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.
Not the one I'm referring to. Which I just looked up and got the region wrong -- it was in Mesopotamia. It was an actual museum showing ancient artifacts in a building, 2,500 years ago. Some of the things in that museum were an additional 1,500 years old at the time they were on display.
It's a funny story because the modern archeologists who dug it up were very confused by finding objects from different regions and separated by hundreds or thousands of years, all in the same layer.
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. . . .
TFA originally meant "The Fucking Article" but on HN seems to have morphed its meaning to "The Fine Article" or "The Featured Article". I can't stop reading it as the former every time I come across it.
Those multiple readings date back to Slashdot and have stayed consistent. It just means in plain speech the linked article in the original post. Now get off my lawn!
Doesn’t really work as OP used it, though, as it gets confusing. They wrote “the TFA mummy” every time, so it becomes “the the fucking article mummy”. Like saying you’re a fan of the The Beatles.
I had it both ways when it was first posted, about twenty minutes later after reading the “what is TFA?” comment I edited it to be consistent.
Only first line was the only “TFA” without the article…or with only one article? or is that two articles?
Anyway, the three article phrase “the TFA mummy” is equivalent to the three article phrase “the mummy in TFA” which is what I started to write.
And while “the TFA mummy” does not expand as cleanly as even I would wish, it has a better rhythm than “TFA mummy.” Or to put it another way, my poetic license removes “the TFA mummy” from grammar police jurisdiction.
Well, if space is expanding and earth is revolving and spinning around the sun which is spinning around the milkyway which is moving through space then.... Was it really close in space either?
Most people kind of merge the kingdoms together, while every kingdom is unique in both the culture and, say, external influence. And the late period is quite long as well.
There is a very strong connection between periods, of course. But 2500+ years of ancient egypt is a very long damn time. All of our modern history is, say, 3k years, starting with greeks, early chinese , india and all.
But egypt to me is like a star in the vast ocean of nothingness of early history. We know NAMES and DEEDS of people who lived 4500 years ago. We see things they've built, we can read words they wrote.
> But 2500+ years of ancient egypt is a very long damn time.
To put that in perspective, consider how long 100 years ago feels.. not in technological terms, but in human perception of time: The USA was founded 250~ years ago. Try to recall your own life from 20, 40, 50 years ago.. it's a literal lifetime. Most people only meet people as far back as their grandparents, just 2 generations back. Great-grandparents and the eras they grew up in are already almost impossible to relate to.. 2500 years is FIFTY such lifetimes!
So in "just" after 500 years the pyramids would already be a mythical unrelatable object to people from 2000 years before us...
I like to think Ancient Egyptians were descendants of the survivors from a Green Sahara and the pyramids were meant to be their post-apocalyptic marker in case the world went to further shit..
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.
The construction work camps for the pyramids have been dug. There is also wood, an organic matter in the Kings chamber and mortar inside the pyramid, which can be dated.
There's also optically stimulated luminescence which can tell you when a rock was buried! I don't know that it's ever been used on a pyramid, but it exists.
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.
To the degree that is a scientific argument, the scientific research and scholarship underpinning it is a subset of the scientific research and scholarship underpinning the dates the contemporary Egyptology community ascribes to the pyramids.
Egyptologists can access science and have access to cultural artifacts and those artifacts include writing and that writing can be read and what can be read includes dates.
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."
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"
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 historical time period, I wouldnt watch a WW2 Zombie movie if the nazi zombies were wearing viking armor driving an Abrams tank either.
> "Oh its a fantasy film" its set in a historical time period, I wouldnt watch a WW2 Zombie movie if the nazi zombies were wearing viking armor driving an Abrams tank either.
WW2 Zombie movie with Nazis in Viking armors and random tanks sounds so much more _fun_ than a "historically acurate Nazi Zombie" movie!
Different strokes for different folks. I think they are just used to the common trope of people immediately telling them because one aspect of a movie/film/play is unrealistic they shouldn't care if the entire thing is nonsense. Vice versa though, nobody should mind others enjoy or make such content, beyond these kinds of statements that it's not for them.
I also more often enjoy films which sit between "100% realistic/accurate" and "anything goes" than either extreme itself. 100% realistic/accurate and it tends to already be known unless it's relatively bland. 100% anything goes and it can still be good but there is a high risk it ends up feeling like every other "anything goes" movie of the same topic. In between you can often get the best of both worlds - something new, but still unique.
