| And yet even in antiquity there were people thinking that the nature of their own existence was a recreation of the past from within the future. We are actually performing early versions of such recreations as we speed towards both destroying ourselves and developing a lifeform that makes us obsolete, and yet many still don't examine the present moment against the past and future. As for the Bronze Age collapse - in Alexandria around the 2nd century BCE following the conquest of Alexander the Great you had a ton of cultures of the Mediterranean comparing notes on their respective histories. Most of those notes have been lost to us, but we have the general conclusions they drew which was that an Exodus from Egypt had occurred, it had been many different people and not just one, and they had conquered most of the Mediterranean. And indeed, there's striking parallels between Ramses II, the Lybian appearing Pharoh with 50 sons, and stories like the Lybian king Danaus as part of Diodorus Siculus's Exodus fleeing Egypt from Aegyptus, his brother with 50 sons. We know Ramses II captured many different peoples in battle, and that many of the groups captured later appeared as sea peoples, initially allied together with Lybia against Egypt during Ramses II's successor. It only remains a mystery because of the reluctance of one group to think things occurred at all different to what's written in a single book scribed centuries later, and the reluctance of anyone not in that group to entertain that aspects of what's written in that book are a continuation of an oral history of actual events (though notably altered). |