Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy (opens in new tab)

> But 2500+ years of ancient egypt is a very long damn time.

To put that in perspective, consider how long 100 years ago feels.. not in technological terms, but in human perception of time: The USA was founded 250~ years ago. Try to recall your own life from 20, 40, 50 years ago.. it's a literal lifetime. Most people only meet people as far back as their grandparents, just 2 generations back. Great-grandparents and the eras they grew up in are already almost impossible to relate to.. 2500 years is FIFTY such lifetimes!

So in "just" after 500 years the pyramids would already be a mythical unrelatable object to people from 2000 years before us...

I like to think Ancient Egyptians were descendants of the survivors from a Green Sahara and the pyramids were meant to be their post-apocalyptic marker in case the world went to further shit..

Ancient Egypt had archeological museums showing dug up artifacts of even more ancient Egypt.

In Ancient Egypt Ancient Egypt was ancient.

TFA originally meant "The Fucking Article" but on HN seems to have morphed its meaning to "The Fine Article" or "The Featured Article". I can't stop reading it as the former every time I come across it.

The mummy that is the subject of The Friendly Article (the post that we're all commenting under right now).

That Fucking Asshole mummy from Bubba Ho Tep.

In time, not space.

I used the phrase “the TFA mummy” where the “the” is the article for “mummy.”

“The TFA mummy” has the same three articles as “the mummy in TFA” but one less word.

And pedantically, pedantry leaves the house when “TFA” walks in the door.

I don’t think you’re reclaiming “peg”. Lost cause.

Within the rock construction are wood beams, mortar and charcoal that are all datable.

> aren't actually datable, because it's rock

To add to the methods shared by others, one way I think is really cool is optically stimulated luminescence.

  So, a grain of quartz destined someday to become the perfect OSL sample will 
  begin its journey by emptying its electron traps. This typically happens 
  through steady sunlight exposure, in a process called bleaching. Bleaching 
  resets the OSL clock. In this example scenario, the grain is fully bleached 
  by the sun as the wind blows it across the landscape, until it finally 
  settles and additional wind-blown material buries it.
  
  Once it is cut off from light, the OSL clock begins running. The sediment now 
  surrounding the quartz will include tiny amounts of radioactive isotopes, 
  exposing the quartz to a steady flow of ionizing radiation. The quartz 
  captures electrons from this radiation; the radiation flow is called the dose 
  rate. This is like the steady ticking of a clock. The quartz begins trapping 
  electrons, and because it is cut off from light, the trapped electrons will 
  continue building up at a fairly steady, measurable rate.

https://desert.com/osl/

The construction work camps for the pyramids have been dug. There is also wood, an organic matter in the Kings chamber and mortar inside the pyramid, which can be dated.

To the degree that is a scientific argument, the scientific research and scholarship underpinning it is a subset of the scientific research and scholarship underpinning the dates the contemporary Egyptology community ascribes to the pyramids.

Egyptologists can access science and have access to cultural artifacts and those artifacts include writing and that writing can be read and what can be read includes dates.

Carbon ain't the only substance that's datable.

I find it interesting how uncommon it is for this to yield new works.

It seems like it's always the same handful of texts. Ancient readers liked what they liked and weren't out for variety it seems.

At the same time, Juvenal has a whole satire about how everyone is trying their hand at writing books and mentions in another how booksellers are always getting new volumes.

I spend way too much time pining for the chance to read the other parts of the Trojan Cycle, even though the ancient said they were much lower quality. Like your favorite show getting canceled.

I wonder now and then about the extent of dissent and cynicism in ancient Egypt. This is a vague question, I know, not least because the scope covers thousands of years. But officially, everybody gets grave goods in proportion to their status, especially their closeness to royalty, and these are provided so that they can have chairs and games and sports and clothes and food and so on in the next world, to make approximately four out of their eight forms of soul feel comfortable. Then these grave goods are often immediately stolen, probably by the same priestly officials who organized the burial. I wonder if ancient Egyptians silently thought their own religion ridiculous.

Well, sure. All of our death rituals are for the living left behind, not for the dead.

> This is present even today, I saw a burial in Eastern Europe where the parents put a game of chess and toys in the coffin. While it will do no good to the deceased my theory is that it is a way for the living to deal with the loss.