>I also more often enjoy films which sit between "100% realistic/accurate" and "anything goes" than either extreme itself. 100% realistic/accurate and it tends to already be known unless it's relatively bland. 100% anything goes and it can still be good but there is a high risk it ends up feeling like every other "anything goes" movie of the same topic. In between you can often get the best of both worlds - something new, but still unique.
I think that Nolan sells himself (The online worship can hardly all be organic) as an authentic, technical director interested in accurate physical props.
When mostly what he does is potter about and destroy sound design.
I agree no one is going to be 100% accurate and accuracy isnt always desirable. But an attempt? When thats the guys reputation? Doesnt feel like too much to ask for.
>I think that Nolan sells himself (The online worship can hardly all be organic) as an authentic, technical director interested in accurate physical props.
I'm not a huge Nolan-discourse-insider, but that seems like a pretty bizarre reputation to have for someone who's famous for directing three Batman movies, Inception, Interstellar and Tenet?
Is this reputation just because of Oppenheimer?
I haven't seen Dunkirk (and I'm not a WWII buff so couldn't tell if they used right planes/boats/guns/uniforms/whatever even if I tried), but even a short blurb on Wikipedia talks about a "balance historical accuracy with aesthetics that would favour the film stock".
Well, interstellar has also some nerd stuff in it. If I remember correctly Kip Thorne did physics consulting on the movie and they even use a simulation running on a cluster to visualize the black hole physically correct.
They could have used some arbitrary CGI…but no, they wanted it accurate according to science.
And yet the rest of the movie runs on movie logic, enough so that every physicist I know rolls their eyes at it. It gives me the vibe of the "IFLS" crowd, not anyone who actually understands science.
Your sound design comment reminds me of seeing Inception in the cinema sitting next to a friend who works in sound (Frozen, John Wick films, etc). Early in the film, I offered him some of my popcorn, and he politely declined. I spent a good portion of the film partially distracted by the idea that maybe he didn't want to be crunching away on popcorn because he was keenly focused on thinking about the sound experience, and the cinema speakers and the like. I ate my popcorn even more quietly than usual.
After the film, I asked if he'd turned down the popcorn for professional reasons. He said, "No, I just didn't feel like popcorn."
The example was really to me because one of the better Nazi zombie movies is Norwegian (Dead Snow) and given the Nazi obsession with old Germanic and Norse myths, it wouldn't seem wrong at all to come across Nazi Vikings in a movie like that.
Would you choose the weapons, armour and tactics as described in the Iliad? Even though it is thought they are inaccurate for the time period that they think the Iliad is set? Not so easy I would say.
And the extra you describe, where does he appear on screen? Front and centre, or in the fourth rank behind the people in better costumes?
And the longboat, does it appear on screen in its original form, or with additions to make it look more period accurate?
> Would you choose the weapons, armour and tactics as described in the Iliad? Even though it is thought they are inaccurate for the time period that they think the Iliad is set? Not so easy I would say.
Either “best attempt at historical accuracy” (although that would have been difficult given the sparse record), or “true to Homer’s anachronistic story” would have been reasonable ways to go. Sounds like they picked neither, though…
This is fairly typical level of detail for Hollywood, most of stuff they do around Europe is insulting as hell if one cares about the topic, historical stuff being the most visible source of offense.
Dumbed down far more than required for short movie transition of any topic. But I guess they know their US audience, their level of knowledge and care for authenticity better than me.
For someone who purports not to care about the film, you seem very familiar with the discourse about it. (I have seen zero experts, or anyone really, discussing boat design.)
> the fragment contains lines from Book 2’s epic “catalogue of ships,” which lists all the vessels the Achaean army sends off to Troy
It's been about 30 years since I've read The Iliad, but I remember that chapter as the worst part of the book. Just pages upon pages of names and where they came from. I wonder what significance it held for the buried individual to have been specifically included so.
Sounds like an Order of Battle that armies publish these days after a war which documents the entire list of units, unit size, commander, equipment, experience etc etc
This is an old technique that appears in Beowulf and other classic texts that came from oral traditions: it is cataloging. It is often used to list treasured collected or in this case to show expansiveness of the fleet (and memory of the teller, perhaps?)
