[HN Gopher] Two hundred years ago, the Rosetta Stone unlocked th...
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Two hundred years ago, the Rosetta Stone unlocked the secrets of
ancient Egypt
Author : rntn
Score : 75 points
Date : 2022-09-27 12:28 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| pseingatl wrote:
| Champollion's achievement was bad news for Joseph Smith. See,
| *The Book of Abraham."
| scrapcode wrote:
| So, basically, it showed that he was completely making up his
| 'translations' of hieroglyphs to say what he wanted them to say
| while pinning them as words of God?
| bobsmooth wrote:
| So glad I was able to see it when I went to the British Museum.
| keepquestioning wrote:
| Why didnt Egyptians get industrial revolution or electricity?
| lordnacho wrote:
| Are there coal deposits there? And some kind of use for the
| energy?
| danschuller wrote:
| When the same is asked of the Romans a common reply is that
| they had a mass of slave labour and that removes some of the
| incentives for automation. But the Egyptians didn't even have
| much knowledge of making iron until very late - contemporary
| with ancient Greece or Rome.
|
| This is a question I find fascinating too.
| ncmncm wrote:
| You can still walk right up to the Rosetta Stone in the British
| Museum. It always has a big crowd around it. Don't bother taking
| a picture of it, there are lots.
|
| There are certain rockfaces in Australia covered with authentic
| hieroglyphs, discovered last century sometime. Some of the glyphs
| used only appeared in dictionaries in this century. Experts who
| have examined it date the vocabulary used to late period, close
| to 2000 years ago, just a few centuries before hieroglyphs were
| abandoned and forgotten.
|
| People in antiquity did get around. Just not always on an
| industrial scale.
| TSiege wrote:
| Never heard of these glyphs in Australia before, but they seem
| to have been debunked as fake pretty quickly. (Sources 1, 2)
|
| That being said, Indigenous Australians of New South Wales
| (where these phony glyphs are) have done a lot of impressive
| things themselves and have an amazing history to learn an
| appreciate all their own. The most famous I'm aware of was the
| complex societies built upon massive fishery management.
| (Sources 3, 4)
|
| Sources:
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosford_Glyphs
|
| 2: https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/blogs/tim-the-
| yowie-...
|
| 3:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewarrina_Aboriginal_Fish_Tra...
|
| 4: https://asia.nikkei.com/Life-Arts/Life/Ancient-Aboriginal-
| fi...
| ncmncm wrote:
| It is always easy to claim things are a hoax. You don't even
| need to look at them. How the hoaxers found out about glyphs
| that had not been published yet seems to need explanation.
| And that they actually spell words and sentences not about
| gods or pharaohs, as sequences copied would have.
|
| The Ceruti mastodon butchered near San Diego 130,000 ya is
| one people tried really hard to debunk, and are now forced to
| admit is real. Nobody has a clue if it was H.s, H.n, H.e, or
| "others".
| wl wrote:
| If you copy signs from a Greco-Roman period inscription,
| chances are good you'll copy a sign that's missing from
| some Greco-Roman sign lists. There are just so many more
| signs used in that period than the earlier periods--and the
| work of cataloging them is still ongoing.
|
| Looking at various pictures, I see many mistakes and the
| signs are badly copied. Even assuming Egypt sent their
| worst scribes to Australia, why would they be copying
| fragments of standard funerary texts--for example--on
| random rock walls far away from anything resembling an
| Egyptian burial?
| ncmncm wrote:
| What funerary texts?
| TSiege wrote:
| I'm all for accepting evidence when it's there. I do
| believe humans have been highly mobile for our entire
| history. Hell, the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians
| migrated to both Australia and Madagascar, proven by the
| fact that Madagascans are genetically much more closely
| related to Aboriginal Australians than Africans. The
| debunking of these glyphs are quite thorough, and looking
| at them as a lay person they look quite fresh. There's even
| a local known nearby aboriginal site that is 250 years old
| and looks it.
|
| As for the mastodon, it's news to me, but I'm highly
| suspect of any positive findings. I believe humans were in
| the Americas before the widely touted 14,000 year mark.
| There's solid evidence that Monte Verde in Chile could be
| 30,000 years old, but maybe just 14,000 years ago. But
| either way that's far into southern Chile begging the
| question of when did humans really first arrive in America.
