1.5-Inch Hand-Carved Agate from 1500 B.C. Shows Sub-Millimeter Details (2017) | Hacker News Reader

1.5-Inch Hand-Carved Agate from 1500 B.C. Shows Sub-Millimeter Details (2017)

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This is actually much more interesting than just the level of detail.

The motif on it is the same as on a seal found in the Mycenaean grave circle with "Agamemnon's Mask" (dated 16th century BCE, centuries too early to be Homer's Agamemnon): https://www.alamy.com/battling-warriors-on-a-gold-seal-from-...

But the Minoans almost never produced goods for themselves depicting warfare until after the Mycenaean take over ~1450 BCE, after these seals were made.

While Minoan princes were often depicted nearly nude and with long hair and sometimes leaping, the Griffin warrior grave was for an actual warrior and among the items he was buried with was a comb for hair.

Just who were the warriors depicted across centuries and different locations in these Mycenaean seals, and what was the nature of their battle?

You can see in the Pylos combat agate that the long haired warrior is fighting above the body of another fallen comrade.

While the motif predates any possible historic Trojan War by centuries, I suspect that the tradition behind this scene is what eventually inspired Homer's story of Achilles fighting Hector after the death of Patroclus, reworked into the narrative of Troy with the original story lost to the ages in lieu of these seals left behind.

Should the Griffin warrior grave in the palace of Nestor turn out to be closer in time to the Mycenaean grave circle (dating off pottery isn't always the most reliable), I'd like to think that the Griffin warrior IS the warrior from the seal, with his greatest accomplishment immortalized in one of the finest works of art in that time, and that we have indeed found the grave of Achilles (or the inspiration thereof), just outside the timeline of various events compressed into a single fiction by 'Homer' and the oral tradition which survived the Greek Dark Ages.

Based on dress my first impression would be that the fallen is not a comrade but a defeated enemy.

Or from the article:

“The landmark find shows a warrior battling against two adversaries, killing one enemy, the other already dead at his feet.”

The reasons behind this conclusion are dubious.

There are no other elements on which to decide to whom the dead one belongs, except his weapons, his hair and his dress.

His weapons (sword and scabbard) are identical with those of the victorious warrior. He has long, tied hair like the victorious warrior and no helmet like that of the enemy is visible. Only his shorts might be more similar to those of the enemy, but even this is not certain, as most of the shorts of the enemy are behind his shield.

So, in my opinion, the evidence is overwhelming for the fact that the dead man is not an enemy, but a comrade.

To be even more clear, the enemy was equipped with spear, helmet and shield, while both the victorious warrior and the dead warrior had none of those.

Instead of those, they both had identical swords and scabbards.

Taking into account this very obvious difference in the military equipment, I cannot understand what prompted someone to state that the fallen man belonged to the enemies.

Both have the same loincloth design and short hair.

Look at the higher resolution photograph of the stone, not at the graphic sketch, which is slightly misleading.

For the fallen man, you can see the back of his head, on which it is clear that the hair is shown, and not a helmet, as on the enemy.

Besides the head, at the edge of the stone, there is something that looks like a ponytail, in the same way as the hair of the victorious warrior is shown. Moreover, the ponytail of both warriors is tied with a chord, which has at its 2 loose ends some kind of knots or decorations. The 2 ends of the chord are seen for both the victorious man and for the fallen man, and they look the same.

The resolution of the photograph is not good enough to make the identification of the feature at the side of the head as a ponytail certain.

Nevertheless, the hair on the back of the head and the presumed ponytail look very much, at least at this resolution, like the hair of the victorious warrior, and very unlike the helmet of the enemy.

Because the enemy wears a helmet, we cannot know for sure whether his hair was short or long. We can presume that his hair was short, as otherwise the helmet might have been uncomfortable.

Also from the loincloth of the enemy we see just a narrow edge, which is not covered by the shield.

I agree that the lower edge of the loincloth is similar for the fallen man and for the enemy, and this is the only similarity between them.

So we have:

Pro the fallen man being an enemy: Similar lower edges of the loincloth.

