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3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

openculture.com

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Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#211

Post by munk-a »

kansface wrote: post #193
munk-a wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IQ is a pretty arbitrary measurement, but I think a modern yankee in egypt would indeed have problem solving skills beyond their peers. Our education, formal and social, is quite a rapid process in the modern world and we basically give kids a free ride until around 18 so that they can focus on education rather than being forced to do menial labour. I think that as physical beings we're pretty similar to our ancient…

I don’t know the historical record for ancient Egypt, but I imagine we are way bigger and way smarter on average because of childhood nutrition and lack of parasites - see also, North Korea.

Smarter feels like a bad word to use - I specifically dialed into problem solving because I think that's one place we can accurately differentiate but "smarts" is an incredibly broad concept. We're better at certain things because of specialization and long education but worse at other things because we're obviously not training our motor skills to do different things from birth - it's like folks who can skin mangos in a single cut, it can be learned but most of us aren't going to learn it.

Ancient Egypt did have public schools and a semi-meritocratic scribe class so formal education was a thing which makes it easier to compare in contrast to areas that revolved entirely around apprenticeship like the more nomadic contemporaries would be.

Also, we do have a much more balanced diet growing up but if we did travel back to ancient Egypt there might be dietary issues trying to maintain our extra mass - the lack of access to diverse fruits and vegetables might wreck havoc on our bodies... you can look to extreme contemporary diets for any evidence of that you'd like to see.

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#212

Post by yowlingcat »

Karawebnetwork wrote: post #79
ARandomerDude wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that the dates are "Month 3 of Summer, Day 24" etc. The curious bit to me being the enduring use of 4 distinct seasons, when there are obviously other ways to mark a year. Is anyone aware of a culture that did/does not have exactly 4 seasons?

"Sekki is the traditional way of expressing seasons in Japan. There are 24 sekki, including rikka (立夏, the first day of summer) in early May, shoman (小満, lit. “a little full” as in growing, waxing) in late May and boshu (芒種, lit. bearded grain) in early June. The 24 sekki can be further divided into three for a total of 72 shijijūni ko (七十二侯) that last for about five days each. These subseasons include mugi no toki i…

I love this. Ever since moving back into the wild from the city, it's been so nice to take notice of all the little "microseasons" you'll see inside a usual season. I took it for granted as a kid, but as an adult, it's nice to name and partake in the various parts of the year as you mention.

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#213

Post by drocer88 »

Someone wrote: post #85
ARandomerDude wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that the dates are "Month 3 of Summer, Day 24" etc. The curious bit to me being the enduring use of 4 distinct seasons, when there are obviously other ways to mark a year. Is anyone aware of a culture that did/does not have exactly 4 seasons?

> Is anyone aware of a culture that did/does not have exactly 4 seasons? Ancient Egyptian :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_calendar : “The ancient Egyptian calendar – a civil calendar – was a solar calendar with a 365-day year. The year consisted of three seasons of 120 days each, plus an intercalary month of five epagomenal days treated as outside of the year proper. Each season was divided into four month…

"There are just two seasons in the old Icelandic calendar: [...] summer and winter."

https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/news/2015/10/21/do_you_kn...

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#214

Post by oh_sigh »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #201
oh_sigh wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're only closer to the homeless guy with a completely naive take on the utility of money.

Can you check my math? 0 -> 1M -> 10B Not sure how far away from 10B 1M is. Maybe you can help

Yes, that is the naive take on the utility of money that I was talking about.

By your logic Sergey Brin is closer to the homeless man you step over on the street than he is to Elon Musk. Which would be a silly thing to say.

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#215

Post by chrononaut »

jbandela1 wrote: post #112

As an aside, a lot of people are joking about the pyramids. However, 3200 years ago is 1200 BC which is New Kingdom. The pyramids were built in the Old Kingdom. When these workers were complaining, the Great Pyramid was already 1000 years old. (The bosses probably talked about how back in the day when their ancestors built the pyramids, workers were much tougher and dedicated)

As I find always interesting, we are as far to the Romans in history as the Romans were from the construction of the pyramids.

