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Egyptian hieroglyphs weren't translated until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 showed a translation of hieroglyphs into Demotic script and Ancient Greek, which was already known by scholars and allowed for the previously forgotten language to be painstakingly reconstructed. But did you know that a lot of people thought they were already translated? They weren't. It was just really easy to get people to believe you if you were a scholar.  Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) was your classic Renaissance Man. The Jesuit scholar published around 40 works in varying fields, contributing to fields as diverse as biology, geology, Chinese culture and history, and machinery. Some of the conclusions he came to were correct, albeit not in the way he expected; he correctly predicted that disease was caused by microorganisms, but was likely viewing blood cells through a microscope and mistaking them for little creatures. He had a belief in a sort of proto-evolution that creatures in different climates transformed into new ones, but on the level of "Reindeer are actually deer that bred in the cold climate" or thinking that armadillos were a cross between turtles and porcupines. Some of his beliefs were spectacularly wrong, believing that dinosaur fossils were the bones of giants and that mountains were "Earth's skeleton" exposed by erosion. The one area he really succeeded in was language, becoming familiar with about 20 of them. In general, Kircher was a guy who made a lot of wild theories but didn't do a lot of testing and badly misinterpreted evidence based on his cultural and educational background (including taking the Bible literally and trying to explain how the Ark could have been logistically possible). He was the sort of accident-prone idiot who would ask questions and try to understand everything, never really figuring out that he wasn't as smart as he thought he was. But these were times when you could say just about any kind of bullshit and if you used enough big words and Latin people would nod their heads and figure that you knew what you were talking about. His knowledge of language would eventually drive him to do something really, really dumb. In 1628 he found a collection of hieroglyphs in a library at Speyer and began studying them, learning Coptic (the language of Egyptian Christians). He was correct in assuming that Coptic was descended from the Ancient Egyptian language, but he started by taking the story of the Tower of Babel literally. He believed that there really was a universal language given by God to Adam, spoken by all peoples until their hubris led God to make them all speak different languages. He thus believed that Ancient Egyptian could have been this universal language and translating it could unlock the secrets of the universe. What he did was essentially bullshitting. Kircher believed that hieroglyphs were occult symbols that couldn't actually be read literally as words. He studied every single hieroglyph and known artifact of Egypt to try and crack the code of these symbols. With so little knowledge, it was like trying to get a caveman to figure out a V8 engine. Assuming that all pictographic scripts (and "similar" ones like Chinese) were descended from Ancient Egyptian, he came to the conclusion that all of these profane pagan cultures on both sides of the world were actually repeating sacred Christian doctrine distorted by the influence of others. He interpreted stories of Isis and Osiris as a form of the Holy Trinity and that Hermes Trismegistus was actually Moses. His final book on the subject, Egyptian Oedipus, has been called "one of the most learned monstrosities of all time." An especially major flaw in his reading was that he believed that Egyptian monuments like obelisks and tombs were filled with ancient wisdom rather than any kind of mundane details or monuments to the gods. Take, for example, an obelisk that was taken from Heliopolis. This is what we now know the inscription to read: quote:Horus, strong bull, beloved of Maat, Usr-Maat-Ra Setep-en-Ra (Ra-strong-in-truth-chosen-of-Ra), king of Upper and Lower Egypt, son of the Sun, Ramesses II. Pretty straightforward monument to Horus, right? That's not good enough for Athanasius Kircher! Here's how he interpreted it: quote:Supramundane Osiris, concealed in the center of eternity, flows down into the world of the Genies, which is the most near, similar, and immediately subject to him. He flows down into the divinity Osiris of the sensible World, and its soul, which is the Sun. He flows down into the Osiris of the elemental World, Apis, beneficent Agathodemon, who distributes the power imparted by Osiris to all the members of the lower world. His minister and faithful attendant, the polymorphous Spirit, shows the abundance and wealth of all necessary things by the variety that he brings about and oversees. But since the beneficent power of the polymorphous Spirit may be impeded in various ways by adverse powers, the sacred Mophto-Mendesian table, which acquires the moist strength and fertility of the Nile, in order for the flow of good things to be performed without impediment, must be worn for protection. But