Think about 10 year olds talking about all the different candies they are going to devour on Halloween night to get a sense of how it is meant to resonate with a crowd.
If the only way you could hear about Napoleon's battles was having a guy recount them to you in verse, I bet it would sound pretty impressive when he started listing off all the regiments present for a battle, their commanders and deployments. There's a sense of scale to it, that probably isn't captured by just saying "such and such number of ships and such and such number of soldiers".
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.
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.
This reminds me of a piece I just saw at the Legion of Honor (SF) special exhibit on the etruscans. They have a Etruscan manuscript, written on linen, that was used to wrap a mummy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Linteus
Ironically a huge percentage of the historical documents we had came from "the garbage", and/or other cases of people reusing documents for other purposes.
In large part this was because paper was incredibly expensive back then, so it got used for one purpose, used again for another, and that continued until you were out of room ... at which point it may get used yet again (for say mummy wrapping).
Another classic example: Jews believed you couldn't burn a piece of paper once you wrote the name of God on it, so there were special towers in ancient cities for Jews to throw away their paper. But again, because paper was so expensive, each paper often had lots of other things on it.
Because these towers were sometimes preserved better than libraries were, historians have found huge treasure troves of saved papers in them. Like the mummy wrappings, they only still exist due to a special quirk of ancient peoples ... but because of the price of paper they have lots of other non-mummy-wrapping/non-God's name stuff.
> Jews believed you couldn't burn a piece of paper once you wrote the name of God on it, so there were special towers in ancient cities for Jews to throw away their paper.
Fascinating!
The Cairo Genizah
Located in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo), Egypt, this particular Genizah was a massive, windowless attic room built high into the structure. To put papers in it, the synagogue's caretaker had to climb a tall ladder and drop the documents through a hole in the wall. Because the local community never got around to burying the papers, this high, hidden room acted like a time capsule for over a thousand years. When it was rediscovered in the late 19th century, it contained nearly 300,000 manuscript fragments.
>In large part this was because paper was incredibly expensive back then
The largest contributor to having garbage as historical sources for western European cultures was the millennium-long program of genocide and cultural destruction perpetrated by Christians against anything or anyone non-Christian they could get their hands on.
It's no coincidence the few primary sources for pre-Christian religion we have from Europe comes from Iceland... it was the furthest away. Surviving works of European mythology like Beowulf and Snorri's eddas are filled with Christian references because that's the only way they survived.
Much much more existed 1600 years ago and would have survived if the empire had not converted.
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 my eyes).
The article describes the veneration Roman -> (old) Greek -> (old) Egyptian and this finding appears to show that the veneration went both ways.
Frankly I can understand that: Homer really did smash out an absolute banger with Iliad. I might ask for a copy in my grave too, when the time comes.
The whole point of the article appears to be that when civilizations overlap, the "good old days" becomes a two way street (to gargle metaphors). I do find that interpretation very interesting and it fits in with my world view that history ("historia" - Latin for "story") is generally rather more complicated than many would like it to be to fit their current (or current as was) world view.
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.
Actually, now that I think about it, I guess there is a certain type of Tolkien nerd who would choose the long listing of elf lineages as the section to have in their pocket for their funeral.
Back then, ships might almost have felt like the starships of our scifi today. Capsules that can transport mankind beyond the limits of the known universe to discover strange new worlds and civilizations. Certainly worthy of epic cataloging.
The article sounds convincing enough, but discoveries can easily be faked, just like crop circles can be made by farmers using rake-like devices.
Luxor and Las Vegas = same thing.
Not trolling, but it's worth keeping this notion in mind. It's great for tourism and building mystique. At least when there is fakery, it's makes the real thing all the more valuable.
Fakery sells movie tickets - it can sell plane tickets too.
People still love Milli Vanilli - so many don't even care because it's just entertainment.
How much of history is real, how much is entertainment (and diversion) by vested interests and the "winners" ?
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.
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.
In Ancient Egypt Ancient Egypt was ancient.
Ancient Egypt had archeological museums showing dug up artifacts of even more ancient Egypt.
Isn't that just like our normal museums now ?
Yes but much further in the future when someone else digs them up.
