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ChubbyChecker posted:
awesome, do you have a link to the full translation?
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Feb 11, 2022 18:36
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WoodrowSkillson posted:awesome, do you have a link to the full translation? There's a full translation on its British museum page: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA5634. Some other reasons for missing work are "His wife was bleeding," "suffering with his eye," and "fetching stone for the scribe."
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Feb 11, 2022 18:54
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ChubbyChecker posted:
Scorpion guy is definitely lying.
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Feb 11, 2022 18:54
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Ancient egypt Columbo: Just one more thing! You told your foreman you couldn't make it to the site because you were bitten by a scorpion. But scorpions don't bite they sting!
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Feb 11, 2022 19:20
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Promontory posted:There's been renewed debate about the domestication of horses thanks to archaeological discoveries. David W. Anthony's Horse, Wheel and Language (2007) is a summary of the argument, though I don't have it on hand. Oh this is great, thank you!
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Feb 11, 2022 19:28
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too much focus on the poor guy who got bit by a scorpion and not enough on the guy who's embalming his brother for the tenth time this year.
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Feb 11, 2022 19:31
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Benagain posted:too much focus on the poor guy who got bit by a scorpion and not enough on the guy who's embalming his brother for the tenth time this year. Look, the brother keeps escaping and needing to be re-embalmed
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Feb 11, 2022 19:33
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Promontory posted:There's been renewed debate about the domestication of horses thanks to archaeological discoveries. David W. Anthony's Horse, Wheel and Language (2007) is a summary of the argument, though I don't have it on hand. Do we have much archaeological evidence of the domestication of cattle? Do we know if beef or dairy herding came first? I'm curious how the first people decided to start squeezing out and drinking giant mammal baby food, and then making it into solid food.
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Feb 11, 2022 19:54
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cheetah7071 posted:Look, the brother keeps escaping and needing to be re-embalmed that’s what you get with shoddy pyramid building.
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Feb 11, 2022 19:55
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Tulip posted:Oh this is great, thank you! We know that chariots came before domestication of horses because the Sumerians and others left murals of chariots being pulled by donkeys. I guess they were smaller and easier to tame. Obviously, they would have used horses if they had them. 
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Feb 11, 2022 20:00
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PawParole posted:that’s what you get with shoddy pyramid building. Those are just called ziggurats.
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Feb 11, 2022 20:07
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Deteriorata posted:We know that chariots came before domestication of horses because the Sumerians and others left murals of chariots being pulled by donkeys. I guess they were smaller and easier to tame. Obviously, they would have used horses if they had them. we know that chariots came to agricultural societies before the agricultural societies had easy access to domesticated horses, yes. that doesn't really mean that the invention of chariots predates the domestication of horses; the animals were spread slower than the technology
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Feb 11, 2022 20:11
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ChubbyChecker posted:
here is the link to the the British museum object description and info. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA5634 e: f;b ughhhh fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Feb 11, 2022 |
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Feb 11, 2022 20:12
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Shoutout to Penduauu just straight up being like oh yeah sorry couldn't make it in because I was drinking with my buddy Khonsu.
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Feb 11, 2022 20:25
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Deteriorata posted:We know that chariots came before domestication of horses because the Sumerians and others left murals of chariots being pulled by donkeys. I guess they were smaller and easier to tame. Obviously, they would have used horses if they had them. So these are actually carts, not chariots: chariots appear hundreds of years later. It sounds like a semantic difference, but two-wheeled chariots also incorporate a suspension system and are much, much faster than four-wheeled carts. They were a pretty big technological innovation.
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Feb 11, 2022 20:25
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CrypticFox posted:There's a full translation on its British museum page: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA5634. drat, Paherypedjet was definitely the party (workplace?) healer, he must have got a whole month off making potions and poo poo.
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Feb 11, 2022 21:57
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Hearty lol at all these guys who got off work because their wife/daughter had her period. Try that poo poo nowadays and see how many pyramid-building jobs you can keep
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Feb 11, 2022 22:15
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If she had endometriosis that can be bad news .
