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Comment by marshallward | Hacker News Reader

> “The pyramids seem like pretty monumental work”

You don't say...

“Cutting-edge psychological research suggests that pharaohs may have suffered from megalomania”

"Breaking news - older civilizations than currently have been found may have had most evidence of their existence wiped out by major events"

Megalomania is characterized by delusion.

I'm willing to entertain the idea that the god kings had some delusions

If they're indulged by society as a whole, are they delusions?

It's the "god" part of "god king" that was the delusion, and all of the wasted effort that went into ensuring the Pharoah's resurrection and immortality after death. And yes, it's a delusion regardless of how many people believe in it.

>>all of the wasted effort that went into ensuring the Pharoah's resurrection and immortality after death.

How do you know that it didn’t work? What if it wasn’t a waste?

Gods aren't real, neither is the soul, nor an afterlife.

I don’t believe gods are real, but I can still see the irony of making absolute statements regarding unfalsifiable ideas.

If I die and find my soul being weighed on the scales of Anubis you can say you told me so. What a fool I was to doubt!

Building a big thing because you think it would be neat is not really a waste. It's a big thing, everyone knows it's not strictly necessary, but whether it's for the glorification of your nation or your people or your God doesn't matter so much. If people don't have gods they build big monuments to other stuff.

To some degree, the practice of state religion exists to ensure the stability of the state, especially in pre-mass communication times.

To that, so what if the "god" part was a lie?

A stable society built on an unfalsifiable lie is still a stable society.

That's all well and good until a really bad drought or a plague blows through and people start to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the inbred jackass on the golden throne doesn't control the weather after all.

Or maybe they're just not praying hard enough.

I'm a through-and-through atheist, but I recognize the civilizing effect of order.

'Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (but epistemologically pure!) isn't a great sort of life.

Except, the Egyptian society was quite stable for 3,000 years. Can you imagine the USA existing for 3,000 years? Will there ever be another human civilization that lasts as long as the ancient Egyptian civilization?

My understanding of Egyptian chronology is that Egypt was far from stable for 3000 years. In fact, Ancient Egypt is broken up into the Old, Middle, and New Kingdom periods, separated by "intermediate periods" of a few centuries. Even then, it's generally reckoned around 2500 years from the beginning of the Old Kingdom to the incorporation by the Persian Empire.

This 3 hr long history documentary is well worth it.

Fall of Civilizations Episode 18. Egypt - Fall of the Pharaohs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpKej05RgsY

But, even during the intermediate periods, the invaders became the pharaohs and kept the old time religion going.

Imagine back when Europe was under the thumb of the Roman Catholic church, but then it went on pretty much the same for 3,000 years. There would be some hiccups along the way, but for the normal peasant, it would pretty much be the same old same old from millennium to millennium.

Isn't the Catholic church becoming the roman Catholic church or vice versa sort of the same thing? Even with the split into Protestant it's still essentially the same core and looking back 5000 years from now it would probably be reasonable to glue it all together as the Ancient Roman-Christian period / civilization.

Imagine today there is not all these different European governments, but just the Catholic church controlling all of the different governments, which are all really branches of the Catholic Church. Their kings are determined by the Catholic church. All of them are under the Pope. Their laws have to be approved by the Catholic Church. Everyone is Catholic. Catholic bishops are more powerful than any king. Etc. And that is the way it is and continues for 3,000 years.

Like they say "without faith there is no fear".

But it is a role they believe he fills.

If we all have the delision that you can fly with the power of your mind that is still a delusion. Because one can perform an experiment and see that you in fact can’t fly with the power of your mind.

But if we all believe that you are the eastern bunny, or the coolest dude on the planet, or the twice crowned poet laurate, those are social constructs. We believe you are the eastern bunny and that makes you the eastern bunny, and that’s no longer a delusion.

I think your hang up is that you have a set of expectations you think a “god” should fulfill, and clearly the pharao did not fulfill them. And that is an objective fact. But there is no reason to expect that the ancient Egyptians shared your expectations about what a god is.

> ensuring the Pharoah's resurrection and immortality after death

That does not sound correct. I don’t think they believed that the Pharao will walk again after he died. That is what the world “resurection” would imply. Their belief was that there is some form of afterlife where you need to perform certain rituals. The pyramids and the treasures were there to aid the pharao in peforming those rituals so he can obtain a better position in the afterlife.