since the polymorphous Spirit is not capable of thoroughly completing this task, the cooperation of Isis, whose dryness tempers the moisture of Mendes, is needed. To obtain it, the following sacred table of Osiris is composed, on which are taught the things to be done in sacrifices and the way to perform the Komasian rites. Through this table and the sight of it supramundane Osiris shows the desired abundance of necessary things. In another case, he translated "Osiris says" as "The treachery of Typhon ends at the throne of Isis; the moisture of nature is guarded by the vigilance of Anubis." When Egyptian obelisks were taken and erected in Rome, he gleefully added his own hieroglyphs to the blank areas that nobody can really figure out the meaning of. It was more than just translating words incorrectly. It was so fundamentally wrong that he wasn't even on the same subject. The Egyptians were playing baseball and he was bringing a soccer ball, a rugby uniform, and a handgun. While today we recognize how awful his work is, it was widely accepted in his time. The practice of interpreting the Bible literally and trying to fit metaphorical stories and magic into what was actually known of the world and its history was the accepted practice for centuries. Kircher was simply following along with everyone else of his time by finding a way to interpret the discovery of America and its native cultures into a coherent Biblical worldview. His reputation for "decoding" the hieroglyphs was such that a copy of the Voynich Manuscript was sent to him to try and translate too, which is actually the earliest dated letter mentioning the manuscript. Kircher's theory of the hieroglyphs as symbols rather than a written language would only come to an end in the early 19th century when the Rosetta Stone allowed for back translation. Until then, even people who didn't necessarily believe his "translation" definitely thought he was on the right track. chitoryu12 has a new favorite as of 16:37 on Jun 14, 2019 |
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Jun 14, 2019 16:34
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That’s amazing. How did he get it so wrong? And also, do you know if it would’ve been possible to ever decode hieroglyphics without the Rosetta Stone?
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Jun 15, 2019 17:01
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poisonpill posted:That’s amazing. How did he get it so wrong? And also, do you know if it would’ve been possible to ever decode hieroglyphics without the Rosetta Stone? For the first question, it's because he was starting from a number of completely wrong positions: 1. The Bible is literal historical truth and thus every historical study must be conducted on the basis of incorporating it into Biblical canon, whether that's trying to justify the Ark and Great Flood's truth or trying to work the Aztecs, Mayans, and Inca into a history that had no knowledge of their existence. 2. Because the Tower of Babel story is something that actually happened and not a metaphor or something completely made up, assume that all pictographic and logographic languages are descended from a common ancestor. Because of the age, he considered Ancient Egyptian to be this. 3. The Egyptian writing system was not actually a written language in which each character represents a word, phrase, or sound, but actually symbols forming an allegorical riddle meant to be interpreted (this was a common assumption of the time, not his own invention). 4. The writing the Egyptians left was not mundane text or meant to honor the gods or deceased, but actually instructions to unlock the secrets of the universe. Because if you already started this enterprise by thinking their language is the original one God gave Adam, why assume that they wrote down anything except cool magic stuff? So from these assumptions he began studying the symbols themselves to extract meaning from their shape, comparison to other scripts from around the world that he thought were descended from it, and Egyptian artifacts. He then peppered this was lots of extremely flowery, learned language in Latin that made the translations seem much more spectacular. He also had a lot of inaccurate drawings and transcriptions of hieroglyphs to work from rather than original sources, which further confused him. As for the second question, almost definitely not. I'd even venture saying that it would have been 100% impossible without it or a comparative document. Their complexity and the influence of Greece and Rome led to the people of Egypt steadily abandoning them for simpler script like Demotic or other languages like Greek, Latin, and Coptic (which started as basically transliterating Egyptian into Greek). But hieroglyphs are a logographic writing system in which each symbol can have multiple meanings and represent sounds as well as specific items or words. There are symbols that only act as sounds that are appended to more complicated drawings to change their meaning. You can even read it in different directions depending on how it's set up! Trying to translate them without a guide to what the text is supposed to say would be like asking you to interpret Japanese without any help at all.
