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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 Irelan

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange

vowelless 9y ago
Nothing blows my mind more than Göbekli Tepe, especially its age. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe
- wuliwong 9y ago
  Yes! Göbekli Tepe is so fascinating!
- qubex 9y ago
  Yes I visited it in 2012 and spoke with the German archaeologist who found it, Claus Schmidt. Amazing place and an amazing man, sorely missed.
- nkoren 9y ago
  Fun fact: Cleopatra and Mark Antony etc. lived closer in time to the invention of mobile phones than to the construction of the Great Pyramids. Egyptian history is deep. Funner fact: the Great Pyramids were built closer in time to the invention of mobile phones than to the construction of Göbekli Tepe. Human history is way deep. Funnest fact: if we don't fuck it up, we're still only at the dawn of history, not at the end of it.
  - graphitezepp 9y ago
    Yeah but I am pretty worried about us fucking it up these days.
    - nkoren 9y ago
      Me too. If this is a worry of yours, though, may I suggest, in no way rhetorically, going into the "not fucking it up" business? The pay is generally terrible, but nothing beats making your own hope.
      - graphitezepp 9y ago
        I could really go for some hope and would very much like to do something of that nature, but it's hard to figure out where my skills are best allocated. As for the pay I am very difficult to motivate with money beyond what makes for housing and food security.
        nkoren 9y ago
        > it's hard to figure out where my skills are best allocated Better is the enemy of good enough -- just do something, and if that doesn't work, do something else. There are so many issues facing the world: climate change, population growth (/collapse, depending on where you are), food security, energy security, biodiversity, civil society, socioeconomics in the face of automation, supervolcanos, etc. etc. etc. There are diverse solutions to all these problems. If energy security is your thing, then everything from better residential insulation, to business process optimisation for solar panel installation, to R&D for fusion reactors is potentially part of the solution. Pick whichever one interests you the most. You don't need to be the Elon Musk of whatever it is that you've chosen: if someone else is already doing it, they'll need everything from web developers to janitors. Work for them, and you'll be part of the solution. And if in a few years you see something that'll make you even more hopeful, do that instead. Personally, I chose "better urban design" as my personal route to saving the world. If we could make much better cities, this would seriously mitigate issues with energy consumption, climate change, land use, and civil society. But how best to do this? First I tried being an architect. But the impact I could make was limited by the property developers I worked for, who were limited by the urban planners they worked around, who were limited by the urban infrastructure technologies they worked with. So I changed careers, taking aim at transport technology innovation. Went back to school, got an MBA, and joined a company developing a new class of transport technology (the Heathrow Pod, if you're curious). After a few years I realised that my influence was constrained by working for the technology vendor; I actually needed to work for governments instead. So I switched careers again and became a transport-planning consultant doing advisory work in 14 countries. After a few years I realised that my advisory services were producing cool feasibility studies but no actual results, because the actual implementations were too constrained by antiquated, innovation-inhibiting communications processes and planning/design tools. This was a software problem. So I switched careers again and started a company developing collaborative urban planning software (https://www.podaris.com https://www.podaris.com), and now spend most of every week fighting with Javascript. This can be a tough slog, but it's Javascript that will hopefully change the way that cities are designed, thereby doing my bit to save the world. I feel good about it. The above story isn't meant to be illustrative of what you or anyone else should do. WHAT you do will be different for everyone, and is very nearly irrelevant, provided you've put some thought into it. THAT you do is the important part -- and you are absolutely capable of doing it.
  - nl 9y ago
    It took ~60,000 years to go from nearly extinct (possibly 40 "breeding pairs" of humans[1] left alive) to Göbekli Tepe, and we barely know anything about that time. [1] http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/ho...
- marnett 9y ago
  Thanks for sharing this place. I've visited Turkey and unfortunately was unaware of this site then.
- nnq 9y ago
  The style of the animal carvings is really interesting - they look somewhat symbolic as letters in a "visual language" instead of artistic... "artistic" drawings/sculptures seek either to be skeurmorphic, aka imitate nature, or intentionally simplistic but following some "universally aesthetically pleasing" style, relative as it may be. These have things like the number of legs correct, but nothing about the angles. These look like neither... and that's damn weird! Almost like what a blind carver would make from listening to a description of a thing he never saw and carving it. Probably the oldest cave paintings are like this, but those are like "simplest thing one can do" while these imply effort, but... somehow "skillfully retarted", like there was something "messed up" with the minds of the designers, or simply very different from our own.
qubex 9y ago
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.)
- dkersten 9y ago
  There are thousands of sumerian cuneiform tablets left to translate, if you're bored ;-) Many of these predate the pyramids by a thousand years or so. Most translated ones contain mundane enough stuff, so its likely that the rest are similar, but if you're looking for something ancient to discover something in, I can't think of a better place to look given their age and that they're already found (ie available to read).
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    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 works that are likely to yield interesting output, and sources to aid in that? What software is good for aiding such translation work?
    - dkersten 9y ago
      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 cuneiform would be to physically visit the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum (not sure if anybody can make an appointment for the cuneiform study rooms or what though...) If you or anybody else were to find a collection/library of digitized cuneiform tablets, I would be very much interested myself, more so if there are any notes or commentary.
the_rosentotter 9y ago
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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- megaman22 9y ago
  The Pyramids were originally cased in a layer of white limestone. Almost all of that is gone, since, if I recall, they were small enough that they could be carted away, unlike the granite that remains. Monumental buildings almost always end up being wholesale building supply once they aren't revered and maintained.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  Almost every pyramid was looted nearly immediately, and the limestone covers on the pyramids were stolen long ago. Most of the reason the pyramids remain as they are is because they are made of very large blocks which are inordinately difficult to move and impractical to use for other purposes.
- eponeponepon 9y ago
  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 burial, so it's far from uncommon to find people interred with spells on papyri that are centuries older than them, but have had the original owner's name scratched out and the new one inserted. If anything, the respect shown for the Giza complex in the last hundred years or so is the exception in its history. Heck, one of the two smaller pyramids has a huge hole in the side from where a 16th or 17th century caliph tried to demolish it. Essentially, humans have always been garbage.
powertower 9y ago
Also the giant monolith/megalith structures in Russia are out of this world. Personally I think some of the footage and pictures of them are more impressive than the pyramids. The size of the blocks compared to a human is just incredible.
- HatchedLake721 9y ago
  Like?
  - danbruc 9y ago
    Gornaya Shoria megaliths [1] maybe? But they are not man-made. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gornaya_Shoria_megaliths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gornaya_Shoria_megaliths
    - jrimbault 9y ago
      The Talk section of that article is really two men's polite war
bromuro 9y ago
In Sardinia, Italy, there are also hundreds of neolithic sites called Domus de Janas (House of the Fairies) dating back to 3000 BC. Some of them are quite impressive: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domus_de_Janas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domus_de_Janas