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Feb 11, 2022 22:17
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Jazerus posted:we know that chariots came to agricultural societies before the agricultural societies had easy access to domesticated horses, yes. that doesn't really mean that the invention of chariots predates the domestication of horses; the animals were spread slower than the technology which makes sense really, it's a hell of a lot easier to replicate a mechanism you might have seen than trying to fabricate baby horses. bit like the legendary silk worm trade, unless someone can physically abscond with enough to make a stable population it's relatively possible to contain the spread, at least for awhile.
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Feb 11, 2022 22:22
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SexyBlindfold posted:drat, Paherypedjet was definitely the party (workplace?) healer, he must have got a whole month off making potions and poo poo. quote:day 25 (MAKING REMEDIES FOR THE SCRIBE’S WIFE) I'm assuming this is a euphemism.
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Feb 11, 2022 22:43
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She complains her husband's pen is too small; he has remedied this (after a fashion)
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Feb 11, 2022 22:58
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I did not see anything on the site, do we know what/who this ledger was for? Like I assume some kind of work corvee or whatever since it seems pretty loose with attendance all things considered, and beer making seems to take precedence for many of their workers.
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Feb 11, 2022 23:02
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WoodrowSkillson posted:I did not see anything on the site, do we know what/who this ledger was for? Like I assume some kind of work corvee or whatever since it seems pretty loose with attendance all things considered, and beer making seems to take precedence for many of their workers. 'Absence from work by the necropolis workmen of Thebes'
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Feb 11, 2022 23:09
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CrypticFox posted:There's a full translation on its British museum page: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA5634. iirc eye problems were a big thing in legions too
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Feb 12, 2022 01:20
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Hey wait I got a question did the central great lakes region of Africa manage to domesticate any crops or animals?
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Feb 12, 2022 01:38
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I can't think of anything offhand, but I don't know why. There are a fair number of regions in the world where wild food was so abundant nobody really bothered and you got settlements without the need for agriculture.
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Feb 12, 2022 01:50
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WoodrowSkillson posted:I did not see anything on the site, do we know what/who this ledger was for? Like I assume some kind of work corvee or whatever since it seems pretty loose with attendance all things considered, and beer making seems to take precedence for many of their workers. These workers were not corvee laborers. Deir el-Medina was the village where the artisans who built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived. They were professionals who lived and worked there year round. They were in the employ of the Pharaoh, and management presumably wanted to keep track of its workers. The construction of royal tombs was an enormous project, with a very large workforce. Deir el-Medina management probably used the records in a way similar to how modern managers would use attendance records. If Amenhotep the painter is out with a scorpion bite, the section of a wall painting he is assigned to would need to be covered by someone else that day, or made up later. The people working at Deir el-Medina were probably relatively privileged and relatively well paid, but we can't speak very confidently about that. Deir el-Medina is uniquely well preserved because of its isolation, and dry climate (its much further from the Nile than almost any other Ancient Egyptian town was, because its next to the Valley of the Kings). We don't have much to compare it to, so we can't really say whether this level of record keeping was unusual, or whether no other similar documents from other areas have survived. It's probably the latter, since where there are bureaucratic records from other places, they tend to be pretty detailed. The Egyptians really liked keeping records. The absences for beer making were probably at least partly related to to religious festivals. Beer was used in a variety of ways in Egyptian religion, including as offerings to the gods. There are sections of the text where no one is recorded being out for 10 days at a time, and those holes seem to line up with religious festivals. The beer making may have been preparation for those occasions.
