Here is a piece of news which is almost guaranteed to have no effect on your life whatsoever. Egypt, which is already full of antiquities, has re-erected an ancient statue of Pharaoh Amonhotep the 3rd, which is actually just a huge statue of his leg, some nondescript rock, and a pretty fair carving of his Queen, but it’s really, really big and really, really old. It’s just been lying, broken, in the desert for the last 3,000 years or so.
Look on these works, ye mighty, and despair
Now, some might wonder why Egypt is making the effort to put ancient statues back up again when millions of their people are unemployed, and it’s not really clear whose in charge of the country or which way it’s going, but economically it makes sense. Probably no amount of tourism is going to rescue Egypt from poverty, because it’s too large and has no natural resources of any value whatsoever, but tourism is all they’ve got and every little bit helps.
I think it’s kind of amazing just for the pure symbolism of it. For the last 6 or 7,000 years, great civilizations have been popping up here and there around the planet, and many of them have erected magnificent monuments to themselves, and much of that has been lost. If all that magnificence could be restored, it would be, to say the least, kind of impressive. And all it would cost is a bit of money and effort, nobody needs to be killed at all.
Instead of harassing Iraq and treating them like the world’s trailer trash cousin that nobody wants to have anything to do with, there should be an international effort to recreate The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, along the banks of the Tigris river, or the Euphrates, wherever it was. They get a nice little earner and maybe some affordable middle class housing thrown in, the world gets one more tourist destination, and everybody is happy.
It doesn’t even need to be a real past. Pretty much any place with a castle in the West of England, or Wales, could declare itself to be the original site of Camelot, and any island in need of some tourist dollars could change it’s name to Mu or Atlantis, put up some monumentally big, impressive looking stuff, sit back and watch the tourist dollars roll in.
It doesn’t need to be gold, it doesn’t even need to be granite. Styrofoam would work just fine, as long as you get the surfacing right.
With all of the knowledge and technology at our disposal today, we should be able to create a past way cooler than the past actually was.
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