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"The year 2024 is closer in time to Cleopatra than the Egyptian queen’s life was to the construction of the pyramids."

It's truly astonishing how old Egypt is. The sphinx is 4500 years old! I listened to Bob Brier's course on ancient Egypt (from TGC) and it was mind-blowing.

Indeed, Stonehenge is not much older. But given that, in human history, Egypt has always been an island of fertile land in a sea of desert, it's not so surprising that the area has persisted as a separate political, social and cultural entity, even when remembering that in fact it has constituted multiple kingdoms and dynasties over its history.

Egypt's greatest legacy is that its early history was so spectacular, and evidence of that is so visible today.

Visit it before the brotherhood takes over and starts blowing up "heathen monuments" like the taliban or isis.
What you're talking about already happened. The pyramids of Giza used to be encased in a smooth layer of white marble. One out of many ways we know this is that when the ancient Greeks visited them, they wrote about it.

But just a few hundred years ago the near ancestors of the people who live in Cairo right now decided to steal the marble casing, and that's why the pyramids are now jagged granite.

I wish this silly "gotcha" fact about Oxford being older than the Aztecs would go away.

All it's saying is that most people don't know enough about Mesoamerican civilizations to differentiate clearly between the Aztec and the Maya; the Maya have been around since long before Oxford and that's why people anchor 'the Aztecs' in the distant past. This should be pretty obvious.

It's like saying "Did you know that the Aztec Empire is older than the University of Reading" -- yeah, that's not what most people are thinking of when they think of an old English university.

I don't want to contradict the thesis of the article though, it's true that our perception is skewed. My favorite version of this is that Chinese armies were fighting each other with gunpowder-based weapons in the 1100s.

It sounds shocking because it's one sentence which delivers two surprises; Oxford is older than expected and the Aztec empire is more recent than expected.
I agree. It’s not a comment on the existence of a people group but rather a political structure. Saying something is older than the USA does not imply nobody lived in North America more than 250 years ago.
No his point is that this is surprising because people have the wrong idea of what the Aztec empire is.

It's like saying "the population of the City of London is only 8500 people!" - it's only surprising because it's misleading.

That's a great analogy, that's exactly what I was trying to say.
Ok here’s another: they were teaching at the University of Oxford before the Māori discovered and settled New Zealand.
I wish more Kiwis knew this.
Whats the inference here?
In New Zealand the Maori act as though they're some indigenous population who deserves reparations, however they were really more like a colonial people who lost to a more powerful colonial nation.

It's a little like the UK claiming the Falkland Islands. The British were the first to discover the islands and the first to inhabit them, however I wouldn't call them indigenous to the Falkland islands in the same way they might be indigenous to England. Certainly they wouldn't deserve reparations if Argentina someday captured the islands

… And Mediterranean countries were using grenade since the 8th century.
I remember walking around Oxford and seeing "New College" with the date of 1379
The New Forest was started by William Conqueror post-1066, too.

But the really mind boggling numbers are in the Mediterranean. Naples is originally Nea Polis in Greek, so "New City". Barely 2700 years old.

Civilization is really old in some places.

https://x.com/waitbutwhy/status/1292882798982967296/photo/1

I hope that before I shuffle off we have agents that can emulate these people with subtlety and depth, and I can invite them over for long chats. Have them available as podcast guests. Assign high school students to interview them. Face them off in ideological cage matches. Learn first hand from them about the plasticity of human ethics and culture. Hire Beethoven as a piano teacher, Faraday as a lab assistant, Machiavelli as a wartime consiglieri. But it can only work so far as the agents know the limits of their own training data and not make shit up.

You will not be learning “first hand” from an AI agent.
Eeeek