Lost Languages Discovered in One of the Oldest Continuously Run Libraries
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
It would be interesting to compare modern Udi with the discovered Caucasian Albanian text to see if there is any resemblance.
we lost of a bunch of priceless history then, too.
i'm not trying to make statements about the equivalences or non-equivalences of various war participants over there, but, there's so much ancient history being destroyed by military operations nowadays.
who the hell knows what's being lost in Yemen right now?
and there are also ethical questions. i mean, suppose we could pay Blackwater to lead a team of archaeologists to make digital copies of some stuff -- but they had to kill a few dozen people in the process? would anyone still feel good about donating to that campaign? would it have been worthwhile?
Oh, Romans
It's profoundly depressing to consider what was lost, though.
Mildly related, in the same times, a minority protection office was established and funded to some extent [1] which also incurred in some well known political upheaval.
There's nothing new under the sun.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protector_of_the_Indians
The results were very good, the pages were clear and sharp, even though I hadn't been able to flatten them out.
We have tendency to consider that all knowledge is precious. That all information, especially from the past, should be treasured. It's sounds more anchored in a collector mindset that in any real assessment of the value of the discovery.
We can't save everything. We don't have to save everything.
As usual, we need to evaluate the cost vs the reward.
Now the hard part is to put a value on knowledge and potential, which I agree is very hard and controversial. But stating we must save things as soon as we discover it doesn't help.
Storage is cheap nowadays, if we can afford to archive petabytes of cat videos I'm sure we can collect endangered cultural artifacts.
Who knows what we could've learned from the destroyed works of the library of Alexandria? All those things we don't know we don't know...
I completely agree.
But we have data about many, many languages, lost and current. The chances that those newly discovered ones bring something more than "oh that's nice and interesting" on the table are quite weak.
> Who knows what we could've learned from the destroyed works of the library of Alexandria?
This is a totally different scale. As I say, we must assess the potential winning vs the cost.
Currently, the science enthusiasts are saying yes to everything, and the people with money are saying no to everything. I find it harmful both ways.
I can imagine someone saying this in the early 20th century. And then the decipherment of Hittite and discovery of Tocharian completely rewrote the history of the Near East and Central Asia. Just a few years ago, Werner and Vajda’s work on Ket finally connected a Siberian population with a Native American one. In fact, I could really go on for hours about how much Central and Northeast Asia history has been drastically revised in just the last 20–30 years from this kind of work.
Digitizing manuscripts and analyzing data collected from little-known languages is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways (especially compared to digs) to gain major historical insights.
It's obvious that lives (and memory) are worth more to anyone with compassion who can recognize other people's humanity. That is only a debate and only interesting if you engage in it to remind someone with a colonialist mindset of their own shared humanity.
We need to stop shaming people for trying to do good because there is something else we believe is a better cause.
Well, except people who think they are "helping" by forming "prayer circles" to help with disasters or take crates and crates of bibles to starving people. Shame the hell out of them.
Those "conflict zones" are also generally the sovereign territory of the people who live there, who are generally one half of the "fools" you mentioned (their neighbors being generally the other half).
The "ego" they have is generally a desire to keep their sovereign territory--their homelands, which are frequently the same places in which their ancestors produced the "archives" you want to "protect and secure."
Those people have a right to decide what to do about the destruction of their cultural artifacts, because they are people and have agency. They can fight, they can ask for help from their allies, they can do any number of things.
If they don't prioritize the preservation of their culture, that's unfortunate, but it's also their business. If they decide to destroy artifacts of their culture rather than let them fall into invaders' hands (sound familiar?), that's tragic, but it's still their business.
Your suspicion of value in their cultural output does not entitle you to pay armed men to swoop in and take their "priceless history," no matter how noble you think your intentions are.
When the Bamiyan buddhas were dynamited, exactly whose culture were the Taliban "preserving"?
It is entirely reasonable to believe that culture and history have an importance independent of petty, local squabbles. Crowd funding militia may well be questionable but to demean the sentiment as colonialist is pointlessly insulting.
You should not presuppose that conflicts are "petty, local squabbles." Minimizing language like that reinforces the mindset that the mighty are justified in interfering in the sovereign destiny of a people.
