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#years#more#ancient#movie#egypt#mummy#old#iliad#article#paper
Discussion (118 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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)
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.
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."
Edit: the Sphynx dating is even more controversial, because it seems to have rain erosion on it.
A typical laconic reply works here: "If"
I dont care about the casting.
But the costumes look like ass (One of the extras was saying he had fit into the same armor for a low budget sword and sandal film), they are using a viking longboat as a greek ship (have already seen half a dozen experts spitting chips over the difference in boat design). I just cant bring myself to care about the film.
"Oh its a fantasy film" its set in a historical time period, I wouldnt watch a WW2 Zombie movie if the nazi zombies were wearing viking armor driving an Abrams tank either.
At least they bothered to CGI out the stirrups, but it's incredibly obvious from how he's sitting on the horse in the trailer.
And the extra you describe, where does he appear on screen? Front and centre, or in the fourth rank behind the people in better costumes?
And the longboat, does it appear on screen in its original form, or with additions to make it look more period accurate?
Either “best attempt at historical accuracy” (although that would have been difficult given the sparse record), or “true to Homer’s anachronistic story” would have been reasonable ways to go. Sounds like they picked neither, though…
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/the-battle-of-...
OK, so you didn't watch Kung Fury?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fury
WW2 Zombie movie with Nazis in Viking armors and random tanks sounds so much more _fun_ than a "historically acurate Nazi Zombie" movie!
I also more often enjoy films which sit between "100% realistic/accurate" and "anything goes" than either extreme itself. 100% realistic/accurate and it tends to already be known unless it's relatively bland. 100% anything goes and it can still be good but there is a high risk it ends up feeling like every other "anything goes" movie of the same topic. In between you can often get the best of both worlds - something new, but still unique.
Dumbed down far more than required for short movie transition of any topic. But I guess they know their US audience, their level of knowledge and care for authenticity better than me.
It's been about 30 years since I've read The Iliad, but I remember that chapter as the worst part of the book. Just pages upon pages of names and where they came from. I wonder what significance it held for the buried individual to have been specifically included so.
Think about 10 year olds talking about all the different candies they are going to devour on Halloween night to get a sense of how it is meant to resonate with a crowd.
In large part this was because paper was incredibly expensive back then, so it got used for one purpose, used again for another, and that continued until you were out of room ... at which point it may get used yet again (for say mummy wrapping).
Another classic example: Jews believed you couldn't burn a piece of paper once you wrote the name of God on it, so there were special towers in ancient cities for Jews to throw away their paper. But again, because paper was so expensive, each paper often had lots of other things on it.
Because these towers were sometimes preserved better than libraries were, historians have found huge treasure troves of saved papers in them. Like the mummy wrappings, they only still exist due to a special quirk of ancient peoples ... but because of the price of paper they have lots of other non-mummy-wrapping/non-God's name stuff.
Fascinating!
The Cairo Genizah
Located in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo), Egypt, this particular Genizah was a massive, windowless attic room built high into the structure. To put papers in it, the synagogue's caretaker had to climb a tall ladder and drop the documents through a hole in the wall. Because the local community never got around to burying the papers, this high, hidden room acted like a time capsule for over a thousand years. When it was rediscovered in the late 19th century, it contained nearly 300,000 manuscript fragments.
The largest contributor to having garbage as historical sources for western European cultures was the millennium-long program of genocide and cultural destruction perpetrated by Christians against anything or anyone non-Christian they could get their hands on.
It's no coincidence the few primary sources for pre-Christian religion we have from Europe comes from Iceland... it was the furthest away. Surviving works of European mythology like Beowulf and Snorri's eddas are filled with Christian references because that's the only way they survived.
Much much more existed 1600 years ago and would have survived if the empire had not converted.
Finding american freed slave papers in a grave at Valley Forge -> ever so slightly interesting, we know those people were around there at that time.
Finding american freed slave papers in a grave outside an 1870s British encampment in Sudan -> very interesting how did this get here.
Or kind of like how finding Christian stuff in a roman grave varies a lot in implication by the year.
Before that, Egypt was mostly been ruled by invaders since the end of the New Kingdom around 1000 BCE.
Basically, with few exceptions Egypt was not ruled by a indigenous ruler for about 3000 years until Nassar.
Frankly I can understand that: Homer really did smash out an absolute banger with Iliad. I might ask for a copy in my grave too, when the time comes.
The whole point of the article appears to be that when civilizations overlap, the "good old days" becomes a two way street (to gargle metaphors). I do find that interpretation very interesting and it fits in with my world view that history ("historia" - Latin for "story") is generally rather more complicated than many would like it to be to fit their current (or current as was) world view.
I see your supernerd cred flex, mummified guy!
Also if it was fraud to capitalize on the movie, wouldn't they use the odyssey instead of the iliad?
Luxor and Las Vegas = same thing.
Not trolling, but it's worth keeping this notion in mind. It's great for tourism and building mystique. At least when there is fakery, it's makes the real thing all the more valuable.
Fakery sells movie tickets - it can sell plane tickets too.
People still love Milli Vanilli - so many don't even care because it's just entertainment.
How much of history is real, how much is entertainment (and diversion) by vested interests and the "winners" ?