[HN Gopher] Archaeologists found an ancient Egyptian observatory
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Archaeologists found an ancient Egyptian observatory
Author : LinuxBender
Score : 72 points
Date : 2024-10-08 12:32 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| slythr wrote:
| I've seen enough Stargate to know where this is going.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Sadly, entirely wrong period.
|
| Seriously, though. There are a lot of open questions on dating
| old and middle kingdom events. The issue is not that there is
| no good chronology, it's rather that there are multiple
| reasonable and established chronologies that conflict. Entire
| careers have been made on basically arguing about dates.
|
| We can date important events after the 8th century BCE pretty
| well for the entire Levant, thanks to the hard work of
| Babylonian royal astronomers who around that time started
| systematically recording all celestial events on clay tablets,
| on which they also recorded the date and occasionally various
| major events. We can "run the sky backwards" and compare with
| their records to get a perfect correspondence between their
| calendar and ours. This is why we know the exact date of the
| death of Alexander the Great, among other things.
|
| An old or middle kingdom observatory with dated slabs that
| describe enough events to get us a few unambiguously fixed
| dates is one of those finds that archeologists dream of.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > "Everything we found shattered our expectations....suggesting
| the site had a dual role as both a spiritual and a scientific
| place.
|
| I've been interested for a while in the way that religion and
| science (mainly astronomy) are related in the ancient world.
|
| Reading between the lines, it seems like there was a class of
| professional scientists who were also religious "priests". And
| what we now know as ancient myths partially served as a way to
| communicate the relevant scientific knowledge (e.g. the calendar
| of events relevant to raising and harvesting crops) without
| having to communicate where we got that information.
|
| For example, the story we hear about Pythagoras is that he goes
| and studies in the Egyptian temples and then comes back and tries
| to make math more open source. That suggests that there is a lot
| of math going on in the temples, and that secrecy was a part of
| how they operated.
|
| Secrecy persisted with the Pythagoreans, but that feels a bit
| more like a continuation of an existing tradition rather than
| something they invented.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| ancient connections between religion and astronomy:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574
| codegladiator wrote:
| The scientists of today are the priests of tomorrow.
|
| The only reason we don't use "religious" method is because
| science has taught us to only believe "data backed evidence".
| Also at the same time we are moving fast into the era where
| reproduction of most "papers" being published today is hard and
| unlikely if not impossible.
|
| That "day-to-day" people neither read science papers in depth
| nor religious scriptures in depth is a common problem as well.
| j_maffe wrote:
| This is simply false. Reproduction of papers is an academic
| issue but your claim is at the very least hyperbolic. The
| scientific method has proven to be by far the most successful
| method of investigating the world around us.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Agreed. However, the method has ritualistic elements that
| can reproduced without following the method itself all that
| closely. When we use "accepted by a top journal" as a proxy
| for value, we are substituting social proof for actual
| value.
| lazide wrote:
| I think what you're referring to is that a lot of
| traditional 'hard' science we are familiar with came out
| of a period of time when the most important thing was
| being provably correct (or not) - and it mattered in
| concrete ways - and so was enforced pretty heavily. Aka ~
| early 1900's to mid cold-war. When hard science and
| industrialization was a front and center, existential
| thing for society.
|
| A lot of science (both back then, but especially now) is
| less hard and is more optimized towards being accepted.
| Psychology, Anthropology, Geology, Paleontology, many
| fields of Biology, and many others are all about social
| proof, since really what else _can_ you use? There are
| too many lines of judgement that have to be drawn for any
| of it to make sense in a hard 'verifiable' way.
|
| And hard science still requires reproducibility, but a
| lot of that is getting more niche and harder to verify,
| rather than more directly verifiable, so it is also
| falling prey to 'acceptability' vs 'verifiable
| correctness'.
|
| Going back even further Historically, it was very hard to
| afford verifiable correctness, so very few people could
| actually do it. Pretty much either very rich people, or
| people with rich rich sponsors - which also often
| required or provided social proof/acceptance.
|
| Religion helps wrap the whole thing up in a way that is
| marketable, and secrecy protects the 'trade secrets' so
| any sort of professionalism can be supported for further
| work or development. And because people need to eat.
| detourdog wrote:
| I'm not so sure it was secrecy or just some not that
| curious about the complicated subject matter. Much of the
| group study happend in specific location travel and
| publishing being what they were I expect knowledge
| scarcity without trying to control the information.
| lazide wrote:
| The Guilds were definitely about secrecy.
| detourdog wrote:
| When were the guilds? How do you know it was secrecy and
| not some other tiered system of information sharing based
| on achievements.
