Two hundred years ago, the Rosetta Stone unlocked the secrets of ancient Egypt
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
The scale of ancient civilization is always astounding to me.
Are you referring to the long held contemporary debate on whether or not Khufu built the pyramids?
It gives me a newfound appreciation for how much language changes and the challenges of conveying information across generations.
Mesopotamia was even more completely buried and forgotten. A few names in the Bible, nothing more of the history survived until rediscovered in modern times. Around 400 BC, Xenophon returning from his campaign against the Persians, marched past the ruins of a great city. He was impressed with the size of it. The walls on stone foundations 20 ft tall! They're still there today, more or less. Perhaps the Medes had built it, according to the locals. Not much was known of the Medes, to the Greeks. It may have been quite ancient.
Xenophon did not know that it was Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, last of the great Mesopotamian empires. It had been destroyed some 200 years before in the final war between Babylon and Assyria. The Mesopotamian cultural-political system sort of fell apart after. The languages of administration and history stopped being used. Written records ceased. The Persians came to rule the area. Only two hundred years and already forgotten.
There are certain rockfaces in Australia covered with authentic hieroglyphs, discovered last century sometime. Some of the glyphs used only appeared in dictionaries in this century. Experts who have examined it date the vocabulary used to late period, close to 2000 years ago, just a few centuries before hieroglyphs were abandoned and forgotten.
People in antiquity did get around. Just not always on an industrial scale.
That being said, Indigenous Australians of New South Wales (where these phony glyphs are) have done a lot of impressive things themselves and have an amazing history to learn an appreciate all their own. The most famous I'm aware of was the complex societies built upon massive fishery management. (Sources 3, 4)
Sources:
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosford_Glyphs
2: https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/blogs/tim-the-yowie-...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewarrina_Aboriginal_Fish_Tra...
4: https://asia.nikkei.com/Life-Arts/Life/Ancient-Aboriginal-fi...
The Ceruti mastodon butchered near San Diego 130,000 ya is one people tried really hard to debunk, and are now forced to admit is real. Nobody has a clue if it was H.s, H.n, H.e, or "others".
Looking at various pictures, I see many mistakes and the signs are badly copied. Even assuming Egypt sent their worst scribes to Australia, why would they be copying fragments of standard funerary texts—for example—on random rock walls far away from anything resembling an Egyptian burial?
ꜥnḫ ḏt n ḫꜣt...
I mean, I'd need more context to do a real translation, but there's the "living forever" thing (ꜥnḫ ḏt) that comes after the name of the deceased, or maybe it's di (sign before is cutoff) ꜥnḫ ḏt ("given life forever"). There's the ḫꜣt relating to a corpse.
That text is talking about a dead guy.
As for the mastodon, it's news to me, but I'm highly suspect of any positive findings. I believe humans were in the Americas before the widely touted 14,000 year mark. There's solid evidence that Monte Verde in Chile could be 30,000 years old, but maybe just 14,000 years ago. But either way that's far into southern Chile begging the question of when did humans really first arrive in America. But as I said, 130,000 years ago? I'm skeptical, and so are most anthropologists from what I'm seeing
The marimba started life as the gamelan. The language is also Indonesian.
The arrival is dated only 800ya.
I am unable to edit or delete that comment since too much time has passed but ncmncm is correct. I conflated Austronesian migration with Australian
This is usually explained as their common ancestor being the first to enter and populate the Americas. Then, subsequent waves displaced and diluted them except at the extremum of their range.
That probably means the first wave crossed not long after people got to Australia, and maybe via a similar route, i.e. island hopping, at least 50,000 years ago.
They count four major waves of migration into the Americas, not counting any that left no mark.
But really, do you think there is a cabal of powerful academics who have their identity so wrapped up in "Humans only came to the Americas 25,000 years ago", that they would try to explain away clear evidence of humans in the Americas 130,000 years ago?
Look up "Leakey Calico Early Human site". Yes, that Leakey. National Geographic sponsored work. They dug down dozens of feet, kept finding older worked stone. 1960s.
> The present consensus is that there is no evidence of human activity at the Calico Early Man site. This consensus developed based on a number of factors, including:
> The lack of other evidence of human activity (e.g. human or animal remains, or non-tool artifacts).
> The deep antiquity of the site (the next oldest date for human artifacts in the Americas is 30,000 BP, and that date itself is controversial).
> The sheer number of possible tools, up to 60,000 by one account.[6]
> The research by Duvall/Venner, Payen, and others providing possible natural explanations for the stone objects.
They did not, at the time, know about the Cerutti Mastodon.
You can see vids on YT of visits to the site. There were so many tools found, there are piles of them left out on the ground. Very, very obviously knapped tools.
Unfortunately there is a cabal of powerful academics in almost every field who have their identities and their professional reputations wrapped up in a wide variety of flimsy, dated conjecture. It is why the statement, "science advances one funeral at a time" was coined and remains so relevant.
There are still lots of geologists and historians who insist there was no Younger Dryas Boundary bolide strike and continentwide conflagration responsible for extinction of most large North American genera; and plenty who still even insist on Clovis First.
Topically, Bretz was hampered buy lack of a source for the many cubic miles of meltwater his scenario called for. (Lake Missoula did not suffice, though it was pressed into service.) It was finally resolved by proof of the bolide strike.
https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/grande-tra...
