Archaeologists “flabbergasted” to find Cerne Giant’s origins are medieval | Hacker News Reader

Archaeologists “flabbergasted” to find Cerne Giant’s origins are medieval

arstechnica.com

86 pointsdiodorus47 comments

I was so pleased to hear that the cock was a later addition. I feel a tiny bit of national pride to know that my ancestors, seeing the Cerne Giant, thought "you know what that needs? A big old stiffie."

I've read that the dick had originally been sized more proportionately to the figure, but at some point it was merged with a large circular belly button, increasing its size/length.

I wonder whether that is the result the article is referring to, or whether there was an initial project to add a penis to the figure, followed by a distinct "this penis needs to be longer" revision later on.

> or whether there was an initial project to add a penis to the figure, followed by a distinct "this penis needs to be longer" revision later on.

An historic git’s pull request.

I submit that you should likewise feel pride for the "rude man" euphemism. Understatement at its absolute finest.

I have no idea about the rude man name. I've always known him as the big man. I live nearby.

EDIT: I should point out that big refers to the size of his club and is nothing to do with him being 180' tall. That knobbly club is ridiculous.

I'm quite certain amstrong draw a dick on the moon. I mean, come on.

Where does it say that?

> indicating that the giant was probably first made by late Saxons sometime between 700 and 1100 CE. However, other samples indicate a later date of around 1560—still predating the first recorded mention of the giant in the 1694 church warden's account.

I still think the later date is much more likely. That nobody in England bothered to mention the giant for nearly 1000 years seems very unlikely.

Who knows, perhaps we were hungover?

People didn't write stuff down at that time. The English forgot that the Romans used to rule the land and built a bunch of stuff...

That is a popular myth. The elite never forgot. Roman legacy was still culturally important to them, even if they lost the technological aspects of the Roman empire.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5c8z4k/did_d...

This doesn't even make sense. Even with a civilsational collapse like the fall of the Western Roman Empire or the various Germanic invasions people remember things. The Turks of Turkey knew their ancestors came from the East and conquered the lands of Christians. The Japanese knew that their high culture came from China. The Egyptians knew that there was a time when they were not Arabs. There are Irish legends about when the Celts invaded.

> The Egyptians knew that there was a time when they were not Arabs.

They still aren't Arabs...?

Feel free to tell any of the Arab speakers from Khuzestan in Iran to Morocco that. If you want to do it in the written form of "their" language it won't be what they speak with their family or friends . It will be based on the Arabic of the armies that erupted out of Arabia in the 660s. The only language descended from that with a separate written standard is Maltese.

Perhaps you're confusing "Arabic", the language group, with "Arabs", the ethnic group?

> the Arab People are an ethnic group[56][79] and a nation[80] mainly inhabiting the Arab world in Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Indian Ocean islands (including the Comoros), and Southern Europe (like Sicily, Malta, and formerly in Al-Andalus / Iberian Peninsula).[81] The Arab diaspora is established around the world in significant numbers, in the Americas, Western Europe, Indonesia, Israel, Turkey, India and Iran.[82][83][84][85][86] In modern usage the term refers to those whose native language is Arabic and identify as such, this contrasts with the narrower traditional definition which referred to the descendants of the Tribes of the Arabian Peninsula.[87] Islam started in Arabia, Arabic is the language of Islamic scripture, and most Arabs are Muslims. However, only about 20% of Muslims are Arabs.[88]

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

Arab countries are those where the majority of people speak Arabic. Iran is not an Arab county, but Iraq is. Turkey is not an Arab country, but Egypt is.

Huh, it looks like usage has shifted over time to mean this. I recall Arab as referring to a Semitic ethnic group but it appears today we use it to refer to speakers of Arabic. Well, TIL.

Iran has a significant Arab community.

> Most Iranian Arabs in Khūzestān Province speak Arabic and Persian. The Arabic spoken in the province is Khuzestani Arabic, a mixed of Gulf Arabic and Mesopotamian Arabic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Arabs#:~:text=Most%20I....

1.6 million people is certainly significant, so you're not wrong. But leaving it at that without more information is likely to mislead people.

> The CIA World Factbook (which is based on 2013 statistics) gives the following numbers for the languages spoken in Iran today: Persian, Luri, Gilaki and Mazandarani 66%; Azerbaijani and other Turkic languages 18%; Kurdish 10%; Arabic 2%; Balochi 2%; others 2% (Armenian, Georgian, Circassian, Assyrian, etc.).[20]

> Other sources, such as the Library of Congress, and the Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden)[21] give Iran's ethnic groups as following: Persians 65%, Azerbaijanis 16%, Kurds 7%, Lurs 6%, Arabs 2%, Baloch 2%, Turkmens 1%, Turkic tribal groups (e.g. Qashqai) 1%, and non-Persian, non-Turkic groups (e.g. Armenians, Georgians, Assyrians, Circassians, Basseri ) less than 1%.[22] For sources prior to and after 2000, see Languages and ethnicities in Iran.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Iran#Languages...

So does the USA, but the USA isn't an arab country either.

Many of my colleagues are Egyptian and I find it very interesting to hear the mix of identities they espouse. For some their identity as Arabic is very important to them, whereas others feel more Egyptian and dare I say predominantly Western. Some will almost always talk and write in vernacular Arabic (and it fascinates me to see the ASCII dialects they use in Slack) whereas others still venerate classical Arabic. So, while I suspect people will correct you that technically yes they are, it still seems a complex subject.

