This post was originally published on the main website on Apr 14
2026.
I am reposting it here for SEO reasons and enabling humble bumble discussions with the DEV community.
Feel free to engage with this post and i am available to respond during weekends.
Sorry about the spam posting all the blogs in one day.
I forgor about my dev account <3!
Hey everyone 👋, I want to warn you upfront that this post is going to sound strange.
I am a software engineer who spends most of his days thinking about rust compilers, physics-informed neural networks, and why language models are not as intelligent as the marketing says they are.
I wrote about that in LLMs are Useful.
LMMs will Break Reality, and I stand by every word.
But today I want to do something different.
I want to go back, way back, not to the sixties or the nineties or even to Turing, but to ancient Egypt, to a time when pharaohs were gods and the Nile was the spine of the world, and I want to make a case that feels almost absurd the first time you hear it.
The case is this: the pharaonic civilization was the first human system to achieve something functionally equivalent to artificial superintelligence, not through silicon or transformers or gradient descent, but through symbols, mathematics, architecture, administration, and the compression of collective human knowledge into durable physical and textual form.
I am not saying the pharaohs had computers.
I am saying they built something that no individual human mind could contain, and they made it run for thousands of years, and it was smarter than any of its parts.
That is the definition I care about, and by that definition, they did it first.
I know how that sounds.
I know some people will close this tab immediately.
But I am asking you to stay, because the argument is more rigorous than the title suggests, and because I think it connects directly to the questions I have been asking in every post I have written so far.
In Language is Limited.
ASI is Impossible., I argued that intelligence is not the same thing as language, and that any system confined to text will always be smaller than the world it is trying to describe.
In Mathematical Equations are Multimodal by Default, I argued that equations are the most compressed, most powerful representation of reality that humans have ever found, and that any real intelligence must be grounded in mathematical structure rather than statistical pattern in text.
And in Technology Has Destroyed My Livelihood, I talked about how the modern system extracts value from people who have nothing and gives credit to people who already have everything.
All of those ideas connect to what I am about to say about the pharaohs, because in a strange way, this ancient civilization solved every one of those problems, not perfectly, not justly, and not without enormous human suffering, but structurally in ways that we have not managed to replicate even with all of our modern technology.
That is the uncomfortable truth I am going to try to explain.
Why I Think About Ancient Egypt At All Let me start with something personal, because every idea I have ever had has been rooted in personal experience, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
I grew up in a country that was broken by war, as I wrote in my first post, and one of the things that war does is strip away every assumption you had about civilization, about order, about the predictability of tomorrow.
When everything around you is collapsing, you start to wonder what actually holds a civilization together, what the essential parts are, what would survive if everything else burned.
That question has been sitting in me for years, and it is the question that brought me to ancient Egypt, because Egypt is the only civilization in human history that held together for three thousand years with a continuous identity and a continuous system of governance, knowledge, and symbolic order.
That is the most durable example of organized human intelligence that we ha