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Judgy Fucker posted:It's still valuable as literature, though. And if nothing else it's really drat exciting to get access to previously-lost ancient texts. Wake me up when they find Lives.
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Apr 30, 2024 16:07
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Silver2195 posted:To be clear, this would have been written long enough after Plato's death that it's historical accuracy is questionable. All texts have questionable historical accuracy! People still argue about whether Plato’s eyewitness portrait of Socrates’ teaching is accurate or not. Aubrey’s “Brief Lives” posted:What uncertainty doe we find in printed histories? they either treading too neer on the heeles of trueth that they dare not speake plaine, or els for want of intelligence (things being antiquated) become too obscure and darke!
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Apr 30, 2024 16:30
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Man if we find an Etruscan to Latin translation that would be huge.
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Apr 30, 2024 16:37
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WoodrowSkillson posted:Man if we find an Etruscan to Latin translation that would be huge. All the toasty scrolls are Greek apparently, but now that there is a chance of reading them, maybe Latin stuff will be dug up?
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Apr 30, 2024 16:41
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skasion posted:All the toasty scrolls are Greek apparently, but now that there is a chance of reading them, maybe Latin stuff will be dug up? I think the style at the time was to have separate Greek and Latin libraries. At least we can say that one hasn't been dug up yet and there's a lot of places left to be excavated, so here's hoping! Man, the whole "reading burnt ancient scrolls with really thin laser beams" thing makes me remember being excited about the possibilities of future technology instead of just dreading what they come up with next.
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Apr 30, 2024 18:45
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barbecue at the folks posted:I think the style at the time was to have separate Greek and Latin libraries. At least we can say that one hasn't been dug up yet and there's a lot of places left to be excavated, so here's hoping! I'm afraid to tell you that really thin laser beams are an important component in the Torment Nexus
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Apr 30, 2024 23:59
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barbecue at the folks posted:I think the style at the time was to have separate Greek and Latin libraries. At least we can say that one hasn't been dug up yet and there's a lot of places left to be excavated, so here's hoping! We have a lot of missing texts, right? What if we feed the existing ones into an AI machine learning neurally networked algorithm AI?
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May 1, 2024 00:12
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I don't doubt that once the training data exists, machine learning will be an important part of decoding the texts more rapidly (and possibly already is), but existing models basically completely failed to make any headway without application-specific training. The initial breakthrough came from a guy just staring at the images until the vague squiggles started looking like greek
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May 1, 2024 01:08
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This isnt the same project I think, but yea plenty of people are trying to use machine learning vision stuff to read the scrolls. See the Scroll Prize website. Generally, the problem is that carbonized scrolls are a 3D medium of difference sheets of varying thickness rolled up together. So you've got to be able to detect both the 3D blobs of ink on a piece of papyrus, but also be able to seperate out the different sheets from your 3D scroll into 3D sheets. And you're dealing with huge data volumes even for a single scroll, because of how high resolution the scanning data needs to be to detect the ink in the carbonized scroll
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May 1, 2024 01:16
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Has there been any progress on Linear A / the Harappan script? It feels wild to me there's all this text we still can't actually read even with all the technological headway these days.
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May 1, 2024 04:19
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Can’t read the Indus script either yet. That’s a big one .
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May 1, 2024 04:22
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my understanding is that every case of deciphering a lost script happened with a language that was still being spoken at the time of decipherment. If the language behind linear A is truly gone, then it's probably a lost cause.
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May 1, 2024 04:31
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I read an article about the process used to read the scrolls, and machine learning is indeed involved in reconstructing the images of the scrolls once another part of the process scans and "unrolls" them. Obviously nothing like the "ai" bullshit that's everywhere now, this isn't going to hallucinate anything (the text wouldn't make any sense if it did).
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May 1, 2024 04:31
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Please stop saying mahine learning and other buzzwords .