No, the artifacts stayed where they were found. Different concept.
Not the one I'm referring to. Which I just looked up and got the region wrong -- it was in Mesopotamia. It was an actual museum showing ancient artifacts in a building, 2,500 years ago. Some of the things in that museum were an additional 1,500 years old at the time they were on display.
It's a funny story because the modern archeologists who dug it up were very confused by finding objects from different regions and separated by hundreds or thousands of years, all in the same layer.
Also dinosaur bones.
https://classics.stanford.edu/publications/first-fossil-hunt...
What is the “TFA” mummy?
That Fucking Asshole mummy from Bubba Ho Tep.
Great movie
The mummy that is the subject of The Friendly Article (the post that we're all commenting under right now).
TFA originally meant "The Fucking Article" but on HN seems to have morphed its meaning to "The Fine Article" or "The Featured Article". I can't stop reading it as the former every time I come across it.
Those multiple readings date back to Slashdot and have stayed consistent. It just means in plain speech the linked article in the original post. Now get off my lawn!
To expand on this: It started as “RTFA”, which is a riff on RTFM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM#List_of_similar_initialis...
Doesn’t really work as OP used it, though, as it gets confusing. They wrote “the TFA mummy” every time, so it becomes “the the fucking article mummy”. Like saying you’re a fan of the The Beatles.
They wrote “the TFA mummy” every time
I had it both ways when it was first posted, about twenty minutes later after reading the “what is TFA?” comment I edited it to be consistent.
Only first line was the only “TFA” without the article…or with only one article? or is that two articles?
Anyway, the three article phrase “the TFA mummy” is equivalent to the three article phrase “the mummy in TFA” which is what I started to write.
And while “the TFA mummy” does not expand as cleanly as even I would wish, it has a better rhythm than “TFA mummy.” Or to put it another way, my poetic license removes “the TFA mummy” from grammar police jurisdiction.
But you missed a chance to call it the new mummy!
I am a fan of the Beatles. What’s wrong with that?
That's related to PNS syndrome (PIN Number Syndrome syndrome (Personal Identification Number Number Syndrome syndrome)).
Obligatory "Cleopatra lived closer to the creation of the iPhone than she did to the building of the Great Pyramid"
In time, not space.
Well, if space is expanding and earth is revolving and spinning around the sun which is spinning around the milkyway which is moving through space then.... Was it really close in space either?
Local origin not global
Or universal
On a stressful day full of short deadlines and somewhat overwhelming work, thank you for the chuckle :-)
they are both the same though
Most people kind of merge the kingdoms together, while every kingdom is unique in both the culture and, say, external influence. And the late period is quite long as well.
There is a very strong connection between periods, of course. But 2500+ years of ancient egypt is a very long damn time. All of our modern history is, say, 3k years, starting with greeks, early chinese , india and all.
But egypt to me is like a star in the vast ocean of nothingness of early history. We know NAMES and DEEDS of people who lived 4500 years ago. We see things they've built, we can read words they wrote.
This is amazing.
> But 2500+ years of ancient egypt is a very long damn time.
To put that in perspective, consider how long 100 years ago feels.. not in technological terms, but in human perception of time: The USA was founded 250~ years ago. Try to recall your own life from 20, 40, 50 years ago.. it's a literal lifetime. Most people only meet people as far back as their grandparents, just 2 generations back. Great-grandparents and the eras they grew up in are already almost impossible to relate to.. 2500 years is FIFTY such lifetimes!
So in "just" after 500 years the pyramids would already be a mythical unrelatable object to people from 2000 years before us...
I like to think Ancient Egyptians were descendants of the survivors from a Green Sahara and the pyramids were meant to be their post-apocalyptic marker in case the world went to further shit..
> To put that in perspective
Star Wars debuted 37 years after World War II
Star Wars debuted 49 years from now
(Now I feel really old)
The iPhone launched 7 years after 2000
The iPhone launched 19 years from now
Sorry I meant "to people from 4000 years before us" because BC is negative years lol
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.
The construction work camps for the pyramids have been dug. There is also wood, an organic matter in the Kings chamber and mortar inside the pyramid, which can be dated.
Within the rock construction are wood beams, mortar and charcoal that are all datable.
I stand corrected.