Anyway, my reply was thoughtful, not pointlessly insulting. If you'd like to engage on this beyond the invocation of the Taliban bogeyman, I'm happy to. But if you're just gonna presume that I'm equating the exercise of sovereign rights with wholesale destruction, I'm not interested.
Sovereignty is the historic acquisition of power through violence in all cases that spring to mind (W. European bias).
How far back do you go. Does Russia now have sovereignty over Crimean history?
Of course Russia could not allow their warm water port to fall under NATO jurisdiction
I was misusing the term nationalist in a literary device in order to deliberately mimic your misuse of the word colonialist. I wasn't so condescending as to assume you didn't know what colonialist meant so I assumed its misuse was deliberate too.
> my reply was thoughtful, not pointlessly insulting.
My mistake. It's rare to see colonialist used as a term of endearment.
> sovereign destiny / sovereign rights
I guess this is the meat of the point. See I don't believe that just because someone in temporarily in charge of a country that they should have carte blanche to do whatever they fancy. Now, in the case of the Coptic monasteries in the Sinai, there is no threat from the present government. If, say, the Sinai Insurgency escalated and the monasteries were under threat, it would be entirely appropriate, in my view, to pressure Egypt to do something about it.
I can't envisage a realistic situation where external forces would be appropriate in this case. I do believe that it is both right and proper to care about, and if necessary act for, our fragile collective cultural heritage. If that makes me a colonialist in your eyes then so be it. I've been called worse.
I'm Egyptian Christian descent (genuinely, my father was from Alexandria).
Do I get a golden ticket? If I want to set fire to the library are we good with this as its "my people"? What about if I asked an external power in to preserve it?
But wait, I'm not Coptic. Are they not my people now? Am I a colonialist for wanting to preserve the library because of the church my old man attended?
What could possibly go wrong with cultural ghettoisation?
This is complicated. Are we to assume that we aren't in a culture group unless we are born from a group's member or born in a specific location. If a culture resonates with an individual that doesn't fit into the "culture group" definition, can they never see the culture as their own? It definitely seems to bring into question what the definition of culture is and when is a culture added to the collective. Isn't that what sharing does?
Aren't there arguments about writers writing books and readers interpreting the story in their own way? The story is now everybody's, right? I do feel the danger in the idea, but it also feels sort of correct.
Their own.
> It is entirely reasonable to believe that culture and history have an importance independent of petty, local squabbles.
Calling it “reasonable” elevates it to a level of objective neutrality to which it is not entitled. That view is simply it's own set of cultural values, which, while perhaps fairly widespread at the moment, are no more universal or grounded in reason than any others.
The value attached to particular outputs, such as those that might be supported by preservation of cultural artifacts, is unmistakably a cultural value.
If an object (informational work like a book, ancient artifact, etc.) is considered to be owned by the public, does a subset of the public have the right to destroy the object?
If an object has a cultural association, say of Egypt, is the public ownership of the object only those in Egyptian culture? Do Egyptian-Americans count under this ownership for example?
If the object is thousands of years old, is the ownership the heirs of the creator, if it is possible to track the descendants down? Is the ownership those who call nearby locations their home? Is the ownership all citizens of the country the object was created in, or currently resides in? Is the ownership simply the creator and nothing else? Or are ancient artifacts owned equally by all humans on earth?
These are not very straightforward questions. It is not a matter of their business and our business when it's difficult to place ownership of a cultural object.
National cultures and cultural artifacts are part of the human culture as a whole, and as such they belong to mankind.
There's hardly any good justification to destroy pieces of human culture, and misplaced nationalism definitely is not of them.
There's a certain phrase that people from my county use to express surprise and approval. It isn't widely known. When I use it around neighbors, they know what I'm conveying, and it identifies us as kindred.
I could tell you what it is, and you might like it. You might even start using it just because you like the sound of it. And it might become very popular, and soon, all kinds of people from all kinds of places might bond over its use. Hell, people might even make T-shirts.
But I choose not to. It's a shibboleth for me and the folks back home, and that use is valuable to us. You don't have the right to force me to share it.
If I wanted to explore its etymology, survey exactly how widely it's used, or argue that it's related to a similar phrase in a nearby region, I could certainly do those things and might choose to. But if I don't, human culture as a whole doesn't get a crack at it just because I passed on the opportunity.