Contra the fallen man being an enemy: 1. Completely different military equipment, spear and helmet and shield versus sword with a scabbard of an unusual form (common to the fallen man and to the victorious man). 2. Long hair tied in a ponytail versus presumably short hair under the helmet

The similar lower edges of the loincloth might be explained by all loincloths being similar. The victorious warrior might have been a richer warrior and he might have had some more expensive leather garment instead of a loincloth, like most other warriors.

It is not clear what kind of dress the fallen man had in comparison with the enemy (whose dress is obscured by some kind of shield).

On the other hand, while the enemy fought with a spear, the fallen man had both a sword and a scabbard of exactly the same type as the victorious fighter.

So based on the weapons, it seems more plausible that the fallen man was a comrade.

I concur. Notice the hem of the garment in both cases. The successful warrior's garment is not similar.

I can't help but thinking I see two bodies on the ground, or a representation of the spirit leaving the body of the fallen. Perhaps I just perceived it incorrectly and can't shake that false first impression. Any explainers?

What a lovely notion!

I’ve made a timeline that covers this period. Comments welcome: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOC4jXo4=/

Thank you for sharing this! It looks like a labor of love -- if you don't mind my asking: how long have you been curating this for? Also, have you tried using another tool/app for this, or did miro really work very well for all of your use-cases?

Thanks!

Yes, love :) Also, for a live-streamed lecture on April 21 (https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en/plan-your-visit/agenda#H...)

It’s based on much past research, but this actually took me just about two weeks to prepare. Obviously unfinished.

I was thinking of developing something custom, but Miro is just about perfect, except for a desire to have pop up links (ie, click a title to expand info in the page)

May I ask about your interest?

I enjoy making and curating, and enjoys seeing that same urge expressed in others!

In the past, I've used tools like FreeMind, only to be (eventually) be disappointed that the tool is dead, so now I have to migrate to (and learn) another tool, etc.

Thanks for replying and for sharing the link!

For anyone else clicking on this and seeing a blank canvas, you need to zoom way out for the timeline to show up. :)

Whenever I see something like this, I'm reminded that really smart people have always existed. We're not at some pinnacle of human intelligence (the opposite actually [1]), we're just in a different context.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Fragile_Intellect

When I see this (a relic of the Minoan civilization), I'm reminded that civilization has undergone multiple collapses as a result of disease, war, corruption, and famine, and in the process we lose skills and technology along the way, and only re-learn them (or alternative technologies) after we enter a period of new abundance, sometimes many centuries or millenia later.

There were way fewer large scale collapses in our history than people assume. Localized ones are plentiful, but knowledge almost always gets preserved by some distant people.

Lost knowledge usually happens because it stops being useful or because it wasn't actually widespread.

Although that is one way to get out of a local minimum.

David Herlihy made the argument in The Black Death and the “Transformation of the West”, that much of feudal Europe prior to the plague was caught in a Malthusian deadlock, where labor was abundant and thus cheap enough that there was no return to investment in technology or capital. It was only when labor became scarce and expensive that investments in productivity were justified.

Several centuries before the Black Plague, the Justinian Plague accelerated the decline of the remnants of the Roman Empire and plunged Europe into the Dark Ages. In the process a lot of Roman technology and skill was lost, and the burgeoning Byzantine empire failed to reach Roman heights as a result of massive losses of human life. In addition the climate got colder as a result of volcanism and caused widespread famine. Maybe the Black Plague did shake up things in what we retrospectively look at as good outcomes, but it happened at the tail end of a long period of malaise.

This hypothesis is contested. Average IQ results have gone up generation by generation. While IQ tests aren't a straightforward intelligence measure, it's at least a result based on data rather than conjecture.

The specific book linked in the grandparent’s post seems to be some silly pop science claim that human intelligence peaked a few thousand years ago when most humans were hunter gatherers, and subsequently declined.

I believe you’re talking about the Flynn effect of rising IQs in the past several decades, which might have actually leveled off recently (or even reversed slightly) in developed countries.

This doesn't really make sense as a long term trend though. If I recall correctly the Flynn Effect is something like 3 points a decade, so people born ten decades were retarded by today's standards?

If you look at older literature or school tests from the 19th century or similar it doesn't seem like people one hundred years ago were dumber than modern humans.

Consider that the survivorship bias might be in play here. The writings / workbooks you see may have been from / for the brighter students, whereas the average may not have much work which remains today.

