Seikilos epitaph | Hacker News Reader

Seikilos epitaph

en.wikipedia.org

160 pointsbenbreen23 comments

> ... in about 1893, as it "was broken at the bottom, its base was sawn off straight so that it could stand and serve as a pedestal for Mrs Purser's flowerpots"; this caused the loss of one line of text, i.e., while the stele would now stand upright, the grinding had obliterated the last line of the inscription.

Sigh.

Sadly, history is full of stories like that:

> Mummy brown was a rich brown bituminous pigment, intermediate in tint between burnt umber and raw umber, which was one of the favorite colors of the Pre-Raphaelites. [It] was originally made in the 16th and 17th centuries from white pitch, myrrh, and the ground-up remains of Egyptian mummies, both human and feline.

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

The Egyptian's mummified everyone not just pharaohs and other people of note.

Mummies have been used for resources by the local populous heck much more important things were used for local resources many monuments were turned into essentially quarries by the locals.

Exporting "mummies" and their byproduct was going in Egypt since for ever during roman times mummified remains were used in medicine, alchemy, pigments and much more. Mummia which is the "medical" use of mummified remains is documented in Materia Medica which is essentially the oldest surviving medical encyclopedia and the documented use of it dates back to at least Imhotep which was an Egyptian physician (before he was made a god).

While some of these artifacts may have had historical value in hindsight you are essentially arguing against recycling.

De materia medica refers to "mūmiyā", a kind of asphalt, and not to human mummies. The use of human remains began during the Middle Ages.

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

When the antikythera mechanism was recovered, it was embedded in a lump of mud. Nobody realized what it was so they left it in storage in a museum until a long time after, when the lump, now dried up, broke into pieces revealing its secrets.

That's not destructive, though.

Well..it broke into pieces.

See also some of the standing stones from Avebury stone circle being taken and used for building material.

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

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/avebury

Yes, it's been the norm to reuse stone from older construction. It's often more or less in the right place, and already reasonably shaped. Also, during cultural changes, destruction of old stuff was itself a key goal. And not just stone. Parchment from old manuscripts got scraped for reuse, or became book bindings.

It's just ironic that this stone turned out to be so valuable.

How serendipitous that the most everlasting song would be about the evanescence of existence!

Civ V turned me on to this song, and it's been intermittently stuck in my head ever since. I hum it to my infant daughter often (along with Ocarina tunes from Zelda..)

The lyrics are bittersweet, but I find them fitting for a parent to sing to their child.

``` While you live, shine

have no grief at all

life exists only for a short while

and Time demands his due ```

Ah so that's the "Peace" song that plays when Alexander comes grovelling. Very cool.

One of those unexpected things that has been preserved from the ancient times. I actually learned to sing this, I think it's quite sad.

The 1951 film Quo Vadis features Peter Ustinov as emperor Nero singing a version of this in English with changed lyrics, Oh lambent flame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBIswXv28GI

How it may have sounded:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xERitvFYpAk

I think the pronunciation is quite good. Not your classical Attic Greek pronunciation but it shouldn't be since the stele is from a later time and from Anatolia where people would have spoken a Ionic dialect originally.

Hi, are you saying this with a some linguistic expertise ?

As a Greek without much background in linguistics etc I noticed a some pretty strong mistakes (to my ear) and since the original is pretty understandable to me I assume (potentially mistakenly) that the pronunciation can't have changed THAT much.

She pronounces ai as 'aee' but ai definitely an 'ɛ' sound (as in head: /hɛd/) in modern greek

She then pronounces 'meden' as mɛdɛn when it should be midɛn (η is an ee sound, at least in modern geek)

and she puts a strongish h in holos (ὅλως) which again seems like a person without any greek knowledge reading the latin alphabet version of the word and assuming how it's pronounced...

she says zɛn instead of zeen/zin

So again, as a modern greek with no particular knowledge of how ancient pronunciation worked, this was pretty bad to my ears..

If you know more than me please correct me, it would be great to know

It's a pretty good rendition. Greek pronunciation has shifted a lot from ancient to modern. See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iotacism. Among other things, the accentuation has gone from pitch, which comes out nicely in this version (though we don't know precisely what it sounded like), to stress. So while it may look quite familiar to you reading it, it would have sounded very different. There was a Modern Greek speaker in the intro to Ancient Greek class I took in college, and I remember him remarking how disorienting it was.

According to Wikipedia, "first century AD is the most probable guess" for the stele's age. By that time, pronunciation was probably nearer to the modern language than to Ancient Greek, although, of course, not exactly the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology#Popular_...

Even Modern Greek, despite the homogenization effect of modern communications, still has local dialects which sound very different from one another and aren't easily intelligible to speakers of the standard dialect.

The shift in pronunciation wasn’t a simple and straightforward process. If you’re trying to argue that the reconstruction is faulty on the basis that the shift was >50% complete, I’d respond that nothing like that level of precision is possible. Moreover, I’d expect funerary songs to be a bit conservative in their pronunciation.

I have studied Latin at the university level and also some Greek, especially from the historical linguistic point of view.

I truly understand that the ancient pronunciation sounds bad to your ears! All those "mistakes" that you mentioned are exactly the ways that Greek pronunciation has changed over the thousands (!) of years. If you look closely, it is as if the writing system is made for the old language, which is the case. The modern pronunciation drifts further apart from what is written. Historical linguistics is quite interesting once you get into it.

I recommend the following books, although both quite technical in the linguistic sense:

Allen, Vox Graeca: The Pronunciation of Classical Greek 3rd Edition (Cambridge University Press 1987)

Horrocks, Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers, 2nd Edition (Wiley-Blackwell 2010)

It makes sense why it would sound terrible to your ears. The way 'ancient' Greek is taught in U.S. universities- referred to as Attic Greek- is based on the pronunciation ascribed to Erasmus- the Dutch Scholar. Of course, it is just a theory.

It sounds very close to the Attic Greek (4th Century BC Athenian) pronunciation I learned at school. The version recorded on Wikipedia sounds more like Modern Greek.

There's a nice sound clip in the posted wikipedia page, below the musical score. Less than fifty seconds.

(Only noticed it the second time I looked ...)

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