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Comment by mrspeaker | Hacker News Reader

More so than the art and tools/homeware (which are very modern - often better than utensils I own now!), the Pompeii graffiti really changed how I think about the past.

When you're growing up, it seems like the older generation is so different, and the generation before that is unrecognizable. I assumed that modern day life would be absolutely foreign to someone from 2000 years ago.

Then you read the graffiti and realize, nothing has changed! https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-p...

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As an engineer touring Roman ruins and the museums, what was striking to me was how modern the Romans were.

For example, we toured Pompeii in early December and it was raining lightly. We got to see the rain systems in action--2000+ year old road grading and rain capturing systems (compluvium/impluvium/subfloor cistern) working as designed.

The Romans had water fountains on every block fed by pressure from the aqueduct, and they were all marked with different figures so that you effectively had a street address even if you were illiterate.

It was also quite stunning to me that the Romans worked glass, and it was common. That's just amazing to me given the temperatures and skill involved.

And, as people noticed, the art of the time was quite good. These food stalls are decorated with quite workable figures as they had to be--common people weren't literate. And the art in the better houses was actively good. The artists had working knowledge of their medium, tools and techniques--no crappy flat faces without depth and perspective here.

We are clever monkeys in any time.

You might want to read the book The Ancient Engineers

In this line, I recommend A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome by Alberto Angela. The book is exactly that: a description of a day, from sunrise to sundown, in 115 CE Rome.

Thanks. I looked for it at the library online and couldn’t find it. I got ‘24 hours in Ancient Rome ’ (looks like it’s part of a series) instead. The author is Philip Matyszak. Will review once i am done with it. Will keep an eye out for your title.

Go even further back and read Plato, Socrates and Aristotle’s work from nearby regions, much of it never stops being relevant.

Go even further back on the other side of that sea and our earliest cunieform tablets - earliest records of structured language - is about someone trying to amicably resolve a contractual dispute on a simple failure to deliver

I think before then we just lack records and have just put way too much weight on children doodling in caves

There is nothing linear about human advances and customs

> Go even further back on the other side of that sea and our earliest cunieform tablets - earliest records of structured language - is about someone trying to amicably resolve a contractual dispute on a simple failure to deliver

A quality assurance dispute, no less! The customer rejected the initial delivery of copper ingots because they weren't up to his standards and the vendor kept the money. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir

I often wonder how future generations are going to view the past. For us we can only really see footage and pictures a little over a century in the past (and exponentially more as we near the present) but 2000 years from now, should humanity make it that far, people will be able to watch some of your tiktok videos. They'll even probably be able to read this very comment (modulo some translation software probably).

Can you imagine if we could watch millions and millions of hours of romans doing mundane things? Of vikings giving cooking tips? Of ancient mesopothamians freestyling on some ancient instruments? Our vision of the past would be radically different I think. We're at the beginning of an entirely new era of human history, where future humans will be able to analyse the most mundane aspects of our existences documented thoroughly online.

I wonder how it's going to influence languages and cultures. Can you imagine following a video of a recipe recorded 700 years ago for instance? That'd be wild, yet it's probably going to become commonplace in the future.

Meanwhile I feel weird watching century old photos and videos because I can't help thinking "everybody I see here is now dead".

Now I can’t stop feeling bad for the poor soul in 4020, trying to reconstruct “World’s Best Banana Bread” from Allrecipes through the inter generational strata of autoplaying ads and scroll jacking pop ups, only to find that the recipe’s reviews were all bot generated, and that the recipe’s 10-paragraph lead-in inspirational story apparently is the ingredients list, since none can be found.

They’ll also probably run into trouble getting the correct bananas. Someone following a century old banana-centric recipe today would struggle with that.

I think people will become even more willfully blind because 'people in the past were gross'. You can see that on a lot of forums where anything from before 2000 is viewed with suspicion because it isn't lgbtqia+ friendly.

Funnily enough that's how a lot of ancient culture was lost in the middle ages because heresy and paganism.

Maybe. There's actually a theory running around that we're living in a digital dark age.

Here's how the theory goes. Dark ages (a now antiquated term) aren't defined by a lack of records being created, it's defined by the lack of records making it to the modern era. That can happen one of two ways; either records aren't being created due to the fragmentation of existing states, or records are created but they either degrade or are not readable in the future.