It's a bit of a contrived example, because I'm not talking about the Bhagavad Gita here, but I hope you see what I'm getting at. The transmission of culture between peoples should be based on a mutual interest in sharing and learning, not some sense of global entitlement.
Assuming you're USAmerican, USA has "appropriated" the scientific culture of Russia by also going to space; appropriated the beer making culture of Europe; appropriated the Television/Computer culture of Britain; the number system born from Indian/Persian culture; appropriated the high-fashion culture of Paris/Milan/etc. in some of it's cities; appropriated the food culture of Mexico/Germany/Italy/wherever; appropriated the traditional medicines that gave rise to drugs like aspirin; et cetera.
Why do you want to stop positive advancements from being adopted by everyone, is it just greed? Why do you care what culture the music someone else listens to was born from.
Of course you should be allowed to not adopt other's culture if that's your choice, only use anything you've created from scratch yourself (tool use I think arose out of E. African culture, better avoid that) - otherwise you're appropriating somebody's culture in some way.
"The transmission of culture between peoples should be based on a mutual interest in sharing and learning, not some sense of global entitlement."
If something in your culture benefits me, why does my use of it have to be dependent on that also benefiting you? Indeed if its a loss for a small people group but a benefit globally then surely that's a positive thing.
Would you for example argue lack of distinctiveness as a negative thing, in which case you could be blocking all sharing by demanding "mutual interest".
Though I'm interested if you can give specifics, like tell us what culture you identify with primarily and what aspects of that culture you want to keep for only people you identify as 'in' (belonging, if you will).
Maybe expand and show what you're foregoing from other cultures, like if you're not Chinese so avoid cultivated rice, or whatever.
But I certainly don't want a bunch of carpetbaggers helping themselves to my culture in a way that would erode its meaning. So as a living member of the culture, I choose to share or not share based on what I value, why I value it, and how best I judge to nurture it. Would it be better for me, my people, and humanity if I shared this? Do I judge there is more value in not sharing while we are alive? Do I have a responsibility to preserve and transmit my culture--at least among my people?
Simple language is an example that breaks down fast, because I don't really lose anything by teaching you a phrase and its meaning. If my words live in one more mouth, there aren't fewer words for me to say. But even the meaning of words can change based on who uses them and how.
A better example might be a sacred text. I may have a "family Bible" handed down through centuries. The book itself might be a valuable cultural artifact, and the individual contributions by my ancestors might constitute a body of knowledge of interest to others. But it isn't anyone else's right to demand access to my "family Bible." There is no onus on my family to produce a digital copy, no moral obligation to permit visitors to leaf through its pages.
And you certainly may not hire men with guns to come into my home and take it just because I leave it on the coffee table instead of a safe. You may not kick in my door to preserve it just because the cat sleeps on it. But when I am dead and no kin remain to claim it? Take it, study it, put it in a museum.
But archaeological remains aren't really necessarily an artifact of the culture that lives there now. Sometimes there is a continuous cultural tradition that claims them, and sometimes not. The Mississippian mounds of the midwestern US aren't an artifact of the U.S. of A., for example—they were in danger of being looted by Americans more than anything, in the 19th century certainly.
And much as an international militia for the defense of archaeological remains is a bad idea, I think the OP was talking more about ISIS blowing up the Temple of Baalshamin in Palmyra or the Taliban blowing up Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. The locals are likely descended from the people who built those structures, but we do all lose something. These religious structures were not shibboleths, but public structures into which people poured their creativity, their personality, their values, their traditions to communicate them within and beyond their community. I am not a Christian, but I am moved by the Sistine Chapel—this was Michaelangelo's goal. I am moved by the Hagia Sophia, by the Ishtar Gate.
If the Romans decide to blow up the Vatican, or the Canadians invade Missouri and carry off the artifacts of Cahokia, it's a loss to more than the residents of Rome and St. Louis. Even if (as with Palmyra &c.) it's locals who object most strongly and are the most injured.
Sympathy is the appropriate response. Being ready to help people defend their culture in a conflict is fine, being ready to help people preserve culture before a conflict is fine, being available to help people recover what they can after a conflict is fine, but undermining people to preserve your expectation of value (like by hiring mercenaries to secure archives in a conflict zone) is not. That is an important difference.