Spoiler: they do that so that future grave robbers and archaeologists will know all about the dead person's lifestyle. Surely that kind of everlasting glory has to be worth something to the deceased, one would think?

"Volume" means "scroll" in Latin.

"Book" has been used to translate the Latin word "liber", which is the word used by the Ancient Romans for the parts of a bigger document, each of which would have been written on a different scroll.

Latin "liber" was used to translate the Greek words "biblion" or "byblos", which are thus the oldest source of the word "book". "Byblos" originally meant papyrus in Greek, but later it was also used for the parts of a big document. A later form of this word, which was more specialized with the meaning of "material for writing" or "book", is "biblion" (a diminutive), having the plural "ta biblia" = "the books", which is the source of English "bible".

It's actually a modern innovation, AFAIK. Common people were stripped and wrapped in linens (or equivalent). Obviously, mummy wrapping would be the extreme example of it, but wills often designated who would inherit "my best tunic", because the clothes were quite valuable if still wearable.

I'm speaking of the common people; kings and bishops were buried in finery. And it's not universal by any means. In times of disaster or plague bodies were buried quickly in their current clothes. This leads to some interesting finds, as when all that remains of an entire outfit is the silk stitching and things like metal buttons.

So your friends know you were standing pat when you died.

(See "Saint James Infirmary Blues").

Pearly gates is basically an interview.

It was a little before that even.

Greek was the language of most fields of learning besides law in the Roman Empire. But the Greeks themselves wrote works on these papyrus scrolls that crumbled fast, so anything not actively used by the Romans was quickly lost.

There's a good chance that if the papyrus scrolls in any library (Alexandria or otherwise) weren't being copied regularly they were crumbling even before they burned or were lost to time for other reasons.

Towards the end of the Roman Empire, a few philosophers took the time to transmit Greek knowledge in Latin as knowledge of Greek faded in western Europe. What these guys happened to translate was the basis of most of European learning in philosophy, math, and other fields for centuries.

But they weren't monks (the most famous, Boethius, was not Christian either but a lot of later writers thought he was), the monks in scriptorium came later and grew slowly.

St. Benedict said that monks should be taught to read and do so regularly, which required copying books, but he prioritized physical work (to create self-sufficient communities) and prayer. But future Benedictines responded to the incentives of the time and began scaling up the copying and doing less agricultural work as the years went on.

Thanks for sharing. Maybe not as common as you think. I never heard that before.

As far as I know the vast majority of cuneiform we have is essentially administrative records, tax record and receipts. And homework.

That's the stuff that tells us how societies and cultures really worked.

People say this without any evidence. This ai-post is just regurgitating hn-thread "received wisdom". The evidence for the existence of a library is thin and hard to piece together, but points to more than a myth. I appreciate that people want real proof of anything, but dumping an ai-slop summary is hardly doing any better than accepting the existence of a large library.

Well, the library surely is not there anymore.

I don't get the point of this comment. What are you implying?

those are certainly Christian curated documents. The previous six hundred+ years had seen the development of vivid and exotic religion, philosophy and arts. The Christians famously slew the Dragons, condemned Herod as a sorcerer and astrologer, and replaced the Apollo cults with the scripture that many know well.

I imagine that the Library of Alexandria was plural and diverse with respect to the traditions and inquiry that was represented there.

"I wouldnt watch a WW2 Zombie movie if the nazi zombies were wearing viking armor driving an Abrams tank either."

OK, so you didn't watch Kung Fury?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fury

Would you choose the weapons, armour and tactics as described in the Iliad? Even though it is thought they are inaccurate for the time period that they think the Iliad is set? Not so easy I would say.

And the extra you describe, where does he appear on screen? Front and centre, or in the fourth rank behind the people in better costumes?

And the longboat, does it appear on screen in its original form, or with additions to make it look more period accurate?

The costumes are completely wrong.

At least they bothered to CGI out the stirrups, but it's incredibly obvious from how he's sitting on the horse in the trailer.

> "Oh its a fantasy film" its set in a historical time period, I wouldnt watch a WW2 Zombie movie if the nazi zombies were wearing viking armor driving an Abrams tank either.

