Question inspired by the image (see attached)
Hieroglyphs are actually not that simple, my ex gf was an Egyptologist, I went to quite a few lectures with her, that was a highly complex language, more akin to Japanese Kanji, with deep layered subtexts. Those desert dudes were crazy. If you have ever have a chance to visit a lecture about hieroglyphs, do it, it’ll blow your mind. Or how they calculated time, or even saw it, culturally and individually, wow. They were so unbelievably far ahead, I sometimes compare them to the octopus of human development, they should rule the world, but there was that one thing, that prevented it. (For the analogy: the octopus dies when their kids are hatching, would they have the ability to pass their knowledge along to them, today eight armed space suits would be en Vogue)
It’s incredibly easy to fall into the trap of seeing modern societies as more advanced. There’s no reason to think they weren’t just as intelligent and resourceful as we are today. They just lived a long time ago. If history can teach us one thing, it’s that nobody rules the world forever, as advanced a civilization can be.
Prior to collapsing, Rome achieved a sustained population in excess of a million people.
This did not occur again anywhere else until the mid 1800s.
(For the analogy: the octopus dies when their kids are hatching, would they have the ability to pass their knowledge along to them, today eight armed space suits would be en Vogue)
Thank you for sending me down that rabbit hole, it was a really interesting read, and I learned something new today.
From an article on the subject…
Octopuses are serious cannibals, so a biologically programmed death spiral may be a way to keep mothers from eating their young.
They also can grow pretty much indefinitely, so eliminating hungry adults keeps the octopus ecosystem from being dominated by a few massive, cranky, octopuses.
What held the Egyptians back?
Probably the bronze age collapse, quite a scary event that extinguished trade routes and literacy.
