A pharaoh with 100 children bungled his succession

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/history-magazine/article/ancient-egypt-children-pharaoh-ramses-family-tree

by Brajeshwar • 3 years ago

60 51 3 years ago

nationalgeographic.com

mxwsn• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/CK5Be

rippercushions• 3 years ago

The black article text fades into white in this copy. Intentional defence or just crappy CSS?

Springtime2• 3 years ago

For anyone else needing to view via this link (eg: those who block cookies by default) the article implemented a gradient overlay that progressively fades to white, obscuring the latter half of the article. Can disable the linear-gradient via web inspection though.

kevin_thibedeau• 3 years ago

Reader mode works well enough.

kqr22• 3 years ago

Is there a quick way to determine which element to modify?

CobrastanJorji2• 3 years ago

I'm sure this is interesting, but I'm not sure if it's "$6 + automatically renews into a small print $40 annual subscription in six months" kind of interesting.

omnibrain2• 3 years ago

annual subscription

You have to cancel by phone. ;)

haasted• 3 years ago

The Economist playbook. Infuriating.

kornork• 3 years ago

Pretty sure California's Automatic Renewal law makes this illegal. Does NatGeo have different cancelation processes by state/country?

Cthulhu_• 3 years ago

It's not the only article they published this month though. They had to do hours of research, writing, editing, etc for the article, their labor is worth money. Whether you think it is, or whether you want this particular content, is a separate matter though.

CobrastanJorji2• 3 years ago

Oh sure, but a link to a story on Hacker News that you can only read once you pay money is just an ad. It's not wrong to put useful ads on Hacker News, but they should be labeled.

smeagull• 3 years ago

This article is exclusively for National Geographic subscribers.

Why post this? If you need to, just directly link the archive version.

boomboomsubban2• 3 years ago

The HN guidelines say link the original article.

danjc• 3 years ago

Perhaps it would be a nice feature to be able to "sticky" post an archive link. I generally search the comments for it first if I know I'm going to hit a paywall.

personjerry• 3 years ago

tl;dr: pharaoh Ramses II did great things but lived 90 years, outliving many of his sons, and soon after he died his kingdom fell into civil wars over successions and collapsed

lonelyasacloud• 3 years ago

Ramses II said he did great things and fathered a lot of children - like a lot of rulers ancient and modern.

rnd03• 3 years ago

Well, we do have the tomb he made for his family (KV5 if I remember correctly)...

ciphol• 3 years ago

Presumably a pharaoh who ruled for decades would indeed have lots of kids, if he wanted to and (as most are) was physically able.

kromem• 3 years ago

There's more to it than what the article goes into.

For example, Ramses II's forensic report says he appears to have been a Lybian Berber.

The Greeks told a story about how there was a conflict between Danaus, the leader of Lybia, and his brother the Pharoh of Egypt who had fifty sons.

The single day Lybian/sea peoples war against Ramses II's successor has a lot in common with the single day battle Odysseus talks about going to against Egypt as soon as Troy fell, where he's taken captive and parties with the Pharoh until after seven years a "certain Phonecian" showed up and tries to ransom him to Lybia.

Seven years after that Lybian/sea peoples battle is when Amenmesse seized power from Seti II.

The account of Ramses III about the end of the 19th dynasty described fairly Phonecian elements like the city governors collectively ruling or "making the gods like men" - almost identical wording to the opening euhemerism of Sanchoniathon's Phonecian myths.

I suspect our understanding of the end of the 19th dynasty will be changing quite a bit over the next decade...

DavidNielsen• 3 years ago

He had 99 problems, but an heir ain’t one?

_448• 3 years ago

When I saw "100 children" in the title, immediately the Indian king Dhrutarashtr came to mind. Didn't know he had a competition from Egypt :)

nindalf2• 3 years ago

This is obvious to those in the know, but the King you mention is quasi-fictional, in the sense that Achilles and Odysseus are. He’s mentioned in the Indian epic Mahabharata, which is similar to the Iliad in terms of age, scope and influence on modern society.

Whereas the pharaoh is much more real.

rnd03• 3 years ago

Mind you, that's what they thought about the city of Troy, too. Don't be too surprised if someone somewhere stumbles upon the tomb of king Dhrutarashtr!

lockhouse• 3 years ago

There is also Genghis Khan who had so many children that 1 in 200 men living today are direct descendants of him.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/1-in-200-men-d...

kshacker2• 3 years ago

Thought experiment: after a couple of generations, would we expect a higher or lower percentage using the same calculations

Without reading the article, (had read a similar one years back), here are my thoughts:

More: 0.5% is a small segment of population and by random selection, they are likely to breed with the 99.5% thus increasing the direct descendants with every generation.

Less: they may be locked by geography so they may be inter breeding and not growing (at worst) or slowly growing (at best) but other places such as India quadrupled over the century and they lost percentage as a result.

rjsw• 3 years ago

Saudi Arabia fits the pattern too.

alexitorg• 3 years ago

From listening to the fall of civilization podcast, it seems that a lot of empires went down from too many heirs. From memory Mansa Musa lived very old and had more than 50 heirs as well. The Malian empire did not long last his death. https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/

mach1ne• 3 years ago

Lineages seem to be the downfall of empires. I wonder if the Roman Empire would have survived longer had Marcus Aurelius (or anyone after him) not chosen their heir by biology, but by virtue, as the previous emperors did.

danioli• 3 years ago

Marcus had many children, many of whom died early. He was succeeded by his son Commodus, who's depiction in Gladiator is well known (and invariably inaccurate).

Footkerchief• 3 years ago

A large proportion of Roman emperors became heirs via adoption for this purpose, not via actual inheritance.

vondur• 3 years ago

It would have probably caused a civil war itself. Commodus was the accepted heir, I doubt Marcus Aurelius could have chosen anyone else as long as Commodus was alive. All of the previous "good" emperors had no male heirs to pass the empire on to.

dsfyu404ed• 3 years ago

The point of heir by birth is to eliminate questions of who will be heir and the power struggles. You can raise the heir and any backups with that role in mind from day 1 so they're amenable to it and you also have time to figure out if they're idiots or not and can assemble other governance structures (e.g. delegate specific responsibility into more merit-based advisor roles to keep your heir from screwing it up) to insulate against that if needed. The problem is when you have a bunch of idiots in a row or when you have a bunch of good kings in a row (and all the surrounding official positions get full of idiots). Generally speaking, of course.

29athrowaway• 3 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_of_succession

passwordoops• 3 years ago

GGRM has an example of this in the World of Ice and Fire. Fire and Blood as well, but not to such a great extent - just rival heirs going to war every couple of generations

A pharaoh with 100 children bungled his succession

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