To put that in perspective, consider how long 100 years ago feels.. not in technological terms, but in human perception of time: The USA was founded 250~ years ago. Try to recall your own life from 20, 40, 50 years ago.. it's a literal lifetime. Most people only meet people as far back as their grandparents, just 2 generations back. Great-grandparents and the eras they grew up in are already almost impossible to relate to.. 2500 years is FIFTY such lifetimes!

So in "just" after 500 years the pyramids would already be a mythical unrelatable object to people from 2000 years before us...

I like to think Ancient Egyptians were descendants of the survivors from a Green Sahara and the pyramids were meant to be their post-apocalyptic marker in case the world went to further shit..

“The TFA mummy” has the same three articles as “the mummy in TFA” but one less word.

And pedantically, pedantry leaves the house when “TFA” walks in the door.

Egyptologists can access science and have access to cultural artifacts and those artifacts include writing and that writing can be read and what can be read includes dates.

To add to the methods shared by others, one way I think is really cool is optically stimulated luminescence.

  So, a grain of quartz destined someday to become the perfect OSL sample will 
  begin its journey by emptying its electron traps. This typically happens 
  through steady sunlight exposure, in a process called bleaching. Bleaching 
  resets the OSL clock. In this example scenario, the grain is fully bleached 
  by the sun as the wind blows it across the landscape, until it finally 
  settles and additional wind-blown material buries it.
  
  Once it is cut off from light, the OSL clock begins running. The sediment now 
  surrounding the quartz will include tiny amounts of radioactive isotopes, 
  exposing the quartz to a steady flow of ionizing radiation. The quartz 
  captures electrons from this radiation; the radiation flow is called the dose 
  rate. This is like the steady ticking of a clock. The quartz begins trapping 
  electrons, and because it is cut off from light, the trapped electrons will 
  continue building up at a fairly steady, measurable rate.

And the extra you describe, where does he appear on screen? Front and centre, or in the fourth rank behind the people in better costumes?

And the longboat, does it appear on screen in its original form, or with additions to make it look more period accurate?

At least they bothered to CGI out the stirrups, but it's incredibly obvious from how he's sitting on the horse in the trailer.

OK, so you didn't watch Kung Fury?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fury

WW2 Zombie movie with Nazis in Viking armors and random tanks sounds so much more _fun_ than a "historically acurate Nazi Zombie" movie!

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/the-battle-of-...

Dumbed down far more than required for short movie transition of any topic. But I guess they know their US audience, their level of knowledge and care for authenticity better than me.

Fascinating!

The Cairo Genizah

Located in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo), Egypt, this particular Genizah was a massive, windowless attic room built high into the structure. To put papers in it, the synagogue's caretaker had to climb a tall ladder and drop the documents through a hole in the wall. Because the local community never got around to burying the papers, this high, hidden room acted like a time capsule for over a thousand years. When it was rediscovered in the late 19th century, it contained nearly 300,000 manuscript fragments.

The largest contributor to having garbage as historical sources for western European cultures was the millennium-long program of genocide and cultural destruction perpetrated by Christians against anything or anyone non-Christian they could get their hands on.

It's no coincidence the few primary sources for pre-Christian religion we have from Europe comes from Iceland... it was the furthest away. Surviving works of European mythology like Beowulf and Snorri's eddas are filled with Christian references because that's the only way they survived.

Much much more existed 1600 years ago and would have survived if the empire had not converted.

Finding american freed slave papers in a grave at Valley Forge -> ever so slightly interesting, we know those people were around there at that time.

Finding american freed slave papers in a grave outside an 1870s British encampment in Sudan -> very interesting how did this get here.

Or kind of like how finding Christian stuff in a roman grave varies a lot in implication by the year.