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Dicho83 t1_iqv9s03 wrote

Reply to comment by Tidesticky in Archaeologists hail ‘dream discovery’ as sarcophagus of Ptah-em-wia is unearthed near Cairo by MeatballDom

The Egyptian civilization lasted so long, that they had their own Egyptian archaeologists to study earlier eras of Egyptian civilization.

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lendmeyoureer t1_iqvhtc5 wrote

I thought I read somewhere that we are closer to the time Cleopatra was alive than she was to the building of the Pyramids.

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madchad90 t1_iqviw3d wrote

The great pyramid was built 2500 years before Cleopatra was born. The pyramid would have been considered ancient by her.

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aaronupright t1_iqvmwy6 wrote

I believe Alexander the Great is about midway between the Pyramids construction and our era.

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And I think Herodotus is almost the midpoint of recorded history.

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zsturgeon t1_iqwczzt wrote

I think the quote is that Ancient Egypt was more ancient to Romans than Romans are to us

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FlutterRaeg t1_iqwijon wrote

It's even crazier to realize they were ancient to themselves.

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Harsimaja t1_iqxn9ii wrote

Yes, it gets brought up under every Reddit post on either ancient Egypt or “facts that don’t sound true but are” or anything about bizarre time gaps.

Part of it of course is that people think Cleopatra was just like Nefertiti, rather than an ethnic Greek/Macedonian after natively-ruled Egyptian civilisation was over. Same story as the Aztec empire only being a particular civilisation in the last century and a bit before Cortes, when people assume it stands for all of (actually very ancient) broader Meso-American civilisation, and similar for the even shorter-lived Incas standing for the even longer-lived broader Andean civilisation.

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Phyzzx t1_iqywwl9 wrote

These are fun. Here's another: Tyrannosaurus lived closer to the period of the moon landings than to the period Stegosaurus lived.

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Tidesticky t1_iqvnc6v wrote

And I'll bet there were Egyptian archeologists who studied those eras and later ones who studied those eras and etc

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[deleted] t1_iqw9tao wrote

[removed]

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Saint_Genghis t1_iqwy307 wrote

Ehh, it's presumed to be that old by a small fringe group, current archeological evidence suggests it was created during the reign of Khafre, who also constructed the second largest pyramid on the Giza plateau. It may be older than that, but if it is it would be by a mere couple of centuries to the early dynastic period, definitely not thousands of years.

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Harsimaja t1_iqxn64t wrote

Ancient Egyptian civilisation literally lasted for most of history (in the written sense).

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Dicho83 t1_iqxs2ty wrote

Ancient Egyptian civilization also existed before known written history.

Largely, because some Pharos had writings from previous eras intentionally destroyed or defaced.

So we really don't know how old Egyptian civilization really was, other than surviving references from other post-writen word civilizations....

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Harsimaja t1_iqxsqr0 wrote

Well, Egyptian writing ‘proper’ seems to have developed gradually from proto-writing over the course of the 4th millennium BC, so in a sense we have as good an idea as can likely be well-defined. We don’t have the very earliest ‘fully written’ records (and we’d never be able to prove they were first if we could even clarify what that meant) but we do have some bounds… and since the writing system seems to have gradually expanded to encompass the whole language, it’s fuzzy in reality in any case.

EDIT: I suppose one could argue that the moment Egyptian developed the monoliterals, it was technically a full writing system. Not sure how we’d ever possibly know exactly when that was, though.

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