| codegladiator wrote:
| > Reproduction of papers is an academic issue but your
| claim is at the very least hyperbolic
|
| What % of population today can actually understand let
| alone reproduce the papers being published today. And this
| is not just about practicality of it. Is there a motivation
| to even reproduce it ?
|
| I am not saying "science is bad". I am saying science has
| the same fate as religion.
| j_maffe wrote:
| No it doesn't. The fact that most are unable to reproduce
| it doesn't mean they can't reproduce it. Many do in fact
| are interested in these sort of experiments and
| methodologies and do them outside of their profession.
| All of this is different from the practice of religion. I
| have no idea how you compare a methodology to a ritual.
| The methodology comes from easily provable axiomatic
| facts about statistics and logic. The same cannot be said
| for rituals.
| detourdog wrote:
| It's easy for me to believe that art and religion have
| formed into science and engineering.
| j_maffe wrote:
| Why? They're built on completely different principles and
| methodologies.
| detourdog wrote:
| We probably disagree that they are built differently. I'm
| willing to let you believe they are seperate and ask that
| you let Me hold my ideals. If you want to discuss you
| would have to state what the differences are. Declaring
| they are different and expecting me to know why you think
| that is a real hindrance.
|
| It is not obvious to me.
| j_maffe wrote:
| You're free to hold onto your ideals, but if you're not
| willing to defend them, maybe don't go out of your way to
| share them.
| detourdog wrote:
| I'm happy to defend them. I just don't know what you
| think is correct. I understand you believe I'm wrong. I
| see the linkage as crystal clear evolution of human
| thought.
|
| You have some other ideal I assume.
|
| I see you as unwilling to defend your ideas.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| What does Science do to those in its ranks who challenge
| Global Warming Dogma? Flat Earth? Alternative medicine?
| dogsgobork wrote:
| Tell them to present some evidence or go pound sand?
| ("You know what they call alternative medicine that's
| been proved to work? Medicine." -Tim Minchin)
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Or, you know, destroy and deny existence of evidence that
| was previously abundant and considered obvious. Or move
| goalposts on what's considered "evidence" at all. Or
| manufacture mountains of data and statistics to simply
| drown out anything else.
| WillAdams wrote:
| More importantly, Jupyter Notebooks are becoming a de facto
| standard which makes repeating calculations using newly
| gathered data far easier, allowing for a straight-forward
| reproduction.
| elashri wrote:
| > reproduction of most "papers" being published today is hard
| and unlikely if not impossible.
|
| It is unlikely because there is no incentive to it. In
| contrast, it would be considered career sabotage if you keep
| reproducing other studies than creating original research.
| Because funding agencies and hiring committees will look for
| that. Not because it is impossible (Of course operative word
| here is "most")
| detourdog wrote:
| I think it may be more subtle than what you present. Earlier
| naive beliefs my have just as much evidence of support in the
| context at the time of conception.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Well, we grow up with knowing about the origins of the
| universe, and life, from a young age.
|
| I suspect, when you don't understand things like the big bang
| and genetics, the line between religion and science (or fact
| and fantasy) is quite blurry.
| prewett wrote:
| We grow up with an Epicurean world view (matter is all there
| is, the gods didn't create the universe, it's just
| independent atoms), which is the only reason why science and
| religion are at odds. Knowing that the universe started with
| the Big Bang doesn't preclude God in any fashion--the
| Epicurean worldview precludes God. In a theistic worldview
| the Big Bang is _how_ God created the universe. Likewise,
| genetics doesn 't preclude God creating life, the Epicurean
| worldview precludes that. How did the genetic code come to
| be? An Epicurean worldview says that it was all chance. A
| theistic worldview says that God created the genetic code,
| and you have lots of options to choose from that are
| consistent with evidence: God created the major changes (i.e.
| God caused much of the major evolution); or God is such a
| good engineer that he created the minimal amount once, in
| such a way that it would evolve into what he wants; or even
| that God is such a divine engineer that he created the
| universe such that it would naturally create what he desired
| without him having to do anything else.
| theultdev wrote:
| In no way do we fully understand things like the big bang or
| life.
|
| How would we when we don't know what caused them.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| The interconnection of "the divine" and science was central to
| the scientific revolution -- Kepler, Newton, Galileo, etc.
| There became an understanding that one can learn about the
| divine through empirical methods, not just doctrine or
| contemplation.
|
| Though interesting that each of the above scientists all
| explicitly claimed to be Pythagorean... where are the
| Pythagoreans of today?