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#216

Post by DiggyJohnson »

dotancohen wrote: post #110
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective, anything regularly periodic in nature is used to track time: the Sun (years, seasons, days, day/dusk) and Moon (months, weeks, King tides). Consider even the starfield (astrology: years, decades+). Four seasons makes sense in all of these contexts, and I hypothesize that there are a lot of patterns in nature that are well bucketed into 4 sequential, equal seasons. This is impossible for me to dem…

> I always like to imagine what life would be like if weeks were 3 days long. Or 11. I just love this topic. I especially like that you chose prime numbers. A week composed of a prime number of days will remain the smallest indivisible group of days that a culture will have.

Agreed, glad you called this out! I was thinking about rambling about this, but this is a topic I can go on and on about, and I was already off to a slow start today...

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#217

Post by kogus »

chrononaut wrote: post #215
jbandela1 wrote: post #112

As an aside, a lot of people are joking about the pyramids. However, 3200 years ago is 1200 BC which is New Kingdom. The pyramids were built in the Old Kingdom. When these workers were complaining, the Great Pyramid was already 1000 years old. (The bosses probably talked about how back in the day when their ancestors built the pyramids, workers were much tougher and dedicated)

As I find always interesting, we are as far to the Romans in history as the Romans were from the construction of the pyramids.

Cleopatra was closer to the moon landings them to the building of the pyramids!

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#218

Post by thepasswordis »

jamesfisher wrote: post #198
blakesterz wrote: post #54

The original with ALL of the excuses is at the British Museum here: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA5634

cat excuses | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn 67 ILL 49 WITH HIS BOSS 17 BREWING BEER 13 WITH AAPEHTI 8 WITH THE SCRIBE 6 MAKING REMEDIES FOR THE SCRIBE’S WIFE 5 WRAPPING (THE CORPSE OF) HIS MOTHER 5 OFFERING TO THE GOD 5 HIS WIFE WAS BLEEDING 5 FETCHING STONE FOR THE SCRIBE 4 WITH KHONS MAKING REMEDIES 4 SUFFERING WITH HIS EYE 4 OFF ABSENT 4 HIS DAUGHTER WAS BLEEDING 3 WITH HOREMWIA 3 WITH HIS BOSS DITTO 3 LIBATING TO HIS…

Wow this really does tell a story. His mom and his son both died.

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#219

Post by TruthWillHurt »

davemtl wrote: post #111

We're effectively looking at somebody's notebook from 3200 years ago. Makes me wonder what our descendants would think if they were looking at our old notebooks and random text files in the next 3200 years.

"Apparently the people of the 21st century had a short attention span as they could only focus on 10 things that would change their .."

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#220

Post by the_af »

wesleywt wrote: post #210
jamesfisher wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cat excuses | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn 67 ILL 49 WITH HIS BOSS 17 BREWING BEER 13 WITH AAPEHTI 8 WITH THE SCRIBE 6 MAKING REMEDIES FOR THE SCRIBE’S WIFE 5 WRAPPING (THE CORPSE OF) HIS MOTHER 5 OFFERING TO THE GOD 5 HIS WIFE WAS BLEEDING 5 FETCHING STONE FOR THE SCRIBE 4 WITH KHONS MAKING REMEDIES 4 SUFFERING WITH HIS EYE 4 OFF ABSENT 4 HIS DAUGHTER WAS BLEEDING 3 WITH HOREMWIA 3 WITH HIS BOSS DITTO 3 LIBATING TO HIS…

Who knew that Egypt was so progressive that guys can take off when their wife or daughter has a period.

Maybe they, like in some Abrahamic religions to come later, considered women "impure" when they had the period, and this somehow translated to the men in the household? Wild speculation, of course.
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