| But as I said, 130,000 years ago? I'm skeptical, and so are
| most anthropologists from what I'm seeing
| ncmncm wrote:
| Madagascans are related to Indonesians, who like
| Polynesians have been traced back, ultimately, to Taiwan.
| There has been recent mixing with Australians. This
| happened historically quite recently.
|
| The marimba started life as the gamelan. The language is
| also Indonesian.
|
| The arrival is dated only 800ya.
| googlryas wrote:
| No one is forced to admit it is real. In fact, if you read
| the wikipedia article, there are a number of people
| offering alternative explanations to explain the site.
|
| But really, do you think there is a cabal of powerful
| academics who have their identity so wrapped up in "Humans
| only came to the Americas 25,000 years ago", that they
| would try to explain away clear evidence of humans in the
| Americas 130,000 years ago?
| ncmncm wrote:
| Yet, astonishingly, did.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5z3DbmOuaFI
| ncmncm wrote:
| Maybe if you find hominins in North America 130,000 years
| ago difficult to contemplate, you will have greater
| difficulty with 200,000 years?
|
| Look up "Leakey Calico Early Human site". Yes, _that_
| Leakey. National Geographic sponsored work. They dug down
| dozens of feet, kept finding older worked stone. 1960s.
| lock-the-spock wrote:
| I believe up to a few years ago it was the original Rosetta
| stone, but when I last visited 2-3 years ago it was just a copy
| (with a sign explaining why).
| lordleft wrote:
| > (For a sense of just how long ancient Egypt thrived, writes
| Dolnick, consider this: "Cleopatra came at the very end of
| Egypt's imperial run, 13 centuries after King Tut, 20 centuries
| after the golden age of Egyptian literature, 26 centuries after
| the Great Pyramid." To put it in another context, the reign of
| Cleopatra is closer to the year 2022 than it is to when the
| pyramids were built.)
|
| The scale of ancient civilization is always astounding to me.
| retrac wrote:
| As another bit of trivia, when Cleopatra and Caesar were
| together, they toured Egypt. They almost certainly made a stop
| at the Pyramids. (As much of a must-see in Egypt then as now!)
| But they wouldn't have known, not with certainty, who built
| them and when.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| > But they wouldn't have known, not with certainty, who built
| them and when.
|
| Are you referring to the long held contemporary debate on
| whether or not Khufu built the pyramids?
|
| https://www.gaia.com/article/book-of-enoch
| alrlroipsp wrote:
| Or rather the fact that they were like 1800 years old by
| then.
| retrac wrote:
| By the time of Cleopatra, written Egyptian had been dead
| for hundreds of years. No one could read the old
| inscriptions. Herodotus, some ~400 years before may have
| had some access to records in some way, or oral tradition,
| and he wrote an account of Cheops (Khufu) and the
| construction of the Great Pyramid. An event more than 1000
| years before Herodotus himself. How much of Herodotus was
| myth and how much history was already under debate while he
| was still alive, and it still is. Being able to read
| Egyptian gave a whole new perspective in the 19th century:
| Khufu's name is on the king's list at Abydos.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I'm surprised at how such information could be lost over
| generations. Yet, I recall having to read Shakespeare and
| barely being able to glean meaning from the passages
| despite them being written in English. If you go even
| farther back to the works of Chaucer, the text is
| essentially indecipherable for any layperson without a
| teacher. And that is a span of only about 600 years. I
| must admit that even reading the Federalist papers is a
| little difficult and those are only a little more than
| 200 years old.
|
| It gives me a newfound appreciation for how much language
| changes and the challenges of conveying information
| across generations.
| retrac wrote:
| Our civilization has not collapsed since Shakespeare.
| Ancient Egypt's did c. 1200 BC and never exactly
| recovered in terms of literacy though remnants remained
| into early Roman times. Then it was conquered by the
| Greeks.
|
| Mesopotamia was even more completely buried and
| forgotten. A few names in the Bible, nothing more of the
| history survived until rediscovered in modern times.
| Around 400 BC, Xenophon returning from his campaign
| against the Persians, marched past the ruins of a great
| city. He was impressed with the size of it. The walls on
| stone foundations 20 ft tall! They're still there today,
| more or less. Perhaps the Medes had built it, according
| to the locals. Not much was known of the Medes, to the
| Greeks. It may have been quite ancient.