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Jun 15, 2019 19:04
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poisonpill posted:That’s amazing. How did he get it so wrong? And also, do you know if it would’ve been possible to ever decode hieroglyphics without the Rosetta Stone? Greek travellers writing at the time ancient Egyptian was still a living language completely misunderstood how hieroglyphics worked. They assumed it was primitive picture-writing and that each symbol represented a broad concept or idea - a picture of the god Ra must refer to the god himself or some aspect of his power. In fact hieroglyphics were also used phonetically and that picture of Ra might also just mean the syllable "Ra" as part of a larger word. Later work on hieroglyphics then took those Greek texts as primary sources, thus repeating the false assumptions, and it's easy for people to lead themselves down increasingly insane trains of thought when the foundations of their theories are wrong. Even when you know the writing system is mostly phonetic that doesn't help much when you don't know how the language is supposed to sound because the last person who spoke it died 1000 years ago. The breakthrough was when someone worked out that the cartouches (a set of hieroglyphs inside an oval) corresponded to personal names of people mentioned in the Greek translation. If you assume that personal names are pronounced more or less the same in both languages then it gives you a foothold to establish what sounds certain hieroglyphic symbols might represent. An added complication is that ancient Egyptian scribes would sometimes ignore the "correct" representation and substitute similar symbols, omit others (vowels especially), or swap the symbol order for aesthetic reasons and/or to reduce the amount of whitespace. Soyoumight hve to dciphrsometng liekthis wrttn in a languge youdontknow, in a scrpt you dnt undrstnd. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 21:51 on Jun 15, 2019 |
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Jun 15, 2019 19:16
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chitoryu12 posted:
Just to clarify, coptic is essentially egyptian as much as english is anglo-saxon. They abandoned hieroglyphs for other systems of writing but didn’t swap out to a foreign language entirely.
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Jun 15, 2019 19:25
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Just to clarify, coptic is essentially egyptian as much as english is anglo-saxon. They abandoned hieroglyphs for other systems of writing but didn’t swap out to a foreign language entirely. Yeah, that's why I mentioned how it started. Not entirely a foreign language, but far enough that you can reasonably call it different. To give an example of what happens when you never get a translation guide, there's the Voynich Manuscript. It's written in a completely alien script with no guide at all to what anything might say. It's been almost 400 years since the oldest confirmed date of its possession (and carbon dating says it's older still) and not one person has ever managed to decipher it. Without anything to give a single hint, it's completely indecipherable. If no documents translating it were ever created or existed, it'll most likely go undeciphered for eternity.
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Jun 15, 2019 19:37
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On the subject of writing, the Voynich Manuscript is currently stored in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It looks like this:  The wall panels are 1.25-inch thick marble panels that let in filtered sunlight.
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Jun 15, 2019 19:46
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God that's a good looking special purpose library
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Jun 15, 2019 19:51
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Nice video game level.
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Jun 15, 2019 21:00
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Just to clarify, coptic is essentially egyptian as much as english is anglo-saxon. They abandoned hieroglyphs for other systems of writing but didn’t swap out to a foreign language entirely. Isn't modern phonetic understanding of anient Egyptian mostly based on the Coptic language?
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Jun 15, 2019 21:11
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steinrokkan posted:Isn't modern phonetic understanding of anient Egyptian mostly based on the Coptic language? The phonetic understanding is basically a big shrug. There’s no recording of what vowels were used and the writers often took shortcuts, so we’ve had to guess at the actual sound of the language. Coptic started as transliterating Egyptian into Greek and there are still disagreements to this day over properly interpreting it.
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Jun 16, 2019 06:12
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chitoryu12 posted:The phonetic understanding is basically a big shrug. There’s no recording of what vowels were used and the writers often took shortcuts, so we’ve had to guess at the actual sound of the language. Coptic started as transliterating Egyptian into Greek and there are still disagreements to this day over properly interpreting it. Yup, that's how you get Akhnaten/Echnaton, Nefertiti/Nofretete etc.
