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11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

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Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#31

Post by 0xffff2 »

retrac wrote: post #29
Insanity wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one of those mind-boggling timeline comparisons I sometimes think about is Cleopatra and the Pyramids. The Giza pyramids were built around ~2600 years _before_ Cleopatra. And she's about 2000 years removed from us today. So to think that Egyptians and Romans in Cleopatra's era went to visit the Pyramids as a kind of tourist thing from a civilization 2 millennia removed from them is quite astounding. I guess Cleopatra…

> I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire. It's due to the historiography of western civilization that for so long always traced its origins back to Greece (and Cleopatra was, of course, Greek.) Compare to Mesopotamia, Sumer mentioned by the parent comment. There may be more surviving cuneiform literature than Greek and Latin. The…

I really hate that I'm even typing these words right now, but wouldn't this be one of the few fields where modern LLMs would potentially provide a real capability that was previously lacking? I'm imagining an LLM might be able to provide rough first pass translations and provide hints about which specific tablets might be most interesting for a human that can't possibly look at them all.

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#32

Post by ccozan »

westmeal wrote: post #11
anentropic wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that they went to considerable effort to carve it in stone as part of a temple complex, it was likely neither juvenile nor perverse

Some people like making others laugh, maybe they thought we'd appreciate it

Humor and jokes exist since the great apes!

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#33

Post by asdff »

lproven wrote: post #8

The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing about 5000-5500Y ago. This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today. Mind-boggling.

Writing seems like it should be far more ancient than we ought to assume. You make some tally marks to count something, show someone else how to read your tallys, now you have a proto writing system. All you need is to iterate more symbols describing more things to scale it out, and this sort of thing seems like it would snowball over time and generations.

Seems like there ought to be countless ancient proto writing systems not just in our species either. I guess most species aren't in situations where storing information like this offers much of a selective advantage. Maybe you can count an animal scent marking out its territory as a sort of proto writing system; it is only somewhat different than the plat map in your city hall.

EDIT: Apparently neanderthals are thought to have used tally marks... (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-did-neanderth...)

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#34

Post by exhumet »

asdff wrote: post #33
lproven wrote: post #8

The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing about 5000-5500Y ago. This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today. Mind-boggling.

Writing seems like it should be far more ancient than we ought to assume. You make some tally marks to count something, show someone else how to read your tallys, now you have a proto writing system. All you need is to iterate more symbols describing more things to scale it out, and this sort of thing seems like it would snowball over time and generations. Seems like there ought to be countless ancient proto writing…

they have found tally markers on bones and other objects like that, so yeah you would be correct, i guess it really comes down to what "writing" is i guess?

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#35

Post by ccozan »

lproven wrote: post #8

The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing about 5000-5500Y ago. This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today. Mind-boggling.

Not sure what is mind boggling. The homo sapiens exists in the _current_ form ( physiologically and brain size, etc ) since at least 250k years. about 50k year ago abstract art was already in vogue.

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#36

Post by ccozan »

retrac wrote: post #29
Insanity wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one of those mind-boggling timeline comparisons I sometimes think about is Cleopatra and the Pyramids. The Giza pyramids were built around ~2600 years _before_ Cleopatra. And she's about 2000 years removed from us today. So to think that Egyptians and Romans in Cleopatra's era went to visit the Pyramids as a kind of tourist thing from a civilization 2 millennia removed from them is quite astounding. I guess Cleopatra…

> I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire. It's due to the historiography of western civilization that for so long always traced its origins back to Greece (and Cleopatra was, of course, Greek.) Compare to Mesopotamia, Sumer mentioned by the parent comment. There may be more surviving cuneiform literature than Greek and Latin. The…

> There aren't enough people who know Sumerian and Akkadian

one LLM is enough!

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#37

Post by exhumet »

0xffff2 wrote: post #31
retrac wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire. It's due to the historiography of western civilization that for so long always traced its origins back to Greece (and Cleopatra was, of course, Greek.) Compare to Mesopotamia, Sumer mentioned by the parent comment. There may be more surviving cuneiform literature than Greek and Latin. The…

I really hate that I'm even typing these words right now, but wouldn't this be one of the few fields where modern LLMs would potentially provide a real capability that was previously lacking? I'm imagining an LLM might be able to provide rough first pass translations and provide hints about which specific tablets might be most interesting for a human that can't possibly look at them all.

and imo ive also thought the same thing, but then it does still come down to the amount of people and time it would take to go over those rough translations and pull the wanted info out of it. manpower is lacking in a lot of those fields

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#38

Post by quuxplusone »

krapp wrote: post #19
Insanity wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one of those mind-boggling timeline comparisons I sometimes think about is Cleopatra and the Pyramids. The Giza pyramids were built around ~2600 years _before_ Cleopatra. And she's about 2000 years removed from us today. So to think that Egyptians and Romans in Cleopatra's era went to visit the Pyramids as a kind of tourist thing from a civilization 2 millennia removed from them is quite astounding. I guess Cleopatra…

>I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire. Shakespeare wrote a play about her and Elizabeth Taylor played her in a movie. The effect of modern media is 99% of the reason why Cleopatra feels more "contemporary" than, say, Hatshepsut (for whom plenty of artifacts exist) or even Nefertiti.

Cleopatra was a contemporary of Julius Caesar, and played a major role in his biography. (Which is why Plutarch wrote about her, which is why Shakespeare wrote about her, which is why 20th Century Fox made the film about her.) Julius Caesar is... a big name... in the West. Call that "the effect of media" if you like, but it's a thing.

Hatshepsut and Nefertiti lived respectively 1400 and 1300 years before Cleopatra, and about 700 years before even the founding of Rome. I'm no expert, but seems to me that those two names completely disappeared from the historical record between say 1000 BC and AD 1800, and were rescued from obscurity only by 19th-century archaeologists.

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#39

Post by Exoristos »

anentropic wrote: post #6
bena wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the nature of the grip. He could be trying to protect his junk from the leopards, or taunting the leopards by jerking at them. So many options. The past was just as juvenile and perverse as modernity.

Given that they went to considerable effort to carve it in stone as part of a temple complex, it was likely neither juvenile nor perverse

Wait until you see some of the carvings in Gothic cathedrals.

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#40

Post by ozgung »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #2

>> Less than 12 miles away from Karahan Tepe, a high relief of a man gripping his phallus flanked by two roaring/biting leopards carved into the stone is the earliest narrative scene ever discovered. So, er, what is the um narrative conveyed by this scene?

Man gripping his phallus was a popular character in Karahan Tepe in the old times.

See his 2.6 meter statue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe#/media/File:Karah...

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