It's not just the writings or workbooks that exist, but also the things that people read. For example, in his day, Mark Twain was a massively popular author. Were retarded people (projecting the Flynn Effect backwards) enjoying great literature? Seems implausible to me. If the average intellect at the time were relatively much reduced compared to the modern intellect I would expect the public to prefer simpler literature.

What do studies say about the Flynn Effect when it comes to the upper classes? My guess is that the upper classes have always had a decent diet and good living conditions. So, if improvements in those things are what is driving the Flynn effect, the upper classes were probably always just about as intelligent as the average person today. And, in all classes, at least a portion of people, who happened to have decent living conditions, would also be up to today's standards of intelligence.

The Flynn effect is a very complex topic, so I don’t want to get too deeply into details here, but considering the totality of evidence, it is unlikely that nutrition and living conditions have much to do with it.

Here is one piece of evidence against it: for upper half of Americans (in terms of economic prosperity), the improvements in nutrition and material living condition have, to a first approximation, maxed out by 1960 at the latest. The wealthier half of Americans in 1960 had no lack of food, neither in terms of quality or quantity, and things have not got significantly better since then (if anything, you could argue that the diets today are less healthy now). Certainly, they ate much better than even the wealthiest people did back before 1700, and had much better material conditions of existence. However, the Flynn effect gains kept steadily growing decade after decade, until 2010 or so.

Flynn effect gains in IQ scores are hollow. They, by and large, do not correspond to real gains in what people understand as intelligence. This is because they do not act on g. It is more useful to think of them as measurement error, as if yardsticks we used to measure length we’re getting shorter generation by generation: we’d observe then things getting apparently longer, but this elongation effect wouldn’t be real.

We have known all of this for more than 2 decades now. This thread is full of people saying completely inane things about psychometric and intelligence research. I don’t blame them: the field itself is very technical, and at the same time there are plenty of people who don’t like its findings, and then misrepresent them (often deliberately) to the general public.

For one thing, if you want to talk about anything related to IQ tests, but have no idea what the g factor is, please note that you are missing the absolute basics of the field, and you’ll be completely hopelessly confused by some easy to explain and understand facts.

> the opposite actually [1]

This is a much more controversial view than as suggested in the comment -- specifically there is very little data backing up the hypothesis that intelligence is decreasing. This is compounded by the fact that we really don't have great tools for measuring intelligence or a deep understanding of how it develops and manifests in humans. IMO the jury is still out on the general direction human intelligence is moving, but realistically if you are concerned the best thing you can do is improve environmental factors and educational access.

There is 1) survival of the fittest and 2) random genetic mutation. To accept the theory of revolution, we accept these two premises. Without fitness being an aspect of survival, I’m curious what counter arguments there are out there to the position that we really are always getting dumber. I’ll avoid the easy target of anecdotal evidence.

1. IQ tests are actually showing higher scores over time. About 90 years of data on this.

2. We do not have genetic data to show that these mutations are happening. This is theory only without empirical data.

3. There's a lot of debate over the role of genetics and intelligence. It's very possible that our understanding and implementation of childhood development has a larger impact on intelligence than these presumed random mutations.

4. Intelligent people are more likely to pair with other intelligent people, so maybe there is still selection effect for intelligence. This effect could be increases as world travel means a greater geographic range for potential mates.

> It's very possible that our understanding and implementation of childhood development has a larger impact on intelligence than these presumed random mutations.

Bones from burial sites of past hunter-gatherer societies are associated with larger jaws and mouths, while bones retrieved from former farming cultures have decreased jaw size. [0]

I believe jaw development has effects on mental health. Thus, I think our non-genetic changes do happen to affect our mental capabilities. There must be other factors than jaw size that do so.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_jaw_shrinkage?wprov=sfti...

> I believe jaw development has effects on mental health.

Why? I am honestly curious.

Someone else posted around the same time as you. Apparently it has been postulated that decreased oxygen to the brain and being tired (from sleep apnea related to jaw development) causes cognitive impairment. So... give everyone a CPAP machine to sleep with?

If you go down the rabbit hole of weird libertarian beliefs, you may stumble upon “mewing” sometime after paleo diets and nofap.

