Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy(thehistoryblog.com) |
Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy(thehistoryblog.com) |
That's c. 400 AD. Closer to today, than to the time of King Tut...and King Tut was closer to the TFA mummy than to the First Dynasty.
Ancient Egypt is really really old. The Great pyramid was 3000 years old at the time of the TFA mummy.
The TFA mummy is about equidistant between today and the events of the Iliad and the book was already more than 1000 years old in 400 CE.
There is a very strong connection between periods, of course. But 2500+ years of ancient egypt is a very long damn time. All of our modern history is, say, 3k years, starting with greeks, early chinese , india and all.
But egypt to me is like a star in the vast ocean of nothingness of early history. We know NAMES and DEEDS of people who lived 4500 years ago. We see things they've built, we can read words they wrote.
This is amazing.
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..
If it’s about brevity, "the peg" is just as short and mean in journalism parlance "A topic of interest, such as an ongoing event or an anniversary, around which various features can be developed."
“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.
Edit: the Sphynx dating is even more controversial, because it seems to have rain erosion on it.
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.
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.
Cold and dry would be just as good. It's the dryness that matters.
A typical laconic reply works here: "If"
It's been about 30 years since I've read The Iliad, but I remember that chapter as the worst part of the book. Just pages upon pages of names and where they came from. I wonder what significance it held for the buried individual to have been specifically included so.
Think about 10 year olds talking about all the different candies they are going to devour on Halloween night to get a sense of how it is meant to resonate with a crowd.
I see your supernerd cred flex, mummified guy!
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.
Before that, Egypt was mostly been ruled by invaders since the end of the New Kingdom around 1000 BCE.
Basically, with few exceptions Egypt was not ruled by a indigenous ruler for about 3000 years until Nassar.
Frankly I can understand that: Homer really did smash out an absolute banger with Iliad. I might ask for a copy in my grave too, when the time comes.
The whole point of the article appears to be that when civilizations overlap, the "good old days" becomes a two way street (to gargle metaphors). I do find that interpretation very interesting and it fits in with my world view that history ("historia" - Latin for "story") is generally rather more complicated than many would like it to be to fit their current (or current as was) world view.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/robert-cioffi/pharao...
For instance, the Library of Alexandria had up to 500,000 scrolls (which of course were all handwritten). And it was partly stocked by confiscating all the books from any ship that happened to dock in the nearby port.
https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/aegyp/articl...
Also:
I think the premise for the books is that the story is found on ancient papyrus.
The burn down of Alexandria library was a pity
Why did the person have that fragment? Was it like a comic book or something?
Your job is to wrap mummies, so you use and reuse whatever is available, scraps of completely worn out clothing, or in this case some scraps of paper that happen to have writing on them. Which you cannot read because literacy rates are fairly low, especially amongst the poor working class.
Also if it was fraud to capitalize on the movie, wouldn't they use the odyssey instead of the iliad?
Luxor and Las Vegas = same thing.
Not trolling, but it's worth keeping this notion in mind. It's great for tourism and building mystique. At least when there is fakery, it's makes the real thing all the more valuable.
Fakery sells movie tickets - it can sell plane tickets too.
People still love Milli Vanilli - so many don't even care because it's just entertainment.
How much of history is real, how much is entertainment (and diversion) by vested interests and the "winners" ?
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."
I dont care about the casting.
But the costumes look like ass (One of the extras was saying he had fit into the same armor for a low budget sword and sandal film), they are using a viking longboat as a greek ship (have already seen half a dozen experts spitting chips over the difference in boat design). I just cant bring myself to care about the film.
"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.
OK, so you didn't watch Kung Fury?
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?
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.
WW2 Zombie movie with Nazis in Viking armors and random tanks sounds so much more _fun_ than a "historically acurate Nazi Zombie" movie!
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.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/the-battle-of-...
In large part this was because paper was incredibly expensive back then, so it got used for one purpose, used again for another, and that continued until you were out of room ... at which point it may get used yet again (for say mummy wrapping).
Another classic example: 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. But again, because paper was so expensive, each paper often had lots of other things on it.
Because these towers were sometimes preserved better than libraries were, historians have found huge treasure troves of saved papers in them. Like the mummy wrappings, they only still exist due to a special quirk of ancient peoples ... but because of the price of paper they have lots of other non-mummy-wrapping/non-God's name stuff.
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.
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.
What really decided what texts survived and what didn't was monastic traditions in in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages [1]. At this time, a monk might spend their entire life transcribing a particularly long manuscript. The materials were also expensive. So monasteries were selective in what got retain and unsurprisingly it skewed heavily to texts of religious significance and then to texts of significance to, say, Roman and Greek tradition and history given that monasteries were European.
[1]: https://spokenpast.com/articles/medieval-monks-erased-preser...
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.
That's the stuff that tells us how societies and cultures really worked.
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/the-great-library-of-a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Catherine%27s_Monastery#...
How did all that stuff get up there? It was holy angels. #itsalwaysangels
I imagine that the Library of Alexandria was plural and diverse with respect to the traditions and inquiry that was represented there.
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.