It has always interested me that these possibilities are there and potentially just ignored in something so crucial as religion to ~15 million LDS worldwide. Thanks for the introduction.
He knows it’s BS but to him if they’ve got a good thing going, why not stick with it.
I grew up in the church and left because of similar things and honestly he seems happier than I do.
As I get older I think maybe it’s better to be happy than to be right. Most people unconsciously just naturally do this, and those of us with “engineer mindsets” where we can’t abide by obvious falsehoods for the sake of the tribe are the weird ones.
The argument being they don't need the original and could make a near perfect copy with 3D printing and display that.
Well, also the argument that they were looted and stolen in the first place.
I said it was controversial, not wrong. There are two sides to the argument.
You have to tie yourself in to all sorts of knots to untangle this Ship of Theseus.
And while where at it, all filth of Roman, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman descent better fuck out of GB. It belongs to the Celts and I want my Gaelic back.
The Coptic Christians of Egypt and the Muslims of Egypt are largely the same ethnic/genetic group. Modern day Muslim Egyptians are descendants of Coptic Egyptians who converted to Islam at some point after the Arabs conquered Egypt.
One of the (many) interesting things about Egypt is that despite being conquered by several foreign empires, their genetic/ethnic makeup has stayed largely consistent, with only minor intermixing from those foreign groups.
Shit like this is the reason half the world danced when the Queen died, you know.
But the parthenon marbles where lying all over the ground after being literally blown up in the 17th century when it was used as an ammunition storage depot. Nobody cared and it was not a recognized cultural artifact of note. Not until the British earl who bought them, legally, used them to help revive interest in Ancient Greece, and Athens specifically, and donated them to the British museum where they have been on prominent display since.
"But they were bought from the Ottomans, not Greece!"
Yeah, because Greece didn't exist, and hadn't existed as a nation or anything comparable since before the Roman Empire. The Byzantine Empire was the greek-speaking Roman Empire, and the Ottomans were the successors to Byzantine. But guess what? The 19th century revival in interest in greek origins was an essential part of gathering foreign support for greek nationalism, which would be achieved--with the support of British nationals--a few decades after the Parthenon marbles first went on display at the British Museum.
The Parthenon became the symbol of Greece because it was on display at the British Museum for all to see. In an alternate history where the Parthenon marbles were not purchased from the Ottomans but instead were pilfered and reused for various building projects in 19th century Athens, no one but some academics would have cared about the relief sculptures, and greek nationalism might have been set back a few decades, or more. They only have widespread cultural value because of a British PR investment.
Maybe they should be given back to Greece anyway. There's something to be said about having artifacts displayed in their original context. But the issue is hardly as clear-cut as it is made out to be.
There are plenty of cases where the US just flat out broke treaties, or bribed one chief to sell off his whole tribe's land when it wasn't even clear he had that authority. Even if he did, there's a moral issue about taking the land that way. And if none of those strategies worked, sometimes the settlers would just kill everyone in the indigenous village: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnadenhutten_massacre
Manhattan Beach, CA stole a piece of land from a black family through eminent domain in the early 20th Century. They just recently made things right and came to a settlement with the family. Better late than never.
So who should the real owner of the stone ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Museum_of_Brazil_fire
This is a question I find fascinating too.
Wind mills were probably good enought for seed?
Egyptians did have batteries, BTW.
Another angle, with the TL;DR of "There was no such thing a industrial revolution, ever":
Also, if you look at the numeric history of the combined agricultural/industrial throughput of mankind, there was no such thing as a time period for a single industrial revolution. The logarithmic scale of aforementioned output show no peaks, but rather that we made so far made the same speeding up slope in growth every year for all the history we can guess an estimate for.
Building the pyramids must involve a lot of advanced techniques in a cooperative effort involving a lot of specialists. They didn't have gas or petrol but managed to develop an advanced technology on glass, quarrying, agriculture and bureaucracy. They had literature, and this is an huge step. Any advance towards making machines or doing science would be diverted towards supporting war and religion and kept secret probably
"The Great Divergence or European miracle is the socioeconomic shift in which the Western world (i.e. Western Europe and the parts of the New World where its people became the dominant populations) overcame pre-modern growth constraints and emerged during the 19th century as the most powerful and wealthy world civilization, eclipsing the Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, Qing China, Tokugawa Japan, and Joseon Korea. "
These questions are complex to answer and the answer isn't really one: how many things didnt we do in Europe we could have done if this or that guy had not died or whatever.
But, usually Europe's industrial revolution is explained by mathematical maturity, political reforms towards individualism, large cross pollination between countries, tolerance of atheism, absence of abudant resources pushing towards mecanisation, outside enemies disappearing, older generation dead or tamed by previous wars liberating the youth,the slow penetration of reading skills in the entire population thanks to the printing press, the liberation of working capital thanks to the transition to paper money, the enforcement of mandatory schooling for more and more children: it's a miraculous convergence of factors, that allowed us to wait for thousands of years before we were ready to seize the opportunity finally to try stuff fearlessly without oppressing traditions to respect.
It's like today why the Netherland can innovate in electro lithography almost without caring while China can send billions to loyal political executives and only produce death sentences for corruption after a few years of investment: there needs to be a fertile ground to produce an innovative jump that seems to revolve around letting people experiment without too much red tape and frivolous politico religious constraints. It doesnt require capital as much as it requires relinquishing ownership and credit for invention back to the populace so they sort their stuff themselves.