To a visiting alien, libertarian associated beliefs would look positively sane compared to numerous mainstream practices, like daily consumption of highly processed foods coupled with little physical activity, factory farming of meat, mono-crop agriculture, and the rituals of social sensitivity signalling that change by the year, ranging from personalized gender pronouns to micro-aggression avoidance.

It's important to note that the aforementioned are all extremely mainstream, with leading academic and corporate institutions adopting and promoting them.

I love that there's an internet forum where one minute I can be reading someone who's explaining why the US government needs to create a new agency to regulate social media and the next I can see someone named CryptoPunk say that it's mainstream society that's crazy not libertarians.

I believe it. I read the pop sci book “Breath” recently—as I remember it says jaw development has degraded in modern humans because of the availability of soft foods and increased mouth breathing. We need to chew to develop properly. Apparently this impacts the sinuses and airway which causes sleep apnea and other respiratory issues, leading to bad sleep and worsened cognition overall.

Yes and cranial measurements determine intelligence too…

Come on people. We’ve been down this road before. It’s not good.

Cranial capacity doesn’t determine intelligence, just as height doesn’t determine basketball ability. Nevertheless, good basketball players tend to be tall, and intelligent people tend to have large cranial capacity. These are well documented correlations, with multiple studies observing those.

So, does evolution and biology stop at the neck somehow?

Or if it does not, are we better off staying ignorant than trying to discover some knowledge, however fractional and incomplete?

I don't believe in either.

The Turing test is like saying planes don't fly unless they can fool birds into thinking they're birds. - Peter Norvig, via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

IMHO other intelligence tests are the same - they tend to measure familiarity with established systems of rationality and response within a given culture only.

Here's a thought experiment. Imagine a student who can't read, or who can't read the language the test is written in, or are an elementary learner of that language. They would tend to score poorly. All communication is like this, not just written tests. But the logical basis upon which rationality is measured within said tests is also a language, and its drawbacks exactly parallel that of language itself. Perhaps what IQ and similar metrics are really measuring is cultural indoctrination and familiarity as a highly tangential proxy to the basic cognitive abilities which they actually purport to grade.

It's impossible for there to be an objective measure of intelligence as it is an adaptation to a specific environment.

As others have said before me, an IQ test measures how adapted you are to IQ tests.

Goodhart's Law (Popular formulation): When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

As for 2 we absolutely do have data. People are constantly being shuffled both up and down from their parents, that's why wealth is not permanently intergenerational even in a capitalist society with inheritance. De novo genetic diseases are also constantly arising from healthy parents.

It used to be that way, but IQ has actually been dropping in Europe for quite some time. In France and the UK it's a drop of about 4 IQ points per decade, which is a bit of a crisis (some scores can be found compiled here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309330272_The_negat...).

There's a claim that the reversal of the Flynn effect is environmental (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1718793115), by two Norwegian researchers, but they've argued in a way which is obviously fallacious-- they basically said that environmental effects explain the drop in Norway, but the drop in Norway is relatively low, around 1 IQ point per decade (although that is of course incredibly bad) and the argue that this is the case for the other countries as well, but that doesn't follow since the drops in the countries they do not even consider are so much larger. In fact, they could have made another argument, for example that the drops in the UK and France can't be environmental because those effects in Norway can only be made to account for one 1 IQ point per decade.

The definition of “fitness” is context (environment) dependent. Intelligence (more than say 2s out) might not have any special advantage at the moment.

I have no opinion on this topic, merely pointing out the mechanism.

And off we go on a wild HN tangent on human intelligence.

I have a bachelor's in psychology and almost all the comments I read are wildly speculative if not outright debunked. For some reason people think being smart means they are qualified to talk about intelligence. It does not.

How is this a helpful comment?

Evolution can't be tested like this, imo. You can't reason about what where it will lead and assume that this is where it's leading.

I don't know why people harp on about intelligence. There are plenty stories about ugly ducklings. If you are in the wrong place (geographically, socially) and time your intelligence can mean very little.

If intelligence were some super drug every life form and human would evolve to maximize it. As an extreme example, Koalas evolved to have extremely energy efficient brains that are as small as possible.

Having a powerful "CPU" is worth very little when it is mostly empty and idle most of the time. We send our kids to the program loader (school) for 12 years for a reason. It takes a lot of effort to get the most out of our brains.

