It's more like how California has tons of things in Spanish and English.

OP is basically following on from Balabanova. So I’m actually not sure about this from what I’ve done so far but I did my due diligence and hunted down some bibliography on Balananova’s claims as well as the articles he referenced.

Basically, Balabanova tried toxicology on several unprovenanced mummies from a German museum and found traces indicating cocaine and nicotine (not tobacco) in their system.

I specify this because there are several plants in West Africa that contain nicotine without requiring tobacco. The real question is: cocaine. Now the evidence here is already really dodgy: toxicology on mummies of an uncertain origin, even if they are real mummies, is incredibly dodgy.

Not to mention there being no evidence of either plant anywhere else in the record, the fact that no other mummies have revealed either nicotine or cocaine in the same way. Even Balabanova didn’t suggest that the Egyptians were trading with the Americas, rather than there were (not extinct) varieties of the two plants in Africa at the time of the pharaohs.

The question I have is what about the rest of the stuff? Egypt is great because the dry conditions mean that a lot survives and people put all sorts of stuff, including high value imports, in tombs. So my question is: if the Egyptians did have trade contacts with the Americas, where’s the rest of the stuff?

What about cacao beans or maize? I mean rice and spices and herbs survive from Egypt, so why are there no other indications of this trade?

The Kanji used in Japanese are basically the old school versions of the traditional Chinese characters. There are even specific Japanese Kanji. So while technically they are of the same origin as the Chinese ones, they are not exactly the same nowadays and back then (they are very close to traditional Chinese, though) Afaik.

it makes no sense to eliminate them, as they are 'distinctive' enough. You also have to understand that every fascist Ideology heavily relies on religion, heroism and tradition. You cannot rely on traditional values, if you kill the historical inscription, seals and so on.

How do you want to explain to the common people that their emperor, the direct descendent of God, now has to write his name in the peasant signs? ;)

Would you give up the Arabic numbers, the Hindu '0', the Latin alphabet even if you hate them all? I don't think so, as they are such old, that they are basically a part of your own identity, history and culture.

Pomeranians are quite comforting when sailing the rough waters of them North Sea.

Liberation was probably not really a thought, that was probably aimed more at a Greek audience. As someone once said, Egypt is easy to oppress. They have revolts, but it is easy to control the population, and their culture supported that. It was really just and economic and food resource to whoever owned it.

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I don't think it was for the foreigners. The Rosetta stone is written in Greek, the language of the ruling elite; and ancient Egyptian, the language of the local masses. The Egyptian is further written in both hyroglyphics, the religious script for priests, since it was posted at and the text concerned temple taxes; and demotic, the common script, used in daily life for record keeping, letters, etc.

Any foreigner happening upon it would have to be able to both speak and write one of these two languages.

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Brief is relative. For a kingdom over 3,000 years old, 'brief' takes on a different definition.

This discovery is from a more recent point in history, so this neither confirms or denies anything found in the biblical book of Exodus.

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No. Exodus has no archaeological evidence at all. Not even the existence of Hebrew people within the nation living in slavery.

No pottery, nothing at all. No way for a million people to pour out of a busy nation in a few days and find nothing. It appears as though it was an adaptation of a Persian story. Same general theme, made for the Hebrew people after the fall of Israel during the Persian invasion. The religion was very different at that time.

This is during the Greek occupation, not the pharo rule. Thousands of years after they ruled.

Still super interesting, though.

Edit: it could be Babylon. 🤷

So is the same story in the Bible known as the Exodus?

Ah, that was poorly worded.

I mean that sure the egyptians were under persian rule, but they revolted several times against darius and Xerxes, too. By the time alexander came around they were used to persian rule. When the greeks came through alexander painted himself as a liberator. He got his divinity in Siwa and that's really it until ptolemy takes over.

I wonder if they had the expectation that they were actually going to be liberated, or if they were aware they were under 6new occupation? If they were aware of new occupy they had to test the will if the greeks. How much fighting are the greeks willing to do for egypt? How much money and man power is going to be sunk?

These things are never really mentioned, it all was just seamless and that just seems contrary to human nature.

Not brief, lasted until Octavius too over

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Their existence makes sense given historical context. Egypt, particularly Alexandria, was mutli-cultural as hell eventually, with people from all over the region being in it. Lots of trade, so putting these stones out is the modern day equivalent of cities that get a lot of international travelers having signs in multiple languages.

I mean, there would have to have been at some point. I always thought that the annexation of egypt by alexander was brief and there had to have been a revolt at some point.

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Interestingly "the" Rosetta Stone was only one of many copies - "According to the inscription on the Stone, an identical copy of the declaration was to be placed in every sizeable temple across Egypt. Whether this happened is unknown, but copies of the same bilingual, three-script decree have now been found and can be seen in other museums. The Rosetta Stone is thus one of many mass-produced stelae designed to widely disseminate an agreement issued by a council of priests in 196 BC. In fact, the text on the Stone is a copy of a prototype that was composed about a century earlier in the 3rd century BC. Only the date and the names were changed!" https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/everything-you-ever-wanted-know-about-rosetta-stone

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Okay so for a time there was a theory that most maritime trade was basically this process of traders sorta just working their way along coastlines looking for a profit wherever they could. The idea was that Greek merchants didn’t really have set ideas of where there was a good market for anything so they just bought and sold whatever and wherever they could.

Nowadays, we know that is not true. Merchants in the ancient world actually had a very complex understanding of the wider market and where they could make a profit. As such, they plied specific routes, often over rather large distances, that they knew would make a profit.

For your question, the answer is that it kinda varies. Strabo tells us that, under the Ptolemies, some 20 ships made the journey to India each year which increased to 100 under the Romans. Now whether or not we accept those exact numbers, the point is that he attests to a certain number of Greek and Roman ships making the journey as far as India each year.

However, there are a couple of points to raise here. Firstly, there is no reason to suspect they personally went any further east than India (it just wouldn’t make any financial or personal sense to do so). Secondly, these Greeks and Romans are probably a minority of shipping.

Instead, the main journeys across the Indian Ocean were probably dominated by the Arabians and Ethiopians (specifically Axum) who understood the winds of the Indian Ocean a lot better than the Greeks. That said we do hear of attempts by Ptolemaic explorers to try and map the winds in the later periods of the dynasty.

So for the Greeks and Romans, trade in the Indian Ocean was probably mostly through intermediaries (buying and selling at, say Adulis or Muscat or Petra). However, plenty of Africans and Arabians were making direct trips across the ocean.