| mcphage wrote:
| Gene Ray? :-)
| datameta wrote:
| The book A Beautiful Question explores this topic quite well.
| dbrueck wrote:
| > The interconnection of "the divine" and science was central
| to the scientific revolution
|
| Agreed. Even today, for many people there is no fatal tension
| between science and religion (often in large part because
| they serve to answer different questions).
|
| My personal rule of thumb is that if I see an apparent
| contradiction between religion and science, it just means I
| have an incorrect/incomplete understanding of some area of
| religion or science (or both).
| WillAdams wrote:
| I would like to view every scientist or academic who
| publishes, even a Master's Thesis, but most especially a PhD:
|
| https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
|
| is a successor of the Pythagoreans.
| detourdog wrote:
| I see the pursuit of the divine as searching for small
| repeatable surprises. The people doing the discovery observed
| some small physical world and surprised an set about divining
| the origin and documenting simple repeatability.
| debit-freak wrote:
| Any distinction is likely only about 500 years old at most.
| Though I do very much dislike the term "religion" for
| interpreting history as it connotes so much that's specific to
| abrahamic religions and in particular Christianity and Islam.
| Such framing really doesn't prepare you well for empathizing
| with people who were likely as curious, critical, and wanting
| to understand the universe as we are.
| dotancohen wrote:
| When I hear the word religion I specifically think of people
| that are curious and critical.
|
| Referring back to your example of Abrahamic religions, their
| most famous work opens with an explanation of how the world
| was created. Was that not the work of somebody interested in
| how the world works?
| lazide wrote:
| No major world religion I'm aware of is all that friendly
| to anyone who _disagrees_ with the answer once 'given'.
| Which doesn't go well with 'critical'.
|
| Some will flat out kill you for disagreeing, in fact.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I am not an expert in this area but I think one has to go
| further back in time before religions were weaponized,
| censored, intentionally mistranslated, edited and
| otherwise tainted by kings and emperors. One example
| might be Gnosticism [1] _not the modern version_. There
| are probably better examples from earlier times of
| antiquity but again I am not an expert in this area. I
| would wager someone here may be knowledgeable in this
| area. Perhaps some religions around the time period of
| the Mycenaean period or other periods where people may
| have partaken in mind expanding substances as a matter of
| religious or cult practice? Or perhaps theories around
| psychedelic drugs used in the Eleusinian Mysteries?
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism
| lazide wrote:
| Uh, when 'further back' has religion not been weaponized?
|
| Every major religion in recorded history, and all the
| ones I'm aware of from prehistory, have _some_ history of
| violence. Even Buddhism.
|
| This is one of those 'false ideal past' things.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Buddhism has ongoing violence, today, if you count the
| persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I should have been more clear. When I say weaponized I
| meant to manipulate societies and control peoples
| traditions, compliance with governments and less to do
| with wars, crusades, jihads and the like. This seems to
| fluctuate throughout history but then again I am not an
| expert on this topic. _Dominance of the patriarchy vs the
| sacred feminine and such..._ I am probably still being
| too vague.
| o11c wrote:
| The problem with Gnosticism is that it was highly prone
| to people inventing their own fanfiction that completely
| contradicted the canonical source material (and a warning
| against this exact thing is in the source itself). Of
| course, this doesn't stop the same from applying to
| "mainstream" denominations too.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Around 2002, I asked a Dominican friar if it was true
| that _The Matrix_ films were promoting Gnosticism. He
| said that I could find Gnosticism just about anywhere, if
| I looked closely enough.
|
| Pair that with Modernism, and you've got a recipe for
| some slippery definitions of "truth".
| o11c wrote:
| If you define it literally, you can easily find
| "Gnosticism" (personal knowledge/revelation) in the Bible
| itself (e.g. Mt 11, Mt 16, Lk 2, Jn 16, 2 Tim 3, all of
| Rev).
|
| But we generally agree to only _label_ it as Gnosticism
| if it doesn 't pass the consistency trial (2 Pet 1, 1 Jn
| 4), and especially if it outright fails it.
| debit-freak wrote:
| How is that a problem? Even within christianity the bible
| is not considered "true" or "absolute" or "the word of
| god" or "sacred" outside of niche literalist communities.
| If you're chasing coherence with texts written by humans
| you're likely to end up bitter and confused (or openly
| exploitative) rather than benefitting.
|
| EDIT: _Especially_ in the context of christianity, the
| importance of faith /belief cannot be overstated. Even
| the very act of looking for proof that you're doing the
| right thing can arguably undermine the entire point of
| the "religion". cf John 3:16--"For God so loved the
| world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever
| believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting
| life."
