151–160 of 246 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A) proper digging shouldn’t destroy the monument. B) removal of parts of the structure is how we know what’s in it at all. The same is true for any othe other monuments that are structures. We had to dig through the valley of the kings to find the tombs. If we don’t breech the obstruction, we won’t understand the thing.
It's at the very least, a double-edged sword. You're essentially condoning grave robbing.
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It seems that peoples through the ages have respected the pyramids enough to leave them mostly intact and undisturbed, giving us the unique heritage that we have today. I can't help but contrast this with the British explorers who just started blowing through it with explosives and pulling stuff out wholesale.
Not at all. Most of the pyramids, and many many other burials were ransacked by graverobbers and scavengers in antiquity - in a lot of cases, even while there were still pharaohs. It's assumed that a lot of them were robbed immediately , by the same workers who built them - in fact, even as early as the Middle Kingdom, there was a thriving trade in robbed grave goods for the explicit purpose of reuse in another buria…
who were, by and large, slaves ...
> Essentially, humans have always been garbage.
I don't really consider them too garbage-y for trying to give even a little F.U. to their masters.
Fun coincidence: Noticed the newest book on Project Gutenburg is: A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE IN ALL COUNTRIES, FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE PRESENT DAY. By JAMES FERGUSSON, D.C.L., F.R.S., M.R.A.S., FELLOW ROYAL INST. BRIT. ARCHITECTS, So I click on it, and the very first building is the Great Pyramid, complete with diagram: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55870/55870-h/55870-h.htm#Pa... 1893.
It's an interesting subject no doubt but a more modern source would likely be a better use of time.
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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…
Perhaps it’s just that nobody has tried? I can’t imagine it’s as difficult as, say, Google Street View’s street number recognition. 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 cu…
It looks like they've got images of tablets from about 30 institutions, organized by time period. I've found a few with transliterations, but information seems fragmentary. There are also a fair number of entries without images.
I found that this theory was pretty interesting: The Giza Power Plants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUjYsOXm3IA
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Giza_pyramids#Power_station_.2...
> The Giza pyramids have been the cause of more extreme wingnuttery, pseudoscience, bullshit, and woo than any other ancient monument on the planet.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at all. Most of the pyramids, and many many other burials were ransacked by graverobbers and scavengers in antiquity - in a lot of cases, even while there were still pharaohs. It's assumed that a lot of them were robbed immediately , by the same workers who built them - in fact, even as early as the Middle Kingdom, there was a thriving trade in robbed grave goods for the explicit purpose of reuse in another buria…
> by the same workers who built them who were, by and large, slaves ... > Essentially, humans have always been garbage. I don't really consider them too garbage-y for trying to give even a little F.U. to their masters.
They weren't slaves
Slightly off-topic but perhaps someone has an answer: After finishing "Dark Forest" / "Death’s End" I somehow ended up with the questions if our way of doing archaeology is actually a good idea. Currently we i) remove a lot of things from the ground / graves / ruins, ii) analyze them, iii) put them in a museum and iv) write books about them. This means that all the knowledge about those artifacts and our history is s…
> Is there any project which strives to preserve our current knowledge about humanity in some sort of long-term storage so that also people in 500 or 2000 years will be able to reconstruct even without having access to 'real' artifacts? Is this actually a problem which current archaeologist think about? That's an interesting project on it's own (and there are various types of "capsules" -- from knowledge to seeds) bu…
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
It seems that peoples through the ages have respected the pyramids enough to leave them mostly intact and undisturbed, giving us the unique heritage that we have today. I can't help but contrast this with the British explorers who just started blowing through it with explosives and pulling stuff out wholesale.
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.)