove the information that you refer to as "religious fabrication". Lack of information in Egyptian records is not a citation.
I know it is not satisfying, but essentially all of modern biblical scholarship no longer consider these (among others) are factual. This is held by believers and non-believers in the field alike. There is not a single paper to cite, its the result of decades of research with the field slowly settling on this as the result of hundreds of papers, studies, and books. In particular, you won't find a paper entitled "Modern Biblical Criticism rejects X", as it is not original research and worthy of publication. A book like Thomas Romer's "The Invention of God" goes through a bunch of the pro/con evidence and various theories and proposals put forth. And here is a paper by Romer that just summarily states that modern research has abandoned the documentary hypothesis, but doesn't really offer support for that as it is a well known point within the field that doesn't require re-litigation: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03820791/document
It is only controversial to say this because it is a religious document.
(Lest you think I’m taking sides, the Jewish account of exodus doesn’t line up with archeological evidence either.)
On the Egyptian side, basically no excavations or inscriptions anywhere match up with the biblical story. There were semitic-speaking slaves in Egypt, yes, but not chattel slavery as commonly depicted, but rather something more akin to domestic servants and feudal peasants. And they were never expelled, as there are ongoing references long after into the Ptolemaic kingdom. The only exodus on record of semitic peoples is the Hyksos, who weren't slaves but rather conquerors and the fifteenth dynasty of Egypt. When the Hyksos were eventually defeated, they were expelled and driven out as far as Syria. Maybe that was the origin of The Exodus? But if the story changed from a slave rebellion ("let my people go!") to a dynastic struggle by the ruling class, are we still talking about the same story?
Finally there's the question of when the story was written down in the first place. It is interesting to note that the first few prophets of Israel make no mention of the Exodus whatsoever. It is not part of the shared zeitgeist of early Israel. It is only a few hundred years later that the references to an Egyptian origin are made by some of the northern prophets, and then the story spreads to the south. The Exodus itself isn't written down until Babylonian captivity much, much later, at which point a liberation story starts sounding quite a bit like Mary Sue fan-fiction.
Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of the current state of research as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus
Please check this documentary on the new evidences regarding the Exodus [1].
[1]The Real Mount Sinai - Shocking Exodus Evidence in Saudi Arabia:
Anyway I was directly replying to my parent poster not to the article mentioning that if anyone especially kings that can sort of reliably predict the future they can claim divinity.
[1]Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwariz...
A simple search on Amazon on 'Egypt' and 'Exodus' returned several results of books written by the scholars including the following books [1],[2]. There is also a link to the video documentary regarding the Real Mount Sinai in my other comments.
[1] Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition:
https://academic.oup.com/book/25374
[2] Origin of the Hebrews: New Evidences of Israelites in Egypt From Joseph to The Exodus:
https://www.swrc.com/the-douglas-petrovich-collection-dougla...
swrc is not a valid source of biblical scholarshp, Douglas Petrovich publishes fringe theories and is not someone you want to be citing for biblical research. To wit, he argues that the tower of babel is the only reasonable explanation for the number of languages we have in the world. He is self proclaimed inerrantist and creationist[1]. Why? Because God talked to him and told him it was true. This is not scholarship. That linked video (mine, not yours) is pretty interesting - he talks about being rejected in academia, colleagues won't speak to him, etc. He unfortunately interprets this as rejection of the Christian God, not because his 'research' is shoddy and unsupported, and takes it as proof that he is right. I don't say this to mock him, he is in tears at the end, but to point out he isn't doing scholarship and isn't considered a reliable source in academia.
Please check videos of the Real Mount Sinai as explained in the Bilble (Old Testament) as being shared in my other comments and other sites.