17-7 ka ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, terrible things happened to the world our ancestors lived in. Great ice caps over northern Europe and north America melted down, huge floods ripped across the earth, sea-level rose by more than 100m, and 25m km2 of formerly habitable lands were swallowed up by the waves. Marine archaeology has been possible as a scholarly discipline for 50 years – since the introduction of scuba. In that time, only 500 submerged sites have been found worldwide containing the remains of any form of man-made structure or of lithic artifacts. Of these sites only 100 are more than 3 ka old.
you’ll definitely need UAV to scour millions of square kilometers
Elected representatives on committees that established policy at the highest level were motivated by base self-interest, expediency, and petty rivalries. They were not only ignorant, but uninterested in educating themselves. Given a choice between saving public money and spending it, they preferred to spend it. Allowed the option of destroying a city or leaving it unscathed, they opted to destroy it. Forced to choose between maximizing human suffering on innocent civilians or minimizing it, they chose to maximize it.
a must-read piece on sam cohen, the inventor of the neutron bomb, which he concluded, quite legitimately, was the most moral weapon ever developed. if history education were designed to prevent the eternal rehashing of mistakes, this is what would be taught. we get to obsess over times and places, instead of explaining the (lack of) thinking behind events that shaped the world. my history education was fairly short on recent developments, and i had to learn about game theory and nuclear deterrence on my own. considering how much they shaped the world we live in, i wish there was more emphasis on them. one way to do that might be to start from the present and work backwards. this would make sure you don’t run out of time just as you get to the present (happened in my high school, for sure), and would put the weight on what is probably most important today. on the other hand, one might argue that in order to understand the present, you need to be more mature, and therefore you are first presented with all these tales about ages past, until you grow up enough to hear the juicy stuff. another option might be to work with the arcs of history that philip bobbitt had in his excellent the shield of achilles.
Some 4 hours drive from Axum – plus a further 2 hours stiff uphill walk from the point where the road ends – lies the spectacular monastery of Debra Damo, situated on an isolated cliff top in one of the wildest parts of Tigray. Damo is unique and unforgettable although, as with most Ethiopian monasteries, women are not allowed to enter it. Even so, there is a daunting obstacle to the monastery: the only means of access is a climb of 25 meters up a sheer cliff. Monks lower a safety rope which visitors tie around their waists. Then they use a second, thicker rope to climb with. Some may reflect, as they make their way to the top, that because of this arduous, dangerous ascent the art treasures of Debra Damo have remained intact through the monastery’s 1400 tumultuous years of history.
when the history channel is not showing yet another nazi documentary (yawn), it’s pure crack.
2013-12-19: Over 100 years ago, archaeologists discovered a 2 ka old trash dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, chock full of 1000s of ancient documents, and preserved by the desert and pure chance. From Wikipedia on Oxyrhynchus:
Because Egyptian society under the Greeks and Romans was governed bureaucratically, and because Oxyrhynchus was the capital of the 19th nome, the material at the Oxyrhynchus dumps included vast amounts of paper. Accounts, tax returns, census material, invoices, receipts, correspondence on administrative, military, religious, economic, and political matters, certificates and licenses of all kinds—all these were periodically cleaned out of government offices, put in wicker baskets, and dumped out in the desert. Private citizens added their own piles of unwanted paper. Because papyrus was expensive, paper was often reused: a document might have farm accounts on one side, and a student’s text of Homer on the other. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, therefore, contained a complete record of the life of the town, and of the civilizations and empires of which the town was a part.
In the century since they were uncovered, only a small fraction of the 1000 briefcase-sized storage boxes of papyrus fragments have been edited and published. There are ongoing efforts to speed this up using multispectral imaging, high resolution CT scanning, and transcription by crowdsourcing.
2013-12-23: Using CT imaging at the micron instead of a millimeter scale to virtually unroll a scroll and bring the libraries of Herculaneum back to life.
However, unraveling was still a problem so scientists kept searching for a mechanism by which to examine the scrolls while they remained closed.
A computer science professor from the University of Kentucky thought he had the answer. Working with 2 preserved Herculaneum scrolls, Brent Seales used micro-CT imaging techniques to attempt to “virtually unroll a scroll.” Micro-CT works at a higher resolution than regular CT scans, operating on the much-smaller micron scale instead of a millimeter scale. Experiments on similar objects seemed promising.