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May 1, 2024 04:33
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Short of finding a multilingual inscription with Linear A in it it's probably going to stay unreadable. I hope that ends up being wrong but as far as I understand it the problem is there's just nowhere to start. There's been lots of guessing with known languages and none of them have ever turned up any results that make sense.
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May 1, 2024 04:34
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euphronius posted:Please stop saying mahine learning and other buzzwords . they made up the word machine learning to do the same poo poo they were doing in statistical AI but actually get grants, after the third AI winter or so, as a second round to what they did after the first AI winter. quite the old buzzword you can call it statistics, but the peeps who actually do this sort of thing hate the statisticians at this point and especially their computational incompetence, so it's gotta have another word
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May 1, 2024 04:40
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I understand RAs have to use those words to get grants / published
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May 1, 2024 04:41
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The fundamental problem with Linear A and The Indus Valley script is the lack of a large corpus of texts and the lack of any bilingual texts. You need one or the other, preferably both, in order to decipher an unknown script that is writing an unknown language. When it comes to the Indus Valley script, we have a fair amount of texts, 5,509 total known. But they are almost all extremely short. On average, each text has less than four symbols, and 707 unique symbols have been identified. This means it is very hard to find patterns, since the huge number of unique symbols and the extreme brevity of nearly all texts means its quite hard to draw any conclusions. There has been a fair amount of recent computational work on the Indus Valley script, which has been able to show fairly conclusively that is it in fact recording language. This has not always been assumed. Given the brevity of inscriptions, and the huge number of distinct signs relative to the size of the total corpus, people have sometimes suggested it was actually recording something language-adjacent, like personal heraldry or administrative identifications. But thanks to ~statistics~ we are now pretty confident that it is in fact a language. Attempts to use those same computational methods to uncover the underlying language, or find insights into the meaning of the words, have unfortunately been failures. The current evidence simply does not provide the patterns needed to start making conclusions about the underlying language, whether a human is looking at it or a computer is. If we don't find longer texts, or bilingual texts, we will probably never know much more about the Indus Valley script. We are on somewhat more solid ground when it comes to Linear A, since the sign inventory is smaller (around 300), and there's a core group of less than a hundred signs that are more common than others. Crucially, there are also some signs that are shared between Linear A and Linear B, and so we know what those ones mean. This has enabled some basic syntactic conclusions to be drawn, since sometimes we can pick out a few words known from Linear B. The underlying language of Linear A probably had Verb-Subject-Object word order, since in a study of Linear A offering bowls, the word for "olive" (the object) can be identified based on a sign shared with Linear B, the personal name (the subject) can be identified due to its uniqueness, and the verb for "to give" (or something similar) can identified based on it being repeatedly constantly in these offering bowls. That's already more than we know about the Indus Valley script. But the overall corpus of Linear A is fairly small, at around 1,400 total texts, and most of those are texts like offering bowls, short and formulaic. Longer, more varied texts, or bilingual texts, are needed to make more progress on Linear A.
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May 1, 2024 04:59
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cheetah7071 posted:my understanding is that every case of deciphering a lost script happened with a language that was still being spoken at the time of decipherment. If the language behind linear A is truly gone, then it's probably a lost cause. That's not quite true. One example where a script was deciphered where the underlying language had been totally lost is Meroitic, which was written in Nubia in the late 1st millennium BCE and early 1st millennium CE. The script itself wasn't that hard to work out since its got a number of similarities with Demotic Egyptian, although it also some differences that had to be figured out based on internal evidence, including a totally different system of writing vowels, which took a while to to be fully understood. The Meroitic language is extinct, and it was totally unknown when the first Meroitic inscriptions were discovered in the late 19th century. Meroitic has no known relatives among any other known languages, ancient or modern. (There are people who claim it is related to certain modern Nubian or Nilo-Saharan languages but this is based on very thin evidence. It's probably related to something that it still spoken today but its unclear what). Our knowledge of the Meroitic language is fully reconstructed based on careful study of the texts. Now, the Meroitic language isn't understood that well, and there are a lot of gaps in our knowledge, but everything we know about it we have learned by deciphering texts written in Meroitic. There are a few Egyptian-Meroitic bilingual texts that have helped, but they don't offer that much, since they tend to be short and formulaic. There's no Rosetta Stone equivalent.
