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Comment by mablopoule | Hacker News Reader

I sometime wonder if in the 25th century people will be searching for the exact location of Hogwarts from Harry Potter.

To be fair, Troy was also mostly thought to be mystical before Heinrich Schliemann went on a quest to find it (and subsequently destroyed most of it as he used explosives to perform archeological digs).

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The funny thing is this has already happened. They erected a platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross. The only problem being that a) it doesn’t even vaguely correspond to the description in the book and b) in fact, from the description it’s likely they were actually talking about old St Pancras station.

Well they couldn't put it in St. Pancras because that was already in use by former Norse gods waiting to get into Valhalla.

https://www.scld.org/st-pancras-station-sparks-imaginations/

Life imitates art.

There's no reason to believe that what Evans found was the mythological Troy (note the "mythological"). Maybe it was the city called Wilusa by the Hittites, or maybe it wasn't, and maybe Wilusa was Troy ("Ilion") or maybe it wasn't. There's no way to know for sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_the_Iliad#Hitti...

Homer certainly didn't give a super detailed description of Troy's location. The Iliad is an epic poem not a historical account. The Homeric Question is a debate almost as ancient as the Iliad, after all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question

As to Schleimann, he was certainly all too ready to "discover" elements of the Homeric epics. For example, "the mask of Agamemnon":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_of_Agamemnon

Or "The Jewels of Helen":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priam%27s_Treasure#/media/File...

The one i like is imagining some poor schnook of a grad student in 500 years writing a dissertation on “american pie” and the complex interrelationship of food culture and religion, and if the Jester in the song is the same as the joker that batman killed (or didn’t), and if so was he talking to the thief in the watchtower — and what really does that have to do with band camp?!

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2017/10/12/bye-bye...

Evidence supports that it is, in fact, located just outside of Orlando, FL.

Unfortunately it was mostly demolished by the explosives used to dig it up

Or on the banks of Loch Shiel in Scotland?

[NB This is based on me recognising the landscape in some of the movies, apparently the books say it is near Dufftown - which is on the other side of Scotland].

I had also assumed it was the school on Lauriston Place in Edinburgh, but apparently that's definitely not true...

i.e. George Heriots

Definitely is true. She also sent her own kids there.

Apparently Rowling thought of Hogwarts before moving to Edinburgh - but it seems a bit of a coincidence that Heriots school is right next to the graveyard with Tom Riddle's grave:

https://www.pottertour.co.uk/blog/george-heriots-school-harr...

Mind you - I'm not really that big a Harry Potter fan but I did live in that part of Edinburgh for many years and my son went to Heriots after adventures at other schools...

"We know that they generally had good diplomatic relationships and there was a great deal of cross-border trade, but the historical record is still unclear about the exact relationship between the United States of America and the Magic Kingdom."

The way things are going, history may see you as the Nostradamus of this century.

I'll take it.

Over drinks one night, Cardozo shared with Brosnan a short, somewhat cheeky passage in DeMille's 1959 autobiography in which the director cryptically confirmed the burial. The book's section reads: "If, 1,000 years from now, archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilisation... extended all the way to the Pacific Coast of North America… The sphinxes they will find were buried there when we had finished with them."

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230212-a-city-under-the...

FUTURE ARCHAEOLOGIST: "We've found what we believe to be the ruins of Platform 9 3/4." [gestures at ruins of Slough railway station]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/221B_Baker_Street

Humans model their world on stories.

The scene opens on a world that appears totally primitive. People are naked, people are orgiastic, people are nomadic. But when they close their eyes there are menus hanging in space. Culture has been internalized. Culture is supposed to be internalized. All this talk about virtual reality - people don't seem to notice - this is a virtual reality. These are all ideas - ideas that have been forced into matter so that we could live in a reconstruction of our imagination. And de-constructing these virtual realities in which we live is the only way to get back to some sort of baseline of what it is to be human. - Terence McKenna

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