People aren't getting dumber. They are getting more isolated and out of touch with the old way of living that was considered the only way 500 years ago. A lot more people are living a lifestyle that used to be associated with aristocracy. More children are being sheltered from the outside world.

It’s not really survival of the fittest, since fittest is a tautology.

It’s basically survival of the survivors.

Or, in other words, we are definitely selecting for and against certain kinds of intelligence differently now than thousands of years ago.

The better or worse element is a judgment call. But definitely different.

Sure, but this seems more of an observation at the micro level. At the macro level, general positives (intelligence, strength, health) would generally mean more selection in their favor _overall_ wouldn’t it?

>There is 1) survival of the fittest and 2) random genetic mutation.

There is 1) survival of the fittest and 2) random genetic mutation and 3) survival of the luckiest.

You could be part of the fittest, most well-evolved tribe of people on the planet that gets hit by a meteor which completely obliterates your entire lineage, while a much less "fit" group of people on the other side of the world soldiers on. These survivors didn't survive the meteor strike because of any inherent strengths or benefits of evolution or genetic mutation, but they are the only ones left out of sheer chance.

I would say just given the sheer number of people these days that we are more likely to get the tippy top of intelligence than say 3500 years ago. Just by the law of large numbers. Maybe I'm just less smart than the Minoans though and my devolving mind should shut up about such things :)

I would say that we are or were close to average peak. Just due to access to sufficient number of calories. In many parts of West that really wasn't true in relatively recent past like beginning of last century.

That may be true, but is tangential to parent's point. The point was that smart people existed, not that the median or average intelligence was higher.

It's about how their geniuses compared to ours, not how our average Joe compares to theirs.

I don't believe that. First because we are we are with larger numbers, so more absolute numbers of smart people. Second. We have never lived so rich, free and well fed as today.

> Second. We have never lived so rich, free and well fed as today.

And this is the proposed driving factors for that supposed reducing intelligence.

It seems that intellect is actually being selected against today, i.e. smart people have less children and (importantly) have them later in life:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1600398113

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1612113114

Yes. The topic is somewhat taboo, but The Economist wasn't scared of mentioning it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17303693

(I don't think it's something we should worry about, though: humanity has far more pressing and serious problems to deal with.)

> Whenever I see something like this, I'm reminded that really smart people have always existed.

No doubt, but the person(s) that produced this carving don’t have to be smart, just skilled artisans/craftsman.

This is I personal favourite topic of mine. If you share this interest, you might enjoy this resource at the SEP. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/progress/#CriDocPro

Given that my father was born and raised in Crete, I've visited the island numerous times.

This place is deep, I always have a very weird feeling when I'm there, it's like starring in those movies, where everyone is happy and joyful, however you know that something mysterious is lurking below all of this.

There are places that still are called by their Minoan names.

If you ever get there, don't miss the archaeological museum in Heraklion. Here is a small sample:

https://ibb.co/P5RWZtZ https://ibb.co/khqvm8F

I didn't go to that museum, but i went to the one in Chania. The thing i remember most clearly is the little pull-along toy, substantially the same as one you might buy in a bougie toyshop today, that's getting on for three thousand years old:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clay_oxen_wheel,_a_t...

Is that one of those cultures that had invented the wheel for a child’s toy, but not for any more practical purpose?

Sorry if I'm just spreading factoids and platitudes, but isn't this the point at which some people say "it's not the wheel that was the hard part; it was the axle and bearings."? So a wheel for a child's toy would almost not even be a wheel.

I think you are confused with the idea "the romans invented the steam engine but only used it as a toy" which semi-misleadingly refers to the Aeolipile.

It is thought that the biggest challenge for using a wheel for serious applications was getting the axle right. This is not an issue for toys.

https://interestingengineering.com/the-history-and-evolution...

My girlfriend was conceived in Crete, by her Greek father and her Italian mother.

She tells me that the feeling you get in Crete and the way Cretans think of life and death (what you call "something mysterious is lurking below") can be explained by the story of the Arkadi Monastery [1]: during the Cretan Revolt against the Ottoman empire in 1866 943 Greeks, mostly women and children, sought refuge in the monastery. After three days of battle and under orders from the hegumen (abbot) of the monastery, the Cretans blew up barrels of gunpowder, choosing to sacrifice themselves rather than surrender.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkadi_Monastery

After reading this I can't help but think of a talk "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization" given by Jonathan Blow (the game dev) about progress and how it's not always increasing like we tend to think.

