Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jedd | Hacker News Reader

From TFA:

"It was probably a way to affirm the ownership of the territory by a small prince or king at the time,"

Frustratingly I can't find a lovely quote I stumbled across recently that was (poorly paraphrased) something like 'Small men pointing at things on a map is the leading cause of war'.

It might have been from one of Simon Winder's superb European trilogy.

Certainly there does seem to be a trend amongst insecure monarchs and dictators eager to accurately audit their domain, and identify the neighbouring realms that desperately need to be liberated from their current owners / occupants.

View on HN

> Small men pointing at things on a map is the leading cause of war'

That may be true for people looking for conquest.

Wars can also be waged over resources when you’re running out of them (like a growing pop or your land has become infertile, etc.)

That quote trivializes things a bit. Kings couldn’t go to war just because. They’d have to get general agreement from lots of stakeholders, else they hold the bag.

My personal reaction to this statement in the article was that it seemed like an overreaching assumption. The map could have been a land separation agreement between two sheep herders, or something else similarly prosaic. Not sure why we need to ascribe great importance to items that don't present any evidence of such.

Agreed that it may be similar to the archaeological catch-all of 'this was probably used in religious ceremonies'.

OTOH for something like this to have been constructed ~3800 years ago suggests that it was probably the product of a more sophisticated kingdom than a couple of sheep herders would have had either the means or inclination to construct.

That it has survived this long - well, maybe a bias, but also may indicate that it was well cared for, and stored away carefully at some point, such that it survived the next few millennia.

But this kind of artifact must have been expensive to produce, requiring time and skill of one or more masons. I can't find the weight mentioned, but given the dimensions and the density of schist, it should be around 3000 pounds.

For all we know, there was not that much of a difference between very successful sheepherders and small princes back then - and bronze was not a common material back then. Animal skin parchment was readily available - It is a good assumption that they chose bronze because they wanted the agreement to persist for a long time, and to show it's importance.

> It is a good assumption that they chose bronze because ...

Not everything made during the Bronze Age was made out of bronze.

Case in point, as described in the article, this artefact was made of rock.

Fair point ... I read the article, but answered based on the headline and somehow skipped the "Age"...

Still, a rock slab map is a considerable investment in creating time, and remains relatively stable over time - so the basic argument still stands.

> Certainly there does seem to be a trend amongst insecure monarchs and dictators eager to accurately audit their domain

or just to know where they can and can't levy taxes. Or go hunting without impinging on a neighbor's land. Or cutting trees, digging a quarry or a mine and so on

qv "Seeing Like A State"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com