|
| Xenophon did not know that it was Nineveh, the capital of
| Assyria, last of the great Mesopotamian empires. It had
| been destroyed some 200 years before in the final war
| between Babylon and Assyria. The Mesopotamian cultural-
| political system sort of fell apart after. The languages
| of administration and history stopped being used. Written
| records ceased. The Persians came to rule the area. Only
| two hundred years and already forgotten.
| wl wrote:
| Knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphs, hieratic, and demotic
| didn't completely disappear until a few centuries into
| the Christian era, evidenced by priests producing new
| texts in these scripts. They even produced texts in
| Middle Egyptian--the phase of the language beginning
| approximately 2,000 BCE--almost to the end of the use of
| Egyptian hieroglyphs. This thread is about a copy of the
| Memphis Decree, a text written in two forms of written
| Egyptian (hieroglyphs, Demotic) produced about 150 years
| before Cleopatra.
| wildpeaks wrote:
| Seeing it in person at the British Museum is still one of my
| fondest childhood memories.
| quercusa wrote:
| And one of my not-so-childhood memories.
| The_suffocated wrote:
| It was Joseph Fourier, the Fourier in Fourier transform, who
| showed the then 11-years-old Jean-Francois Champollion a copy of
| the Rosetta stone.
| wl wrote:
| Thomas Young, who made many important contributions to the
| decipherment, was an influential physicist and mathematician.
| He's largely responsible for the wave theory of light. Young's
| modulus is named for him.
| danschuller wrote:
| That is a great factoid
| jonnybgood wrote:
| The British Museum has free ~20min tour guides scattered
| throughout the museum who begin at set times. I stumbled into the
| one for the Rosetta Stone and it was really informative.
| ourmandave wrote:
| There's been a bunch of articles lately about the British
| Museum under pressure to return artifacts to their original
| owners / nations.
|
| The argument being they don't need the original and could make
| a near perfect copy with 3D printing and display that.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > The argument being they don't need the original and could
| make a near perfect copy with 3D printing and display that.
|
| Well, also the argument that they were looted and stolen in
| the first place.
| adastra22 wrote:
| It's a controversial argument. Many of the chief pieces on
| display were officially purchased from the country in
| question.
| ourmandave wrote:
| Every piece has it's own story and a lot of research has
| to go into each one.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Just like a lot of land in the United States was
| _purchased_ from some Native American chief who may have
| been bought off, or under duress to save his tribe.
| adastra22 wrote:
| So can we reverse any trade because X centuries down the
| road we don't like the outcome?
|
| I said it was controversial, not wrong. There are two
| sides to the argument.
| Thrymr wrote:
| Specifically, the Rosetta stone was looted by the French
| during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, and then carted away
| by the British after they defeated the French. There are
| two sides to this, but none of them are Egyptian.
| ourmandave wrote:
| No, the Egyptians want their shit back.
| jl6 wrote:
| It really is an oversimplification to apply modern
| standards of property ownership to this situation.
| Egyptian history, like most history, is the story of
| might-makes-right usurpation. It's easy to paint the
| French rediscoverers as looters, but the Ottoman
| administration they took the stone from were not exactly
| what we would call the rightful rulers either. Is it part
| of the cultural heritage of the Egyptian peoples? Yes,
| sort of, and that's what makes it complicated. I say sort
| of because the cultural continuity from the stone's
| origin to 1799 is somewhat suspect - the stone was being
| used as building material, with no recognized historic
| value. Hieroglyphics had been utterly forgotten. So yes,
| it is part of Egyptian history, but it's also part of
| French and British history. It's complicated.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Who are the Egyptians? The Arabs got there in 700AD, long
| after the Rosetta Stone had been engraved. Remnants of
| the Copts perhaps? Maybe the Greeks want a piece of it
| too. And it was Napoleon who found it, so surely Corsica
| has a claim as well.
|
| You have to tie yourself in to all sorts of knots to
| untangle this Ship of Theseus.
|
| And while where at it, all filth of Roman, Norse, Anglo-
| Saxon, and Norman descent better fuck out of GB. It
| belongs to the Celts and I want my Gaelic back.
| [deleted]
| suzzer99 wrote:
| The point is just because someone in some position of
| authority (who may have been motivated by greed or fear)
| at one time agreed to sell off land or precious
| artifacts, that may not make it right to keep them.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| I think the priceless historical artifacts should be kept
| where they can be properly maintained.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Museum_of_Brazil_fire
| ourmandave wrote:
| I can take better care of the stuff I stole than you.
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