Super interesting if you have the time for it:

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

As said in other comments the artifact is indeed gorgeous, the intricacy of carving stunning. I also agree with the idea that it shows our predecessors were as intelligent as we are today. Certainly no less "artistic" or creative.

Other objects from prior epochs reflect the same levels of intelligence. The astonishing "Venus of Dolní Věstonice" (National Museum in Prague, Czech Republic) [0] is a ceramic piece made ~25-29K years ago. I was privileged to see it about 25 years ago, its patina resembles raku-like ceramics. I've asked myself, how did anyone know how to do this 25K years ago? How did the creator of the piece manage to get the elevated temperature (~750C) needed to make it work? It was the product of intelligence to be sure.

Of course there are many other examples of ancient human ingenuity to point to. It's evident our ancestors figured out solutions to problems in surprisingly effective ways. We're smart too, but probably no smarter than those who came before.

[0] https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=2493

1500 BC is very recent in evolutionary and even cultural terms

In an odd coincidence - I'm just sailing away from Crete, I've always been interested in the Minion civilisation which dates at its earliest to 3500 years ago.

Things of note. Please respect the following text, which is civil and describes nude sculpture, bearing in mind Minoan civilisation was renowned for priestesses which wore bodices that exposed their breasts.

A few days ago I saw a Minoan figure of a female clay bust, which I have not found online, in the Heraklion Archaelogical museum, and it is the finest sculpture of breasts I have ever seen that predates modernity. I will try and upload an image if anyone is interested. Just perfectly sculpted and realistic.

Within the theme, I also discovered a 3500 year old sculpture of a woman which has over 100 breasts all over it. Oddly the sculpture was listed as having "nubs" quite why the museum did I have no idea why. While odd, what I found compelling , is that a figure of a multiple breasted woman is renowned in the city of Ephesus - called the Diana of Ephesus - (feel free to google). I have not found any link in museum of in texts, but it must be related, as Ephesus was also settled by Minoans. Just an odd similarity which I do genuinely is related.

I am not a historian so please chime in if there is a link.

But importantly - I just wanted to share my observation, that usual sculptures one associates with minoan civilisation such as the priestess holding the snakes - seems like an amateur attempt at sculpture compared to the more secretive, hidden pieces that I happened to come across. This helps to contextualise the quality of detail in the agate described in the article.

No conspiracy life is just surprising like that.

Just my take I hope it was of interest. PS - If anyone is interested in video just browse the Crete tag on tiktok as I know there is video there.

Is this level of detail in a hand made object really surprising?

The Avogadro Project involved making silicon balls with a mass of 1kg and surface irregularities of the order of a few nanometres. Achim Leistner, a master lens maker, finished the spheres by hand as he was able to feel surface imperfections of the order of a few nanometres.

A similarly skilled person could have lived in 1500 BC.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/making-the-worlds-perfect-ki...

Yes, but you'd need archeological evidence to say that such a person existed, and the oldest known possibly manufactured lens dates from the 7th century BC [0].

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens#History

If you're looking for a tl;dr, just spend ten seconds looking at this high-res image of the object in question:

https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2017/11/31SCI-WARRIO...

Thanks, that's more stunning than the ink drawing made of it. Far more detail than what I could see in the drawing.

In particular, the dead guy and the arm holding the sword. It uses light reflections very effectively.

The impression is even cooler imho[1].

[1]http://www.griffinwarrior.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Hes...

What is that? An impression would be inverted. If the impression was filled (used as a mould) it would match the original. Is the image reversed?

Unsure what you mean. It is inverted. It's been pressed into something. The frame is pressed inward, and the bas-relief figures come outward.

I think I’m not seeing either the original or the copy correctly, both look to me to have figures that come outward, and the copy is also flipped left to right.

Surely a straight copy made by pressing the original into something would have the dead body on the left, with their features going into the medium, not coming out?

Edit: I think I’m seeing the original wrong, I just can’t see how the figures stick in, rather than out. Part of it might be because All the photos appear to have been altered to allow you to see the figures, as the true colour version is much harder to appreciate. See the true colour version here:

https://aristomenismessinios.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-combat...

