121–130 of 246 posts
Amazing this stuff still yields secrets after thousands of years. Meanwhile the 3.5" floppy disks in my parents attic on which I've kept all my teenage Turbo Pascal source code have long lost all their data.
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Nothing blows my mind more than Göbekli Tepe, especially its age. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe
Fun fact: Cleopatra and Mark Antony etc. lived closer in time to the invention of mobile phones than to the construction of the Great Pyramids. Egyptian history is deep . Funner fact: the Great Pyramids were built closer in time to the invention of mobile phones than to the construction of Göbekli Tepe. Human history is way deep. Funnest fact: if we don't fuck it up, we're still only at the dawn of history, not at th…
The Giza Power Plants:
This diagram shows a shaft going into this void from two sides. I was wondering why they don't send a robot down into those. Seems the answer is that they have, but there's something blocking the shaft and they're not willing to destroy it any further for some reason: http://guardians.net/hawass/articles/news_on_the_robot_Dec_2... http://www.crystalinks.com/gantenbrink.html http://www.gizapower.com/Articles/door2.htm…
Interesting how the pyramids have been around for 4500 years and we still don't know all about their structure... Fun fact: there's a Neolithic site in Ireland, Newgrange, that's actually older than the pyramids. Fascinating and worth a visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange
Imagine if they find an opened chamber, and that it contains artefacts that can be carbon-dated, and they turn out to be thousands of years older than conventional Egyptology expects. (I expect there will be artefacts, and I expect their dates will coincide with what we already expect, but I’m always holding out for ”new science” that needs to be explained.)
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There are thousands of sumerian cuneiform tablets left to translate, if you're bored ;-) Many of these predate the pyramids by a thousand years or so. Most translated ones contain mundane enough stuff, so its likely that the rest are similar, but if you're looking for something ancient to discover something in, I can't think of a better place to look given their age and that they're already found (ie available to rea…
Suprised they're not largely machine readable given the geometric nature of cuneiform. You might have to aggressively guess some combinations as the components of hte symbols aren't always well separated but it seems easier than reading current alphabets/characters. I did get in to cuneiform at one point in the past but the dictionary to translate was, IIRC, over £1k. Any good links you can suggest for corpus of work…
Unfortunately I don’t have any answers to your question. I’m a rather casual observer with an interest but little experience. I only recently got interested enough to buy some books in the topic (and Sumerian history/mythology in general). It seems that the best source of untranslated cuneiform would be to physically visit the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum (not sure if anybody can make an appointment for the cuneiform study rooms or what though...)
If you or anybody else were to find a collection/library of digitized cuneiform tablets, I would be very much interested myself, more so if there are any notes or commentary.
Interesting how the pyramids have been around for 4500 years and we still don't know all about their structure... Fun fact: there's a Neolithic site in Ireland, Newgrange, that's actually older than the pyramids. Fascinating and worth a visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange
Personally I think some of the footage and pictures of them are more impressive than the pyramids. The size of the blocks compared to a human is just incredible.
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Imagine if they find an opened chamber, and that it contains artefacts that can be carbon-dated, and they turn out to be thousands of years older than conventional Egyptology expects. (I expect there will be artefacts, and I expect their dates will coincide with what we already expect, but I’m always holding out for ”new science” that needs to be explained.)
There are thousands of sumerian cuneiform tablets left to translate, if you're bored ;-) Many of these predate the pyramids by a thousand years or so. Most translated ones contain mundane enough stuff, so its likely that the rest are similar, but if you're looking for something ancient to discover something in, I can't think of a better place to look given their age and that they're already found (ie available to rea…
So if this hypothetical chamber were found to be intact and unopened, and to contain artefacts made not of stone but of wood or fibre, then finally it would be possible to definitively date the structure and corroborate (or refute) the timeline currently taken for granted.
Interesting how the pyramids have been around for 4500 years and we still don't know all about their structure... Fun fact: there's a Neolithic site in Ireland, Newgrange, that's actually older than the pyramids. Fascinating and worth a visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange
Also the giant monolith/megalith structures in Russia are out of this world. Personally I think some of the footage and pictures of them are more impressive than the pyramids. The size of the blocks compared to a human is just incredible.