Show Notes
How does one "do" history, and can an AI do it? The answers:1. You don't "do" history, you feel it.2. AI can do the actions of history, but it can't feel it.Bonus rant: I never liked the idea that the point of history is to learn from the past. Yes, there is learning to be done, that can be both useful and fun, but I feel that this reduces history to something less than it is in practice. And indeed, think about your own consumption of history, how often are you learning valuable lessons compared to how often you are simply experiencing the unique feeling of exploring the wider cosmos and seeing both your place within it and your connection with ancestors and the web of human connection? My bet is that the majority of it is the latter. And, indeed, I would suggest that much of the satisfaction of fiction, particularly world-exploring fiction like sci-fi and fantasy, is an artificially heightened version of the satisfaction you would have gotten from studying real history, the way hentai girlfriends are artificially heightened versions of real women with the unpleasant bits shaved off - those unpleasant bits are often the parts that are most meaningful. If history is a feeling, it is one we don't have much vocabulary for. But it is not one that can be replicated by robots, because it intrinsically resists optimization and completeness. It isn't just a push on the dopamine lever like a gatcha game. It is a textured thing, a feeling that encompasses more than the experience of experiencing it.
More from Oldest Stories
In 673 BC, the mighty Assyrian Empire marched against Egypt, determined to achieve a conquest greater than any Assyrian king had accomplished before. Instead, its army suffered a humiliating defeat.
The Pedubastis Cycle is a group of ancient Egyptian heroic tales centered on Pharaoh Pedubastis, Inaros, Petechonsis, Pemaus, and the powerful local rulers of Egypt during the centuries surrounding the Assyrian invasions. Preserved mainly in fragmentary Demotic Egyptian manuscripts from later periods, these stories transform an obscure era of Egyptian political fragmentation into a legendary age of heroes, feuds, enchanted objects, battles, divine intervention, and dynastic rivalry.
How did ancient Assyria use divination, astrology, and animal livers to make decisions of war, government, and royal policy? Under King Esarhaddon, the Neo-Assyrian Empire developed one of the ancient world’s most sophisticated systems of omen interpretation, combining centuries of recorded observations with extispicy, celestial omens, ritual expertise, and consultation with the gods.
The Cimmerians were among the first great horse nomad powers to crash into the civilizations of the ancient Near East. Emerging from the Scytho-Siberian world north of the Caucasus, they struck Urartu, devastated Phrygia and Lydia, raided deep into the Near East, and became legendary in Greek memory as one of the great barbarian terrors of antiquity.
Esarhaddon inherited the Neo-Assyrian Empire at the height of its power—but his kingship looked very different from that of the warrior-kings who came before him. Plagued by questions of legitimacy, surrounded by prophets and diviners, and often absent from his own military campaigns, Esarhaddon nevertheless presided over an extraordinarily aggressive and successful Assyrian state.