Could be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow-Face_illusion (“an optical illusion in which the perception of a concave mask of a face appears as a normal convex face.”)

You can see from the small spherical artifact that the light is in the upper-right of the picture. So shadows on the upper-right mean that area is indented. We can see such shadows on the leg of the sword fighter and on the shield. So both those areas are indented.

You are seeing an optical illusion that causes one to think that the impression was actually facing outward, rather than inward.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow-Face_illusion

I believe the light reflections are just that -- actual light reflections. It's a relief carving in shiny stone.

That’s what I mean, sorry, I wasn’t clear.

That really is incredible. Looks like a 1700s decorative item.

We often think that art was truly awoken during the renaissance and people started to understand the human form and realism then, but ancient art shows people have been doing it since the dawn of history.

What’s weird to me is how, for a period between the decline of Rome and the 1400s, Europeans seemed to forget how to realistically depict people in art.

People didn’t forget. That’s been thoroughly debunked by (art) historians. Society changed so art changed with it. Thinking that realism is the pinnacle of art is just a cultural point of view. Medieval art worked with completely different ideas, so it makes no sense to compare it with Renaissance art.

If you look at modern art it would be easy to think that 21st century artist had absolutely no clue how to depict nature, even though it’s clear it’s a stylistic choice to create such works.

Modern art has loads of examples of people making all sorts of things. Picasso is notable for mastering realism before going into abstract art. Realism still goes strong today and still serves as a foundation for learning art professionally before branching out into individual styles.

And I’m not saying realism is the pinnacle of art. I’m an artist myself. I just know that virtually every society made rapid gains into mastering realism pretty quickly, but I don’t know of any examples of truly realistic work or high craftsmanship in the European Middle Ages until cathedrals became a big thing.

My amazement isn’t that this is “realistic=good”, it’s that amateurs can’t crank something like this out easily. That’s what makes it impressive—someone was either devoting loads of leisure time to studying the human form and how to represent it independently 3500 years ago, or people were being taught it. Most people who do some art today with loads of resources at their hands and leisure time but no formal education don’t reach this point, which makes it all the more impressive that ancient people did. Egypt is also flooded with impressive work and people are amazed with it 6000 years later, and I used to think they were unique. But I’m seeing more and more that societies basically everywhere achieved similar degrees of craftsmanship.

the detail around the feet and ankles is stunning

The website of the team excavating the archeological site where this object was found contain more information and fascinating pictures:

http://www.griffinwarrior.org/

I love the site and how they display their work, however their watermarks completely ruin the photos IMO.

> It is indeed a mystery how they did it,” said Stocker.

How about using a Pantograph?

> The ancient Greek engineer Hero of Alexandria described pantographs in his work Mechanics.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph

I have no idea if they could have used a pantograph, but the Hero of Alexandria apparently lived 1500 years after this artist.

A simple device that could have been rediscovered over and over by technologists.

Probably not, it has depth and is carved into agate. If you've never tried to carve stone, it is quite difficult.

A 3D pantograph could be constructed with 2 of these mechanisms. Such device would make a task like this a little easier. Simpler answer than optics or photolithography.

Maybe? It seems like building something like that to hold a carving tool and applying the necessary pressure to the other apparatus would be pretty tricky. The idea that it was done by someone with exceptional eyesight seems more plausible to me. It could have even been done in a workshop by multiple people. Maybe they could have used a crude convex brass mirror to aid the process.

If they can achieve this level of fine detail, I would err on the side of assuming any mirror they chose to fashion would be anything but crude.

I wonder what Eric Schmidt's robotic submarine project is upto - it would be wonderful to see lidar / ground radar along all sea-shelves/continental-shelves... to see submerged coastal cities.

Hope they find another piece or fragment to (dis)prove whether they used some mechanical assisted method by superimposing the details.

Agate has about the same hardness of quartz (6½-7 on the Mohs scale).

I expect patience may have helped. If they did the carving with a slightly harder stone, it may have taken months to make (almost by keeping scratching it, rather than carving it), but it also would have been hard to mess up the work in a few seconds.

> “Looking at the image for the first time was a very moving experience, and it still is,” Stocker noted. “It’s brought some people to tears.”

