You always have to be careful about claims that one dynasty is more modest and moral than its predecessor, since it's likely the historians or storytellers in the new dynasty writing about the old one. The oracle bones and tombs from the Shang Dynasty suggest it was highly bureaucratic, meticulous about keeping records, and orderly in arranging the tombs. There's no archaeological evidence of lakes of wine or forests of meat or mass torture.

Many modern historians believe the last king in the Shang Dynasty was as reasonable and intelligent as most rulers and not as decadent and cruel as following dynasties portrayed him to be. China is justifiably proud of its long history, but modern archaeology and historical research has often cast doubt on the reliability of written records, let alone popular folklore and literature.

Very interesting . Thanks for your comment

Metallurgy is the big one: it isn't like everyone was too dumb to understand why steam is great to use, but if the pipes continually burst, you're kinda just wasting time.

Well, they wouldn't swing a cat anyway because they were revered

I teach the history of the industrial revolution in my engineering classes, and I was expecting technical gaps, but were not any. This was a great article.

The only thing I would add, and it is a corollary to the article's thesis, is that machine precision was not worked out until the industrial revolution. The early steam engines were next to useless and would have remained so if it were not for precision machining.

There were several key innovations that happened in quick succession that lead to precision machining, after centuries of research into them. First, the lathe completely transformed manufacturing because it allowed for precision screws, which allowed for precision measurement. At the same time, the straight line mechanism was essential for getting steam engines to hold any significant pressure, and the lathe was also modified to create the first precision cylindrical bore. All of this and more came together in the Watt-Bolton engine, which was the point at which steam power became widespread. The first flat plates were created not long after. And shortly after that, high precision lengths and weights. Exactly none of the industrial revolution could have not happened without major leaps in measurement, precision, and mechanisms.

But as I said, this is secondary to the articles thesis

Edit, wanted to add some sources for those interested. The Youtube channel "Machine Thinking" produces extremely accessible yet technically useful videos on the history of the industrial revolution. Highly recommend. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=machine+thinking

Edit 2: in particular, this video is most informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58&t=1493s

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Sort of like how it was Hillary not Norgay that conquered Mt. Everest first?

We now call grave robbers archeologists.

Because they didn't have the physics metallurgy or chemistry to industrialise.

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That's the trick, we haven't found the best hidden ones yet

like wooly jumpers, they shrink in the heat

grave robbers is rich.

Pharaohs ransacked their own ancestors graves and placed the loot inside their own tombs.

even the priests would come back and take some bits, by the time the real bandits got to the tomb, most of it was already gone

then the romans came and took what they could find

thats just how long these tombs have been hidden

Well shes the head of the project and chose the precise spot and method to uncover it, she just didn’t do the physical labor. She absolutely did discover it.

There was a time shortly after the period where these tombs were created that the Egyptian government hired their own grave robbers to shore up the kingdoms funds. Thats where the bulk of this came from.

Well, Egyptian writing ‘proper’ seems to have developed gradually from proto-writing over the course of the 4th millennium BC, so in a sense we have as good an idea as can likely be well-defined. We don’t have the very earliest ‘fully written’ records (and we’d never be able to prove they were first if we could even clarify what that meant) but we do have some bounds… and since the writing system seems to have gradually expanded to encompass the whole language, it’s fuzzy in reality in any case.

EDIT: I suppose one could argue that the moment Egyptian developed the monoliterals, it was technically a full writing system. Not sure how we’d ever possibly know exactly when that was, though.

Fair question. My understanding is that they’ve pretty much always been robbed thousands of years ago though.

Ancient Egyptian civilization also existed before known written history.

Largely, because some Pharos had writings from previous eras intentionally destroyed or defaced.

So we really don't know how old Egyptian civilization really was, other than surviving references from other post-writen word civilizations....

I think metal detectors work better?

I saw that the Egyptian antiquities dude was getting ready to announce finding Nefertiti’s tomb. If this is that same find, I’m sure he’s bummed it wasn’t Nefertiti’s.

Yes, it gets brought up under every Reddit post on either ancient Egypt or “facts that don’t sound true but are” or anything about bizarre time gaps.

Part of it of course is that people think Cleopatra was just like Nefertiti, rather than an ethnic Greek/Macedonian after natively-ruled Egyptian civilisation was over. Same story as the Aztec empire only being a particular civilisation in the last century and a bit before Cortes, when people assume it stands for all of (actually very ancient) broader Meso-American civilisation, and similar for the even shorter-lived Incas standing for the even longer-lived broader Andean civilisation.

Ancient Egyptian civilisation literally lasted for most of history (in the written sense).

Leave 👏 the 👏 dead 👏 to👏 rest 👏 in 👏 peace 👏

Ptah-em?

I hardly know em!

(I'll be here all week. Try the veal!)

Well she didnt discover the sarcophagus lol The workers who we’re removing the sand did. People who made the “dangerous” 10 meter journey multiple times before her.

After the shaft was cleared, they lowered her into the already uncovered object and she “was astonished to discover” it.

It’s nice to be the head of a project.