[jojobas]

It is indeed a Ponzi scheme backed by government education loans. Pretty much the only way for an Egyptologist to make money is to teach more Egyptologists. Guess what, one day even the option to learn interesting stuff on the "future me"'s dime will not be attractive enough.

[jmopp]

There was a post a few days ago about Roman Egypt that mentioned how there are so many papyri that are just sitting there and not enough trained Egyptologists to read, translate, and contextualise them. There is clear value in training Egyptologists, since by learning more about Egypt's place in the Roman empire, we can learn more about Western society (as we are in some sense descendents of the Roman Empire) as well as Middle-Eastern society (as Egypt was one of the first huge conquests from the Romans by the Rashidun Caliphate, and thus an early example of how the Middle East became Islamic)

[jojobas]

The problem is that no government or other entity is willing to hire 1000 Egyptologists for their lifetimes in order to translate and digitize all that papyrwork, as there is perceived value of their contents is Not That High.

[biofox]

That's why researchers also lecture. They get paid for the latter (in a closely aligned topic), with some small amount of time to perform the former.

[tonto]

sounds like ya might want a computational egyptologist

[quickthrower2]

All roads lead to ChatGPT this week