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

Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy

thehistoryblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 274 posts

Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy

#221

Post by Ladioss »

RobotToaster wrote: post #145
protocolture wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks pretty shonky. I dont care about the casting. But the costumes look like ass (One of the extras was saying he had fit into the same armor for a low budget sword and sandal film), they are using a viking longboat as a greek ship (have already seen half a dozen experts spitting chips over the difference in boat design). I just cant bring myself to care about the film. "Oh its a fantasy film" its set in a histo…

The costumes are completely wrong. At least they bothered to CGI out the stirrups, but it's incredibly obvious from how he's sitting on the horse in the trailer.

I would do unfathomable things for a movie with period-accurate Bronze Age armor sets.

Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy

#222

Post by cucumber3732842 »

lkrubner wrote: post #104
baud147258 wrote: post #100

I am a little disappointed the tomb where the mummy was found is from the time where Egypt was part of the Roman Empire. At this point ancient Egypt had been a colony of Rome for quite some time and beforehand a Greek/Macedonian colony for a few more centuries (under the Ptolemaic dynasty, founded by a general of Alexander the Great). If it was from a previous era, it would have been a much more interesting find (in…

The Iliad was written after the classical era of Bronze Age Egypt, so no classical age mummy could be buried with the Iliad because it didn't exist yet.

I think the point was that it would be a lot more interesting had it dated to a time prior to people for whom the Iliad was part of their culture were present in the region and when such artifacts would have been normal-ish

Finding american freed slave papers in a grave at Valley Forge -> ever so slightly interesting, we know those people were around there at that time.

Finding american freed slave papers in a grave outside an 1870s British encampment in Sudan -> very interesting how did this get here.

Or kind of like how finding Christian stuff in a roman grave varies a lot in implication by the year.

Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy

#223

Post by adolph »

adastra22 wrote: post #171
mattfrommars wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds about right. People generally under estimate how old Ancient Egyptian really are, me included and think it sometimes around the era of Middle Ages.

Ancient Egypt had archeological museums showing dug up artifacts of even more ancient Egypt.

Also dinosaur bones.

  As Mayor shows, the Greeks and Romans were well aware that a different breed 
  of creatures once inhabited their lands. They frequently encountered the 
  fossilized bones of these primeval beings, and they developed sophisticated 
  concepts to explain the fossil evidence, concepts that were expressed in 
  mythological stories. . . .

  Like their modern counterparts, the ancient fossil hunters collected and 
  measured impressive petrified remains and displayed them in temples and 
  museums; they attempted to reconstruct the appearance of these prehistoric 
  creatures and to explain their extinction. . . .
https://classics.stanford.edu/publications/first-fossil-hunt...

Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy

#224

Post by stevesimmons »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #219

Wasn't the Ptolemaic dynasty (300-30BC) Greek speaking and culturally Greek, presumably the Library at Alexandria had a full set of classic Greek texts.

There's a great article on the Ptolemaic dynasty in the latest issue of the London Review of Books. Tons of fascinating detail.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/robert-cioffi/pharao...

For instance, the Library of Alexandria had up to 500,000 scrolls (which of course were all handwritten). And it was partly stocked by confiscating all the books from any ship that happened to dock in the nearby port.

Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy

#225

Post by adolph »

dmos62 wrote: post #167
brudgers wrote: post #110

Unearthed from a 1,600-year-old Roman-era tomb That's c. 400 AD. Closer to today, than to the time of King Tut...and King Tut was closer to the TFA mummy than to the First Dynasty. Ancient Egypt is really really old. The Great pyramid was 3000 years old at the time of the TFA mummy. The TFA mummy is about equidistant between today and the events of the Iliad and the book was already more than 1000 years old in 400 CE…

The pyramids aren't actually datable, because it's rock. Maybe if you were to find something with carbon that's provably from the time of construction, that could be used, but I don't think that happened. The popular datings for the older pyramids are educated guesses. Edit: the Sphynx dating is even more controversial, because it seems to have rain erosion on it.

> aren't actually datable, because it's rock

To add to the methods shared by others, one way I think is really cool is optically stimulated luminescence.

  So, a grain of quartz destined someday to become the perfect OSL sample will 
  begin its journey by emptying its electron traps. This typically happens 
  through steady sunlight exposure, in a process called bleaching. Bleaching 
  resets the OSL clock. In this example scenario, the grain is fully bleached 
  by the sun as the wind blows it across the landscape, until it finally 
  settles and additional wind-blown material buries it.
  