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Feb 12, 2022 02:37
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skasion posted:Hearty lol at all these guys who got off work because their wife/daughter had her period. Try that poo poo nowadays and see how many pyramid-building jobs you can keep It might be a ritual purity thing? That said, I've had zero luck finding any pyramid building jobs
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Feb 12, 2022 09:28
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Lawman 0 posted:Hey wait I got a question did the central great lakes region of Africa manage to domesticate any crops or animals? I'm pretty sure all kinds of crops, although nothing quite as effective as the modern staples? I've been sometimes browsing this book, which is a good source: https://www.nap.edu/catalog/2305/lost-crops-of-africa-volume-i-grains
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Feb 12, 2022 10:13
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Fuschia tude posted:Do we have much archaeological evidence of the domestication of cattle? There's plenty of evidence, but there is still debate on how to interpret the findings. Genetic research has provided more context. Specifically for cattle I believe the consensus still is that they were domesticated from the ancient aurochs at least twice: from an aurochs population in the Near East, giving us Bos taurus taurus or taurine cattle and from an aurochs population in India, giving us Bos taurus indicus or zebu cattle. A well-known archaeological marker is morphology, i.e. looking for for changes in animal bones that may have been caused by human control of reproduction etc. Usually it's been considered that larger wild progenitor species became smaller docile domesticates (aurochs -> cattle) but it does not seem to be a hard and fast rule. Llamas and alpacas are bigger than their progenitors. The other issue is that can take a long time for any clear changes in body size to manifest. Goats, for example, show a decline in average body size a thousand years after other evidence of domestication, according to Melinda Zeder. Then there's plasticity, i.e. evidence of something having been done to individual animals. Bit wear on horse teeth is an example of this. However, it can be very difficult to tell human action apart from other reasons. The main criticism against bit wear theory is that similar teeth markings can be found on horse teeth dated to the Pleistocene in North America. Demographic profiling of animal bones depends on being able to reliably tell male and female bones apart (and their age). The idea is that in a human-controlled animal population only select males were kept for breeding, while females lived longer. This needs to balance between theory, actual known herding practices and the behaviour of the animals in the wild. It's possible that excess males had a different purpose than just being butchered for meat, and population numbers could have been managed instead with castration. Zoogeographical evidence is based on the idea that certain animals appear beyond their "natural range" because humans have transported them there. Determining the natural habitat of common animals and extinct progenitors can be very difficult. Animal bones discovered in an unusual place could be a remnant population instead of domesticated cattle. Finally there's traditional archaeological interpretation, such as finding an enclosed area with lots of dung, which can reasonably be described as a pen or a corral. Putting all of these together will provide strongest evidence for domestication. If archaeologists discover a significant amount of bones showing a noticeable bias in sex and age, which are different from older animal remains and are found together with cow tools, they can be pretty sure.
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Feb 12, 2022 11:48
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Tree Bucket posted:It might be a ritual purity thing? Yeah, sounds like a ritual purity thing. Would you be interested in selling Cutco knives?
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Feb 12, 2022 12:43
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Lead out in cuffs posted:I'm pretty sure all kinds of crops, although nothing quite as effective as the modern staples? Wow that sounds interesting thanks! 
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Feb 12, 2022 17:19
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I recall hearing that you can use linguistic evidence to date domestication sometimes. Like, if two languages have the same word for sheep, that's reasonable evidence that the languages diverged after their speakers were exposed to sheep and thus needed a word for them. If they have different words for sheep, and you can be reasonably certain both words are ancient, then that's evidence that the speakers encountered sheep after the languages diverged Of course, dating languages is also tricky, and evidence like this is just as often used to date the language splits, rather than dating the time the speakers first encountered some new thing
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Feb 12, 2022 18:50
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Lawman 0 posted:Wow that sounds interesting thanks! No worries! It's more of a food security / agriculture kind of book, but should be a good jumping off point into the archaeological literature. And it's fascinating how many obscure domesticated crops there are out there. Like in Peru there are half a dozen different tubers besides potatoes.
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Feb 12, 2022 19:18
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ChubbyChecker posted:Yeah, sounds like a ritual purity thing. Well whatever the reason, would be nice to have a couple extra days off a month.
