Egypt uncovers 'huge cache' of ancient sealed coffins | Hacker News Reader

Egypt uncovers 'huge cache' of ancient sealed coffins

cnn.com

93 pointsunpredict25 comments

It seems they just crack open a crypt every few years to perpetuate the tourism. I know that's not the case but it feels like it with every new discovery making its rounds in articles as the important to date.

Maybe they just delay announcing discoveries until a tourism boost is needed/practical?

My first thought was that it's amazing we're still routinely pulling coffins out of the ground in Egypt.

My second thought was that 10,000 years from now some follow-on replacement for humanity will be staggered at the 30 billion dead bodies we put into the ground. They'll frequently be hitting grave sites when they go to dig into the ground.

From this point of view Earth could become a very popular place for galactic tourism, they could sell a lot of souvenirs.

A century ago there were so many mummies in Egypt, they sold then literally as firewood.

Most bodies buried in most places won't be so well preserved though. In Europe the average grave will be dug up and replaced 20-30 years after burial to make space for the next one.

> Europe the average grave will be dug up and replaced 20-30 years after burial to make space for the next one.

How do you mean?

I come from a part of Europe that takes death seriously and I walk past 250 year old graveyards every day. Saw a fresh grave in one recently

I can go visit the graves of the last 5 generations of my family

It's certainly true for Germany. At least any "normal" graveyard. I haven't really interacted with the "death system" yet (knock on wood) but yeah, graves have a TTL :P

edit: but I wouldn't phrase that as "not taking death seriously"

In the US, you have to pay for that privilege. Your family will need land they own, someone to pay taxes on them, etc. At graveyards, most are 'leases.'

5 gens, that's awesome. Sorry for off-topic, but did you research your family history to find them or was it already known to your immediate family?

Everyone just knows where they were all buried. The church owns almost all these graveyards so they stay around a long time.

Competition is fierce to get into some of the ancestral graves.

In Vietnam, they are literally in peoples front (and back) yards.

I wonder if the Copts see this as desecration of their ancestors' graves?

This is awesome news. It means the price for mummy brown oil paint should finally go down.

The painting on them is quite beautiful.

The nation of Egypt did something....

I don't like the way some people assert that nations does things. Living beings takes action, other things just are.

I think it is misleading and unhealthy to attribute human action to inanimate things.

I guess some people might think that this statement is to philosophical. Like people don't mean the things they say in a literal sense. I think that if someone should mean the things they write in a literal sense it is journalists.

You're going to be fighting an uphill battle here; this is a completely normal, natural manner of using language called ["synecdoche"][0]. I would wager that you use it yourself from time to time without even noticing (though I could be wrong).

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche

Thanks, interesting that it had a name :)

Yeah I know I do, but when I notice I do try to use different langauge.

Normal does not mean good, it just means normal.

What problems do you see with using synecdoches? I'm usually first to criticize problems in our languages and their use, but I have not considered synecdoches problematic.

When you use language that is imprecise (or inaccurate) and you don't actively think about it you will start to believe those inaccuracies maybe not consciously but on some subconscious level. Having those types of ridiculous ideas in your subconscious is not good for your mental health.

An example that I can take from my life would be talking about the Iraq war. Where a person actually thinks that America is against Iraq.

Ridiculous shit like that. Some people actively think about companies and countries as human beings with emotions I would rather not contribute to that sort of simple minded thing.

In this case, I don't think anyone is subconsciously imagining the literal country of Egypt cracking open an ancient tomb, but rather "the people over in Egypt who do that sort of thing". There's artistic expression in figurative speech and I think it enhances average intelligence of the population by existing. A common trope in distopian fiction is banning of figurative speech as a form of fascist mind control.

> I don't think anyone is subconsciously imagining

I think it's trivial to argue that there's a lot of occasions where someone mislaid frustration with, for example, a whole nation (or religion or ethnicity, etc. etc.), because of an act that was perpetrated by a subset of that group. So the idea that synecdoches are problematic can't be discarded so easily.

I liked your point about figurative speech in dystopian fiction. China's banned Winnie the Pooh recently (synecdoche!), because there was a meme going around comparing Winnie the Pooh with Xi Jinping; so you don't even need to turn to dystopian fiction for dystopian examples of this. However, these anecdotes, in a way, also support the point that language precision and figurative language are potent vehicles for discourse, similarly to how humor can be used to sneak in "offensive" speech (as much as I dislike the term), shrugging off criticism with "it's just a joke".

I see your point, and I sympathize with the quest for precision. Saying one thing, when you mean another is a bit perverse as a cultural phenomenon.

However, there's something wrong with an unrelenting search for precision as well (it seems to me), but I can't put my finger on it. I remember this writer talking about two approaches to writing: one where you suspend belief, and work with truths, and one where you suspend disbelief, and see where the "story" takes you. In some ways, the unwillingness to suspend disbelief feels a bit like the unwillingness to face the dark side of your own fantasy. I mean the place where the lies, inaccuracies and fear mongering (the things we try to weed out when we advocate precise language) take you.

I haven't made up my mind about this, but it's an interesting topic.

It's a bit like pointer semantics and pass-by-reference semantics. There's a good reason we don't pass everything by value. And there's cause for concern about invalid dereferencing. Truth is, our mental models are full of unknowns.

The use of the English language, particularly in news articles, tends toward abstracting responsibility for things away from individuals, or anything for that matter. For some writers it is just the style, for others it may be more deliberate, for a variety of reasons.

Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities seems to have found them, so it IS like Egypt did it. The Ministry of Antiquities is run by the government of Egypt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Antiquities_(Egypt...

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