I live near the big man and feel no need to mention him at all in general, let alone his huge club. You don't bother mentioning trivialities and the historic record is pretty fragmentary as well.

Records get lost - I've lost loads of photos from the past and I'm not even one generation removed from myself! Nowadays my phone syncs to the Nextcloud instance in my attic and that gets backed up to my business' gear.

It is also whispered in corners that the state of the M25 is the result of satanic influences. Two dedicated investigative journalists were required to determine the veracity of this: Neil Gaiman and Sir Terry Pratchett. Their paper: "Good Omens" is well worth reading. They only had to deal with a few decades of shadowy history for a major motorway. Can you imagine the difficulty of dealing with an inconsequential chalk figure which was probably mostly indistinct until pissed up locals restored it for a laugh every few centuries.

It may have had a few changes made over the years.

Their work is intriguing, but their analysis of the ostensible Agnes Nutter primary source document, which was subsequently lost, makes some of their claims dubious.

Good Omens is interesting to me for being a rewrite of an earlier book also by Terry Pratchett. Perhaps an early indicator of the observation that "every [scientific] paper will be published five times" moving into the realm of literature.

What book is that? The account I'd seen is basically the same as what's quoted in the Wikipedia article, about concurrent creation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens#Development

Sourcery.

Huh. Agree to disagree on that one. They both have horsemen, and Death feels like the same Death, but beyond that I wouldn't connect the two much at all. Adam/Anathema/Crowley/Azariphale all have very different stories than the ones around Coin/Rincewind/Conina. Very different apocalypses.

Sourcery is about a power beyond the world taking itself off the world. Literally someone realising: "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" and taking themselves outside the universe for a good telling off. The sourceror turned out to be a girl but whatevs (7th son of a 7th son etc). She nearly caused a bit of a wobble in a universe already a Rizzla paper thickness away from some distressing oddness. However, the potential cause never wanted and eventually averts things going totally Pete.

Good Omens is a damn fine spin on the Christian apocalypse as described in quite some detail in John. There is the full on Angel vs Demon thing with a bloody great Hell Hound. Anyone who knows Jack Russells knows that they have a roughly 50/50 chance vs anything up to and including a nuclear weapon (which will either be shaken to death or sha ..... fzzzzt.) The Dog is almost certainly a JR.

Anyway, I digress. There are clear similarities but distinct differences between the two books.

Sourcery: One individual nearly caused armageddon but took themself away to avoid it

Good Omens: The universe's squishy contents tried to destroy the whole material plane and tripped over its own shoelaces

The historic record can leave out things that people think are super obvious. For example, if you look at a typical recipe for an omelet, they mention eggs but leave out the fact that it's chicken eggs. A 1000 years for now, people think that we meant duck or goose eggs or something else. Another example is the land of Punt. It was a fairly important trading partner with Egypt. The problem is that the historical record doesn't mention where it is so there's a debate about it's location.

And historical records for post-Roman and early medieval Britain are just very limited. Very few documents exist from this period, and those that do exist (like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: [1]) limit themselves to discussing events of great importance: the births, deaths, and major acts of royalty, battles won and lost, major weather events, and unusual celestial phenomena. The construction of a hill engraving probably wouldn't have been written down.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_Chronicle; https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/657/pg657.html

It may not have been visible for much of that time.

One wonders how researchers are confident that they haven't sampled maintenance work on the figure, rather than tapping the original material to arrive at the age estimates.

> That would explain why he doesn’t appear in the abbey records or in Tudor surveys."

Perhaps this figure was simply considered too rude to write about.

It has to be scoured, otherwise it grows over (some day we're going to figure out how to discover overgrown figures and find a lot more in Southern England).

If it was too rude to write about, it was certainly too rude to maintain.

I don’t think that is true. It was fussy religious types writing the records while it was probably the common illiterate people who thought it was funny that maintained it.

The Abbey owned the hill.

Personally, I think it's Hercules. The prediction in the 30s, "if it's Hercules he should be carrying a lion skin" followed by the discovery of the lion skin/cloak in the 70s, is pretty compelling.

Why someone carved Hercules into a field in England? Not a clue.

> ...it was probably the common illiterate people who thought it was funny that maintained it.

Or maybe the common illiterate people thought it was important for the fertility of their crops and flocks (and possibly their own).

"If your geoglyph lasts more than 500 years..."

Anyone else get annoyed when they see "fertility symbol". No one has any way of knowing why it was made. Why make up some stupid reasoning that is applied to everything that could be sexual?

Because "fertility symbol" is euphemism for "sexual".

It’s a fairly common thing in archaeology sadly. Sometimes when it’s unclear what something is, it’s chucked down as “for ritual purposes”.

The evidence only demonstrates it is at least that old.

This is a common feature of subtractive constructions, also tunnels, catacombs.

Interesting how many people consider the size to be out of proportion…

Well, it’s mostly about the fact that he’s got an erection but anyway he’s got it going to his second rib. That distance is two iPhone X lengths on me, so about 11.1 inches.

Mate, maybe you came here to brag about how big your dick is but that’s a couple standard deviations above median. It is hardly “interesting” anyone’s remarking on it.

Still cheaper than space travel though

The interesting bit was that was where everyone’s mind went. It’s hilarious you took time out of your day to try and “debunk” the comment lol. It’s a giant chalk drawing and you’re using an iPhone to try and compare pee pee sizes.

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