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Feb 12, 2022 20:05
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kaschei posted:My understanding is that horseback riding and horse domestication didn't always go together. Do we have any descriptions of horseback riding from cultures that had (or at least knew of) horses but didn't ride them? Would a chariot soldier's mind have been totally blown, or would it have seemed kind of gimmicky? I kind of assume if there are people around horses, there are some kids trying to jump on their backs, even if (because?) it wasn't recognized as a useful pursuit. I've read about this happening in ancient China -- chariot-based warfare was incredibly prestigious, whereas horseback riding started out with associations with northern barbarians, so there was apparently substantial resistance to adopting the practice for a time. The northern state of Zhou, who obviously had the most frequent interactions with the nomadic peoples, adopted it first in the late 300s and it took decades to spread throughout the greater Chinese cultural sphere at the time, and even then only in a supporting role. Tulip posted:I think this is a misunderstanding, potentially driven by source bias (i.e. we don't have historical records from groups that specifically lived outside of the literate, urban tradition we all live in). I know you're actually an expert in this kind of subject so I'm prepared to defer to you, but isn't focusing on cases like eastern Zomia kind of an outlier? Yeah there are a number of places around the world where settled agriculturalist vs non-settled-agriculturalist interactions haven't been so lopsided, but as I've been reading casually about neolithic genetic movements over the past year I've been kind of stunned at how that does seem to be so very unusual -- that in the vast majority of places, pressure from agricultural groups was straight up overwhelming, to the point that it seems like they would in many instances practically replace the original populations as they expanded time and time again, and present day populations in much of the world are overwhelmingly descended from groups from originally kind of strikingly localized regions. There are many exceptions, but to point to them as what we should be looking at first strikes me as kind of needlessly contrarian, and while obviously there's very damaging associations that are made by thinking of settled agriculturalists as "better," (although I hope we as a society have long moved past might makes right, so that shouldn't really have to be what we jump to anyway) a better understanding of how actually most of us in e.g. East Asia or Europe have far more recent common ancestry than the frequent image of unbroken lineages stretching back to the ice age imply might be pretty beneficial.
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Feb 12, 2022 20:41
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cheetah7071 posted:I recall hearing that you can use linguistic evidence to date domestication sometimes. Like, if two languages have the same word for sheep, that's reasonable evidence that the languages diverged after their speakers were exposed to sheep and thus needed a word for them. If they have different words for sheep, and you can be reasonably certain both words are ancient, then that's evidence that the speakers encountered sheep after the languages diverged A cool reversal of this is that in bronze age China, we see multiple different ideograms for 'chariot' all pop up around the same time in different places, implying that chariots entered China from the outside and more rapidly than language standardization could keep up. Koramei posted:I know you're actually an expert in this kind of subject so I'm prepared to defer to you, but isn't focusing on cases like eastern Zomia kind of an outlier? Yeah there are a number of places around the world where settled agriculturalist vs non-settled-agriculturalist interactions haven't been so lopsided, but as I've been reading casually about neolithic genetic movements over the past year I've been kind of stunned at how that does seem to be so very unusual -- that in the vast majority of places, pressure from agricultural groups was straight up overwhelming, to the point that it seems like they would in many instances practically replace the original populations as they expanded time and time again, and present day populations in much of the world are overwhelmingly descended from groups from originally kind of strikingly localized regions. There are settled, agrarian societies that are outside the literate, urban traditions that I referred to. And from the post that I made: quote:This relationship is not unique to eastern Zomia - a similar situation can be seen in the Balkans, Iranian plateau, Scandinavia, Mexico, Peru, really basically anywhere that there are cities, the cities are not very far from areas where city building and intensive agriculture are just not economically good ideas. Transhumance is still practiced today and was until quite recently a critical part of most economies, and it is fundamentally not compatible with how settled states with intensive agriculture govern. I definitely do not think of Zomia as an outlier in terms of "there are settled state societies having long-term relationships with less settled, less state-style societies." I think Zomia is exceptional for being well studied, well published, an area I have any sort of experience with. And for clarity's sake I do think that the the vertical stratification of Zomian cultures is unusual - when I look at e.g. the Balkans, there tens to be fairly straightforward highland vs lowland groups, not multiple striated layers of highland groups at different altitudes. I am absolutely not a genetics guy, to be clear, but I am skeptical that there is a clean connection between neolithic genetic spreads and economic patterns between 4000bce-1800ce. Economic and political formations that existed and even thrived outside of "state with intensive agriculture" are quite easy to find on all continents, and if those groups happen to have substantial genetic similarity to nearby urban state societies, my gut would be "they moved in and then changed their political economies at some point to adapt to climate and geography." That said, genuinely sincerely am having trouble understanding this and this does sound interesting: quote:present day populations in much of the world are overwhelmingly descended from groups from originally kind of strikingly localized regions Could you expand here a little? The first part makes it sound like the majority of people today do have a genetic lineage going back to the neolithic, but the second part sounds to me like that is exactly the claim you want to challenge. Apologies if I'm just having a brain fart or something but I am confused.