I get the meaning here, but I still find it slightly humorous that people are being moved to tears by an image depicting a human murdering another human (and a corpse on the ground)

When I got to see the "venus of willendorf" I had a very atavistic reaction. Really strong goose bumps. An amazing feeling of connectedness across deep time.

"Sub-Millimeter" may sound impressive to a novice, but with very simple tools like a hand file you can work on metal with a precision of a thousandth of a millimeter. So yes, this is impressive craftmanship but nothing that would rewite history of technology.

What is the other (non-sword) object that he holds?

http://www.griffinwarrior.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Hes...

It is the plume from the helmet of the warrior he is fighting.

Regarding the fine detail, firstly I think people generally had better eyesight back then.

Secondly, jellyfish. One type, always washed up on my local beach, is a 3pi/2 arc - about the size and shape of a 3/4 donut. And perfectly transparent. Its optical qualities are something any curious human will investigate. It's a small step to use it to see and work on fine detail. And much smaller steps to experiment with which curvature gives the best magnification. Could also be used as a telescope. Jellypunk.

You probably meant "magnifying glass".

I looked it up because I was skeptical and found this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/149328524@N08/49759508281/in/p...

Here's a photo http://imgur.com/7Pulqtau

Apparently, not jellyfish, but sea snail egg sacs https://www.google.com/search?q=sea+snail+egg&source=lnms&tb...

It's from 2017, and has been discussed previously on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15649062

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254122

> has been discussed

There seem to be 0 comments on either of those pages.

Recommendation: Read “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed” by Eric H. Cline https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691208015/11...

I am not sure magnification would be required to produce that piece. Some people have visual acuity in the range needed to produce that work. And it depends on age.

I do wonder what tool they used. Perhaps a harder stone?

However it was done, it's a great, beautiful piece! What a find!

It is rare to find a tomb with such wealth that has not been raided. Says team of tomb raiders.

I'm not so sure the sub-millimeter details are so mysterious if a sub-millimeter mark in hard stone is easy to feel with the fingers.

And if that's how they did it, this is still remarkable work.

Do we have evidence it was carved?

It’s possible to “shrink” a stamp by pressing onto wet clay, firing, and then repeating the process multiple times (clay will reduce after firing).

I wonder if this could have been etched or pressed, potentially with a chemical process?

Apparently the stone is very hard and difficult to carve. Presumably this would mean it wasn't pressed in some manner.

Agate is silica (quartz) and is harder than steel, or any common metal or alloy that pre-modern people would have had. A few common minerals are harder, such as feldspar and hornblende, and modern ceramic is (but not all fired clay). I think tools made or tipped with these must have been used, and/or perhaps finely ground minerals were used as an abrasive polish.

Article from 2017...

not to dismiss the artisanship but a millimeter is really not that small.

Them calling it merely "sub-millimeter" seems a bit like selling it short. The image in the article is about 1500 pixels wide (the stone part of it), and is 36mm according to Wikipedia. [1] I measured some fine details to be about three pixels in size. That would be 72 µm, which perhaps gives a different idea than a hand-wavy "sub-millimeter". For comparison, Intel's 8008 has a node size of 10 µm.

(I hope I got the measurements and units correctly. The numbers seem slightly too impressive, corrections welcome.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griffin_Warrior_Tomb

That “Griffin Warrior” could make a nice subject for a movie or game :)

Basically all we know about him is that he was rich and he died. So the story would be complete fiction with some "based on a real person" bullshit.

How many of us could replicate this, even with todays resources?

Rubbing things together. Seriously.

Good luck with our free time. But if this was our day job and we kept at it for decades, who knows what would turn out!

Don't underestimate the value of practice. I've watched welders build up a bead to a thickness tolerance better than 0.001" with nothing more sophisticated than a hand-held TIG torch and wire.

And very, very steady hands. I wish I had those skills, be it the amazingly consistent welders you're talking about, or the amazing carving skills of the original article. Crazy.

When you say "us", do you mean computer programmers half-blinded by screens since high school? Not unless STL's are available on thingiverse..

Or did you mean "us" as in professional carvers who practiced their whole lives the skills passed down through generations? This thing wasn't carved by a rando from the peasant class.

How many of us could make a simple match to strike a fire?

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