(January 24, 2016 at 6:08 pm)Stimbo Wrote: Right. I'm not sure it's safe to say that very little is known of the past, but even going with that it doesn't mean you get to fill in the blanks with any old shit.
Ever been to a natural history museum? One of the first things they tell you (if you take the tour) is unless their is a period record of a people time or event the best any of them can do is try and construct or compile a narrative of a time, event or people by looking at the things people discarded or left because it was of no use to them.
The illustration I head was 'it's like trying to put a picture together of a time in society by looking at a culture's trash if you remove all biodegradable material, then break up what's left into quarter size pieces.
In the case of Egypt we have larger artifacts, but we also have to contend with how they wrote history to only shine a positive light on themselves and almost never recorded failures.. The artifact Alpo posted a wiki link to is a good example of this, in that Egypt claimed to have wiped out all of Israel, and we know that to be untrue.
So even if we could accurately put all of their history back together, we would still be viewing it through the lens of Ancient Egyptian propaganda.