Any Egyptologists confirm?

Not an Egyptologist, but I was actually just talking with a friend (when discussing the loss of information in societies) about ~1500 BCE Pharaohs having to run archeological expeditions to figure out whose tomb was whose to pay the proper respects.

And then we have the Epic of Gilgamesh, a 6,000 year old story that reminisces about times long past.

... and Dinosaurs ruled the earth for about 165 million years and even that is only 3% of the time our planet has been around.
Modern man, including the writers of Gilgamesh, are but a fleeting speck on the history of life on this planet.
- Don't think we well last as long as the dinosaurs.
I don't think it's that old.
Times long past could be like your childhood...
- Touché

I remember a Hardcore History episode where he talks about how in the time of the Assyrian empire, it was known even then that the world was ancient, filled with individual civilisations that saw themselves as the centre of the world and would marvel at the ignorance of being lumped in together with equally self-possessed civilisations by the historians who write of them only in passing with incomplete sources.

I might have a bit of that wrong, I just woke up and it's been almost a decade since I listened to it. But the part that stuck with me was the idea that even to people we see as deeply ancient, they too had an apprehension that human history is no spring chicken.

And yet, compared with the span of time claimed by the ages of the dinosaurs, humanity has barely existed long enough to clear its throat and introduce itself. And in that time we have been imperiled very often.

I was intrigued to hear that the Toba catastrophe hypothesis may be discredited. I enjoy the idea that 200,000 years ago we may have had as few as 10,000 individuals. It must have been a peaceful time...

Ah ty for the reminder, I'm surely a few episodes behind on Hardcore History. Also, <3 your name
- (⁠•⁠ө⁠•⁠)⁠♡

The oldest recorded song in history starts with "in those ancient times". Tale of Gilgamesh IIRC

Myths always take place back a long time ago.
Oddly enough it was actually a mistranslated copy of Jerusalem as the rest of the stone said "walk upon England's mountain green"
I wonder if they were referring to the protoindoeuropeans, who just slowly wandered the earth spreading their language
- Why would Akkadian or semite myths speak about a people that not only isn't theirs, but also unknown?

Also crazy is that the thing that brought down the Old Kingdom around 2180 BCE, after nearly a millennia in power, was a megadrought thanks to a climatic change. It took them about 140 years to reboot things into the Middle Kingdom.

I've read that their governance was geared towards stability, not growth or disruption. It helps with keeping things going for a long time.

I've read that their governance was geared towards stability, not growth or disruption. It helps with keeping things going for a long time.
I'm confused. How could their leaders earn a big enough quarterly bonus to blow on cocaine?
Edit: This might be something modern government models could adapt and use, to everyone's benefit... If we can just crack the cocaine challenges with it.
I think I'm joking, except I can't stop thinking about how a universal basic cocaine subsidy might actually be what is needed to convince a bunch of problematic leaders to retire...
- I suspect it's unbridled psychopathic greed that's the problem.
- Cocaine is actually quite cheap to make...
?
I mean, maybe - but its not hard to focus on stability instead of growth when you're the only game in town.
- They did pretty damned well against the Hittites and Lybians, Egypt only really started to struggle when the bronze age collapse happened. Frankly speaking when you are durable enough to weather an apocalypse you are doing pretty good, the only other ones I can think of that pulled the same was the Assyrians who I'm pretty sure are gonna outlast every other culture at this rate.

Want yet another fun fact? All the most famous egyptian pyramids were built in a span of 100 years or so.

They blew their retirement savings and their heirs couldn't afford to build more!
- Pyramid building was serious society-stabilizing policy, not government-breaking waste.
Fashion is ephemeral by nature.

Being in the same place doesn't make it the same civilisation. Cleopatra was more similar to the ancient Greeks than the ancient Egyptians

An unbroken span of time with the same name and identity makes it the same civilization. It isn't like countries stopped being themselves due to an industrial revolution.
- The ruling class in Egypt spoke Greek in Cleopatra's time
- That identity was gone by Cleopatra's time. By a couple of centuries.
  What actually doesn't change the numbers a lot. In fact, it changes them less than the rounding the OP did. But there were a couple of other deep changes like that.

Yes. Ramses II's son "found in Thebes" (Khaemweset) was known and recorded for his passion in archeological study and restoration, and has been called the "first Egyptologist."

Sumeria Jones.

What's his job during winter?
- College professor. 90% of all archeology is done in your local papyrus repository.

This is true for all ancient civilisations though. Maya, Sumer, India, China. All had ancient and ancient ancient.

Human history is nuts because humans were around for so long before we ever figured out how to write things down. We had agriculture before language!

And you know tons of people tried to create languages, but they were just surrounded by mother fuckers who were like "look at this removed, over here with his stick poking the ground. Hey, stick boy! Stop fucking around! Your pictures aren't important! Grug's already the best painting! You see his mammoth? Fucking stick boy."

I think its interesting that we are also very biased towards long lasting societies, because they leave more stuff for us to study, and literate ones, because they can tell us with their own words what events there were. We still dont have a complete picture of the battle of Cannae, one of the consequential in all of history, whose effects we are still living with. Writing was only invented 4500ish years ago, and humans are as a species are way way older.

Its fucked up to think about Catal Hayuk, or Utsie.

It's also interesting how short these time frames actually are. 2000 years are just 80 generations.
All but the most important bullet points of history from that time is wiped out.
And our intuitive understanding "how the past was" is just from maybe 4-5 generations ago.
The past is a vast place and we only ever scratch the very surface of it.
- No one even really knows what their great grandparents were like, unless they were famous or something. I have no idea who my great, great grandfather even was. It stops in 1872
- And now there is an overwhelming amount of information, as long as someone keeps rotating in fresh hard drives and replacing the dead ones

fuck

fuck

And time, goes by so slowly. And time can do so much.

The people and/or sentient crabs that study us in thousands of years are going to have WAY crazier things to think about than how ancient the pyramids were to us.

Confirm what, exactly?