This was the Rampjaar, or Disaster Year, where the Dutch Republic found itself at war with both France and England. A couple of years later the Dutch eventually prevailed and defeated both otherwise larger powers at sea. True Dutch Golden Age

Yeah that’s right, every country murders children for showing their hair. Iran is no less democratic than democracies, etc. etc.

Shove off with the ‘enlightened’ whataboutist moral equivalences. You’re not more nuanced, just more simplistic in a smarmier way.

Germany pledged to send a zillion squillion, though

Aw gee thanks, because you were there and know what was said and how! Even in the cases where the context is flirting and they want me to say something more explicit? Fascinating.

Pet peeve of mine that keeps happening: I make a jokey ‘meta-innuendo’ in a similar way when someone says something that has an obvious double meaning, alluding to something I could say, and get “Ah but say it! Haha” when it should be obvious I don’t have a specific wording in mind but the general idea is clear.

> “There are a few positions on the table”

> “Haha well you know which ones I’d suggest ;)”/“You know what I’d say to that ;)”

> “Haha ;) Suggest them!/Say it!”

> “Um. Isn’t it a little less lame if left unsaid…?”

I obviously don’t have more specific direct wording in mind - the allusion to it was the specific wording.

Viciously murders the mildly amusing moment, even if they got it and found it funny.

There was a silly CGI movie about one called Valiant, too.

Well, Egyptian writing ‘proper’ seems to have developed gradually from proto-writing over the course of the 4th millennium BC, so in a sense we have as good an idea as can likely be well-defined. We don’t have the very earliest ‘fully written’ records (and we’d never be able to prove they were first if we could even clarify what that meant) but we do have some bounds… and since the writing system seems to have gradually expanded to encompass the whole language, it’s fuzzy in reality in any case.

EDIT: I suppose one could argue that the moment Egyptian developed the monoliterals, it was technically a full writing system. Not sure how we’d ever possibly know exactly when that was, though.

Yes, it gets brought up under every Reddit post on either ancient Egypt or “facts that don’t sound true but are” or anything about bizarre time gaps.

Part of it of course is that people think Cleopatra was just like Nefertiti, rather than an ethnic Greek/Macedonian after natively-ruled Egyptian civilisation was over. Same story as the Aztec empire only being a particular civilisation in the last century and a bit before Cortes, when people assume it stands for all of (actually very ancient) broader Meso-American civilisation, and similar for the even shorter-lived Incas standing for the even longer-lived broader Andean civilisation.

Ancient Egyptian civilisation literally lasted for most of history (in the written sense).