  Once it is cut off from light, the OSL clock begins running. The sediment now 
  surrounding the quartz will include tiny amounts of radioactive isotopes, 
  exposing the quartz to a steady flow of ionizing radiation. The quartz 
  captures electrons from this radiation; the radiation flow is called the dose 
  rate. This is like the steady ticking of a clock. The quartz begins trapping 
  electrons, and because it is cut off from light, the trapped electrons will 
  continue building up at a fairly steady, measurable rate.
https://desert.com/osl/

Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy

#226

Post by throwfaraway135 »

bazoom42 wrote: post #216
throwfaraway135 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that always rubs me the wrong way in this type of situations, is how patronizing it is towards black people. It got the "let little timmy play too" vibe all over it. It hints that there are no interesting historical events with black people having a major role in it that you would want to create a movie about.

Is it also patronizing towards Americans to have Brad Pitt play Achilles?

I don't get your argument. You can look at historical monuments or modern Greeks and Brad Pitt doesn't look to different from them.

Let me try to elaborate on my argument. Imagine you are in a park and there are three children playing, child A, B and C. Imagine child A has 10 toys, B has 7 and C 1.

Now if you forcefully took toys from A and B and gave them to C, then that's patronizing behavior as it means "you can't have your own toys, you need to steal them from someone else, you are not good enough".

A more respectful way of solving the dilemma for all involved parties is by just getting more toys for child C.

Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy

#227

Post by bazoom42 »

verisimi wrote: post #185
protocolture wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I legitimately don't care about those things. They could cast the smurfs if they had a cool period boat and nice period armor. You are the one who has some weird race based conditioning where you are hyper-vigilant where it comes to race and need to act offended about it. Seek medical assistance.

You care about the historical detail of the boats and armour, but don't care about the person (sex or colour)? And people who disagree with you need medical help? Do you realise all the contradictions in your position? And then to suggest that the other person needs medical help for stating the obvious, indicates your malign intent. This is gas lighting, ie abusive behaviour. Your own conditioning is making you unabl…

If you genuinely believe every actor should be Greek or Anatolian, that would be a fair and consistent position.

Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy

#228

Post by psychoslave »

tclancy wrote: post #203
psychoslave wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pedantic side note maybe and sorry about that, but I found disturbing to see multiple "the TFA", where I guess TFA stand for "the fine article", so "the the fine article"? If it’s about brevity, "the peg" is just as short and mean in journalism parlance "A topic of interest, such as an ongoing event or an anniversary, around which various features can be developed."

I don’t think you’re reclaiming “peg”. Lost cause.

Everyone should be champion of some lost causes, not because their own have much chance to succeed, simply because otherwise they are all certain to never happen while in the first case, at scale, it’s almost guarantee that some will defeat the odds.

That said, "TFA" is ok, but "the TFA" seems even more extravagant than "PDF format"

Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy

#229

Post by enoint »

throwfaraway135 wrote: post #190
xdennis wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

One thing that always rubs me the wrong way in this type of situations, is how patronizing it is towards black people. It got the "let little timmy play too" vibe all over it. It hints that there are no interesting historical events with black people having a major role in it that you would want to create a movie about.

One thing that might change your mind is the 20th century mythic cowboy. Where I’m from, maybe 1/4 cowboys were black. So we accepted that as whites-only theatre. Do we have to keep accepting whites-only theatre?

Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy

#230

Post by throwfaraway135 »

enoint wrote: post #229
throwfaraway135 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that always rubs me the wrong way in this type of situations, is how patronizing it is towards black people. It got the "let little timmy play too" vibe all over it. It hints that there are no interesting historical events with black people having a major role in it that you would want to create a movie about.

One thing that might change your mind is the 20th century mythic cowboy. Where I’m from, maybe 1/4 cowboys were black. So we accepted that as whites-only theatre. Do we have to keep accepting whites-only theatre?

I think this makes my argument even more true. Imagine you have a budget and want to create a western/cowboy movie. You care about representation and want to have more black cowboys in the movies.

Option A: Take a story with a white cowboy, cast a black guy for him and shoot the movie.

Option B: Find a story of a black cowboy (and as you said there were many of them) and shoot a movie about it.

IMHO option A is patronizing while option B is empowering. Because option A assumes there were no black cowboys, there are no good stories too tell about black people.

Post reply on HN