> I don’t think they believed that the Pharao will walk again after he died.

Don't count on it. At times, they believed everybody would.

It's complicated because concepts varied over time, and people had maybe five or eight souls (alright, soul-aspects) and there were two or three thousand years over which this changed (sometimes for ideological reasons).

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

> one form of the ba that comes into existence after death is corporeal—eating, drinking and copulating.

> The idea of a purely immaterial existence was so foreign to Egyptian thought ...

> the ba of the deceased is depicted in the Book of the Dead returning to the mummy and participating in life outside the tomb in non-corporeal form ...

Does believing someone to be a god make them a god?

When someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES!

When a category of godness is defined as being a pharao, well yes...

First define “god”.

We like to think everyone was dumb but I'm pretty sure if those dudes could build pyramids, a lot of them also knew the Pharaoh wasn't a God even if lots of people believed, same as today with religions or cult of personality leaders.

They didn’t need to actually believe it to indulge the pharaoh.

I think you might be bringing our mindset a little too much into a different context. Religion served a lot of purposes for the ancients.

Then there's the crown family of the UK or GB or whatever the proper calling, which claims to believe the same divine touch. You may call them ancients if you want, but they still get to make headlines.

You are missing the point here, while you might see a similar concept “divine right of kings” the lived experience was a lot different from modern times vs anything BCE.

That there similar social mechanics might be more appropriate.

Why "lived experience" isn't all experience lived by definition? And how do you know what their experience was like?

And why are you hypothesizing a completely distinct experience when we're the same biological organism?

"Lived experience" usually means first hand knowledge and experience, as opposed to the knowledge or information they would gain from external sources.

So, understanding this meaning, I hope it's quite obvious that lived experience is much different for people today than ancient people. Our technology is far more advanced, more information is available to us. And it is all influenced by the vast amount of information that is external to us which puts our first hand experience in different contexts.

All experience is necessarily firsthand. The word experience describes things that come in through the senses. Lived experience means something, but only if you buy into 20th century phenomenology.

re: changes. Yes things have changed. The point of the discussion is some people have asserted without argument that those differences lead to a fundamentally different concept of gods. There is no real reason to believe that that I've seen, and yet people keep pointing out that things are different as if differences in the world necessarily implies different experiences.

The Pharaoh wasn't a god, it was a ruler. I think they had the sun and other elements as "God". Kinda makes sense to praise the sun as it makes their agriculture go.

The pharaos were indeed worshipped as literal gods. Echnaton famously negated them all except for the sun and himself as the incarnation, but after his death all was restored to the normal system of polytheistic theoraty. The sungod Ra was still important, but not the most important. It was a complicated system and very different from our modern thinking.

They also had the concept of the deification of the Pharaoh, much like the Romans later deified the Augustus.

I thought they had all sorts of in breeding going on in royal lines. That does tend to cause somes issues including mental ones.

If I recall, there was a bit of sibling marriage here and there, but it wasn't until the Greeks took over that they really started inbreeding.

I was under the impression that the Greeks leaned into a practice that was already well-established as part of rulership in the region. At the very least it seems we have evidence that Tutankhamun's parents were brother-sister and he appears to have had some severe abnormalities as a result:

> The results of the DNA analyses show that Tutankhamun was, beyond doubt, the child born from a first-degree brother-sister relationship between Akhenaten and Akhenaten’s sister (see Fig. 3). ... Pharaoh Tutankhamun suffered from congenital equinovarus deformity (also called ‘clubfoot’). The tomography scans of Tutankhamun’s mummy also revealed that the Pharaoh had a bone necrosis for quite a long time, which might have caused a walking disability. This was supported by the objects found next to his mummy. Did you know that 130 sticks and staves were found in its tomb?

https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/researchers-in-museums/2018/08/16/co...

And then we have Cleopatra the last Ptolemy and she seems normal. Even the famous inbred Charles Habsburg have relatively normal sister. Nature really plays dice sometimes.

https://acoup.blog/2023/05/26/collections-on-the-reign-of-cl... gives a good overview of Cleopatra parents as we understand them. Note too different family trees - the official one which is so inbred as to believe it isn't possible her parents could survive; and the unofficial one that recognizes nobles often sleep around and so we have no clue.

"I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party."

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