Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

theartnewspaper.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 96 posts

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#41

Post by pigscantfly »

Balgair wrote: post #20

Man, archeology is hard , but this one, with all the upside-down writing, is a bit of a face-palm. My favorite examples in archeology is the Chaco Canyon Cultures. If you are in the western US, have a 4 wheel drive car, and a free few days, I'd go no where else. Those people are an astonishing mystery. You know how with some places, going on the journey is kinda the point? Sometimes with archeology, that's kinda true…

My impression (largely drawn from Ken Burns' series on the national parks and visits to Taos Pueblo) is that the ancient inhabitants of Chaco canyon are the ancestors of the present-day Pueblo people who live to the south in the Rio Grande valley.

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#42

Post by yellowbuilding »

tzs wrote: post #34
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless they're biologists. Then it's for mating displays.

With non-human animals, though, aren't there much fewer possibilities than with humans? Most animals don't have the kind of food surpluses humans have, and so have can't afford to spend energy on things that aren't hunting or gathering food, fighting over territory, or reproducing. So if an animal is doing something prominently that isn't hunting or fighting or mating or raising young and others are watching but not…

On this note, a vast amount of human energy (surplus and sometimes not, in the aggregate) can be understood as mating displays. Of course, we have added gender to the equation, which complicated things quite a bit.

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#43

Post by zer00eyz »

When I was a kid we went to the Peabody museum in CT.

The docent giving us a tour told us about the mixup of a dinosaur head, and this story sprung to mind when reading this.

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/26/nyregion/yale-brontosauru...

The story was amazing to me as a kid, adults were wrong sometimes and they could fix their mistakes.

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#45

Post by wyattpeak »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #33

What am I actually looking at here? I see a rough, pitted, badly damaged surface with smooth, white stuff showing where it's cracked away. Is the smooth inner layer part of the original, a solid object with a decorated exterior? Or is the inner part a modern reconstruction, and the outer all that remains of a hollow original?

The smooth surfaces are modern filler to make the object whole. The pitted and damaged surfaces are pieces of the original.

It'll be hollow since they thought it was a vase.

It's unlikely the filler is solid, these reconstructions are generally made as faithfully as possible to the original without too much synthesis. So it should be the same shape as the original is presumed to have, but no engravings or anything which might be unreasonably speculative.

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#46

Post by failrate »

starshadowx2 wrote: post #13
toufiqbarhamov wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irvin Finkel is a truly entertaining and intelligent speaker. He has a bunch of videos and lectures on a range of subjects on YouTube through the British Museum Channel. I highly recommend not only his work, but the whole channel.

His video with Tom Scott playing "The Royal Game of Ur" is super fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZskjLq040I

I was so inspired by that video when I first saw it that I built my own Ur board. I prefer the 4 2-sided dice approach to the single 4-sided die, because the normal distribution of values allows for slightly more strategy. We also house ruled that rolling a 0 gave you a reroll token.

Oh, and it is a genuinely fun game.

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#47

Post by CaptainJustin »

hetman wrote: post #12

This reminds me of a tour I was once on, by one of the resident archaeologists in the open-air museum in Biskupin, Poland. It's the site of an iron age fortified settlement and there is both ongoing archaeological excavation and a reconstruction of sections of the settlement for visitors. Anyway, the archaeologist showed me a shallow elongated oval wooden vessel with a slight depression in it, that had been on displa…

I have found the same. When a building's purpose is unknown it will usually get labelled a temple.

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#48

Post by titanix2 »

I hate this kind of article where you have no source and no reference to anything related to the object presented in it. As a learner of Sumerian language, I would have loved a link to the transcription of the text on the object or a link to an academic paper about it.

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#49

Post by titanix2 »

minikites wrote: post #24
Libbum wrote: post #3

A pretty embarrassing oversight! If the picture in this article is the mace, it's clear from the cuneiform that the 'object' would be upside down if it were in a vase orientation. Rarely ever do you start an impression from the left and trail off to the right.

There are a lot of wild writing styles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon

No, there are not. Top-down right-left, right-left top-down, left-right top-down, boustrophedon, "filling the available space (hieroglyph)" and that's it. I never heard of a writing system going bottom to top.

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#50

Post by lsc »

2arrs2ells wrote: post #29
hetman wrote: post #12

This reminds me of a tour I was once on, by one of the resident archaeologists in the open-air museum in Biskupin, Poland. It's the site of an iron age fortified settlement and there is both ongoing archaeological excavation and a reconstruction of sections of the settlement for visitors. Anyway, the archaeologist showed me a shallow elongated oval wooden vessel with a slight depression in it, that had been on displa…

David Macaulay's "Motel of the Mysteries" ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108831.Motel_of_the_Myst... ) satirizes this bias, with archeologists from 4022 inspecting a modern day motel room and uncovering the "holy" toilet. It's a gem.

Thank you so much! I remember reading this book during my childhood, but the title and author have been lost to me for like two and a half decades.

I actively look for these books I remember little snatches of... I thought this one was a Stanislaw Lem book, and though I really, really enjoyed "Memoirs found in a bathtub" - but that wasn't this. The chant of "sanitized for your protection" during the ritual use of the toilet really sticks out in my childhood memory. I wonder if it will be as great, reading it as an adult?

Post reply on HN