Oldest Known Animation, a 5200 Year-Old Iranian Ceramic Vessel | Hacker News Reader

Oldest Known Animation, a 5200 Year-Old Iranian Ceramic Vessel

vintag.es

82 pointsdxs18 comments

A similar concept - cave paintings were possibly animated by the movement of fire as a light source:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ice-age-artist...

That's wild! I can picture them rotating the cup around its base to entertain guests. It seems as if it was designed expressly for that purpose.

The site is also the earliest known example of a prosthetic eyeball: https://iranparadise.com/shahr-e-sukhteh/

Both that article and the linked above have confusing dates in them. In one paragraph it talks about a timeline of 5 centuries ago while in others 4000 years.

The linked article above talks about a timeline of 5200 years but also second and third century BCE. Is there some strange translation error going on or is the same sort of typo seeping into both?

Was the text AI generated perhaps?

There's also a hypothesis that the multiple superimposed legs drawn on certain cave paintings is a proto-animation. For example the boar from Altamira whose legs are in various poses of its stride.

I always think of that as a form of cubism, but I suppose I should say that cubism is a call-back to those early efforts.

I associate cubism with multiple viewing angles of a single thing, as opposed to multiple things viewed from a single angle. But definitely agreed that cubism was a rediscovery of a lot of earlier artistic traditions of interpretation that fell out of favor during the ascendance of "realism."

I could imagine someone spinning a pottery wheel to see the animation moving. Wikipedia cites the slow wheel as being invented 4500 BC, so that seems possible.

Kids could run around it too, for the same effect.

The animations poses are actually very impressive, it is something I would more associate with a modern platform game.

The rotate-on-pottery-wheel idea requires a slit to view through? But that's not hard to imagine doing back then - hold up your two hands pinkies together with a gap.

I think you also need some sort of shutter or intermittent light source to actually see the illusion of animation. You could do this by rapidly opening and closing the gap between your fingers.

Other finds at this location.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahr-e_Sukhteh#Finds

Probably looks best in candle light and on top of the pottery wheel.

Finally we know who invented the animated GIF, and moving pictures in general. I wonder why we haven't been sued for copyright infringement yet. The accumulated damages must be worth several fortunes.

wonder what the fps on that animation would be?

Probably lower than the FPS on your average comic book panel

why, it'd entirely depend on how many rpms the 'vessel' can do. that could be more than comic book panel.

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