Excavated: 52 Egyptian Mummies. Over a Dozen Had Mysterious Golden Tongues | Hacker News Reader

Excavated: 52 Egyptian Mummies. Over a Dozen Had Mysterious Golden Tongues

popularmechanics.com

66 pointsbookofjoe34 comments

“Creation was first a spiritual and intellectual activity, facilitated by the divine heart (thought) and tongue (speech/word) of Ptah”

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

Ptah is the Egyptian god of creation and design, for any creatives or designers out there looking for a deity

"It was brought back (to England) as ballast" !!?!

great link

Headline: mysterious golden tongues

First paragraph: the idea behind the golden tongues was that they would help the deceased speak in the afterlife

Interesting, but ambivalent if removing them in the name of science is any more valid than removing them to sell? I'm not sure the occupants would make the distinction .

Once the tombs have been discovered, how long until regular grave robbers make their appearance to “take care” of them? At least this way the finds are open to scientific examination instead of being molten down and sold for profit.

I've never quite understood how it is so easy for people to rationalize this thought-process: “<X := some motivation assumed to be widely shared like greed> means that someone will <Y := do some morally-questionable to morally-unacceptable act>;” therefore, if the speaker's motivation is even arguably less bad than X, it somehow justifies the speaker doing exactly Y first.

Recovering artifacts “for science” almost never benefits humanity in the short-term (and it's questionable if the average case fares better over the long-term). More often than not over our history, it has involved desecration and has enabled essentialism, and serves to benefit private collectors more than any other party (frequently to the exclusion of scientists).

Maybe the energy used to “get there first” would be better put towards making sure the burial remains are respected, or at least ensuring that whatever descendants remain are given legal stewardship.

All the best,

> it somehow justifies the speaker doing exactly Y first.

I think you have a difficult time understanding it because you're equating two things that aren't equal. They aren't doing "exactly Y" if Y is "robbing a grave purely for personal profit without consulting with anyone else first". There is a difference between grave robbing and getting permits from governments, researching, displaying findings in a way that benefits others, etc.. The fact that there is an article in popular mechanics about this means that it isn't "exactly Y".

> Whatever descendants remain are given legal stewardship.

After 2000 years, those mummies either have too many descendants to count, or none at all.

Early egyptology wasnt about science. Ancient egypt was backdrop to many stories from the bible. Historians were looking to learn more about those events from a literate culture that lived alongside them. They were hoping to confirm or elaborate upon christianity. Only later, after almost zero mention was found, did egyptology evolve away from being a religious mission.

Mummies scientifically preserved in museums and visited by hordes of people from all over the world. Scientists and historians trying to learn about thier lives, even trying to rediscover thier words. The pharaohs might appreciate the effort. They didnt biuld such elaborate funeral structures to be forgotten.

Growing up in a mid-sized midwestern city with an art museum and resident mummy, the mummy and room of Egyptian artifacts was honestly one of the most exciting and main reasons for going to the museum besides the rest of the art. Hopefully they would see the Memphis Bass Pro as tribute.

Well, they are dead, so probably the "occupants" have no feelings about it. Should we be concerned with how rocks feel too?

My wife and I have had conversations about exhuming human remains in pursuit of science a number of times, and I haven't quite been able to settle on when or why it is or is not appropriate. In a personal context - it seems a violation of one's own choices (granted that those choices might not be one's own). But the scientific community doesn't seem overly concerned with that - and the learning opportunities are significant to me.

Does anyone else have these ambiguous uncertainties about this kind of stuff?

Some ways one could approach it:

Religious: the body is connected to a spirit and should be protected.

Familial: the body is scared to individuals who knew the person.

Cultural:; the body represents a current people, and to exhume it makes them feel dehumanized.

Legal: the body is property and property rights are to be respected.

Seems like with ancient Egyptian mummies none of those are relevant. The modern Egyptians have moved on from the old faiths, none trace their lineage to those mummies, culturally they are proud of them, legally there has been too much churn for the old claims to be relevant.

A more-general question is whether archaeology should be done at all. Some have argued that future imaging technologies will render it completely unnecessary to dig and displace artifacts, and that future archaeologists and anthropologists will curse us for trashing untold volumes of evidence because we couldn't stand to wait.

I don't really buy that, especially in the absence of any clues regarding what these magical 'future imaging technologies' might turn out to be, but it's an interesting argument to consider. It would certainly have applied many decades ago, and if we say it doesn't apply now, then where was the cutoff?

It might be that thousands of years is enough time that your body and everything about you has fully passed beyond any claim you ever had on it and now belongs to the world at large.

hey at least people aren't eating them anymore...

https://www.chefsresource.com/why-did-victorians-eat-mummies...

Speak for yourself

"When there's a literal curse protecting the body" might be a good start.

I think you might be talking about a "body farm"

There are many organizations and universities that perform similar research. I.e forensic anthropology

Charles Stross has a book about it. The time will be right very soon again

Looks like Reddit is leaking into HN again.

I think there is a certain affinity between working for YC funded company and enjoying the Laundry Files series and more here compared to the great proletariat gathering

Stross posts here fairly regularly.

Why will the time be right very soon again? I’m googling for more info and the top result is your comment.

Stross's Laundry Files series covers a government agency working to prevent eldritch incursions caused by the rise of readily available computation. Lovecraft, with a big touch of common tropes parody and early 2000s IT humor.

What does it have to do with golden mummy tongues though?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyarlathotep shows up in a significant role, as do nasty replacement tongues, among other things. As do space Nazis, elves, vampires and the like.

As a side note, it's crazy how fast HN comments get into google search results these days.

Not just Google. A couple weeks back I saw pretty strong evidence of OpenAI ingesting an HN comment of mine and regurgitating it in ChatGPT within 10-15 minutes of posting.

This is the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42649774

I asked Deep Research why your comment appeared in it's training data, and it said it doesn't generally have near real time data in it's responses unless it's conducting a real time web search. It thinks it found the answer from pulling together and combining these sources: https://www.animatsiya.net/films.php?search=%D0%B3%D0%BE%D1%... + https://ask.metafilter.com/182144/Whats-this-cartoon-with-a-... + https://www.city-data.com/forum/tv/2017670-dies-anyone-remem... - however it also said it has been trained on youtube comments generally and it's hard to know how many uploads might exist with comments referencing the time stamp, as well as forums that have been included in it's training data that are not indexed by google, but that it itself didn't think it was coming from HN. Who knows. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The suspicious part is that ChatGPT did not have any kind of answer when the parent poster checked before posting. Yet soon after my reply it suddenly not only had the answer, but also used many of the same words and had the exact same timestamp. A little too close to be a coincidence, IMO.

What did the book say and what time?

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