Ancient Greek ‘pop culture’ discovery rewrites history of poetry and song | Hacker News Reader

Ancient Greek ‘pop culture’ discovery rewrites history of poetry and song

joh.cam.ac.uk

60 pointsdiodorus29 comments

> Until now, ‘stressed poetry’ of this kind has been unknown before the 5th century, when it began to be used in Byzantine Christian hymns.

FWIW, some scholars argue that the Roman Saturnian verse (3rd century BC or earlier) is stressed poetry. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturnian_(poetry) for examples.

Different language though. Greek poetry was so conservative it can be hard to tell what is a living form and what is a clever pastiche, especially as the Hellenistic era goes on.

Fun fact: Irish [Gaelic] poetry only switched from syllabic to stressed metre about the eighteenth century. One product of the transition was poems in the form of trí rainn agus amhrán, having three stanzas of syllabic metre then a final stanza of stressed metre, for example "Tithe Chorr an Chait": http://www.clanntuirc.co.uk/TRAA/TRAA40.html .

That's super interesting. My familiarity with Irish song isn't great, but I had a fun several minutes minutes reading the poem over and over slowly getting an idea for what rhythm/pacing suited it. Thanks!

Though, looking at the poem again - strictly in terms of syllable structure the final verse is far more regular than the rest in terms of its syllable structure, so I don't know how much sense it makes to categorise the final verse as accentual (in contrast to the rest)? Though I understand it might represent a break from an older tradition of highly constrained poetry, of which careful consideration about syllables is one part. OTOH even the final verse has a lot of classical-seeming features (internal rhyming/alliteration c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_syllabic_poetry#Techniqu... )

https://imgur.com/a/4HZmu64 is my attempt at marking strong vs weak syllables. (I don't know the old Irish syllabic tradition, so in particular I don't know how to categorise some of the starting syllables, and probably messed up a bunch)

[ Apologies to whatever extent this is ignorant/incorrect! ]

Extremely dumb lyrics. What's next? "Ooh baby ... I care for you ... I'll always be there for you ... I know that you want me to"

the original LIVE LAUGH LOVE sign

A lot of songs from the 2nd half of XX century till now have dumber lyrics.

And their authors should have known better, whereas Greeks had to invent pop culture from scratch.

Next headline: twerking found in 35,000 year old cave art

My humps

My lovely lady lumps

In the back and in the front

> What's next?

"Baby do you wanna bump", of course ;)

https://genius.com/Boney-m-baby-do-you-wanna-bump-lyrics

its always seemed strange to me that we just assume something didn't exist before a certain time just because that was the earliest artifact we've found so far.

so much of ancient history which is assumed to be truth is really just based on assumptions and suppositions

In my experience historians don't assume that, but when journalists write up a discovery that pushes the earliest-known date back they like to write it up as if they had.

Especially Greek and Roman history. Some of what is “known” is based on as little as a word or two carved into some stone monument… other things are based on thousands upon thousands of written works that survived antiquity (in some cases we know more about Rome 2000 years ago than we do anywhere else until the renaissance)

There is this transition between scant evidence and near modern levels of familiarity in a rather short time.

And if you compare histories, it gets even more absurd. We almost know what Cicero did hour-to-hour on some important days. We don't even know which century Kalidasa, the most important Sanskrit poet, was active in.

"Rewriting history" based on a single poem? Could as well be a unique style of a particular poet/whoever made it?

My reading was that it wasn't a single poem (by which I think you mean, a single instance of the poem). Apparently this poem was found all over the place, both with and without the final 2 lines, and that basically factories were churning out kitsch with the poem on it for sale.

Looks like the cameo has been digitalised in quite a while already: https://www.livius.org/pictures/hungary/aquincum/aquincum-mu...

Interesting that a "deceased young woman" is identified as a prostitute there. Not an insufficient detail in my opinion - whether the text is a part of vernacular culture in general, i.e. something that all young men and women could relate to or had a specific association with prostitution changes the meaning significantly

they say what they like / let them say it / I don’t care / Burma Shave

Sounds like "haters gonna hate" is as old as it gets.

Do we know what ancient music sound like ?

Yes, actually. Here's one example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

Will Astley ever get old?

I believe it is still quite a hard thing to be truly certain of but there are some indications around. Harmonia Mundi produced an album a few years ago that included some ancient Greek music [1].

[1] La Musique De L'Antiquité https://www.discogs.com/Various-La-Musique-De-LAntiquit%C3%A...

A little older than sibling comment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph

We have the notation for a small amount of Hellenistic and Roman era music, and I think a tiny little bit of Euripides. We'll never know what Sappho sounded like, though.

Sumerian music had a notation, a bit of which was recovered. Interpretation is however difficult and not yet agreed upon.

https://openculture.com/2014/07/the-oldest-song-in-the-world...

There is an audiobook called How to Listen to and Understand Great Music. The author starts way way back with the oldest music we have and then little by little moves forward to more modern times showing how music grew little by little over the millennia. The audiobooks includes audio excerpts of the music. I found it fascinating up until the classical music time when it started bogging down and going a lot slower.

Flutes retain their tonal function despite age. Bone flutes from times past exist.

Flinders Petrie museum in UCL (London) has some stuff on ancient music I think.

The Taipei National Palace Museum collection includes bronze tuned bells (gongs? cymbals?)

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