A pharaoh with 100 children bungled his succession | Hacker News Reader

A pharaoh with 100 children bungled his succession

nationalgeographic.com

60 pointsBrajeshwar51 comments

The black article text fades into white in this copy. Intentional defence or just crappy CSS?

For anyone else needing to view via this link (eg: those who block cookies by default) the article implemented a gradient overlay that progressively fades to white, obscuring the latter half of the article. Can disable the linear-gradient via web inspection though.

Reader mode works well enough.

In fact, reader mode works even better -thanks for the tip!

Is there a quick way to determine which element to modify?

Scroll down to where the gradient has already overlapped the text, then right-click above the text and use inspect element and it should be the correct element (was for me). Then uncheck the background-image property to disable the gradient.

Thank you for the tip -- it worked!

If you've selected the element, you can also simply press delete to delete it :)

From listening to the fall of civilization podcast, it seems that a lot of empires went down from too many heirs. From memory Mansa Musa lived very old and had more than 50 heirs as well. The Malian empire did not long last his death. https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/

Lineages seem to be the downfall of empires. I wonder if the Roman Empire would have survived longer had Marcus Aurelius (or anyone after him) not chosen their heir by biology, but by virtue, as the previous emperors did.

Marcus had many children, many of whom died early. He was succeeded by his son Commodus, who's depiction in Gladiator is well known (and invariably inaccurate).

The depiction of Commodus by historians was not favorable either. He's widely thought of as the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire.

A large proportion of Roman emperors became heirs via adoption for this purpose, not via actual inheritance.

It would have probably caused a civil war itself. Commodus was the accepted heir, I doubt Marcus Aurelius could have chosen anyone else as long as Commodus was alive. All of the previous "good" emperors had no male heirs to pass the empire on to.

The point of heir by birth is to eliminate questions of who will be heir and the power struggles. You can raise the heir and any backups with that role in mind from day 1 so they're amenable to it and you also have time to figure out if they're idiots or not and can assemble other governance structures (e.g. delegate specific responsibility into more merit-based advisor roles to keep your heir from screwing it up) to insulate against that if needed. The problem is when you have a bunch of idiots in a row or when you have a bunch of good kings in a row (and all the surrounding official positions get full of idiots). Generally speaking, of course.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_of_succession

When I saw "100 children" in the title, immediately the Indian king Dhrutarashtr came to mind. Didn't know he had a competition from Egypt :)

This is obvious to those in the know, but the King you mention is quasi-fictional, in the sense that Achilles and Odysseus are. He’s mentioned in the Indian epic Mahabharata, which is similar to the Iliad in terms of age, scope and influence on modern society.

Whereas the pharaoh is much more real.

Mind you, that's what they thought about the city of Troy, too. Don't be too surprised if someone somewhere stumbles upon the tomb of king Dhrutarashtr!

No Tombs for Hindus except some rare parts. Generally cremated in a pyre. But guess we never know how things were millennia back.

Doesn't preclude finding a shrine of some kind though right? What (if anything) was the equivalent of garlanded photo-portraits before cameras? Sketched/painted portraits?

Shrines only exist for deified figures. Some kings did successfully deify themselves, to the point where they are still worshipped as Gods. This king wasn’t deified.

Deification of kings sounds unusual, but it was quite a common tactic of political control in the ancient world. The Roman Imperial cult was quite successful at this.

I only meant it loosely, in the sense of any kind of physical thing or collection of things used to represent or remember the deceased, like a photo adorned with a garland.

There is also Genghis Khan who had so many children that 1 in 200 men living today are direct descendants of him.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/1-in-200-men-d...

Thought experiment: after a couple of generations, would we expect a higher or lower percentage using the same calculations

Without reading the article, (had read a similar one years back), here are my thoughts:

More: 0.5% is a small segment of population and by random selection, they are likely to breed with the 99.5% thus increasing the direct descendants with every generation.

Less: they may be locked by geography so they may be inter breeding and not growing (at worst) or slowly growing (at best) but other places such as India quadrupled over the century and they lost percentage as a result.