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May 1, 2024 05:09
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euphronius posted:Please stop saying mahine learning and other buzzwords . Machine learning is an actual field, and its application to reading the carbonized Herculaneum scrolls is far more akin to an extremely fancy version of optical character recognition, a mature and sober application of the technology, than to anything about so-called "AI" that gives investors boners lately. It's also completely irrelevant to the question of deciphering scripts that are already perfectly legible.
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May 1, 2024 05:25
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Bongo Bill posted:Machine learning is an actual field, and its application to reading the carbonized Herculaneum scrolls is far more akin to an extremely fancy version of optical character recognition, a mature and sober application of the technology, than to anything about so-called "AI" that gives investors boners lately. Yeah this is true. Also "machine learning" was deliberately chosen to be a "softer" term than "AI", since the things people were originally calling AI, while very useful, were very far away from what most people would call "intelligence". Tree Bucket posted:We have a lot of missing texts, right? What if we feed the existing ones into an AI machine learning neurally networked algorithm AI? And this is lazy trolling.
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May 1, 2024 06:33
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I'm not convinced it wasn't supposed to be a joke 
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May 1, 2024 07:27
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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it is a very obvious joke
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May 1, 2024 11:33
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See you'd think so, but I've read the Tech Nightmares thread 
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May 1, 2024 20:57
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Listening to the Tides of History stuff on Shang China and dang this sounds like some of the most systematically entrenched human sacrifice I've ever heard of, it sounds as bad as the Aztecs. I knew it was a thing to an extent; you get ceramic depictions of humans as grave goods in mid-Zhou (the terracotta warriors being the "ultimate" version of that I guess) that I remember are thought to have been used as a replacement for what was previously a tradition of real human sacrifice. But the way Patrick Wyman's talking about it in this episode, it's like Shang ritual practically revolved around it. Hundreds of people sacrificed at a time in often horrible ways.
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May 4, 2024 12:15
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Koramei posted:Listening to the Tides of History stuff on Shang China and dang this sounds like some of the most systematically entrenched human sacrifice I've ever heard of, it sounds as bad as the Aztecs. I knew it was a thing to an extent; you get ceramic depictions of humans as grave goods in mid-Zhou (the terracotta warriors being the "ultimate" version of that I guess) that I remember are thought to have been used as a replacement for what was previously a tradition of real human sacrifice. yeah the early Chinese cultures were weird as poo poo lol. I understand a guy called Li Shuo wrote a book a few years back where he goes over a bunch of archaeological/linguistic evidence and interprets the Shang/Zhou transition in textual sources as reflecting basically a social revolt against the concept of mass human sacrifice. But not translated and my reading level is far too low for it.
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May 4, 2024 12:54
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skasion posted:yeah the early Chinese cultures were weird as poo poo lol. I understand a guy called Li Shuo wrote a book a few years back where he goes over a bunch of archaeological/linguistic evidence and interprets the Shang/Zhou transition in textual sources as reflecting basically a social revolt against the concept of mass human sacrifice. But not translated and my reading level is far too low for it. holy poo poo, I think I was reading a manga about the Shang/Zhou-transition ages ago and suddenly, a lot of the references the author put in start making sense especially the mass sacrifices demanded by the Shang (in the comic, mostly the fault of an evil fox spirit, but that's mainly I think because the manga was based on a mythical version of the story, instead of on history) back then I assumed that poo poo was too gruesome to be real 
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May 4, 2024 13:31
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CrypticFox posted:the verb for "to give" (or something similar) can identified based on it being repeatedly constantly in these offering bowls. What is it?