Hundreds of papyrus rolls, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD and belonging to the only library passed on from Antiquity, were discovered 260 years ago at Herculaneum. These carbonized papyri are extremely fragile and are inevitably damaged or destroyed in the process of trying to open them to read their contents. In recent years, new imaging techniques have been developed to read the texts without unwrapping the rolls. Until now, specialists have been unable to view the carbon-based ink of these papyri, even when they could penetrate the different layers of their spiral structure. Here for the first time, we show that X-ray phase-contrast tomography can reveal various letters hidden inside the precious papyri without unrolling them.
2022-03-09: Now combine this with ML to make sense of text fragments.
Ancient history relies on disciplines such as epigraphy—the study of inscribed texts known as inscriptions—for evidence of the thought, language, society and history of past civilizations. However, over the centuries, many inscriptions have been damaged to the point of illegibility, transported far from their original location and their date of writing is steeped in uncertainty. Here we present Ithaca, a deep neural network for the textual restoration, geographical attribution and chronological attribution of ancient Greek inscriptions. Ithaca is designed to assist and expand the historian’s workflow. The architecture of Ithaca focuses on collaboration, decision support and interpretability. While Ithaca alone achieves 62% accuracy when restoring damaged texts, the use of Ithaca by historians improved their accuracy from 25% to 72%, confirming the synergistic effect of this research tool. Ithaca can attribute inscriptions to their original location with an accuracy of 71% and can date them to less than 30 years of their ground-truth ranges, redating key texts of Classical Athens and contributing to topical debates in ancient history. This research shows how models such as Ithaca can unlock the cooperative potential between artificial intelligence and historians, transformationally impacting the way that we study and write about one of the most important periods in human history.
There would have been a great deal else. Literature, history, science. Epistolaries, miscellanies, essays. Memoirs, novels, biographies. Satires. The work of orators and poets. Philosophy and mathematics. Scientific studies and technical manuals. Dictionaries and encyclopedias; and more. For example, a prominent Latin collector near to Rome is likely to have had the epistolaries (published letter collections) of Cicero. While we already have copies of those, finding editions scribed within decades of his death would still be of considerable use. More importantly, medieval Christians chose not to preserve almost all ancient literature; so there could be epistolaries from other authors here, famous and obscure. And even poets and orators and novelists, besides being priceless to recover just in respect to the history of art, would also have commented on various subjects of importance, such as popular religion and events.
Gladiator combat had become a martial art by the beginning of the first millennium. To amuse the crowds around the arena the gladiators would display broad fighting skills rather than fight for their lives. “Gladiatorial combat is seen as being related to killing and shedding blood. But I think that what we are seeing is an entertaining martial art that was spectator-oriented.”.
it would be interesting to pit the panem et circenses of those times against the ESPN of today. some starting points
It’s _really_ amusing to look at AOL today and say “I know why users are limited to 10-character names.“, and see many other elements of the original PlayNet design unchanged (even though the reason for them is LONG gone). For example, the 10-character name limit was largely based on how many screen names we could display in the room header in chat within 4(?) 40-character lines on a C64 screen. Ditto the screen-name defaults (I remember us sitting around BS’ing about how we’d handle that, and conflicts- so now you have JoeS12345.)
this is Nefertiti’s tomb. Tutankhamun has been sleeping on the couch in his mother-in-law’s living room.
2022-02-14:
More than 170 pharaohs ruled across 30 dynasties for more than 3 ka; Tutankhamun ruled for only 10 years, starting at age 8. The King’s accomplishments, many of them undertaken by one of his advisers, who succeeded Tutankhamun as pharaoh, amounted to reversing his father’s cultural reforms: he restored Thebes (now Luxor) as the capital of the New Kingdom and returned to polytheism after Akhenaten had promoted the worship of Aten above all other gods. (Born Tutankhaten, he changed his name to reflect his renewed worship of Amun-Ra.) Before the discovery of his tomb, he was rarely mentioned in histories of Egypt. Today, many more people can recount his biography than that of Neferkare, thought to have reigned the longest of any pharaoh, for between 64 and 94 years, starting when he was 6; or that of Khufu, who was buried in the Great Pyramid of Giza; or even that of Ramses II, who is regarded as the most powerful of all the ancient rulers of Egypt. More children have worshipped Tutankhamun during the past 100 years than ever did in his lifetime; whatever his authority in the ancient world, he now rules over the kingdom populated by dinosaurs and pirates, horses and astronauts.
This age old saying comes from the days of public hangings. On the day of execution the condemned man would be taken from the prison and driven down the main thoroughfare of the town through screaming crowds, to the gallows. It was customary at the time for him to be given a drink from every ale house that stood between him and the rope, (which could be as many as 20) the intention being to make the poor soul completely bladdered before reaching the rope, thus making his passing easier. Hence, ‘One for the road‘.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 