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Chamuska posted:This might be a little off topic, but who are the Phoenicians and what happened to them exactly ? Phoenicia's history is similar to Israel's. Palestine is neatly nestled between three ancient superpowers - the Hittites to the north, the Babylonians to the east, and the Egyptians to the south. Those three states took turns overrunning the area on their way to fighting each other. Phoenicia and Israel both bloomed in the few centuries after the Sea Peoples invasions knocked all three traditional powers down, but then gradually succumbed as they recovered and resumed using the area for a battlefield.
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Apr 19, 2018 03:03
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The people of Lebanon and coastal Syria are the modern descendants of the Phoenicians. There's never been a major resettlement/genocide of them as far as I know. Their most important legacy is all around you--they invented the alphabet, and seem to have been the only people to do so. All other alphabets are descended from it. Korean's alphabet doesn't seem to be a direct derivation, instead being taken from strokes of Chinese characters, but they certainly knew of the concept of an alphabet when creating it.
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Apr 19, 2018 03:20
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Mantis42 posted:I feel bad for the future grad student who has to piece together information about the Pacific Theater from the only surviving extant source - one of those anime where the ships are personified as schoolgirls.
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Apr 19, 2018 04:02
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Grand Fromage posted:The people of Lebanon and coastal Syria are the modern descendants of the Phoenicians. There's never been a major resettlement/genocide of them as far as I know. Didn't the Mayans have a non-Phoenecian phonetic alphabet of their own, or was that disproven? Not trying to be pedantic here; I'm pretty ignorant on the subject and want to know more.
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Apr 19, 2018 07:14
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Didn't the Mayans have a non-Phoenecian phonetic alphabet of their own, or was that disproven? Not trying to be pedantic here; I'm pretty ignorant on the subject and want to know more. Wikipedia says it was a combination of logography and syllabary, like modern Japanese. Not an alphabet.
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Apr 19, 2018 07:17
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Ras Het posted:I mean we do know with great certainty that the age of onset of puberty in girls has gone from around 14 to around 10 in the last hundred years. Even if we just had anecdotes the change would be obvious. Whether the data from the early 20th century helps with understanding much earlier time periods is much less clear of course Didn't diet and health massively deteriorate during the industrial revolution. Would this be more of a regression to the mean?
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Apr 19, 2018 07:26
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What about South Asian scripts?
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Apr 19, 2018 07:26
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Chamuska posted:This might be a little off topic, but who are the Phoenicians and what happened to them exactly ? basically everyone who talked about them said they were huge assholes
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Apr 19, 2018 07:35
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Kassad posted:What about South Asian scripts? Quick look at Wikipedia sez those scripts aren't alphabets but abugidas, where you write out the consonant and the vowel properly. They're descended from Phoenician via the Aramaic alphabet and then Indian scripts.
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Apr 19, 2018 07:43
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Grand Fromage posted:The people of Lebanon and coastal Syria are the modern descendants of the Phoenicians. There's never been a major resettlement/genocide of them as far as I know. Um, well. Carthago delenda est and all that...
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Apr 19, 2018 10:33
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Chamuska posted:This might be a little off topic, but who are the Phoenicians and what happened to them exactly ? The western ones got trucked by Rome and were integrated into the empire.
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Apr 19, 2018 13:32
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chippocrates posted:Didn't diet and health massively deteriorate during the industrial revolution. Would this be more of a regression to the mean? Well yeah that's what I meant, but obviously it depends on where the data is from
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Apr 19, 2018 13:39
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cheetah7071 posted:Wikipedia says it was a combination of logography and syllabary, like modern Japanese. Not an alphabet. Yep, this is correct. Mayan is very much like Japanese, writing-wise, though they also put together square characters like what Korean does with its alphabet. Also all the characters look like cartoons. It's pretty neat. feedmegin posted:Um, well. Carthago delenda est and all that... Carthage is a special case. Plus the Carthaginians were not wiped out, people there were still speaking Punic for ages. I think even Augustine wrote about that in his time.
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Apr 19, 2018 13:45
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The signs in Maya glyphs can also be stylized differently depending on the scribe recording things which makes everything extra fun. Most important phrases like balam and ahau stay pretty similar though. Also you get the fake pseudo glyphs later on which are meaningless gibberish.
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Apr 19, 2018 13:54
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Telsa Cola posted:Also you get the fake pseudo glyphs later on which are meaningless gibberish. What's that about? Were they just pretend-writing at that point?