|
| NB, as awkward as I am to quoting the bible, I am an
| atheist. I'm just saying this doesn't need to be a
| barrier to understanding other people.
| detourdog wrote:
| Maybe but I'm not sure it has to do with religion. This
| type of behavior is generally only a sub-group of any
| believers.
| lazide wrote:
| Have you even met religious people?! I'm not saying
| everyone is violent. But the core tenet of every religion
| I'm aware of is believing in it without meaningfully
| diverting from its core tenets. That's pretty
| fundamental.
|
| Otherwise, pretty much every religion says they aren't a
| part of it anymore. Sometimes that has serious
| consequences for them. Several of the large religions
| have 'you can't leave' clauses, either de facto or de
| jure.
|
| And if the core tenets get 'influenced' to violence, then
| that is what also happens.
| detourdog wrote:
| I'm really afraid that everything you mention is pretty
| general and not my experience.
| debit-freak wrote:
| > No major world religion I'm aware of is all that
| friendly to anyone who disagrees with the answer once
| 'given'
|
| Eastern worldviews (tao, buddhism--particularly zen
| buddhism) are inherently contradictory. Regarding these
| your perspective is simply nonsensical. Most worldviews
| have contradictory aspects that require inward judgement
| rather than just looking to a given bureaucracy to
| determine value; it's very rare for opinion to have any
| meaning at all outside of the christianity and islam.
|
| Of course, this comes back to what you consider a
| "religion". If you're looking for something like the
| catholic church where belief in a specific worldview is
| necessary for salvation of the soul it's a pretty natural
| to be dismissive of anything other than what you already
| believe in as you presume that other people even care
| what your opinion is (metaphysics, worldview, belief-
| system, whatever you want to call it) when likely your
| opinion is entirely beside the point.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I suspect it's what someone who claims to be a knowledge
| authority comes up with when everyone asks how the world
| was created.
|
| I mean, if you're that guy, you can't just say you don't
| know!
| debit-freak wrote:
| The costs of propagating such a text are significant
| enough this act implies serious buy-in from the community
| (if only its ruling class).
| debit-freak wrote:
| > Referring back to your example of Abrahamic religions,
| their most famous work opens with an explanation of how the
| world was created. Was that not the work of somebody
| interested in how the world works?
|
| I absolutely agree! Although in the context of authorship
| during exile I'd hazard a guess that there was some motive
| of community cohesion and development.
|
| > When I hear the word religion I specifically think of
| people that are curious and critical.
|
| I hear a far more ambiguous term, and the term will have
| different connotations if you ask a catholic vs a
| protestant vs jewish person vs a sunni vs a sufi vs an
| atheist, &c. I have no clue how others perceive the term,
| but I sense that it's a rough match at best and completely
| nonsensical at worse.
|
| But broader than that, our (i.e. those of us in the western
| tradition) entire conceptions about interpreting
| metaphysical/ontological language have been shaped by
| western religious conflict and an impossible to enumerate
| number of people being very, obviously, proudly incoherent,
| preserved in writing at massive, massive cost. The terms we
| use--faith, belief, god(s), spirit, afterlife, heaven/hell,
| sin, evil, guilt, salvation, &c--are difficult to detach
| from the above conflict and often have zero parallel in the
| metaphysics of people outside this culture.
|
| This also results in people not realizing how much they've
| internalized the connotations of what might be basic
| descriptive words for common internal phenomena outside of
| the framing of religous rhetoric--for instance, you often
| see atheists proudly rejecting the concepts of faith and
| belief entirely, unaware that their own worldviews are
| formed around confidence about metaphysical concepts formed
| on less-than-certain grounds. as Hume would point out, and
| as should not be a surprise to anyone who identifies as an
| empiricist--we all have faith or belief that the sun will
| rise tomorrow without any line of reasoning to allow us to
| find deductive, 100%, absolute certainty in this. After all
| you never know when a pulsar might just completely
| obliterate our solar system, or that the laws of physics
| won't arbitrarily change. This might seem facetious until
| you realize that language only binds to reality in terms of
| personal confidence that these words are actually
| descriptive, regardless to what extent this is actually
| relevant to reality wrt established inductive reasoning.