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Jun 16, 2019 08:31
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chitoryu12 posted:
That reminds me, Dutch is one of the few languages where the names of many sciences and of certain mathematical concepts are not simple transliterations of the Latin names (physica -> physics). Physics is natuurkunde: knowledge of nature. Chemistry, scheikunde, knowledge of separating things. Maths, wiskunde, knowledge of that which is certain. Where did the language get these names? Well, from the 16th century scientist Simon Stevin from Bruges, who actually made some good contributions to the science of his day. But for some unfathomable reason he believed Dutch was the Perfect language, created by God, spoken by Adam and Eve. And he thought the names of the sciences shouldn't be in inferior Latin, so he made his own without Latin roots, and those stuck around.
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Jun 16, 2019 20:46
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I bet geert is a big fan
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Jun 16, 2019 20:56
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Ah yes, the original language of humankind: German, but worse.
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Jun 16, 2019 21:39
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Swamp kraut
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Jun 17, 2019 02:43
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Danish language https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk
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Jun 17, 2019 13:38
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https://twitter.com/shutupandrosky/status/1140427545055117312?s=21
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Jun 17, 2019 21:37
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There's a point where something stops being Punk and just becomes Douchey and that definitely crosses the line
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Jun 17, 2019 21:54
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drrockso20 posted:There's a point where something stops being Punk and just becomes Douchey and that definitely crosses the line Apparently they're a comedy punk band that fucks with the audience. They're part of the "rock demenziale" movement that's basically Dadaist humor. Surreal nonsense lyrics with puns, throwing vegetables at the audience, playing out of time on purpose, etc. Sort of like satirical rock but you're never sure if it's being played straight or not.
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Jun 17, 2019 21:57
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Duodecimal posted:Danish language 
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Jun 17, 2019 22:08
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re punk performance, sometime in the 90s Aphex Twin put a disc of sand paper on the turn table and dropped a microphone down a blender
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Jun 17, 2019 22:09
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Krankenstyle posted:re punk performance, sometime in the 90s Aphex Twin put a disc of sand paper on the turn table and dropped a microphone down a blender And nobody noticed?
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Jun 17, 2019 22:16
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chitoryu12 posted:And nobody noticed? They were momentarily delighted at the increase in quality
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Jun 17, 2019 22:26
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chitoryu12 posted:Apparently they're a comedy punk band that fucks with the audience. They're part of the "rock demenziale" movement that's basically Dadaist humor. Surreal nonsense lyrics with puns, throwing vegetables at the audience, playing out of time on purpose, etc. Sort of like satirical rock but you're never sure if it's being played straight or not. So Devo basically
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Jun 17, 2019 23:24
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ikke stor, ikke forfærdelig
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Jun 18, 2019 00:49
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Duodecimal posted:Danish language My mom went to college in Denmark back in the '60s. She learned a little Danish, but she spoke English and pretty good Norwegian and got by on that. She had a lot of trouble with Danish pronunciation and counting which is nigh impossible. Half thirds twenty plus nine minus seven plus two less half tens minus five plus one half sevenths and two square roots of seven. I'm pretty sure that's how you say "One".
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Jun 18, 2019 07:11
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drrockso20 posted:There's a point where something stops being Punk and just becomes Douchey and that definitely crosses the line It only crossed the line when they didn't share the spaghetti.
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Jun 18, 2019 07:39
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drrockso20 posted:There's a point where something stops being Punk and just becomes Douchey and that definitely crosses the line I thought caring about the audiences time and appreciation was the least punk thing possible.
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Jun 18, 2019 08:33
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Not fun but really awkward quote:As is well known, when Emperor Franz Josef died in 1916, his son Karl ruled briefly in his stead until the Hapsburg Empire was dismembered by the victorious allies after the World War. Karl and his wife Zita, whom he had married in 1911, went into exile. Karl died in 1922, but Zita lived on for another 66-plus years. She died at the age of 96 on March 14, 1989.
