The Dendera Dating Controversy | Hacker News Reader

The Dendera Dating Controversy

historytoday.com

56 pointssamizdis41 comments

“Joseph Fourier is now famous for the scientific equations that bear his name, but two centuries ago he was prominent in the world of Egyptologists.”

In fact, as it’s related, it was at Fourier’s house that Champollion first saw the hieroglyphs as an early teen, and, hearing that no one can read them, decided to dedicate his life to their decipherment.

An interesting tangential thought inspired by the article: nowadays it’s common for scientists to be lectured that in addition to truth they also need to consider how their findings will be used; that, if it’s possible that a finding may bolster the wrong argument, maybe it’s better not to undertake that research. I wonder what Champollion thought about this, given how his dating of the artifact supported the religious side that he knew was wrong.

> that, if it’s possible that a finding may bolster the wrong argument, maybe it’s better not to undertake that research

Really? That's horrific.

I suspect it is a paraphrase of the Nature (journal portfolio) "research ethics guidance" published in 2022. That guidance claims an ethical imperative to avoid "indirect" causation of "harm". Here is a quote from the editorial announcing the update:

> Harms can also arise indirectly, as a result of the publication of a research project or a piece of scholarly communication – for instance, stigmatization of a vulnerable human group or potential use of the results of research for unintended purposes (e.g., public policies that undermine human rights or misuse of information to threaten public health). -- Nature Human Behaviour

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2

Hence, according to the publishers of the Nature journal portfolio, if a finding could be used to support a policy which would cause a negative effect for some "vulnerable human group", or which might cause them to be subject to further stigmatization, then there is a moral imperative to not undertake or to not publish that scientific research.

If you are interested in those who have critiqued the editorial and the new guidance, I'd refer you to this post at Heterodox STEM:

https://hxstem.substack.com/p/ideological-mandates-in-publis...

Alternatively, the editorial staff at Nature offer their endorsement of their own policy here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01607-0

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? / That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun.

Building rockets for military purposes is quite different from scientific research.

Seems very unlikely to be the case.

I think this is a distortion between "factually incorrect" and "morally wrong", a reminder to be very careful about results on humans which are going to be used as pro-discrimination arguments.

Images of the piece in question, both actual and reconstructed with original colors from when it had paint:

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

that colored image would look fantastic if i were an ant

> For the rest of his life, what happened next remained a closely guarded secret between Champollion and his elder brother. As he gazed at the remaining inscriptions, he realised that all the cartouches were empty – and that included the one supposedly carrying the crucial word autocrator. Champollion had unwittingly been putting forward false arguments that strengthened the position of his opponents.

> It remains unclear whether the perpetrators of this error simply made a mistake or intentionally faked the evidence. Even so, Champollion has since been vindicated: the Zodiac is now believed to have been created in the first century bc during the reign of Cleopatra VII

Given that the drawings were made by people who could not read the text, I don't see how it can be unclear whether they intentionally faked the evidence? In that scenario, what would they have thought they were doing?

That's clearly from an Ancient Cartouche from the Goa'uld era, before Ra left the earth and the stargate was buried. The symbols are clearly chevrons! That places it at least pre-2995 B.C. which is predynastic, not even Old Kingdom yet.

For anyone who doesn't understand the above comment, it's a reference to the movie Stargate, where the pyramids end up being primitive landing pads created by human slave labour for parasitic aliens posing as human gods.

It sounds like a generic Hollywood knockoff of newage psuedoscience, but it ends up being an enjoyable sci-fi series centred on wormhole travel and how technologically superior civilisations can fall.

> It sounds like a generic Hollywood knockoff of newage psuedoscience, but it ends up being an enjoyable sci-fi series centred on wormhole travel and how technologically superior civilisations can fall.

That's what the US Air Force intended all along! #FalseFlag

there's even an episode about them making TV show based on the Stargates as a cover-up, completing the cycle of meta.

Wormhole X-Treme!

Champillon was lucky to come out alive. Crawling into confined spaces in high temperatures risks finding yourself compromised, heat stressed and in low oxygen environments.

They never show you Indy dropping down into the tomb and collapsing due to excess CO2.

Yeah, or inhaling the few thousand years of bone dust etc. in environments with minimal to no air flow.

Still they are on point for rats and snakes

What's with "bc" being lower case in the article?

I thought we'd all settled on BCE now anyway?

At first I thought there was a controversy about zodiac-based dating being a thing in ancient Egypt.

Couldn't a zodiac be dated through the configuration of the stars?

Probably not. It's not really a star chart and astrologers tend to not update their zodiac as precession causes drift over time.

https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/what-is-the-zodiac...

Your wikipedia link indicates that the current dating of the Dendera zodiac is based on the configuration of the planets within it.

I didn't read it. I was interested in a better image.

Though planets used to be called wandering stars, stars and planets are not the same thing. If this piece actually contains a planetary configuration, that's a fairly reliable means to identify a timeframe, yes.

At least one article about exactly that process has appeared on HN before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33943509

Zodiac is the wheel of signs based on constellations and the word is not synonymous with "astrological chart."

That’s a good link. Sidereal time is interesting. Like a Mercury day is longer than it’s year. Wild

This intrigued me, so I looked it up. Sadly, your memory doesn’t seem to be correct. Mercury’s day is 59 earth days and its year is 88 earth days.

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/planet-mercury.html

There are two different definitions of "day". The sidereal day is the time it takes for a body to complete a full 360° rotation about its axis. The synodic day is the time between success zenith passings of the parent body. If the body rotates in the same direction as its orbits, the synodic day is longer than the sidereal day; if its rotation is in the opposite direction, the sidereal day is longer.

On Earth, the synodic day is 24 hours long, and the sidereal day is about 4 minutes shorter. In the case of Mercury, the sidereal day is 59 Earth days and the synodic day is 176 Earth days. Note that the synodic day is the one we on Earth use to define the length of a day for timekeeping purposes--it's a lot easier to measure synodic time than sidereal time.

It depends on the definition of a “day” that you use, but due to Mercury’s elliptical orbit sunrises and sunsets are weird. [1] It takes 59 Earth days for the planet to revolve once around its axis, but from the surface it takes 176 Earth days to observe the sun making a complete circuit of the sky.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/mercury/in-depth.amp

This is the weirdest thing at that link:

> But when Mercury is moving fastest in its elliptical orbit around the Sun (and it is closest to the Sun), each rotation is not accompanied by sunrise and sunset like it is on most other planets. The morning Sun appears to rise briefly, set, and rise again from some parts of the planet's surface.

>> France’s Elgin Marbles?

The Louvre has several Parthenon marbles. I don't know where they got them from but I don't understand why nobody is asking that they be returned like the ones looted by Elgin. They absolutely should.

Also, they have the Nike of Samothrace and the Aphrodite of Milos, both of which are Greek archeological treasures that should be returned to Greece. And many more besides from Egypt and mesopotamia (the Lamassu from the palace of Sargon II!) that don't belong in, nor, to France.

Cue the usual arguments for and against return of these items. Both sides have very persuasive and compelling arguments to me.

Recently Brazil managed to recover a feathered dinosaur fossil unlawfully smuggled out of the country by German researchers. See:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/one-of-a-...

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

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