If ancient Egyptian culture had never been influenced by outside civilizations, how do you think it would have evolved differently in the modern world?

It would have been just like China. It would have followed the exact same pattern.

When you are the best you inevitably will take the foot off the gas and you’ll get comfortable. You’ve got things going well, the economy is solid, the people are all happy, you’ve got your governing structures set and traditions in place. Society as a whole is stable and doing well. You develop the idea that you’re the center of the world and that you are living in paradise - no other place is as good. Your technology is unprecedented, no one else has anything like what your people have been able to do. You are the envy of any neighboring people who only get a glimpse of what you can do and they haven't even seen half of it. Life is good and things are great.

Some outsiders show up and they have some things to trade. Nothing you're interested in though as you’ve got everything you need in this kingdom that never sees bad days. Life is grand. Truly.

Some of your people who aren’t fairing quite as well do make trades with those outsiders and they go away and come back periodically. It's not a big deal and it’s hardly noticeable until one day these outsiders show up with some military and so you have your military that uses the geography to its advantage and pulls in tight forcing the enemy to fight on your ground and you grind them down quickly. It becomes your doctrine. You use the sheer vastness of your territory to put them onto unfriendly ground and you just outlast them because they have no way of sustaining themselves indefinitely.

You’re not interested in expansion as you’ve got the best territory and you’ve got full control. You are in the center of the world after all and life is great. More outsiders show and for hundreds of years, this goes on where you juts pull in and push them out by refusing to do anything for them or with them and they don’t have the ability to force a fight that would cause any damage to you so you have developed a strategy of exclusion where you won’t let the outside world in. You just want nothing to do with those inferiors.

A few hundred years later something new happens. The Yangtze River has some weird thin in it. It looks like a flat shiny thing with some kind of a weird cannon on it. Never before have you seen such a thing but unfortunately it’s doing what all the other ships couldn’t do.

The large wooden warships could never navigate down the river as it was too shallow. They would get stuck and sink. No other vessel could come from wherever those outsiders came from as they needed to be large sailing ships to cross the ocean but here is this little flat thing and it’s armed to the teeth.

It begins firing into the cities along the river and there is simply no way to respond. It's metal so the fire doesn’t work and there are no projectiles that seem to have any effect on it.

The Chinese had to surrender to one ship. An iron-clad that no longer needed wind and was propelled by steam instead. It had a long flat keel so it could travel in any river system in China and being China was so agrarian they were built around those river systems which meant every single city was within firing range.

China was now open for business - cue the start of the opium wars.

With any country at its zenith - people get complacent and they start to think that they have it as good as it can get. They enjoy life instead of pushing to expand, pushing to become more, pushing for survival.

They start getting entitlement and start taking from people. They start to think they are the be all and end all and they start to marginalize other people.

Eventually, they find out that they were wrong and that they aren’t untouchable when someone finally has enough of the attitude and teaches them how you need to be humble at the top because it’s never permanent.

You need a fight to rise to the challenge but it has to be a winnable fight. If not, then you have to figure out how to make it winnable. The United States did with the Iron Clad.

There’s always something you didn’t think of lingering on the edges. Just because you’re on top now doesn’t mean that is the case indefinitely.