Direct line descendants, that is fathers fathers father etc. While normal descendants increase with every generation as everything is diluted, direct line descendants do not.

He didn’t father even 0.005% of all kids when he was alive, which means reaching 0.5% requires an increase vastly faster than simple population growth. That increase comes from ‘father mother father’ lines of decent being included.

So, I can only conclude you’re confused about something.

It's not just about how many sons he himself had (4). It's also about how many sons his sons had (quite a lot) and so on. His high social status not only let him have many sons but also helped his descendants (not forever, but for some time) with that. Consider also the possibility that his Y-chromosome may be genetically superior. As the Y-chromosome does not undergo recombination, the only way for those beneficial mutations to spread is very gradually, outperforming generation after generation until every single human is a direct descendant.

On the other hand.... it does seem that the genetical evidence is a bit more murky and questionable than popular sources claim.

There’s zero actual genetic evidence the lineage talked about in the article started with him or even that he had it.

As to estimates, going from 4 sons to ~40,000,000 people in ~30 generations is going to take a lot more than slight bias.

The original estimate was clearly including both male and female dependents then removing duplicates. But, like so often happens people keep reporting vaguely inaccurate versions of the same idea so it mutates. This genetic group is simply close enough to the old story that it seems to vaguely fit.

Oh I forgot to mention a pretty important factor: That he probably sired a bunch of bastard sons.

He could have had 400 sons rather than 4 and it wouldn’t have changed things that much.

Again, nobody is actually tracking his children when they make these models.

Saudi Arabia fits the pattern too.

tl;dr: pharaoh Ramses II did great things but lived 90 years, outliving many of his sons, and soon after he died his kingdom fell into civil wars over successions and collapsed

Ramses II said he did great things and fathered a lot of children - like a lot of rulers ancient and modern.

Well, we do have the tomb he made for his family (KV5 if I remember correctly)...

Presumably a pharaoh who ruled for decades would indeed have lots of kids, if he wanted to and (as most are) was physically able.

There's more to it than what the article goes into.

For example, Ramses II's forensic report says he appears to have been a Lybian Berber.

The Greeks told a story about how there was a conflict between Danaus, the leader of Lybia, and his brother the Pharoh of Egypt who had fifty sons.

The single day Lybian/sea peoples war against Ramses II's successor has a lot in common with the single day battle Odysseus talks about going to against Egypt as soon as Troy fell, where he's taken captive and parties with the Pharoh until after seven years a "certain Phonecian" showed up and tries to ransom him to Lybia.

Seven years after that Lybian/sea peoples battle is when Amenmesse seized power from Seti II.

The account of Ramses III about the end of the 19th dynasty described fairly Phonecian elements like the city governors collectively ruling or "making the gods like men" - almost identical wording to the opening euhemerism of Sanchoniathon's Phonecian myths.

I suspect our understanding of the end of the 19th dynasty will be changing quite a bit over the next decade...

He had 99 problems, but an heir ain’t one?

GGRM has an example of this in the World of Ice and Fire. Fire and Blood as well, but not to such a great extent - just rival heirs going to war every couple of generations

I'm sure this is interesting, but I'm not sure if it's "$6 + automatically renews into a small print $40 annual subscription in six months" kind of interesting.

> annual subscription

You have to cancel by phone. ;)

The Economist playbook. Infuriating.

Wall Street Journal too...

Pretty sure California's Automatic Renewal law makes this illegal. Does NatGeo have different cancelation processes by state/country?

It's not the only article they published this month though. They had to do hours of research, writing, editing, etc for the article, their labor is worth money. Whether you think it is, or whether you want this particular content, is a separate matter though.

Oh sure, but a link to a story on Hacker News that you can only read once you pay money is just an ad. It's not wrong to put useful ads on Hacker News, but they should be labeled.

> This article is exclusively for National Geographic subscribers.

Why post this? If you need to, just directly link the archive version.

The HN guidelines say link the original article.

Perhaps it would be a nice feature to be able to "sticky" post an archive link. I generally search the comments for it first if I know I'm going to hit a paywall.

I solve the issue myself by using duckduckgo and then !ais url.

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