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May 4, 2024 14:47
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skasion posted:yeah the early Chinese cultures were weird as poo poo lol. I understand a guy called Li Shuo wrote a book a few years back where he goes over a bunch of archaeological/linguistic evidence and interprets the Shang/Zhou transition in textual sources as reflecting basically a social revolt against the concept of mass human sacrifice. But not translated and my reading level is far too low for it. The Wikipedia article about the last of the Shang kings suggests that the later Shang had heavily backed off on human sacrifices and the Zhou reintroduced the practice. The paragraph on this specific claim has a huge amount of citations, but they're all in Chinese so I couldn't tell you if they're accurate or not.
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May 4, 2024 22:38
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:The Wikipedia article about the last of the Shang kings suggests that the later Shang had heavily backed off on human sacrifices and the Zhou reintroduced the practice. The paragraph on this specific claim has a huge amount of citations, but they're all in Chinese so I couldn't tell you if they're accurate or not. I'm guessing this is one of those things where we have a mere glimpse into a historian flame war that's been going on longer than several countries and religions have existed.
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May 5, 2024 05:52
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Libluini posted:holy poo poo, I think I was reading a manga about the Shang/Zhou-transition ages ago and suddenly, a lot of the references the author put in start making sense To be clear, if you’re thinking of the same manga I am (Hoshin Engi), the specific details about Daji’s torture devices come from the 16th-century novel Investiture of the Gods.
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May 5, 2024 14:33
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Here's some of the background on all that: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=58846 https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1012136 https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/10i7o2j/what_is_original_%E5%8D%AF/ It seems like there's one scholar who published a popular work claiming a bunch of things (which may or may not be substantiated/agreed on by other scholars?): - There was a lot of torture involved in the Shang's mass human sacrifices. - The Zhou Dynasty undertook a project to erase the human sacrifice from history. - The I Ching was introduced by the Zhou specifically as a secular/non-sacrificial divinatory method to replace the conventional human-sacrifice-based divination of the Shang.
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May 6, 2024 23:28
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The grave sacrifices of the Shang have always reminded me of the Royal Tombs of Ur. Podany has some interesting commentary on that in her book:quote:Scholars have come up with many theories to account for the presence of the dead attendants in the early Ur royal tombs, but they have reached no consensus. It may not, in the end, be something that even needs a specifically Mesopotamian explanation. The earliest kings of Egypt did the same thing, as did the earliest kings in Nubia (at a later date), along with some Chinese kings during the early Shang dynasty, and others later still in the New World in Panama and Peru.72 Although I think what's being referred to by Li Shuo is more divinatory/appeasement sacrifices, which apparently also happened en mass during Shang.
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May 6, 2024 23:53
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Here's some of the background on all that: The symbol they use for rabbit is clearly referencing a primitive form of goatse not blood eagle.
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May 7, 2024 01:35
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XavierAlexander posted:The symbol they use for rabbit is clearly referencing a primitive form of goatse not blood eagle. What would Confucius have to say about hello.jpg?
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May 7, 2024 02:26
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:What would Confucius have to say about hello.jpg? First line of the analects dude, "What Joy it is when friends cum from afar!"
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May 7, 2024 02:48
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Human sacrifice does seem like one of those things that rarely lasts very long as a tradition. The Aztecs were iirc relatively very new as a civilization at their height, and the Romans only saved it for very dire occasions. Even the story of Isaac is iirc sometimes seen as an explicit rejection of human sacrifice, like 'Okay that's enough, you don't need to do that anymore, ever'. Still kinda lol to picture entire traditions specifically introduced as a 'Here's a way to divine the future/make sure our rulers have servants in the afterlife without having to kill anybody for it, so don't do that!' I wonder if they thought the terracotta soldiers were a lot more interesting and fun than just having corpses in tombs too, as future people certainly agree.
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May 7, 2024 08:32
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I wonder what it took to end the practice of human sacrifice in any given culture. A non-zero number of instances had to be because of a revolt.
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May 7, 2024 08:43
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How old is leather polish, for boots and so on? And what did people use before that, animal fat?
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May 7, 2024 08:43
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Pure guess but I'll go with - olive oil 
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May 7, 2024 09:18
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