#i'm assuming it was based on being able to read both heiroglphyic and demotic?

[aturinfortheworse]

Don't trust historians to tell you things! You go to Egypt and dig up the Ebers papyrus yourself! You make your own translation! If you don't speak hieratic then you shouldn't try to learn about history.

But obviously you can't trust historians to teach you hieratic. What you need to do first is locate a small community in rural Greece that still speaks totally unaltered Ancient Greek, live there for five years to learn the language by immersion, then use that knowledge to translate the demotic on the rosetta stone, use that translation to learn hieroglyphic from surviving examples (obviously you will need to break into the pyramids for this) and then once you know hieroglyphic, hieratic is basically intuitive.

Though honestly, can you really trust that the artefacts you're learning hieroglyphic from are original historical writing and not just put there by Victorians to impress tourists? Maybe you should get those carbon dated - and by "get those carbon dated" I mean reinvent the field of mass spectrometry yourself so that you can reliably interpret the results of the particle accelerator.

Science is, after all, a human field of study subject to human bias. The only way to ever really be sure that evidence is interpreted without bias is to interpret it yourself - because you would never fall victim to such an obvious human foible.

#ruin rambles #history #ok ive got it out of my system now thank you #i put an unreasonable amount of effort into this #i keep finding new problems with what i had written and having to correct them #like i thought the ebers papyrus was written in demotic #and like i have NO IDEA how we learned to interpret hieratic #i'm assuming it was based on being able to read both heiroglphyic and demotic? #also im not 100% sure mass spectrometry and particle accelerators are how carbon dating happens #i think so???