archaeological what-ifs

Swordman

Banned
Two of my favorites are:

1) what would be the effects on archaeology if the tomb of a great pharoah like Rameses II or Khufu survived unplundered, so that it would be discovered sometime in the 1980's? Based on the contents of Tut's tomb, discovered by Howard Carter in 1923, the amount of treasure in Ramses II's tomb would have been truly enormous

2) what if the contents of the Library of Alexandria survived through to the present day, if not originals, then as copies?

Mike Garrity
 
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About 1) it would certainly be the discovery of the decade (especially given the publicity skills of the Egyptian Antiquities dept.), and very likely be dug up with unseemly hurry to be put on display in Cairo. However, I would not be that sure about the treasure. I am told - and I'm no Egyptologist, so this is just uninformed chatter from general-interest reading - that the situation around the time of Tutankhamen's death allowed for a large amount of treasure to be used. There was gold about from the dissolution of the temples and the dismantling of Akhetaton, and neither Akhenaten nor Tutankhamen invested heavily in warfare or subsidies. The tomb of Ramesses II would be immense and quite likely include thousands of artifacts of exquisite (if pompous) beauty (imagine excavating the Bel Air home of a hip hop millionaire). But he would most likely have had better things to do with a few hundred kilograms of solid gold than make it into a coffin. Still, the value of the inscriptions alone would be tremendous, and keep egyptoplogists busy for decades.

About 2), it would have huge butterflies well before archeology in the modern sense existed. not because of the supposed technological knowledge that was lost (very likely it was not as great as some boosters think), but mainly because it provides ready access to a vast body of literature for European writers to emulate. European 'classicism' arose not least from an effort to make sense of the fragments of Greco-Roman civilisation that were left. If you had that kind of treasure trove, the chances are that it will, in the end, be less valued. There is an enormous amount of source material out there from the fourth ands fifth centuries, and nobody bothers to read it. Of course, modern archeologists would love to read the geographic writings of the early explorers, the entire body of New Comedy, or the full oeuvre of Sophokles or Plato. But there is a good chance modern archeologz will not come about in such a scenario.
 
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