What did ancient Egyp­tians sound like? What did they eat and drink? What ancient Egypt­ian med­i­cine and tools do we still use in mod­ern times? Why did they prac­tice mum­mi­fi­ca­tion? Above, Lau­rel Bestock, a pro­fes­sor from Brown Uni­ver­si­ty, dis­cuss­es every­thing you ever want­ed to know about Ancient Egypt. Not a stranger to pop­u­lar media productions—Bestock appears in a recent Nation­al Geo­graph­ic pro­duc­tion, Egyp­t’s Lost Won­ders—the pro­fes­sor fields every ques­tion that comes her way, no mat­ter how big or small. All along, she gives “out­stand­ing and very down-to-earth expla­na­tions,” notes a fel­low pro­fes­sor in the YouTube com­ments. For my mon­ey, the best part comes at the 10:40 mark when she deci­phers and reads hiero­glyphs. Enjoy.

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Relat­ed Con­tent 

How to Read Ancient Egypt­ian Hiero­glyphs: A British Muse­um Cura­tor Explains

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Roset­ta Stone, and How It Unlocked Our Under­stand­ing of Egypt­ian Hiero­glyphs

What the Great Pyra­mid of Giza Would’ve Looked Like When First Built: It Was Gleam­ing, Reflec­tive White

Who Built the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids & How Did They Do It?: New Arche­o­log­i­cal Evi­dence Busts Ancient Myths

Pur­sued to any depth, the ques­tion of whether the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca counts as an empire becomes dif­fi­cult to address with clar­i­ty. On one hand, the coun­try has exert­ed a strong cul­tur­al influ­ence on most of the world for the bet­ter part of a cen­tu­ry, a phe­nom­e­non not unre­lat­ed to the mil­i­tary pres­ence that extends far beyond its bor­ders. (In Korea, where I live, I once met a for­mer KATUSA, the branch of the Kore­an Army sec­ond­ed to the US Army, who told me he’d joined because he “want­ed to see what it was like to be a mod­ern Roman sol­dier.”) On the oth­er hand, we can’t quite say that it rules the known world — at least, not in the way that the Roman Empire did twen­ty cen­turies ago.

Yet the temp­ta­tion to draw par­al­lels between Amer­i­ca and Rome remains irre­sistible, not least when it comes to the sub­ject of impe­r­i­al decline. In this video from Told in Stone, his­to­ri­an Gar­rett Ryan eval­u­ates “the idea that mod­ern Amer­i­ca is des­tined to decline and fall like ancient Rome.” The argu­ments for this motion tend to involve “an increas­ing­ly unset­tled inter­na­tion­al land­scape” and  “domes­tic divi­sion,” lead­ing to the dis­so­lu­tion of Pax Amer­i­cana — the suc­ces­sor of Pax Bri­tan­ni­ca, which itself suc­ceed­ed Pax Romana. Amer­i­cans, Ryan explains, “have a sense that Rome is in their polit­i­cal DNA. The con­sti­tu­tion, after all, rep­re­sents an attempt to cre­ate a new and per­fect­ed Roman Repub­lic. Anx­i­eties about Roman-style decline have been present since the begin­ning.”

Rome and Amer­i­ca: each “was the great­est pow­er of its time,” each “had a strong legal sys­tem and a soci­ety that left room for social advance­ment,” and each “pro­fessed to be guid­ed by Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ples.” Their polit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic, tech­no­log­i­cal con­di­tions could hard­ly be more dif­fer­ent, of course, but when observers “say that Amer­i­ca is falling like Rome, the under­ly­ing assump­tion is not that Amer­i­ca is specif­i­cal­ly like Rome; it’s that all empires, ancient and mod­ern, fol­low a sim­i­lar course from great­ness to grave.” The Roman Empire fell because “Ger­man­ic tribes over­came its fron­tier defens­es,” because “a series of ruinous civ­il wars sapped its strength,” because “it had lost the loy­al­ty of provin­cial elites,” and for many oth­er rea­sons besides — few of which are like­ly to play major parts in a notion­al Amer­i­can col­lapse.

But the fact that “the decline of Rome has no pre­cise par­al­lels in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry does not mean that it has no lessons to offer mod­ern Amer­i­ca.” To learn those lessons, we could do worse than to turn to eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry his­to­ri­an Edward Gib­bon, whose The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is the sub­ject of the School of Life video above. “The immense sto­ry that Gib­bon tells us moves from one dis­as­ter to anoth­er, cen­tu­ry after cen­tu­ry,” says nar­ra­tor Alain de Bot­ton: failed reforms, insti­tu­tion­al cor­rup­tion, break­downs in civ­il-mil­i­tary rela­tions, plagues, poor har­vests, eco­nom­ic col­lapse. And yet the Renais­sance, the Enlight­en­ment, and the arrival of moder­ni­ty, as we know it, all lay ahead. “You aren’t going to like what comes after Amer­i­ca,” Leonard Cohen once wrote, but maybe our descen­dants will like what comes a mil­len­ni­um or so after Amer­i­ca.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Splen­did Book Design of the 1946 Edi­tion of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

The Rise & Fall of Roman Civ­i­liza­tion: Every Year Shown in a Time­lapse Map Ani­ma­tion (753 BC ‑1479 AD)

Howard Zinn’s “What the Class­room Didn’t Teach Me About the Amer­i­can Empire”: An Illus­trat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by Vig­go Mortensen

When Iggy Pop Pub­lished an Essay, “Cae­sar Lives,” in an Aca­d­e­m­ic Jour­nal about His Love for Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1995)

Do You Think About Ancient Rome Every Day? Then Browse a Wealth of Videos, Maps & Pho­tos That Explore the Roman Empire

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.