|
| Meanwhile, if you go back far enough, or even just speak in
| another language that hasn't marinated in christianized
| latin for millennia, "gods" and "spirits" might as well
| just be code for "unknown force that drives the mechanisms
| of the world and human relations". Anthropomorphization of
| these forces is a social process that allows people to
| reason about these concepts in abstract ways. Atheism in
| this context wouldn't necessarily mean you're rejecting a
| "sky wizard who wants you to deny evolution" (for a
| particularly facetious example); such beliefs might be
| perceived closer to a person abandoning the sole basis
| people _had_ for reasoning about the world without
| providing an alternative other than "skepticism"
| (particularly in the case of Socrates, whose actual
| worldview we have very scant knowledge of). It takes a lot
| of time, resources, and pain for people to create concepts
| we take for granted today--even things like "truth" and
| "encoding words and numbers to strings of symbols we can
| algorithmically reason about" had to be invented. Of course
| this would have been bootstrapped on whatever reasonable
| substrate was available, if only for the sole purpose of
| communicating your reasoning to others.
|
| Naturally this is just my 2C/.
| detourdog wrote:
| I'm only familiar with the Abrahamic strain of religion. I
| usually don't recognize other people's description of this
| religion.
|
| I have always assumed that it was the King James Bible that
| established the "modern" of religion and has distorted its
| emphasis.
|
| The distortion is so intense that it doesn't usually make
| sense to even point out the misunderstanding.
| detourdog wrote:
| I generally never mention downvotes but I really wish
| whoever has different ideas share them.
|
| This domain of human inquiry is definitely large enough for
| all ideas and I find the downvotes on this comment anti-
| social not because they have other ideas but their
| inability to articulate them.
| simplicio wrote:
| I've found this interesting as well.
|
| It's not really clear that "formal" mathematics is actually
| that useful to an ancient society, even ones like Egypt or
| Greece that embarked on large engineering projects (you don't
| really need a proof of most basic geometry, just empirically
| noting relationships between shapes will get you far enough).
| So the idea that it started as basically a religious activity
| amongst mystery cults in Egypt and Greece is appealing
|
| Of course, the fact that the "mystery" part of "mystery
| religions" means they didn't write anything down, so rather
| frustratingly we only get vague third hand accounts of this
| stuff from classical greek philosophers and Roman-era neo-
| platonists.
| detourdog wrote:
| I see the large monolithic monuments are the evidence of an
| extremely sophisticated society that could carry the name of
| "simple machine age". I beleive these ancient societies had
| as rich of an intellectual life as we do today. Since the
| simple machines were made cord/rope and wood the evidence of
| the sophistication is lost. The pyramids is the evidence of
| this sophistication.
| sharpshadow wrote:
| Reading and writing was done in temples. Most people until
| recently weren't capable of it.
| netcan wrote:
| Mystery, science and what we retrospectively see as "religion"
| co_existed. This didn't end in the classical.
|
| Consider the medieval European priesthood... for example. It's
| basically where all scholarship and literacy resided. Also
| esoterica, healing magic, astrology, alchemy...
|
| This persists until the scientific age. Mendel was a monk.
| Newton was highly devout, and mostly devoted to jewish
| christian protoscience... some of it tracing all the way back
| to those Egyptians. If you'd asked him, he would have probably
| described himself as an alchemist.
|
| Recall that the church tried Galileo... because his published
| results negated Church dogma. That's because the study of
| celestial motion was a religious function. Always had been.
|
| Ancient Greek philosophers are often seen as "proto-secular."
| They were mostly seperste from formal priesthood and often
| treated homeric gods and myth with scepticism.
|
| But... they tended to be highly devoted to "mysteries" and
| their cults. There's also evidence that Socrates and co taught
| "secret" esoterica too... about the secret nature of the
| world... and triangles.
|
| Math, religion, deciphering of celestial patterns.. those have
| been together for a long time.
|
| Having religion separate from math, physics and natural science
| is a modern invention.
| 7952 wrote:
| And there were priests who pursued science as a passion. I
| think it was seen as a good secure job and had time for side
| projects.
| markovs_gun wrote:
| Priests weren't (and, I suppose , still aren't) expected to
| do heavy labor or manage a household, and they had to be
| literate to perform the Mass and all of the various
| sacraments. They were all scholars of religion and
| philosophy by training, and had the free time to persue
| other studies if they desired. That said, being a priest
| isn't just a job, it's a 24/7 commitment. Catholic priests
| had to give up all lands and any possibility of marriage,
| and especially in the middle ages the performance of
| various religious ceremonies took up a LOT of time. They
| also had to actually manage churches as institutions, and
| churches themselves could own lots of land and have tenants
| and whole economies under their purview.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Graeber & Wengrow published good work on reassessing "priest"
| labels in anthropologic and archaeologic works of the past
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