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?
https://notebookofghosts.com/2016/11/21/a-list-of-weird-thin...
"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".
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.
(See "Saint James Infirmary Blues").
"The mummy in the fine article" is very aligned with the usual "preposition before article", while "the the fine article mummy" is apomediary¹ with its "article before article" structure.
¹ Distant from mean/median practices.
Everything is not for everybody.
The more generous a person is regarding what they accept, the more things are for them.
That said, "TFA" is ok, but "the TFA" seems even more extravagant than "PDF format"
Either “best attempt at historical accuracy” (although that would have been difficult given the sparse record), or “true to Homer’s anachronistic story” would have been reasonable ways to go. Sounds like they picked neither, though…
Thats fine but my ultimate preference would be fully period.
Theres an old painting of jesus getting stabbed by Longinus kicking around, and Longinus and the other romans are wearing modern (at the time of painting) Italian plate harness with sallet helms.
The reason we dont depict romans like this painting, or wearing modern army fatigues and carrying rifles, is that we know better.
>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?
The gist here is that most of the costumes are rentals with a few exceptions. The extra himself is barely on screen, but he is one of apparently a large number of people in the same outfit. YMMV.
The costumes they have created for the film are no better in accuracy, the batmanesque helmet for Agamemnon has been thoroughly ridiculed online and I wont bother going over it again here.
>And the longboat, does it appear on screen in its original form, or with additions to make it look more period accurate?
They took the dragon head prow down at least. Not much more than that has been done.
Also A Bridge too Far had this issue too.
The more who believed that, the less power their religion had at holding the empire together until it transcended into becoming a vassal and later out of existing. Religion was the foundation of the empire, but judging from the many artifacts we have, at least some did take it very seriously.
Also, Juvenal was a poet. He most likely knew other poets, or aspiring poets, or at least people who liked writing. Your average, generally functionally illiterate, individual at the time is not trying their hand at writing books.
I wonder, however, why such Christians (for example) think a prayer for the soul of the deceased would alter God's plan in any way. "Gee," he says to Michael, who happens to be flying nearby, "John Doe was a dirtbag sinner, but that was a really nice funeral mass... Screw what I said in Scripture; let him in!"
Most disturbing is that apparently people kept using them for paint up until the last supplier ran out of mummies sometime around 1960. Yes. 1960.
As Mayor shows, the Greeks and Romans were well aware that a different breed
of creatures once inhabited their lands. They frequently encountered the
fossilized bones of these primeval beings, and they developed sophisticated
concepts to explain the fossil evidence, concepts that were expressed in
mythological stories. . . .
Like their modern counterparts, the ancient fossil hunters collected and
measured impressive petrified remains and displayed them in temples and
museums; they attempted to reconstruct the appearance of these prehistoric
creatures and to explain their extinction. . . .
It's a funny story because the modern archeologists who dug it up were very confused by finding objects from different regions and separated by hundreds or thousands of years, all in the same layer.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM#List_of_similar_initialis...
Doesn’t really work as OP used it, though, as it gets confusing. They wrote “the TFA mummy” every time, so it becomes “the the fucking article mummy”. Like saying you’re a fan of the The Beatles.
I had it both ways when it was first posted, about twenty minutes later after reading the “what is TFA?” comment I edited it to be consistent.
Only first line was the only “TFA” without the article…or with only one article? or is that two articles?
Anyway, the three article phrase “the TFA mummy” is equivalent to the three article phrase “the mummy in TFA” which is what I started to write.
And while “the TFA mummy” does not expand as cleanly as even I would wish, it has a better rhythm than “TFA mummy.” Or to put it another way, my poetic license removes “the TFA mummy” from grammar police jurisdiction.
Personally, I would’ve found that clearer. I know what TFA means but still found “the TFA mummy” awkward to read and parse every time. But maybe “TFA” itself was the biggest problem there. Since you were editing anyway, “the article’s mummy” was an option too. Sometimes we all forget how acronyms aren’t universal and can impede rather than assist communication.
> my poetic license removes “the TFA mummy” from grammar police jurisdiction.
It was a lighthearted comment on how I personally found the phrasing awkward to read, I haven’t insulted your mother. We’re writing random inconsequential comments on an internet forum about a subject which has no practical effect on any of our lives, not redefining dramaturgy. There’s no poetry to your comment and no one is “policing” your words. The comment wasn’t even directed at you. You can relax.
I'm not doubting the library existed and it was destroyed possibly burned more than once but the common trope that Christians did it does not seem to be backed up by history.
Yes, you can quickly photograph an entire book with a phone camera. No, you do not need archivists to do it. No, you do not need a scanner. No, you do not need special lighting.
Don't believe me? Pick a book of yours, open it, and take a photo with your phone.
I also more often enjoy films which sit between "100% realistic/accurate" and "anything goes" than either extreme itself. 100% realistic/accurate and it tends to already be known unless it's relatively bland. 100% anything goes and it can still be good but there is a high risk it ends up feeling like every other "anything goes" movie of the same topic. In between you can often get the best of both worlds - something new, but still unique.
