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Comment by the_omegist | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the article included different versions of the song.

That serves as a reminder that this song is more or less "reconstructed" from the forever-lost original one and also lets us compare their interpretations. Surprisingly, I love the samuraiguitarist version : there is something unique in the mix of new technology and ancient music but also a melancholy only electric guitar (and violin?) can bring...

On a side note and like another comment mentioned : it's surprising that, like when I've read Gilgamesh (oldest known written story), there is a very modern feel to it. Not much really changed in 3400 years except for technology...

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To that side note...

Perhaps your surprising feeling relates to the fact that storytelling is a very old art, and we have been practising it intensely for a long time.

In the greater scheme, maybe 3400 years isn't as long for storytelling as it is for most arts and practices that you'd be comparing to. Rock n Roll from 2022 isn't that different to someone from 2002. Rock and Roll from 1972 is very different to 1952. You could blow a 1952 mind mind with Ziggy Stardust or Houses of the Holy.

True.

But the fact that the way the story was told (the structure of the story) as well as the characters psychology was very "modern".

For example, I think I can't like japanese literature (for the few I've read) because of their weird way of telling stories [0]. So I would have expected something older and less "cosmopolitan" to be harder to get into... Well perhaps the translator took some "freedom" by modernizing it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kishotenketsu

Nothing changed expect what did, and people are still able to project different representations out of the roughly same stimuli. :D

There will be at most something like 5000 de novo mutations along any evolutionary line from 3400 BP. Compare that to 3 million differences between any two human genomes. It's clear from this basic fact that very little evolutionary time has passed, and people from then and now would be indistinguishable in virtually all aspects.

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