
Was Ramesses II That Great? - tintinnabula
https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-egypt/was-ramesses-ii-pharaoh-great-brilliant-why/
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michalu
Nice article, but these days I am always suspicious whenever I read anything
that offers a "surprising view" on some historical figure.

The reality of today's history is that there are way too many historians and
it requires lots of hard work to add new factual knowledge (other than
speculations and theories) to the field.

So to make a name or at least somehow make money in this discipline,
historians have an incentive to come up with "shocking" and "controversial"
theories so a lot of work that gets exposure is stuff like "was Socrates
sexist?" or "Atheist and gay, Frederick the Great" or articles like this which
questions a figure we know little about, it's actually a fact he was a great
builder but as the only highlighted point in the article says "he had seven
wives and a number of concubines" ... which of course is the point why he
wasn't "great" ... if you want to learn something about Ramses II I recommend
to just read his wikipedia page, it's more interesting and way more
informative.

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moksly
> add new factual knowledge

The thing about history is that there isn’t a whole lot of factual knowledge.
Fields like archeology deals with facts, history is almost always an
interpretation and as such there is often value in reevaluating what’s come
before.

Sometimes it’s to deal with intentional manipulation, other times our society
has simply shifted to a point where we view things differently, but we’re
almost never capable of getting to a point where we know for a fact how things
were. Especially not when we go that far back. I had a professor who had
written numerous papers, and later a few commercial books, on the topic of the
roman emperor cult. His source material was a few one-liners from a few
gravestones. Not to take anything from him, this is just an example, because
this is how a lot of our generally accepted “historical facts” come to be.

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foldr
>The thing about history is that there isn’t a whole lot of factual knowledge.

I find this statement very odd. We know a vast amount about the past through
normal historical methods. Lots of historians are (probably) doing crap,
pointless or silly research, but that happens in all academic disciplines.

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moksly
The vikings are my favourite example for these kinds of interjections. We
think we know a lot about the vikings, there is so much literature on Norse
mythology, there is even a very nice Gabriel book turned TV show on Amazon
prime.

Yet our only written sources on the subject were written by Christian monks.

You brought up Julius Ceacar as an example in another post, and he’s actually
another great point. Because we don’t actually know that much about him, or
his life. Most people think he was the first emperor of Rome, but that was
actually Augustus.

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vondur
We do know a great deal about Julius Caesar. He wrote books on what he was
doing, and we have letters written about him from his contemporaries.

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mcguire
This article rather downplays how big a screw-up Kadesh was for the Egyptians.

There is a great lecture from the Oriental Institute about it:
[https://youtu.be/A1AGe2V0qHo](https://youtu.be/A1AGe2V0qHo)

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skaskaska
Recently I read the book 'The Year Civilization Collapsed' by Eric Cline.
While being a fascinating read (I can really recommend this), I couldn't shake
the feeling that there is a lot of reaching when it comes to really ancient
history, especially the bronze age. The book deals with the mystery of the
apparent collapse of basically all major mediterranean civilizations around
the year 1180 b.c. It's really a mystery, not easily explained by natural
catastrophes or conquests. While the period described in the book seems to be
one of the more 'documented' periods in history (there are a lot of
archeological findings of ccommunications and such), it's still not really
transparent. And then, around 1180 b.c., a dark age started. Light's out. That
seems to be really depressing for archeologists. Just beeing an amateur,
that's starts becoming more obvious especially at the end of the book, when
the author mentions complexity theory, which, so he hopes, will shed some
light on the reasons for this 'global' collapse. To me, being a software
developer, it seems to hint to some kind of deep misunderstanding of what
complexity theory actually is about. And that's kind of disheartening,
because, simply said, somehow the a whole branch of science which seems to
have no clue how to continue.

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RickJWagner
Ramesses II may have been cool, but I doubt he was as cool as Yul Brynner
portrayed him.

Absolutely iconic. Nobody today is in Brynner's league.

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CapricornNoble
We should all try to work "So let it be written, so let it be done." into
meetings.

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timwaagh
History becomes legend and legend becomes myth.