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Apr 19, 2018 13:58
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Grevling posted:What's that about? Were they just pretend-writing at that point? Terminal Collapse hit, lots of city centers and social structure got abandoned and since literacy was centralized around the elite/people with higher status it degraded the point where glyphs became a cool design to add onto your polychrome (elite good) ceramics. So yeah basically. There are a couple areas in the Puuc region (Northern Yucatan) that hung on for quite awhile after the collapse but a whole lot of other places went to poo poo. Edit: There also the possibility that the glyphs are just a new style of writing old glyphs but if that is the case nobody knows what the hell they say, if anything. Regardless, the glyphs still were seen as important. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 14:03
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There were some pre-literate Europeans using gibberish fake writing as decoration too. It's kind of the ancient ancestor of the google translated Chinese tattoo.
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Apr 19, 2018 14:05
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The Terminal Collapse actually must have been kinda spooky for the first archaeologists learning about it. You have dozens of these monuments with dates down to the day, month and year that events happened, and then they just stop showing up in the archaeological record.
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Apr 19, 2018 14:16
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Grand Fromage posted:There were some pre-literate Europeans using gibberish fake writing as decoration too. It's kind of the ancient ancestor of the google translated Chinese tattoo. There's a shitload of fake rune writing on random Norse objects as well. I think I posted about this before, but apparently the consensus is that, since engraving runes on people's things was a legit profession and they were supposed to be magic, the fake runes must be forgeries. Meaning charlatans who couldn't actually write, but could copy the symbols, fooled illiterate Vikings out in the boonies into paying them for writing gibberish on their axes or combs or whatever and then skipped town before anyone caught on. Edit: that, or Asgeir Fuckface somewhere secretly carved fake runes into his sickle and went around going "look what a cool thing I bought, that's my name on it no it totally is you guys" Guildencrantz fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 15:23
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Guildencrantz posted:There's a shitload of fake rune writing on random Norse objects as well. I think I posted about this before, but apparently the consensus is that, since engraving runes on people's things was a legit profession and they were supposed to be magic, the fake runes must be forgeries. Meaning charlatans who couldn't actually write, but could copy the symbols, fooled illiterate Vikings out in the boonies into paying them for writing gibberish on their axes or combs or whatever and then skipped town before anyone caught on. How could that possibly be more worthwhile than learning to write?
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Apr 19, 2018 15:27
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Nonsense is frequently form of magical expression and use of nonsense as a magical spell doesn’t mean the magician is intentionally cheating people. The Mediterranean world had a positive fetish for nonsensical spell words, abracadabra and all that. Iron Age Scandinavians were obsessed with writing ALU on things. It probably means “ale” and is assumed to be some kind of magical invocation but its usage rarely makes any kind of obvious sense. Basically 
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Apr 19, 2018 15:41
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Ras Het posted:How could that possibly be more worthwhile than learning to write? I don't imagine it was a profession. Pure conjecture, but probably you'd have some travelling rear end in a top hat doing a quick con on the side, or a craftsman faking runes on his products to raise the price he can get from gullible customers, rather than a dedicated Fake Runecarver. Plus learning runes was a major time investment and you'd need someone to teach you. Edit: to be fair, magic is another explanation, and yet another is that these objects were a student practicing writing. It's probably a mix of all three, but this version makes for a better story so hey Guildencrantz fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 15:41
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If you reached adulthood without learning how to read/write and you weren't wealthy, you were probably poo poo out of luck. Especially if you were in some small village in the rear end-end of Norway or Iceland. Swindling some illiterate hicks, though? Don't need to spend months or years studying for that.
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Apr 19, 2018 15:42
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skasion posted:Nonsense is frequently form of magical expression and use of nonsense as a magical spell doesn’t mean the magician is intentionally cheating people. The Mediterranean world had a positive fetish for nonsensical spell words, abracadabra and all that. Iron Age Scandinavians were obsessed with writing ALU on things. It probably means “ale” and is assumed to be some kind of magical invocation but its usage rarely makes any kind of obvious sense. Basically Yeah, my assumption would be that the runes individually carried some sort of mysticism with them, and their combination didn't need to make any sense. It's also possible there was something like the Kabbalah going on, where their meaning was obscured through some arcane code that we've since lost.
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Apr 19, 2018 15:48
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The intermediate stage between literacy and illiteracy where you can't read, but you understand some kind of significance towards writing and want to put it everywhere is weird.
