Zopotantor posted:

Totally real.

Yan, tan, tether, mether, pip, azer, sezar, akker, conter, DICK.

Zopotantor posted:

Totally real.

Yan, tan, tether, mether, pip, azer, sezar, akker, conter, DICK.

Tunicate posted:

Except for the guys who would beat the poo poo out of you if you were cheating with your weights

Grand Fromage posted:

The scroll reading tech works: https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1754519304471814555

Should be able to do all of them finally. Lives of Famous Whores will soon be ours.

Grand Fromage posted:

The scroll reading tech works: https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1754519304471814555

Should be able to do all of them finally. Lives of Famous Whores will soon be ours.

FishFood posted:

Alas, Suetonius wrote after Vesuvius erupted so we may only get his sources. I'm hoping there's an unredacted edition of Trogus in there somewhere, though.

Grand Fromage posted:

The scroll reading tech works: https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1754519304471814555

Should be able to do all of them finally. Lives of Famous Whores will soon be ours.

Grand Fromage posted:

The scroll reading tech works: https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1754519304471814555

Should be able to do all of them finally. Lives of Famous Whores will soon be ours.

PittTheElder posted:

This is super cool, and everyone should click through to the actual page (ideally bypassing Twitter in the process ): https://scrollprize.org/grandprize

Very slick explanation of the contest, the winners, and how you do it technically.

cheetah7071 posted:

Apparently, every bit of text recovered so far (both this text, and the scrolls that were physically unraveled decades ago) were Epicurean philosophy. So we can expect a lot of that, probably.

skasion posted:

Also mentions here that there are lower, unexcavated levels of the villa perhaps containing yet more scrolls in addition to the 800 we already have.

skasion posted:

Also mentions here that there are lower, unexcavated levels of the villa perhaps containing yet more scrolls in addition to the 800 we already have.

vvv lol

Tunicate posted:

It's a 2000 year old burn, we spent millions of dollars reading the scrolls and the first thing out is "Rarer stuff isn't better just because it's harder to find."

cheetah7071 posted:

Apparently, every bit of text recovered so far (both this text, and the scrolls that were physically unraveled decades ago) were Epicurean philosophy. So we can expect a lot of that, probably.

Grand Fromage posted:

The scroll reading tech works: https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1754519304471814555

Should be able to do all of them finally. Lives of Famous Whores will soon be ours.

Nenonen posted:

Apropos of nothing, is there an archaeology/pre-history thread? tia

Nenonen posted:

Apropos of nothing, is there an archaeology/pre-history thread? tia

Tunicate posted:

There was but none of it was written down.

Telsa Cola posted:

It's generally this one, but if you wanted to make one I'd post in it.

quote:

A stone age wall discovered beneath the waves off Germany’s Baltic coast may be the oldest known megastructure built by humans in Europe, researchers say.

The wall, which stretches for nearly a kilometre along the seafloor in the Bay of Mecklenburg, was spotted by accident when scientists operated a multibeam sonar system from a research vessel on a student trip about 10km (six miles) offshore.

Closer inspection of the structure, named the Blinkerwall, revealed about 1,400 smaller stones that appear to have been positioned to connect nearly 300 larger boulders, many of which were too heavy for groups of humans to have moved.

The submerged wall, described as a “thrilling discovery”, is covered by 21 metres of water, but researchers believe it was constructed by hunter-gatherers on land next to a lake or marsh more than 10,000 years ago.

While the purpose of the wall is hard to prove, scientists suspect it served as a driving lane for hunters in pursuit of herds of reindeer.

“When you chase the animals, they follow these structures, they don’t attempt to jump over them,” said Jacob Geersen at the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research in Warnemünde, a German port town on the Baltic coast.

“The idea would be to create an artificial bottleneck with a second wall or with the lake shore,” he added.

A second wall that ran alongside the Blinkerwall may be buried in the seafloor sediments, the researchers write in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Alternatively, the wall may have forced the animals into the nearby lake, slowing them down and making them easy pickings for humans lying in wait in canoes armed with spears or bows and arrows.

Based on the size and shape of the 971 metre-long wall, Geersen and his colleagues consider it unlikely that it formed through natural processes, such as a huge tsunami moving the stones into place, or the stones being left behind by a moving glacier.

The angle of the wall, which is mostly less than 1 metre high, changes direction when it meets the larger boulders, suggesting the piles of smaller stones were positioned intentionally to link them up. In total, the wall’s stones are thought to weigh more than 142 tonnes.

If the wall was an ancient hunting lane, it was probably built more than 10,000 years ago and submerged with rising sea levels about 8,500 years ago.

“This puts the Blinkerwall into range of the oldest known examples of hunting architecture in the world and potentially makes it the oldest man-made megastructure in Europe,” the researchers said.

Geersen is now keen to revisit the site to reconstruct the ancient landscape and search for animal bones and human artefacts, such as projectiles used in hunting, which may be buried in sediments around the wall.

Nenonen posted:

What do I look, like a thread starter?

In any case I was just reading about Blinkerwall

It's surprising that the wall is still so "easy" to see after more than ten thousand years. A second parallel wall may be buried in sediments, so it's just good luck that this part was discovered by accident. It makes you wonder what kinds of pre-historic structures are hidden under the bottom of sea. Underwater archeology would have so much to give to our understanding of history if it just wasn't so difficult and expensive.

Arglebargle III posted:

The more I learn about the Shang dynasty the less I like them.

bob dobbs is dead posted:

second most organized human sacrifice regime, after the aztecs

although it's extremely indicative of like, modern rich country culture that you usually get more heat from peeps telling them about their puppy sacrifice (by immurement) than from telling em about their human sacrifice

bob dobbs is dead posted:

Tulip posted:

This is such an interesting form of self-flagellation and I wonder if somebody's studied it in particular. It's not really that unusual for a society to elevate certain things above human life, it seems to me like a fairly straightforward result of social stratification, but there's a specific type of Westerner who thinks that arises specifically from 20th/21st century European culture despite being observed in...I don't want to say most cultures because I don't have a broad enough knowledge base, but I am not familiar with any culture that doesn't have some animals that it holds up as especially valuable.

In the case of China there's actually a very interesting one, from Analects X.11, 廄焚。子退朝，曰：傷人乎？不問馬。 Legge translates this as " When the stables were burnt down, on returning from court Confucius said, "Was anyone hurt?" He did not ask about the horses." The purpose of recording this is to highlight that Confucius valued human lives over those of horses (even if the people were poor and the horses were valuable) in contrast to the prevailing norms of his time. So not only does Spring & Autumn China have people who valued the lives of certain animals over the lives of humans, it also has people who were criticizing it in the same way we see today.

(and small aside, having done quite a lot of work with dogs: people REALLY overestimate how well they treat their dogs. Most of the dogs I encountered when I worked as a groomer's assistant showed obvious visible signs of abuse, and their owners very clearly thought they were treating their dogs very well)

bob dobbs is dead posted:

the shang were finished by 1000 bc, confucius was born 551 bc...

nrook posted:

I think you've misread Tulip; they're criticizing you, not the Shang, with the passage from the Analects. They're arguing that the tendency you described as "novel rich country culture" to put animals above humans was common throughout history.