The destruction of cultural artifacts previously unknown by the local mainstream is thus deplored, not because it had any real intrinsic value, but because it is no longer available for someone to show off and say, "look at this cool old thing that I found, that none of you culturally ignorant heathens have ever seen before."
As N-thousand-years-old artifacts are a scarce resource, whenever some hairy barbarian burns a book that no one cares about, he deprives some hipster of a critical opportunity to gain prestige in front of their friends for about 20 minutes.
Now, some people may become upset that elements of what they perceive as their own culture are essentially being used as toys and amusements for someone else's culture, but it is an essential element of culture that it cannot be controlled in such a way that such uses could be prevented. Culture is broadcast. You put something out there, and it is either adopted and rebroadcast, or it fades into obscurity. Once it is part of the culture, it isn't fully yours any more.
There is no protection for culture. If the consensus changes the meaning of something you liked to something you don't, you just have to move on to liking something else. If someone manages to make rompers for grown men fashionable, you just suck it up and wait patiently for the fad to die. You don't have to wear one, unless you want to participate in that part of the culture. And you don't have to rescue one from a thrift shop as a cultural artifact after it goes away. If you did, it would just be some thing to stick in a museum, so future visitors could see it and giggle, say "hmmmm", or vow "never again".
Not all cultural artifacts are worthy of "saving". For all we know, those unique manuscripts that might be put to the torch when the invaders march in are someone else's cultural equivalent of a Hitler Pepe meme or a man-romper silkscreened with Kim Jong-Il's face at 500% actual size.
Cultural traditions are exactly those things that generation after generation of a community has seen the value of preserving.
It would be acceptable to offer to buy the ones you intend to preserve, or to donate to a museum to preserve the ones they see as important. Archaeology at gunpoint isn't good for the artifacts, isn't good for the people who had them, and isn't good for the people that take them. The best you could do in that vein would be to create a new cultural artifact featuring an adventurer-archaeologist that pilfers the important artifact you would like to preserve as the main plot MacGuffin. And to not make it about stupid crystal-skulled aliens.
Everywhere else I have seen it used there has always been an implication that the making of distinctions like this was negative.
I'm not making a value judgement here, it just struck me as unusual.
Also, as someone from a continent that still has millitias funded by other countries, I find the idea of funding a militia appalling, specially if the purpose is not to at least try and save people, but to save cultural artifacts ...
That said, I think you are oversimplifying things a bit in your comment.
This part:
>Those people have a right to decide what to do about the destruction of their cultural artifacts, because they are people and have agency.
Think of how even in geographically small countries, there is often cultural heterogeneity, and you can see that it's not easy to say if those deciding to destruct some cultural artifact actually "own" it. I think this is specially important since cultural artifacts tell a culture's history (books are the most obvious example, but we are able to learn basic things about pre-historic cultures by looking at their non textual artifacts), and the aftermath of a war typically includes the winner rewriting history, which is something that destroying the loser's artifacts makes easier.
Let me finish with a quote I identify a lot with, from Lukas Ligeti[1]: "It makes no sense to group people together according to superficial characteristics. There are no majorities in the world: we are, each and every one of us, a minority of one"
[1] "Secret Instruments, Secret Destinations", from ARCANA II
Ownership and responsibility are really complex topics. The notion that you shouldn't rent a bunch of goons to steal books from your co-worker's house just because you think he's not taking care of them properly is not complex.
Even the fundamentalists wouldn't go against the prophet himself...
First tier is a group of local farmers with rusty AK's, but the stretch goal is a team of operators from Academi. If you chip in more than $50 you get your name removed from the list of backers on the off chance that this turns into some sort of international incident when the militia joins ISIS or the Academi team massacre a nearby village.
I visited St.Catherine's before, you can get there pretty easy from Sharm el-Sheikh in the Sinai on your way to climb mount Sinai. you can go there for sunrise, it involves an early rise and a bit of a hike but it's beautiful at sunrise. St. Catherine's is also host to what is considered the burning bush. buhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_bush#Location
The articles are similar enough they must originate from the same press release, but the Atlantic's take adds more.