Archaeometallurgical investigation of the Nebra Sky Disc | Hacker News Reader

Archaeometallurgical investigation of the Nebra Sky Disc

nature.com

76 pointsArchelaos18 comments

Would you have deduced that stars are distant suns if you'd lived in the ancient world?

Apparently the only pre-modern people (i.e. pre-Giordano Bruno) recorded as making the claim were Anaxagoras, and Aristarchus of Samos, but their ideas were completely rejected by contemporaries.

In retrospect, it just seems so blindingly obvious that I'm tempted to believe that I too would have seen through the Aristotelean BS. But surely there must be aspects of reality that will seem similarly obvious to future generations, and yet I don't feel any insights coming on.

I should say, Aristarchus is the ideal of maximizing information from minimal data:

>Aristarchus of Samos (Samos is a Greek island in the Aegean Sea) lived from about 310 to 230 BC, about 2250 years ago. He measured the size and distance of the Sun and, though his observations were inaccurate, found that the Sun is much larger than the Earth. Aristarchus then suggested that the small Earth orbits around the big Sun rather than the other way around, and he also suspected that stars were nothing but distant suns, but his ideas were rejected and later forgotten, and he, too, was threatened for suggesting such things

http://solar-center.stanford.edu/FAQ/Qsunasstar.html

A Pythagorean. The pythagoreans taught that there were 10 celestial bodies, but they could only observe 9, so they proposed a counter earth that could not be seen — behind the sun. Aristotle mocks them for this idea, but the idea implies rotation around the sun.

Does it? If the sun were rotating around the Earth, there could still be another planet behind it, rotating synchronously with it.

At least from the point of view of the Greek, who didn't know how gravitation works in detail.

Possibly. But I believe the mechanism for the movement of the planets was believed to be crystal spheres.

Another possibility is that the Pythagoreans actually described the earth rotating around a central fire or Hestia. If that wasn’t the sun, it might have been the center of the earth — and the counter earth was actually the antipodes.

When you see the source texts describing these things, it is terribly vague. Yet, Copernicus described himself as bringing back the Pythagorean ideas—

> five-phase reconstruction of the development of the imagery on the disc seems to be the likeliest sequence for the disc’s development. In the earliest version, an elaborately encoded image reflects sophisticated astronomical knowledge. In subsequent stages this was forgotten and replaced by traditional knowledge, which was focused on the interaction of the heavenly bodies and the horizon; and finally, this reduced knowledge gave way to mythology

It's interesting that the oldest part of the artifact has the most advanced astronomical information.

It’s only relatively recently in history that we have relatively reliable methods for passing on knowledge. It is probable that all the “firsts” we know about were just the first occurrence that survived. It is probable that astronomical knowledge like this was discovered and forgotten and discovered over and over again, until finally it persisted.

Not just passing knowledge but having disparate regimes mutually value that same knowledge. Quite a shift happened between the times when the Romans would kill an Archimedes to what we’ve seen very recently in WWII where scientists would be spared even from the legal system due to the perceived value of their technical knowledge by the victors.

Definitely one of the most awe-inspiring museum visits for me in Germany.

https://www.himmelsscheibe-erleben.de/

> The state of Saxony-Anhalt registered the disc as a trademark, which resulted in two lawsuits. In 2003, Saxony-Anhalt successfully sued the city of Querfurt for depicting the disc design on souvenirs. Saxony-Anhalt also successfully sued the publishing houses Piper and Heyne over an abstract depiction of the disc on book covers.

> The defenders argued that as a cult object, the disc had already been "published" approximately 3,500 years earlier in the Bronze Age and that consequently, all protection of intellectual property associated with it has long expired.

This is really silly, and disappointed if this is valid under DE/EU law. This is our shared history, not a trademark

Not only that, Saxony-Anhalt filed a recent DMCA takedown notice against Wikimedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disc):

> In 2023, the state of Saxony-Anhalt filed a DMCA take down notice requesting removal of nine images of the Nebra sky disc from Wikimedia Commons, asserting that they were the "owner of the exclusive copyright in the Sky Disk of Nebra". Wikimedia Deutschland, a chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, subsequently filed a DMCA counter-notice stating that since the implementation of Article 14 of the Directive 2019/790 of the European Parliament, there can be no such copyrights on reproductions of visual works that are in the public domain.

A modern person interprets this as a sky map. But it some round and cresent shapes on a field of dots. Not sure they drew the sky like that in the Bronze age? What evidence is there, that it's supposed to represent the sky?

The stars are no evidence. A bunch of dots can be stretched to fit any star configuration you please.

And there are way too many crescents. What, did we have three moons back then? And none of them are shaped anything like the actual moon looks at any time.

Hm.

I’m sure the authors of this paper that was published in one of the premiere scientific journals and the authors of all of the works they cite did not consider these elementary questions whatsoever and will appreciate your insight.

Ha. Wasn't asking them. Was asking you guys. But thanks for the informative and helpful response.

Why would you ask the other commenters on Hacker News this, to try to work it out from first principles? It looked more like you were trying to cast doubt on the work these scientists have done because you’re either reflexively contrarian, think they’re making it up, or both.

If you really want to know, the paper has citations, and those references will have citations as well.

The Wikipedia entry includes notes on the hypothesized history of modifications to the disk. For example, the non-solar arcs were probably added later (different gold). So the original version had just the lunar crescent.

Archaeometallurgical, If we allow words with 94 bits of entropy why do we need some words with 3 or 4 different different meanings?

Because we get to have sentences like this:

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

Because we value conciseness over preciseness.

If given enough time and use, we would probably shorten "Archaeometallurgical" to "arcmet" or even "arc" in speech.

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