The Dennis System posted:

Very weird that a bunch of people on a random comedy website message board are super knowledgeable about the bronze age.

That Robot posted:

Yeah Inanna/Ishtar rules. She’s one of my favorite mythological entities because she doesn’t give a gently caress and parties all the time.

wide stance posted:

Blue Star posted:

From what I know, Atlantis isnt something that anyone really believed in. Even at the time, it was just an allegory that Plato came up with and everyone knew it. I think he was using it as a device to contrast with his idea of a perfect Athens. Like, Atlantis was super advanced and powerful but they werent virtuous like the Athenians were, and the Athenians end up defeating them because the gods are on their side, so Atlantis sinks beneath the waves. All of the thinkers and philosophers knew that Atlantis was just something Plato came up with, all through the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages. Im not sure when that changed but I think in the 19th century, when archeology was starting to become a thing, less knowledgeable folks started to make poo poo up about how Atlantis was totally real and Atlanteans founded the Mayans, the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, etc. and they had psychic spiritual powers. But that all came from "modern" people, not ancient times.

Alhazred posted:

Given the widespread belief that routine handling of paper with bare hands chemically damages it, it is telling that our research uncovered no scientific evidence supporting this notion. The closest citation on the subject found was an article entitled, "Fingerprints on Photographs" in which Klaus Hendriks and Rütiger Krall (1993) state that a fingerprint could damage a silver image if the salts in sweat, particularly sodium chloride, managed to penetrate through the gelatin layer. Since the surface of paper is almost always protected by a layer of gelatin (or some other sizing agent), sodium chloride would have to permeate this barrier before it could interact with the cellulose beneath, and the corrosion potential of cellulose is not remotely as great as that of silver. As discovered by Hendriks and Krall, the other necessary component for the silver corrosion reaction is oxygen, and it can be argued that bound sheets of paper in closed books are not exposed to high levels of environmental oxygen for long periods of time, and neither are unbound sheets stored along with other pieces of paper in archival storage folders and boxes.