Insanity 5 hours ago | next |

Super interesting. I have been reading Cleopatra: A Life, recently, and it is amazing to think that the Egyptian civilization is measured in millennia. For reference, this tomb is about 2 millennia older than the rule of Cleopatra.

Complete side note, but the other articles on that news website are full of clickbait and sensational news. So kind of surprised to also find this article on there.

gaoshan 4 hours ago | root | parent |

As soon as I see "dailymail" I, correctly, reasonably and thoughtfully IMO, start doubting whatever is linked.

vkazanov 3 hours ago | root | parent |

Dailymail is dailymail but this particular article is boring.

Things like this happen every year, thanks to both the tomb building tradition and the climate of the region.

Middle kingdom did thrive about 4k years ago, this is the height of the classic Egyptian culture. Numerous tombs were escavated already.

Thr comment you replied to reasonably noted how the culture survived for 2.7k years. They kept track of every pharaoh they had, as well as dynasties, and key events.

This is amazing. Not the boring tomb. Although I love tombs.

gnabgib 5 days ago | prev | next |

Source article (referenced as the source, and the photos/fb quote lifted from): https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14048371/bur...

Source-source article: https://www.fu-berlin.de/en/sites/cairo/news/20241013_Lady-I...

Original source (German): https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/aegyptologie/aktuelles/...

card_zero 5 days ago | root | parent | prev |

That second link needs dy.html on the end. In fact all the links have been truncated to their visible length.

https://www.fu-berlin.de/en/sites/cairo/news/20241013_Lady-I...

gnabgib 5 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Oh thanks! Copy-paste fail (from another post of this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42071429), too late for me to edit, but the working links:

Source article (referenced as the source, and the photos/fb quote lifted from): https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14048371/bur...

Source-source article: https://www.fu-berlin.de/en/sites/cairo/news/20241013_Lady-I...

Original source (German): https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/aegyptologie/aktuelles/...

adonovan 5 days ago | root | parent |

Thanks. The Post’s site is collapsing under the weight of the worst kind of lurid advertising. It is hard to find the news—you even have to expand the section if you don’t want to see only ads.

snthpy 5 days ago | prev | next |

Any pictures of the 11m high chamber?

I'm really intrigued by that because that height seems really excessive given the difficulty of carving that it of rock so they must have thought it was really important.

danans 7 hours ago | prev | next |

In the context of sites like Göbleki Tepe and the sites of the Natufian culture, which reach back 15k years, Ancient Egypt (and their contemporaries in Mesopotamia) are very recent.

It's crazy how our perspective on the age of "civilization" has shifted so much recently.

PittleyDunkin 7 hours ago | root | parent |

I find it very interesting how long it took us to assemble the constituent ingredients of sedentary cities into what we recognize today. Almost as if the sedentary lifestyle were inherently undesirable to people living at the time.

bregma 6 hours ago | root | parent | next |

It required the invention of beer (which was predicated on a number of technologies, including large-scale agriculture, pottery, and zymurgy). Once they cracked open the first cold ones though, it got hard to get up off the stone-age couch and people began to specialize in such fields as philosophy and singing.

xenospn 5 hours ago | root | parent |

Wasn’t all beer warm until the invention of refrigeration?

adolph 3 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

A yakhchāl (Persian: یخچال "ice pit"; yakh meaning "ice" and chāl meaning "pit") is an ancient type of ice house, which also made ice. . . . Records indicate that these structures were built as far back as 400 BCE, and many that were built hundreds of years ago remain standing, where Persian engineers built yakhchāls in the desert to store ice, usually made nearby [0]

Perhaps the earliest reference to icehouses comes from Shulgi, who held sway in the Sumerian city of Ur at the tail end of the third millennium bc. . . . Year 13, for Shulgi, was dubbed “Building of the royal icehouse/cold-house.” Jackson suggested such buildings might have been “timber-lined holes in the ground” designed to keep ice brought down from the mountains “cool and secure.” [1]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhch%C4%81l

1. https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/do-you-want-buil...

burnte 7 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Agriculture took thousands of years of work in selectively breeding crop plants. For a long time it produced little food for a lot of effort, so until it became easier reliably grow good food plants, it was not widely practiced.

Qem 6 hours ago | root | parent |

Also while there was a lot of megafauna around, probably there was little incentive to settle and care for crops. It was better to chase the beasts.

marssaxman 6 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

A sedentary lifestyle is also inherently undesirable for some people living in our time, but most of us have little choice in the matter!

slater 5 days ago | prev | next |

Alas:

"Idy’s remains were robbed of jewelry and metal objects, though the other grave goods appeared to have no interest to the thieves"

farseer 8 hours ago | prev |

[flagged]

tolerance 8 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

Additionally, what factors contribute to how society deems the practice appropriate?

alsetmusic 7 hours ago | root | parent |

In a docu that I watched in which the ethics of displaying mummified remains, a talking head (likely an Egyptologist or anthropologist, I don’t recall) made the argument that these rulers wanted to be remembered for all time, thus this was a form of granting that. I’m not particularly persuaded, but it’s an interesting concept.