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Jun 18, 2019 14:16
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A golden crucifix found in Aarhus, Denmark from 1050-1100: It shows how the vikings imagined Christ. Not some humble man in pain with a crown of thorns, but a defiant man with a big rear end crown because letting yourself be so humiliated that you should wear anything else when you're crucified was beyond the vikings' imagination. Vikings imagined Jesus as the eternal come at me bro. Alhazred has a new favorite as of 18:37 on Jun 18, 2019 |
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Jun 18, 2019 17:17
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Nckdictator posted:Not fun but really awkward Empires and imperialism: noted preventers of genocide
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Jun 18, 2019 17:24
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Nckdictator posted:Not fun but really awkward Speaking of Not Fun facts about Austria-Hungary, there's the Mayerling incident. In January of 1889 Crown Prince Rudolf, the 30-something son of Emperor Franz Joseph had been having an affair with Baroness Mary Vetsera, who was 17 years old at the time. I don't know how much the age difference played into it, but people at the court weren't particularly happy, especially given that Rudolf was already married. However, Rudolf and Mary were in love, and on January 30 they ran away to a hunting lodge, where they were found dead later that day. What had happened exactly was (and is) a mystery, but apparently the Prince had shot himself and possibly also Mary. Or maybe they were poisoned. The investigation was covered up due to the scandalous nature, and she was buried immediately, without any medical examination. According to Wikipedia, Empress Zita, the Duchess of Auschwitz from your story, believed they were murdered by Georges Clemenceau, a French politician and later prime minister of France during world war 1. After some back and forth, the official explanation was that the Prince had shot Mary and then himself. At any rate, the Vatican got involved, because you couldn't exactly give the Crown Prince a christian burial if he was a murderer and had committed suicide on top of that. The Vatican eventually declared that he had been mentally unbalanced, and therefore didn't deliberately kill Mary or take his own life. Since Franz Joseph didn't have any other heirs, the crown went to his brother Karl Ludwig, whose son Franz Ferdinand (in turn the father of another Karl, and father in law of Zita) got killed down in Serbia, which started a whole other kerfuffle. Many years later, in 1959, a young doctor examined the remains of Mary, but was unable to find any bullet wounds. He then FOIA'd the papal archives, who had investigated the scene in 1889. Their conclusion back then was that only one bullet had been fired. The doctor, Gerd Holler then suggested that maybe she'd died accidentally. Then in 2015, a mere 4 years ago, farewell letters from Mary to her mother and family, were discovered in a bank safe deposit box where they'd been sitting untouched since 1926. quote:Dear Mother
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Jun 18, 2019 18:36
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So did she kill him or what? I'm dumb. Also, this is neat: Kid with a metal detector found a sigil/seal stamp that has been matched to a specific sigil (nobleman Niels Krabbe) on a document from 1408, one of the oldest conserved original documents written in Danish. Sigil stamps are pretty common, with some 30-40 being found a year, but it's super rare that they're matched to a specific document; the last time it happened was in 1992. https://natmus.dk/webdok/krabbes-segl/
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Jun 29, 2019 08:08
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She died several hours before him (rigor mortis had set in), and since there probably was no bullet wound and only one bullet fired (which had hit the prince), then I guess she'd probably been poisoned or poisoned herself.
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Jun 29, 2019 10:26
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romeo and juliet suicide pact
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Jun 29, 2019 10:28
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Ah, right. That makes sense.
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Jun 29, 2019 10:35
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https://twitter.com/fjsoyer/status/1144921921382842368?s=21 Ocean‘s Eleven: Imperial Edition
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Jun 29, 2019 15:24
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Does anyone remember a somewhat popular early 20th century figure ranting on about Hitler and then ending with "But by god, I like the boy!" Trying to recall the quote. It was in either this, or another historical thread on SA. Google eludes me.
Suspect Bucket has a new favorite as of 03:05 on Jul 6, 2019 |
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Jul 6, 2019 02:52
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Suspect Bucket posted:Does anyone remember a somewhat popular early 20th century figure ranting on about Hitler and then ending with "But by god, I like the boy!" Trying to recall the quote. It was in either this, or another historical thread on SA. Google eludes me. I want to say that was HP Lovecraft?
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Jul 6, 2019 03:48
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