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Pharaoh's murder riddle solved after 3,000 years. Another good use for archaeology, it aint all bad.What I find strange is their identification of the other mummy found in Ramses III's burial chamber as being that of his potential murderer. I am not an Egyptologist but burying the murderer with the victim seems strange. The only logic I can think of is having the criminal nearby so he can be further punished in the afterlife.Thoughts?
What? You confuse me. I see the same level of archaeological insight in that article as another one I linked to a month or two ago, which you dismissed as “pure speculation”, and stated “probability = the academic and respected word for guess”.
OK, I guess you get me wrong. I still think archaeology is garbage in general. Maybe I did not put my questioning of the second mummies ID clear enough I think it their Id of Ramses himself is pretty solid but the 2nd guy, come on, how could they even know. DNA will tell us nothing how do we know the Pharaoh didn't go around getting every slave girl pregnant, or his grandpa did? We don't, so absence any other evidence that this mummy is the prince it is pure speculation. Makes for a pretty juicy story though doesn't it?My previous statements sill stand but mostly I just wanted to post something other than current politics on my favorite history forum. 😉
I still don't see how you could say the identification of the death of Ramses is “pretty solid” based upon your own standards. How could we know that this was done before of after his death? For all we know, it was done post-mortem. There's a quote in the article which raises this as a less likely possibility, but your standard, which seems to hinge on vacuum-proof evidence rather than conjecture, should highlight this as an indication we really don't know how he died.Of course, using your standards, I think that the vast majority of what is written by historians should have to be disbelieved as well.
I did not say the ID of the cause of death, I said the ID of the mummy. It seems the evidence is pretty good that it is actually Ramses they are looking at. I question the ID of the accompanying corpse."My standards", what exactly do you think "my standards" are? Come on, I am saying extrapolating events from objects dug up by archaeologists absent and written evidence is pure speculation. I don;t reject written accounts out of hand, I think they should be subjected to critical review but I will take written testimony of historical events over archaeology. Archaeology can corroborate or disprove historical accounts but it is difficult, impossible even, to generate a narrative based on archaeology alone. That is all I am saying. I have never demanded bullletproof, I just dislike pure guesswork.
It's like I have been telling you guys, archaeologists are great for unearthing the past, but it's not their job to interpret it. That's for historians to do.
I did not say the ID of the cause of death, I said the ID of the mummy. It seems the evidence is pretty good that it is actually Ramses they are looking at. I question the ID of the accompanying corpse.
Well, the article doesn't say anything about the ID of the first mummy being in question, or being uncovered . What they were looking at and interpreting was the cause of the death of the mummy, presumed to be that of Ramses III, and then the ID of the "screaming mummy", who they think could be Ramses III's son. If you saw something in the article that I missed, let me know.
"My standards", what exactly do you think "my standards" are? Come on, I am saying extrapolating events from objects dug up by archaeologists absent and written evidence is pure speculation. I don;t reject written accounts out of hand, I think they should be subjected to critical review but I will take written testimony of historical events over archaeology. Archaeology can corroborate or disprove historical accounts but it is difficult, impossible even, to generate a narrative based on archaeology alone. That is all I am saying. I have never demanded bullletproof, I just dislike pure guesswork.
I just think that your standards are overly skeptical, and your burden of proof is higher than need be. If we applied such a burden to historical texts - the domain of the historian - we could also refute much of what has been learned. Do we learn about Napoleon's decisions through his correspondence with other military commanders? He could be lying, and we'll never know. Can we trust any of Hitler's memoirs? He could have been a psychopath when he wrote them. Can we trust anything written by Bismark? He might have been drunk, and therefore his writings cannot be believed. Can we believe anything from first-hand accounts by Louis XIV? Perhaps not if we think future documents will be uncovered which change our knowledge of him. Basically, we can raise doubts about anything if we really wanted to. This means all our historical knowledge falls into the lines of "probability". And as you said before, "probability = the academic and respected word for guess".I guess at the end of the day, I think it is a bad practice to dismiss virtually the entire field of archaeology as "guesswork". Archaeologists are trained in methods which have become more and more exact over the decades, and I think the results have become more and more trustworthy. Where theories are raised, they tend to be labeled as such. I find nothing wrong with this so long as they are labeled possibilities. This is a critical step in the investigative process, and is not something to be dismissed as "garbage".
It's like I have been telling you guys, archaeologists are great for unearthing the past, but it's not their job to interpret it. That's for historians to do.
Don't you think that is rather ivory towerish of you? The historian's domain is not "history" per se, but rather the written word from history. The archaeologist's domain is also not history per se, but the historical artifact. What gives the historian privileged insight into data accumulated from the artifact? Can the historian make a judgment about how the pyramids were built that is better than the judgment made by the archaeologist who actually examined the pyramids? You seem to be reducing the archaeologist to a mere workman whose only real contribution is braun, and when this work is done the historian provides the brains. That would be like saying the historian should only be concerned with translating and compiling historical texts, but let others do the analysis of them.
Analysis is the historians forte. I swear sometimes we learned a different historical method.Every document should be analyzed critically, I have never said otherwise. I have also never said that we should assume the writers of historical documents are liars. I must be much worse at putting my thoughts in words than I thought.I just think we should look at everything critically and base its credibility on that critical analysis. I dislike archaeology because that element o critical analysis often seems to be missing. Especially in pieces reported in the news. I do not know if that is because of crappy journalism, crappy archaeology or a combination of the two. I read some scholarly archaeology pieces too, mainly battlefield archaeology I do know that I rarely see any archaeologists go out of their way to correct the sensationalism reported to the media, I dislike that most of all. That is not to say that there are not some historians who are not as bad, just turn on the History channel to see what I am talking about. Academia and academic work appears to go two ways, serious scholarship that is only really available and understandable to initiates, and popular that dumbs stuff down so the peasants and serfs can kind of maybe grasp what the big brains are talking about. I advocate for a middle approach where scholars are critical and rigorous and not afraid to admit that some things we just don't know. Academics are not infallible, only God can claim that, but the way they present academics in poplar media you would think they were.
I just think we should look at everything critically and base its credibility on that critical analysis. I dislike archaeology because that element o critical analysis often seems to be missing. Especially in pieces reported in the news. I do not know if that is because of crappy journalism, crappy archaeology or a combination of the two. I read some scholarly archaeology pieces too, mainly battlefield archaeology I do know that I rarely see any archaeologists go out of their way to correct the sensationalism reported to the media, I dislike that most of all. That is not to say that there are not some historians who are not as bad, just turn on the History channel to see what I am talking about.
If your problem is with media reporting on archaeology, then I can understand that. But the same can hold true for any field, including media reports on what historians say. At the end of the day, I don't think archaeology is superior or inferior to history, nor are archaeologists unequal to historians in their research and analysis of history. Each field has its strengths, strong scholars, and weak scholars.
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