There's also optically stimulated luminescence which can tell you when a rock was buried! I don't know that it's ever been used on a pyramid, but it exists.
> 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.
https://desert.com/osl/
To the degree that is a scientific argument, the scientific research and scholarship underpinning it is a subset of the scientific research and scholarship underpinning the dates the contemporary Egyptology community ascribes to the pyramids.
Egyptologists can access science and have access to cultural artifacts and those artifacts include writing and that writing can be read and what can be read includes dates.
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"
I used the phrase “the TFA mummy” where the “the” is the article for “mummy.”
“The TFA mummy” has the same three articles as “the mummy in TFA” but one less word.
And pedantically, pedantry leaves the house when “TFA” walks in the door.
And I thought being able to trace my ancestors back 2600 years was impressive (okay, maybe 1500 non-apocryphal ancestors)!
>>If Christopher Nolan’s coming adaptation of the Odyssey happens to do well enough to get Hollywood back on its feet,
A typical laconic reply works here: "If"
Because Nolan is known for his hits and misses
Not 100% sure whether you're being sarcastic but... yes? IMO more misses than hits, and the misses tend to miss by more than the hits hit.
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 historical time period, I wouldnt watch a WW2 Zombie movie if the nazi zombies were wearing viking armor driving an Abrams tank either.
> "Oh its a fantasy film" its set in a historical time period, I wouldnt watch a WW2 Zombie movie if the nazi zombies were wearing viking armor driving an Abrams tank either.
WW2 Zombie movie with Nazis in Viking armors and random tanks sounds so much more _fun_ than a "historically acurate Nazi Zombie" movie!
Different strokes for different folks. I think they are just used to the common trope of people immediately telling them because one aspect of a movie/film/play is unrealistic they shouldn't care if the entire thing is nonsense. Vice versa though, nobody should mind others enjoy or make such content, beyond these kinds of statements that it's not for them.
I also more often enjoy films which sit between "100% realistic/accurate" and "anything goes" than either extreme itself. 100% realistic/accurate and it tends to already be known unless it's relatively bland. 100% anything goes and it can still be good but there is a high risk it ends up feeling like every other "anything goes" movie of the same topic. In between you can often get the best of both worlds - something new, but still unique.
>I also more often enjoy films which sit between "100% realistic/accurate" and "anything goes" than either extreme itself. 100% realistic/accurate and it tends to already be known unless it's relatively bland. 100% anything goes and it can still be good but there is a high risk it ends up feeling like every other "anything goes" movie of the same topic. In between you can often get the best of both worlds - something new, but still unique.
I think that Nolan sells himself (The online worship can hardly all be organic) as an authentic, technical director interested in accurate physical props.
When mostly what he does is potter about and destroy sound design.
I agree no one is going to be 100% accurate and accuracy isnt always desirable. But an attempt? When thats the guys reputation? Doesnt feel like too much to ask for.
>I think that Nolan sells himself (The online worship can hardly all be organic) as an authentic, technical director interested in accurate physical props.
I'm not a huge Nolan-discourse-insider, but that seems like a pretty bizarre reputation to have for someone who's famous for directing three Batman movies, Inception, Interstellar and Tenet?
Is this reputation just because of Oppenheimer?
I haven't seen Dunkirk (and I'm not a WWII buff so couldn't tell if they used right planes/boats/guns/uniforms/whatever even if I tried), but even a short blurb on Wikipedia talks about a "balance historical accuracy with aesthetics that would favour the film stock".
Well, interstellar has also some nerd stuff in it. If I remember correctly Kip Thorne did physics consulting on the movie and they even use a simulation running on a cluster to visualize the black hole physically correct.
They could have used some arbitrary CGI…but no, they wanted it accurate according to science.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808
And yet the rest of the movie runs on movie logic, enough so that every physicist I know rolls their eyes at it. It gives me the vibe of the "IFLS" crowd, not anyone who actually understands science.
Maybe we run in different circles, but I feel like “appreciates scientific accuracy” and “appreciates historical accuracy” are pretty disjoint sets?
Not entirely without overlap, but pretty distinct.
