I wonder if this was just a single document or one of many of the same general form. It is structured like a collection of memes built by many participants, each adding a new occupation and its discontents. I can imagine it as something more senior student scribes might write jointly or even as an entertaining writing exercise. Still, it has enough dad joke in it to be an actual letter from a father to a son, but I would not be surprised if more than one scribe father sent such a letter to his scribe student son. Then as now, dad jokes weren't noted for their originality.
Cool! Dickens might've written something similar in the nineteenth century. Could anyone have said the same things in, say, 1950? For those who don't do quantitative history, a contrast between this text
from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, a Dickens writing on something similar, and a text on that same topic from 1950 should/could persuade that there was a hinge of history, at least economic history, sometime in the late nineteenth century. We live during that historical anomaly. That is why it is so worth protecting.
I wonder if this was just a single document or one of many of the same general form. It is structured like a collection of memes built by many participants, each adding a new occupation and its discontents. I can imagine it as something more senior student scribes might write jointly or even as an entertaining writing exercise. Still, it has enough dad joke in it to be an actual letter from a father to a son, but I would not be surprised if more than one scribe father sent such a letter to his scribe student son. Then as now, dad jokes weren't noted for their originality.
Tell that to Thomas Chatterton.
Cool! Dickens might've written something similar in the nineteenth century. Could anyone have said the same things in, say, 1950? For those who don't do quantitative history, a contrast between this text
from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, a Dickens writing on something similar, and a text on that same topic from 1950 should/could persuade that there was a hinge of history, at least economic history, sometime in the late nineteenth century. We live during that historical anomaly. That is why it is so worth protecting.
Keep this coming!!