I think that Nolan sells himself (The online worship can hardly all be organic) as an authentic, technical director interested in accurate physical props.
When mostly what he does is potter about and destroy sound design.
I agree no one is going to be 100% accurate and accuracy isnt always desirable. But an attempt? When thats the guys reputation? Doesnt feel like too much to ask for.
I'm not a huge Nolan-discourse-insider, but that seems like a pretty bizarre reputation to have for someone who's famous for directing three Batman movies, Inception, Interstellar and Tenet?
Is this reputation just because of Oppenheimer?
I haven't seen Dunkirk (and I'm not a WWII buff so couldn't tell if they used right planes/boats/guns/uniforms/whatever even if I tried), but even a short blurb on Wikipedia talks about a "balance historical accuracy with aesthetics that would favour the film stock".
After the film, I asked if he'd turned down the popcorn for professional reasons. He said, "No, I just didn't feel like popcorn."
That is how I took it and I was just having fun with words. In this case, setting up “poetic license.”
Fun is why I write comments. Fun is why what-you-would-have-found-clearer was not my priority. I did not write my comment with you in mind. I wrote it for the kind of people who might like what I wrote.
There’s no poetry to your comment
Everything is not for everyone.
It doesn't necessarily mean that the story was stable, it's just the version that got to us.
There are serious attempts made to write down the vedas. The thing is, historically, very few people learned all 4 vedas by heart; Instead different families recited very small part and passed the recitation as heirloom.
If you meet all those families and compile their recitation, it exactly matches to what we have from different earlier efforts of canonisation.
1. Become an expert in said topic, reading the broad literature, becoming familiar with points and counterpoints, figuring out how research actually works in the field by contributing some papers of your own, and forming your own personal informed opinion on the preponderance of the evidence.
2. Look at the experts' consensus on said topic
Of course, you have other options. A popular one is to adopt the view of one expert in the field that you happen to like, who may or may not accept the consensus view - but this is far more arbitrary than 1 or 2.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus
"Scientific consensus is the collective judgment, position, and opinion of the vast majority of active, qualified experts on a conclusion in a specific scientific discipline.[1] Scientific consensus results from the self-correcting scientific process of peer review, replication of the event through the scientific method, scholarly debate, meta-analysis, and publication of high-quality review articles, monographs, or guidelines in reputable books and journals to establish facts and durable knowledge about the topic."
The whole point of that publication is to make the "durable knowledge" accessible.
Not really; generally consensus ideas will be mentioned in passing while discussing something else. You can get a strong sense of the consensus that way.
For example, I bought several textbooks on early Mesopotamian history, which taught me that Marxism enjoys a strong consensus in that field. And it's not even relevant to the field!
So I purpose we strengthen another aspect of American "democracy" that Canadians find amusing, the concept of "hiring people for popularity not competency". Americans, especially at the local level, vote for judges, police chiefs, even dog-catchers, so why not a local scientist! Rather than 1 or 2, we can conjoin this concept with your third option, yet with the officiousness that only a vote can provide!
Each municipality can have a local head scientist, which will proclaim what scientific fact is correct. People can vote on such candidates, and their platform of scientifically correct "things" during election time.
It will all work out very well for them I'm sure, and hopefully, with science thus democratized, perhaps they will be less of a threat over time.
(Sorry, I don't know why your comment made this pop into my head)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus
https://skepticalscience.com/explainer-scientific-consensus....
https://tomhopper.me/2011/11/02/scientific-consensus/
And even if you reject consensus as being essential to science, calling the consensus view "the non scientific view" is obviously mistaken, a basic error in logic.
This is all well understood by working scientists so I'm not going to debate it or comment on it further.
The first batman movie was a paint by numbers reimplementation of The Shadow (1997). You can find comparisons online, nearly shot by shot and most of the same plot beats. The second and third went sort of back towards a very mechanical batman representation that reminded me of the planned low budget Iron Man movie where he wouldn't have had the ability to fly. Just stomping around punching badguys like a Power Rangers extra. The new Bat Mobile seems to inspire some of this reputation
>Inception
Inceptions pretty flat for a film about dreams.
>Interstellar
Neuro-Diverse level of detail until the bits with space magic at the end.
>Tenet
I couldnt sit through 10 minutes of it. Its like the antifilm. It didnt want me to observe it otherwise it wouldnt have emitted such a piercing screeching noise.
>Dunkirk
He has an old period watch, and he recorded the ticking. He overlays the ticking constantly. Also he tells the story out of sequence for some reason. But theres lots of practical effects if you include the stupid watch.
>Oppenheimer
Between tenet hating me on a physical level, and the perfectly servicable fat man and little boy film from the 70s I just havent seen it to comment.
They could have used some arbitrary CGI…but no, they wanted it accurate according to science.
Not entirely without overlap, but pretty distinct.
>I think that Nolan sells himself (The online worship can hardly all be organic) as an authentic, technical director interested in accurate physical props.
I just wanted to give an example of such accurate physics props, that this is not only due to Oppenheimer.
This was not about the historic accuracy.
Sadly its a lot of "Filmbros first serious scifi movie" and thats something you cant disentangle, its love its not rational.