Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2016 February 12

= February 12 =

Length of reign of Pharaohs
What would be considered a 'long' reign for a pharaoh?—azuki (talk · contribs · email) 14:15, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
 * You can look at List of pharaohs; I'd say any reign over 40 years could be considered 'long', but Pepi II Neferkare may have reigned for as long as 94 years. Note that dates in early Egyptian Chronology are usually tentative and may change in the light of new discoveries. - Lindert (talk) 14:24, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

US Presidential elections - Suspension of campaigns
Has a US Presidential candidate ever resumed a campaign after suspending it? Dismas |(talk) 16:11, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
 * The AP has an article on the subject. Generally, suspension means "dropping out of the race permanently."
 * There are a few exceptions. Most notably, third-party candidate Ross Perot suspended his campaign in July 1992, then in October 1992 (one month before the election) jumped back in. See Ross Perot presidential campaign, 1992. In September 2008, Senator John McCain "suspended" his campaign in September 2008 (and urged then-Senator Obama to do the same) for the duration of talks on the 2008 financial crisis and the Wall Street bailout, although this was regarded as something of a publicity stunt. See John McCain presidential campaign, 2008. See here (NPR) and here (U.S. News & World Report). That was a different type of suspension, though, since it was explicitly intended to be temporary. Neutralitytalk 18:05, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
 * We did this on the language refdesk a short while back. Basically the reason candidates euphemistically say they're "suspending" a campaign is that there are regulations that kick in if they officially end it.  On the other hand, as far as I know, there is no countervailing advantage to officially ending it.
 * So they "suspend" the campaign to let supporters know why they won't be at the last rally, without triggering any legal consequences. I don't think "suspending" a campaign has any meaning at all, legally, though I would be interested to know otherwise. --Trovatore (talk) 19:16, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Satirically speaking, "suspending" a campaign pretty much equates to "putting a noose around it". As regards Perot, his temporary suspension and his strange reason for doing it really cost him. There were many who thought he was in the driver's seat up to that point, and could have been the first third-party president since... maybe, ever. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:58, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I've wondered if a candidate suspends rather than ends a campaign, can they continue to raise funds for their political efforts? They could always say that they could restart a campaign later. Liz  Read! Talk! 00:24, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
 * US political campaigns almost always operate at a deficit. Even the eventual winners. The campaigns, whether successful or not, usually remain active until the debt is paid off, forgiven, negotiated away, etc. A senator's election campaign, for example, may continue to raise money months after the senator actually takes office in order to satisfy debts incurred during the campaign. When Scott Walker "suspended" his campaign, it was operating with a $1 million deficit. His campaign committee is still responsible for that debt. Campaigns are legal entities that can (and sometimes must) remain in operation long after the candidate is finished (one way or another) running. It can keep raising money until the debts go away.--William Thweatt TalkContribs 02:51, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

First individual
On the page on Akhenaten, it says one historian called him the "first individual". It doesn't elaborate. I ran a Google search for Akhenaten "first individual" to get more details, but all the results just contain the same brief snippet of "Akhenaten has been called the 'first individual' by Breasted". Okay. Why was he called the "first individual"? There seems to be no elaboration on this interesting detail. — Melab±1 &#9742; 23:05, 12 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Essentially he means Akhenaten (or Ikhnaton, as Breasted calls him) was the first person to do something new, to break with tradition. Here is the full paragraph (following a description of all the changes Akhenaten introduced):
 * "Such fundamental changes as these, on a moment's reflection, suggest what an overwhelming tide of inherited thought, custom, and tradition had been diverted from its channel by the young king who was guiding this revolution. It is only as this aspect of his movement is clearly discerned that we begin to appreciate the power of his remarkable personality. Before his time religious documents were usually attributed to ancient kings and wise men, and the power of a belief lay chiefly in its claim to remote antiquity and the sanctity of immemorial custom. Even the social prophets of the Feudal Age attribute the maxims of Ptahhotep to a vizier of the Old Kingdom, five or six centuries earlier. Until Ikhnaton the history of the world had been but the irresistible drift of tradition. All men had been but drops of water in the great current. Ikhnaton was the first individual in history. Consciously and deliberately, by intellectual process he gained his position, and then placed himself squarely in the face of tradition and swept it aside. He appeals to no myths, to no ancient and widely accepted versions of the dominion of the gods, to no customs sanctified by centuries—he appeals only to the present and visible evidences of his god's dominion, evidences open to all, and as for tradition, wherever it had left material manifestations of any sort in records which could be reached, he endeavored to annihilate it.”
 * This is from Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt - you can read this chapter (and the rest of the book) on Sacred-Texts.com. Adam Bishop (talk) 00:26, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
 * If I can elaborate on that, pharaohs were portrayed in a very conventional, stereotyped way. As far as "official" texts like temple inscriptions go, a king wasn't an individual, he was a man filling a predefined role. We know nothing about most pharaohs' personalities. That said, different kings chose to portray themselves in particular ways to emphasize different aspects of kingship. Pharaohs were always portrayed smiting enemies, whether or not they actually went into battle, but it was a New Kingdom innovation to describe specific campaigns on royal monuments. Sesostris III and to a lesser extent Amenemhat III portrayed themselves with somber, lined faces (by the standards of pharaonic sculptures). We do not know what message this stylization was meant to convey, but it's often speculated to be related to the pessimistic attitude toward the burden of kingship found in the Instructions of Amenemhat from the same era. Ramesses II's monuments, unusually, listed the dozens of sons he produced, possibly because he wanted to stress that the kingship really was hereditary and his dynasty firmly established—none of the four kings who preceded him were born into a royal family.


 * Akhenaten looks very different from the kingly stereotype at first glance, but studies more recent than Breasted show that he didn't break with tradition quite as much as it seems. The artistic innovations of his reign and the emphasis on the Aten were both foreshadowed in the reign of his father, Amenhotep III. Celebrating the abundance of nature and the diversity of its creatures (as seen in the Great Hymn to the Aten and a lot of Amarna art) was a way of celebrating the sun god as the creator of all life, in a tradition that stretched back a thousand years. Worshipping the Aten and no other deities was a radical, even unimaginable, break with tradition, but even that break may not have been absolute as it seems—other gods were still mentioned early in Akhenaten's reign, and nobody knows how ordinary people were affected by Akhenaten's religious changes.


 * Akhenaten's actions and the way he chose to portray himself obviously reflect something about him, but we really don't know what it was. Dominic Montserrat expressed it well in his book on modern perceptions of Akhenaten. "Akhenaten presents a carefully constructed image of himself through an ideologized set of words and pictures that make the individual behind them elusive. But the idea of him as an individual has become deep-rooted. Akhenaten would never have had the kind of after-life that he has enjoyed unless he was felt to be accessible to them in a unique way. And so Akhenaten has been made to speak, in the first-person singular, in the languages we understand—a kind of ventriloquist's dummy who mouths the words of people who manipulate him." Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt (2000), p. 3. A. Parrot (talk) 07:33, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Breasted has been criticized (perhaps by Montserrat? I forget) for depicting Akhenaten as a sort of Egyptian Martin Luther - i.e., Egyptian religion was corrupt Popery and Akhenaten was a brave reformer. But this would say more about Breasted and the biases of 19th century historians than it would about Akhenaten. Adam Bishop (talk) 14:54, 14 February 2016 (UTC)