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Feb 12, 2022 22:29
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CrypticFox posted:These workers were not corvee laborers. Deir el-Medina was the village where the artisans who built the tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived. They were professionals who lived and worked there year round. They were in the employ of the Pharaoh, and management presumably wanted to keep track of its workers. The construction of royal tombs was an enormous project, with a very large workforce. Deir el-Medina management probably used the records in a way similar to how modern managers would use attendance records. If Amenhotep the painter is out with a scorpion bite, the section of a wall painting he is assigned to would need to be covered by someone else that day, or made up later. Couldn't the beer also be part of their payment, though? I know that beer was regularly used for paying wages in Mesopotamia, not sure if it was the same in Egypt. But I think most regular folks got their salaries in goods (usually grain), and they'd eyeball however much of that they'd need for their household, and bring the surplus to the market to trade it for whatever else they needed. Beer was also used as payment either because it was safer to drink than most water sources (therefore a basic commodity) or because it fetched a higher price due to the labor involved, therefore if you were also paid in beer you were higher up in the social ladder. So it'd make sense that brewing beer for the worker's ration-salaries would be considered part of the workshop's regular activities. Also, aren't the workers from Deir el-Medina the ones who show up on the historical record as the first known instance of a labor strike? I think the details are a bit spotty since they're mostly based on the logs of a single overseer, but iirc it happened in a period where the Egyptian economy was doing pretty badly so there were interruptions in the supply chain and the salaries for the artisans kept coming late or not showing up at all, so at one point they refused to work until the outstanding wages were paid. Management had literally no idea how to respond to this and tried to bribe the workers with cake. It's assumed the issue got sorted out eventually since the project they were working on at the time was finished on schedule.
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Feb 13, 2022 04:01
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SexyBlindfold posted:Management had literally no idea how to respond to this and tried to bribe the workers with cake. I have had a couple workplaces try this
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Feb 14, 2022 01:13
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I think games like Civilization can be both helpful and not helpful when it comes to understanding ancient technological and cultural development. With tech trees and such, you have requirements, you gotta unlock A and B to unlock C, and so on. And it's not the same for everyone; people have to use what's available to them, and have a reason to explore that option to fill their needs. Chariots being an important part of warfare before cavalry may seem weird to modern eyes, but makes sense when you realise it's easier to attach an animal to a cart and point it where you need to go, whether donkeys, oxen or horses (or even people) while riding a horse requires lots of things; before you even get to things like saddles, reins and stirrups, all of which you likely need to figure out from first principles, you actually need horses that are big enough, strong enough and tame enough for someone to sit on their backs and control them. (Civ V comes to mind as actually being fairly good with this; the first mounted archer unit you unlock (civ depending) is the Chariot Archer, which is super fast on flat ground and a ranged attacker like you don't get for much later. Downside is, it can ONLY move fast on flat ground and doesn't handle hills well. On certain terrain you'll be at a huge advantage, on others it's useless) Not to mention I imagine having fast carts and reliable animals to pull them is more something that I imagine benefits you incredibly when it comes to logistics and infrastructure first, with the applications for war coming much later.
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Feb 14, 2022 03:26
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