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Apr 19, 2018 15:55
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Deteriorata posted:Yeah, my assumption would be that the runes individually carried some sort of mysticism with them, and their combination didn't need to make any sense. It's also possible there was something like the Kabbalah going on, where their meaning was obscured through some arcane code that we've since lost. If you have actual letters then sure. There are objects, though, that bear rune-like symbols, or a mix of made up runes and real ones with glaring mistakes, that are a more or less incompetent approximation of actual writing, so definitely someone who couldn't write pretending to inscribe an object. I'm phoneposting but I'll look up the source when I get home.
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Apr 19, 2018 15:58
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The current sovereign citizen “legal” movement is a relatable example of magic nonsense too I think. A court filing of a sovereign citizen is similar to some old Norse incorrectly carving runes.
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Apr 19, 2018 16:04
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euphronius posted:The current sovereign citizen “legal” movement is a relatable example of magic nonsense too I think. Those guys are basically religious fundamentalists but with the US constitution instead of the Bible. It’s politics as theology.
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Apr 19, 2018 16:17
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There's probably an economic incentive for a guy who's making a living carving "proper" runes to not teach them to every random shlub, right? There must've been a situation where a guy who knew how to write and a guy who faked it both happened to be at the village fair and since the villagers all couldn't read there's a better than 50:50 chance that they believed the huckster rather than the nerd that he was the "proper" writer.
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Apr 19, 2018 16:23
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Guildencrantz posted:If you have actual letters then sure. There are objects, though, that bear rune-like symbols, or a mix of made up runes and real ones with glaring mistakes, that are a more or less incompetent approximation of actual writing, so definitely someone who couldn't write pretending to inscribe an object.  
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Apr 19, 2018 16:31
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Jpeg artificing but with afghan rugs, I like it.
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Apr 19, 2018 16:39
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aphid_licker posted:There must've been a situation where a guy who knew how to write and a guy who faked it both happened to be at the village fair and since the villagers all couldn't read there's a better than 50:50 chance that they believed the huckster rather than the nerd that he was the "proper" writer. It probably depended where, because in a lot of places "nerd who knows how to write" = "rich man". The nerd would literally have fancy clothes and other stuff (carrying chair? bodyguards if he was traveling?) that would instantly mark him as belonging to a different social class than the huckster, who presumably wouldn't be one if he could afford that stuff (or anything too close to notice the difference).
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Apr 19, 2018 16:43
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The more likely defense would be "oh I'm just using super-secret magic runes that an ordinary literate person wouldn't know", probably
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Apr 19, 2018 16:47
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:Jpeg artificing Now I'm imagining some guy painstakingly trying to carve DCT artifacts into his woodcut.
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Apr 19, 2018 16:56
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Zopotantor posted:Now I'm imagining some guy painstakingly trying to carve DCT artifacts into his woodcut. The blueprint story from Canticle for Leibowitz is kind of like that.
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Apr 19, 2018 17:24
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Go shopping in mainland China for some clothes with hip "English" slogans or design elements and you'll see variations on all of this today. Badly translated or misspelt phrases, copied non sequitur words or sayings, "lorem ipsum" style lifting of blocks of texts from a random book or news article, voweless gibberish, etc.
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Apr 19, 2018 17:31
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In the Danish 18th century play Erasmus Montanus there's a rural priest who claims to speak Latin but is basically spouting common phrases or just random words put together, to the chagrin of the main character who is a snooty student from the capital just come home for a visit. I wonder how common that was.
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Apr 19, 2018 18:46
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Grand Fromage posted:Yep, this is correct. Mayan is very much like Japanese, writing-wise, though they also put together square characters like what Korean does with its alphabet. Also all the characters look like cartoons. It's pretty neat. I think Carthage itself was pretty much wiped, but they were just the biggest of a bunch of Punic city-states that didn't all like each other.
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Apr 19, 2018 19:41
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I think Carthage itself was pretty much wiped, but they were just the biggest of a bunch of Punic city-states that didn't all like each other. the people of carthage weren't all killed, they were driven into the countryside and forbidden to resettle carthage itself.
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Apr 19, 2018 20:50
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Banana Canada posted:Go shopping in mainland China for some clothes with hip "English" slogans or design elements and you'll see variations on all of this today. Badly translated or misspelt phrases, copied non sequitur words or sayings, "lorem ipsum" style lifting of blocks of texts from a random book or news article, voweless gibberish, etc. a number of icons of the virgin mary show her wearing a veil made of cloth with arabic writing around the edges. sometimes this is real arabic writing, sometimes it is fake as gently caress
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Apr 19, 2018 20:55
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