Your sound design comment reminds me of seeing Inception in the cinema sitting next to a friend who works in sound (Frozen, John Wick films, etc). Early in the film, I offered him some of my popcorn, and he politely declined. I spent a good portion of the film partially distracted by the idea that maybe he didn't want to be crunching away on popcorn because he was keenly focused on thinking about the sound experience, and the cinema speakers and the like. I ate my popcorn even more quietly than usual.
After the film, I asked if he'd turned down the popcorn for professional reasons. He said, "No, I just didn't feel like popcorn."
The example was really to me because one of the better Nazi zombie movies is Norwegian (Dead Snow) and given the Nazi obsession with old Germanic and Norse myths, it wouldn't seem wrong at all to come across Nazi Vikings in a movie like that.
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 had forgotten about the stirrup controversy.
Nothing like historical inaccuracy to stirrup some controversy.
I would do unfathomable things for a movie with period-accurate Bronze Age armor sets.
Would you choose the weapons, armour and tactics as described in the Iliad? Even though it is thought they are inaccurate for the time period that they think the Iliad is set? Not so easy I would say.
And the extra you describe, where does he appear on screen? Front and centre, or in the fourth rank behind the people in better costumes?
And the longboat, does it appear on screen in its original form, or with additions to make it look more period accurate?
> Would you choose the weapons, armour and tactics as described in the Iliad? Even though it is thought they are inaccurate for the time period that they think the Iliad is set? Not so easy I would say.
Either “best attempt at historical accuracy” (although that would have been difficult given the sparse record), or “true to Homer’s anachronistic story” would have been reasonable ways to go. Sounds like they picked neither, though…
This is fairly typical level of detail for Hollywood, most of stuff they do around Europe is insulting as hell if one cares about the topic, historical stuff being the most visible source of offense.
Dumbed down far more than required for short movie transition of any topic. But I guess they know their US audience, their level of knowledge and care for authenticity better than me.
"I wouldnt watch a WW2 Zombie movie if the nazi zombies were wearing viking armor driving an Abrams tank either."
OK, so you didn't watch Kung Fury?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fury
Would you watch a 1965 WW2 "historical" movie if the Nazis were driving M47 Patton tanks?
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/the-battle-of-...
For someone who purports not to care about the film, you seem very familiar with the discourse about it. (I have seen zero experts, or anyone really, discussing boat design.)
Stop noticing, eh?
That's a whole ass Spartan letter.
> the fragment contains lines from Book 2’s epic “catalogue of ships,” which lists all the vessels the Achaean army sends off to Troy
It's been about 30 years since I've read The Iliad, but I remember that chapter as the worst part of the book. Just pages upon pages of names and where they came from. I wonder what significance it held for the buried individual to have been specifically included so.
often times the classical Greeks + Romans would cite their family lineage using works of Homer and other poets
Sounds like an Order of Battle that armies publish these days after a war which documents the entire list of units, unit size, commander, equipment, experience etc etc
Maybe the undertaker agreed with you about it being the worst part, and that's why they used it for the burial!
probably traced his lineage back to one of those vessels.
This is an old technique that appears in Beowulf and other classic texts that came from oral traditions: it is cataloging. It is often used to list treasured collected or in this case to show expansiveness of the fleet (and memory of the teller, perhaps?)
Think about 10 year olds talking about all the different candies they are going to devour on Halloween night to get a sense of how it is meant to resonate with a crowd.
If the only way you could hear about Napoleon's battles was having a guy recount them to you in verse, I bet it would sound pretty impressive when he started listing off all the regiments present for a battle, their commanders and deployments. There's a sense of scale to it, that probably isn't captured by just saying "such and such number of ships and such and such number of soldiers".
I imagine it served a similar purpose as a modern war memorial.
People loved that damn catalogue enough to be buried with it! I guess tastes have changed.
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.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47864056 (247 points, 93 comments, 28 days ago)
This reminds me of a piece I just saw at the Legion of Honor (SF) special exhibit on the etruscans. They have a Etruscan manuscript, written on linen, that was used to wrap a mummy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Linteus
Ironically a huge percentage of the historical documents we had came from "the garbage", and/or other cases of people reusing documents for other purposes.
In large part this was because paper was incredibly expensive back then, so it got used for one purpose, used again for another, and that continued until you were out of room ... at which point it may get used yet again (for say mummy wrapping).
