That's c. 400 AD. Closer to today, than to the time of King Tut...and King Tut was closer to the TFA mummy than to the First Dynasty.
Ancient Egypt is really really old. The Great pyramid was 3000 years old at the time of the TFA mummy.
The TFA mummy is about equidistant between today and the events of the Iliad and the book was already more than 1000 years old in 400 CE.
There is a very strong connection between periods, of course. But 2500+ years of ancient egypt is a very long damn time. All of our modern history is, say, 3k years, starting with greeks, early chinese , india and all.
But egypt to me is like a star in the vast ocean of nothingness of early history. We know NAMES and DEEDS of people who lived 4500 years ago. We see things they've built, we can read words they wrote.
This is amazing.
To put that in perspective, consider how long 100 years ago feels.. not in technological terms, but in human perception of time: The USA was founded 250~ years ago. Try to recall your own life from 20, 40, 50 years ago.. it's a literal lifetime. Most people only meet people as far back as their grandparents, just 2 generations back. Great-grandparents and the eras they grew up in are already almost impossible to relate to.. 2500 years is FIFTY such lifetimes!
So in "just" after 500 years the pyramids would already be a mythical unrelatable object to people from 2000 years before us...
I like to think Ancient Egyptians were descendants of the survivors from a Green Sahara and the pyramids were meant to be their post-apocalyptic marker in case the world went to further shit..
Star Wars debuted 37 years after World War II
Star Wars debuted 49 years from now
(Now I feel really old)
The iPhone launched 19 years from now
It's a funny story because the modern archeologists who dug it up were very confused by finding objects from different regions and separated by hundreds or thousands of years, all in the same layer.
As Mayor shows, the Greeks and Romans were well aware that a different breed
of creatures once inhabited their lands. They frequently encountered the
fossilized bones of these primeval beings, and they developed sophisticated
concepts to explain the fossil evidence, concepts that were expressed in
mythological stories. . . .
Like their modern counterparts, the ancient fossil hunters collected and
measured impressive petrified remains and displayed them in temples and
museums; they attempted to reconstruct the appearance of these prehistoric
creatures and to explain their extinction. . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM#List_of_similar_initialis...
Doesn’t really work as OP used it, though, as it gets confusing. They wrote “the TFA mummy” every time, so it becomes “the the fucking article mummy”. Like saying you’re a fan of the The Beatles.
I had it both ways when it was first posted, about twenty minutes later after reading the “what is TFA?” comment I edited it to be consistent.
Only first line was the only “TFA” without the article…or with only one article? or is that two articles?
Anyway, the three article phrase “the TFA mummy” is equivalent to the three article phrase “the mummy in TFA” which is what I started to write.
And while “the TFA mummy” does not expand as cleanly as even I would wish, it has a better rhythm than “TFA mummy.” Or to put it another way, my poetic license removes “the TFA mummy” from grammar police jurisdiction.
Personally, I would’ve found that clearer. I know what TFA means but still found “the TFA mummy” awkward to read and parse every time. But maybe “TFA” itself was the biggest problem there. Since you were editing anyway, “the article’s mummy” was an option too. Sometimes we all forget how acronyms aren’t universal and can impede rather than assist communication.
> my poetic license removes “the TFA mummy” from grammar police jurisdiction.
It was a lighthearted comment on how I personally found the phrasing awkward to read, I haven’t insulted your mother. We’re writing random inconsequential comments on an internet forum about a subject which has no practical effect on any of our lives, not redefining dramaturgy. There’s no poetry to your comment and no one is “policing” your words. The comment wasn’t even directed at you. You can relax.
That is how I took it and I was just having fun with words. In this case, setting up “poetic license.”
Fun is why I write comments. Fun is why what-you-would-have-found-clearer was not my priority. I did not write my comment with you in mind. I wrote it for the kind of people who might like what I wrote.
There’s no poetry to your comment
Everything is not for everyone.
If it’s about brevity, "the peg" is just as short and mean in journalism parlance "A topic of interest, such as an ongoing event or an anniversary, around which various features can be developed."
That said, "TFA" is ok, but "the TFA" seems even more extravagant than "PDF format"
“The TFA mummy” has the same three articles as “the mummy in TFA” but one less word.
And pedantically, pedantry leaves the house when “TFA” walks in the door.
"The mummy in the fine article" is very aligned with the usual "preposition before article", while "the the fine article mummy" is apomediary¹ with its "article before article" structure.
¹ Distant from mean/median practices.
Everything is not for everybody.
The more generous a person is regarding what they accept, the more things are for them.
Edit: the Sphynx dating is even more controversial, because it seems to have rain erosion on it.
To add to the methods shared by others, one way I think is really cool is optically stimulated luminescence.
So, a grain of quartz destined someday to become the perfect OSL sample will
begin its journey by emptying its electron traps. This typically happens
through steady sunlight exposure, in a process called bleaching. Bleaching
resets the OSL clock. In this example scenario, the grain is fully bleached
by the sun as the wind blows it across the landscape, until it finally
settles and additional wind-blown material buries it.
Once it is cut off from light, the OSL clock begins running. The sediment now
surrounding the quartz will include tiny amounts of radioactive isotopes,
exposing the quartz to a steady flow of ionizing radiation. The quartz
captures electrons from this radiation; the radiation flow is called the dose
rate. This is like the steady ticking of a clock. The quartz begins trapping
electrons, and because it is cut off from light, the trapped electrons will
continue building up at a fairly steady, measurable rate.
Egyptologists can access science and have access to cultural artifacts and those artifacts include writing and that writing can be read and what can be read includes dates.