WW2 Zombie movie with Nazis in Viking armors and random tanks sounds so much more _fun_ than a "historically acurate Nazi Zombie" movie!

This is fairly typical level of detail for Hollywood, most of stuff they do around Europe is insulting as hell if one cares about the topic, historical stuff being the most visible source of offense.

Dumbed down far more than required for short movie transition of any topic. But I guess they know their US audience, their level of knowledge and care for authenticity better than me.

For someone who purports not to care about the film, you seem very familiar with the discourse about it. (I have seen zero experts, or anyone really, discussing boat design.)

Would you watch a 1965 WW2 "historical" movie if the Nazis were driving M47 Patton tanks?

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/the-battle-of-...

Not 100% sure whether you're being sarcastic but... yes? IMO more misses than hits, and the misses tend to miss by more than the hits hit.

If the only way you could hear about Napoleon's battles was having a guy recount them to you in verse, I bet it would sound pretty impressive when he started listing off all the regiments present for a battle, their commanders and deployments. There's a sense of scale to it, that probably isn't captured by just saying "such and such number of ships and such and such number of soldiers".

I think the point was that it would be a lot more interesting had it dated to a time prior to people for whom the Iliad was part of their culture were present in the region and when such artifacts would have been normal-ish

Finding american freed slave papers in a grave at Valley Forge -> ever so slightly interesting, we know those people were around there at that time.

Finding american freed slave papers in a grave outside an 1870s British encampment in Sudan -> very interesting how did this get here.

Or kind of like how finding Christian stuff in a roman grave varies a lot in implication by the year.

That would have made it all the more exciting! Although less likely.

I’m thinking I would pick Snow Crash. Or maybe The Matrix DVD.

> Jews believed you couldn't burn a piece of paper once you wrote the name of God on it, so there were special towers in ancient cities for Jews to throw away their paper.

Fascinating!

The Cairo Genizah

Located in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo), Egypt, this particular Genizah was a massive, windowless attic room built high into the structure. To put papers in it, the synagogue's caretaker had to climb a tall ladder and drop the documents through a hole in the wall. Because the local community never got around to burying the papers, this high, hidden room acted like a time capsule for over a thousand years. When it was rediscovered in the late 19th century, it contained nearly 300,000 manuscript fragments.

Even in relatively modern times people would write letters in both directions to save paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossed_letter

Where I grew up, fish and chips was wrapped in actual newspaper.

>In large part this was because paper was incredibly expensive back then

The largest contributor to having garbage as historical sources for western European cultures was the millennium-long program of genocide and cultural destruction perpetrated by Christians against anything or anyone non-Christian they could get their hands on.

It's no coincidence the few primary sources for pre-Christian religion we have from Europe comes from Iceland... it was the furthest away. Surviving works of European mythology like Beowulf and Snorri's eddas are filled with Christian references because that's the only way they survived.

Much much more existed 1600 years ago and would have survived if the empire had not converted.

heat speeds up oxidation/ accelerates reactions but also decreases relative humidity for a constant moisture constant.

As well, both the Iliad and Vedas are originally oral traditions. Likely there were different versions and different parts of the stories were emphasized to appeal to their audiences and local tastes and current events. Something that can still be apparent in historical texts but probably greatly reduced by the function of printed versions presenting a singular "authoritative version."

They were actually eaten (in the early modern era) or ground up for paint.

You may be right about one observation, but that doesn't mean complimentary observations are genuine and all discoveries are real. In central Australia, and you find some indigenous rock paintings somewhere, and then someone else finds similar ones nearby a year later. Can't question that, right?

The Grand Egyptian Museum (first year in) frequently hits "its maximum planned capacity of around 15,000 to 18,000 visitors per day."

https://www.arabamerica.com/the-grand-egyptian-museums-first...

It's not necessarily about Egypt, it's about questioning discoveries in general.

I've even heard theories of the pyramids existing before "Ancient Egypt" even existed. If so, it may never have even been designed to be a tomb. I read in channeled information that it was to anchor the Earth in space and stop it wobbling. Others have said it is/was a jumping point into other dimensions.

"Despite building them as a gift of love and light to humanity, Ra expresses deep regret over how the pyramids were used."

https://gemini.google.com/share/cbddc708ef93