Another classic example: Jews believed you couldn't burn a piece of paper once you wrote the name of God on it, so there were special towers in ancient cities for Jews to throw away their paper. But again, because paper was so expensive, each paper often had lots of other things on it.
Because these towers were sometimes preserved better than libraries were, historians have found huge treasure troves of saved papers in them. Like the mummy wrappings, they only still exist due to a special quirk of ancient peoples ... but because of the price of paper they have lots of other non-mummy-wrapping/non-God's name stuff.
> Jews believed you couldn't burn a piece of paper once you wrote the name of God on it, so there were special towers in ancient cities for Jews to throw away their paper.
Fascinating!
The Cairo Genizah
Located in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo), Egypt, this particular Genizah was a massive, windowless attic room built high into the structure. To put papers in it, the synagogue's caretaker had to climb a tall ladder and drop the documents through a hole in the wall. Because the local community never got around to burying the papers, this high, hidden room acted like a time capsule for over a thousand years. When it was rediscovered in the late 19th century, it contained nearly 300,000 manuscript fragments.
I recently bought a book, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders, curated from these fragments.
>In large part this was because paper was incredibly expensive back then
The largest contributor to having garbage as historical sources for western European cultures was the millennium-long program of genocide and cultural destruction perpetrated by Christians against anything or anyone non-Christian they could get their hands on.
It's no coincidence the few primary sources for pre-Christian religion we have from Europe comes from Iceland... it was the furthest away. Surviving works of European mythology like Beowulf and Snorri's eddas are filled with Christian references because that's the only way they survived.
Much much more existed 1600 years ago and would have survived if the empire had not converted.
Where I grew up, fish and chips was wrapped in actual newspaper.
Same with grilled chestnuts in Portugal, nowadays they use paper bags.
Even in relatively modern times people would write letters in both directions to save paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossed_letter
1600 years old in Egypt isn't ancient
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 my eyes).
The article describes the veneration Roman -> (old) Greek -> (old) Egyptian and this finding appears to show that the veneration went both ways.
Frankly I can understand that: Homer really did smash out an absolute banger with Iliad. I might ask for a copy in my grave too, when the time comes.
The whole point of the article appears to be that when civilizations overlap, the "good old days" becomes a two way street (to gargle metaphors). I do find that interpretation very interesting and it fits in with my world view that history ("historia" - Latin for "story") is generally rather more complicated than many would like it to be to fit their current (or current as was) world view.
I’m thinking I would pick Snow Crash. Or maybe The Matrix DVD.
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.
That would have made it all the more exciting! Although less likely.
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.
I would hope for some further fragment of the Cypria to be uncovered.
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
Before that, Egypt was mostly been ruled by invaders since the end of the New Kingdom around 1000 BCE.
Basically, with few exceptions Egypt was not ruled by a indigenous ruler for about 3000 years until Nassar.
The Catalog of Ships is certainly the section I want to be buried with.
Actually, now that I think about it, I guess there is a certain type of Tolkien nerd who would choose the long listing of elf lineages as the section to have in their pocket for their funeral.
I see your supernerd cred flex, mummified guy!
Back then, ships might almost have felt like the starships of our scifi today. Capsules that can transport mankind beyond the limits of the known universe to discover strange new worlds and civilizations. Certainly worthy of epic cataloging.
Died trying to read it all?
I'm sure this is just a giant coincidence, given the timing of Chris Nolan's new movie, and couldn't possibly be fraud.
I mean, this is one of the most important works of ancient literature. The movie probably doesn't move the needle on how important the find is.
Also if it was fraud to capitalize on the movie, wouldn't they use the odyssey instead of the iliad?
One possibility is that the finding as news is more likely to resonate and reach print given the looming movie?
The article sounds convincing enough, but discoveries can easily be faked, just like crop circles can be made by farmers using rake-like devices.
Luxor and Las Vegas = same thing.
Not trolling, but it's worth keeping this notion in mind. It's great for tourism and building mystique. At least when there is fakery, it's makes the real thing all the more valuable.
Fakery sells movie tickets - it can sell plane tickets too.
People still love Milli Vanilli - so many don't even care because it's just entertainment.
How much of history is real, how much is entertainment (and diversion) by vested interests and the "winners" ?
You find it hard to believe...that Iliad was big? that 400 AD Egyptian medical practices involved quackeries?