They Must Think We’re Stupid

Egyptologist Andrei Zverev claims that he and his team have uncovered concrete evidence that the Egyptians had predicted the catastrophe of “The Fall” as far back as 1600 BC. In a hitherto unexplored (and as Zverev would have it, undisclosed) chamber of the tomb complex of Ramses II, Zverev discovered a partially fragmented wall painting that depicted the standard journey into the underworld that most funerary decorations depict. One portion of it, however, was found to be thematically and stylistically different than the rest. Zverev, of course, translated the inscription that accompanied the painting…and you can see where this story is heading, can’t you? You can read the rest and point and laugh here.

I don’t mean to be flippant – well, maybe just a little – but it is difficult not to dismiss these so called theories as little more than attention-seeking swill. Every few months, some theory or another experiences a meteoric rise in popularity, only to fade into obscurity a short while later. I am fairly sure that whichever obscure descendant of Ramses that is buried in that tomb would be horrified to find his funerary decorations turned into fodder for the 6 o’clock news. As always, I maintain that our ancient ancestors could barely predict the reality of our world (could you predict the resilience of the Internet in the aftermath of the Fall?), much less the end of it.

It is interesting, however, that no credible explanation for the Fall has ever been proposed. Of course, the government put forth an explanation coached with all the necessary bureaucratic terms; the Fall was a confluence of various factors, the fault of a computer glitch, a symptom of the ailing global markets, the act of God, no one really knows but back to our regularly scheduled programming and please vote for us come November.

Popular opinion, meanwhile, heaped the blame liberally on any number of groups – the Arabs, the Islamic extremists, the Islamic revolutionaries, the Christian far right, Tibetan Buddhists, the kelptocrats, the tweakers, the disaffected youth, aging baby boomers, the North Koreans, the Communists, the Anarcho-Capitalists, the New Babylonians, rogue agents from the Axis of Evil, the Reclaimers, the Reformers, and the End is Nigh street preachers. Or maybe, all of the above.

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