While we are creating records at an unbelievable pace, there's an open question how long they'll be readable. Most of our data is stored on sensitive equipment that requires fairly sophisticated maintenance. So long as our society continues mostly uninterrupted, we can keep adding new data and have it for the future. And while there is some risk of future file formats being hard to read, basic images and what not should be readable forever. But it doesn't take a very long interruption to our social structure for these systems to begin to fail, and left alone for centuries most of the data storage mechanisms we use would lose all their data. Even DVDs break down in a few decades, if we went through a serious civil war or something on-par with the breakup of the roman empire, it's possible that most of the records that would survive into the next millenia might be paper records.

I think most of today's data will be lost way before then, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age

In fact, this already happens all the time when websites go out of business or purge data either by policy or even by accident. On top of my head: Megaupload, Geocties, Myspace, Tumblr and Fotolog have lost massive amounts of data for different reasons.

Also, I don't think most people (non-historians) will care that much about all the stuff that does survive from our time. For example, apparently we do have recipes from ancient Rome: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/233472.html

The 20th century has been absolutely exceptional in the amount of technologically and politically driven social change and discontinuity; a lot of ""olds"" got swept away, sometimes by uncoolness, sometime at gunpoint. But I think in some ways the bigger disconnect for us in the Anglosphere was Victorian/Puritan "bowdlerisation" taking sex and bodily humor out of "public discourse" until the 1960s.

About things foreign 2000 years ago (the Roman empire seems to be more relatable) : Greek considered the past in view in front of them and the future coming from behind (we usually view it the other way). Also colors were perceived differently (this one is hearsay for me): like violett or so referred to shiny.

> Also colors were perceived differently (this one is hearsay for me): like violett or so referred to shiny

It's from Homer's Illiad and Odyssey where he refers to sea the color of wine. However: 1) it's possible he's referring to the darkness, not color, or some other aspect like turbulence; 2) he was also supposedly blind, so not the best judge of colors and 3) it's possible that he didn't really exist at all.

There is even speculation that he referred to some distilled spirit in which case the color was indeed blue.

Distillation to make alcoholic beverages wasn’t known to Bronze Age/early Iron Age Greece. It didn’t take off until the early centuries AD.

We do not know if the distillation was not known. We just do not have evidence that it existed. Technology necessary to produce distilling equipment was available.

It is extremely unlikely that distillation of alcoholic beverages was known to the Ancient Greeks. Once distillation took off at the point when it is documented in the early first millennium, it swiftly spread through Eurasia. It beggars belief to think that the Homeric-era Greeks had these beverages and kept them to themselves.

How different languages identify colours and how those definitions have changed over time is really interesting. Apparently using different words for blue and green is one of the last things a language develops.[0] Usually "red" is one of the earliest terms developed and "blue" one of the last. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms

Yes, I am also fascinated by color perception. Number of rainbow colors varies by culture. The sun is perceived as red by Japanese, and yellow by western culture (true color is white)

I have seen this dark red seas during a storm at sunset, they are scary and powerful in movement and in color. I don't think Homer perceived color differently than we do now.

Could be white wine

If you want to witness some eerie moments, check out some re-colored early photos or video recordings.

In black and white everything looks vintage, antiquated, slightly alien.

When they're colored you can really see the people and make an emotional attachment.

I know that the coloring process uses some artistic license, but in many cases the reproductions are based off of authentic materials, paints, etc so they're quite realistic.

> When you're growing up, it seems like the older generation is so different, and the generation before that is unrecognizable. I assumed that modern day life would be absolutely foreign to someone from 2000 years ago.

Funnily enough, one way that life 2000 years ago was familiar was that it included a lot of inter-generational moaning; we have written records of Romans complaining about the youth of today.

I agree! I love reading the graffiti.

I highly recommend seeing Herculaneum if you're ever in the area. It's very impressive to see all this up close. We really haven't changed that much.

This is great, thanks for sharing!

Similarly, you might appreciate The Satyricon by Petronius. Civility of yore my ass! (Staying in theme)

The stiff translations are hilarious.

There's a really compelling theory that most of what's buried at Pompeii (and presented as being from the ancient eruption) is actually from the 1700s eruption.

.. what, the stuff with the Latin inscriptions and Roman-era pottery?

"compelling"?!

Sources required for such a claim

Sure, here's a primary source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Three_Graces,_fr...

It's a fresco of the Three Graces. From Pompeii. From the first century.

Just whip me up a timeline here of where that fits in at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Graces

If you can find a Three Graces made in a one-digit, two-digit or three-digit year, it would do a lot to change my mind.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.2307/1512847

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