vowelless 9y ago

Nothing blows my mind more than Göbekli Tepe, especially its age. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe

wuliwong 9y ago
Yes! Göbekli Tepe is so fascinating!
qubex 9y ago
Yes I visited it in 2012 and spoke with the German archaeologist who found it, Claus Schmidt. Amazing place and an amazing man, sorely missed.
nkoren 9y ago
Fun fact: Cleopatra and Mark Antony etc. lived closer in time to the invention of mobile phones than to the construction of the Great Pyramids. Egyptian history is deep. Funner fact: the Great Pyramids were built closer in time to the invention of mobile phones than to the construction of Göbekli Tepe. Human history is way deep. Funnest fact: if we don't fuck it up, we're still only at the dawn of history, not at the end of it.
- graphitezepp 9y ago
  Yeah but I am pretty worried about us fucking it up these days.
  - nkoren 9y ago
    Me too. If this is a worry of yours, though, may I suggest, in no way rhetorically, going into the "not fucking it up" business? The pay is generally terrible, but nothing beats making your own hope.
    - graphitezepp 9y ago
      I could really go for some hope and would very much like to do something of that nature, but it's hard to figure out where my skills are best allocated. As for the pay I am very difficult to motivate with money beyond what makes for housing and food security.
      - nkoren 9y ago
        > it's hard to figure out where my skills are best allocated Better is the enemy of good enough -- just do something, and if that doesn't work, do something else. There are so many issues facing the world: climate change, population growth (/collapse, depending on where you are), food security, energy security, biodiversity, civil society, socioeconomics in the face of automation, supervolcanos, etc. etc. etc. There are diverse solutions to all these problems. If energy security is your thing, then everything from better residential insulation, to business process optimisation for solar panel installation, to R&D for fusion reactors is potentially part of the solution. Pick whichever one interests you the most. You don't need to be the Elon Musk of whatever it is that you've chosen: if someone else is already doing it, they'll need everything from web developers to janitors. Work for them, and you'll be part of the solution. And if in a few years you see something that'll make you even more hopeful, do that instead. Personally, I chose "better urban design" as my personal route to saving the world. If we could make much better cities, this would seriously mitigate issues with energy consumption, climate change, land use, and civil society. But how best to do this? First I tried being an architect. But the impact I could make was limited by the property developers I worked for, who were limited by the urban planners they worked around, who were limited by the urban infrastructure technologies they worked with. So I changed careers, taking aim at transport technology innovation. Went back to school, got an MBA, and joined a company developing a new class of transport technology (the Heathrow Pod, if you're curious). After a few years I realised that my influence was constrained by working for the technology vendor; I actually needed to work for governments instead. So I switched careers again and became a transport-planning consultant doing advisory work in 14 countries. After a few years I realised that my advisory services were producing cool feasibility studies but no actual results, because the actual implementations were too constrained by antiquated, innovation-inhibiting communications processes and planning/design tools. This was a software problem. So I switched careers again and started a company developing collaborative urban planning software (https://www.podaris.com https://www.podaris.com), and now spend most of every week fighting with Javascript. This can be a tough slog, but it's Javascript that will hopefully change the way that cities are designed, thereby doing my bit to save the world. I feel good about it. The above story isn't meant to be illustrative of what you or anyone else should do. WHAT you do will be different for everyone, and is very nearly irrelevant, provided you've put some thought into it. THAT you do is the important part -- and you are absolutely capable of doing it.
- nl 9y ago
  It took ~60,000 years to go from nearly extinct (possibly 40 "breeding pairs" of humans[1] left alive) to Göbekli Tepe, and we barely know anything about that time. [1] http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/ho...
marnett 9y ago
Thanks for sharing this place. I've visited Turkey and unfortunately was unaware of this site then.
nnq 9y ago
The style of the animal carvings is really interesting - they look somewhat symbolic as letters in a "visual language" instead of artistic... "artistic" drawings/sculptures seek either to be skeurmorphic, aka imitate nature, or intentionally simplistic but following some "universally aesthetically pleasing" style, relative as it may be. These have things like the number of legs correct, but nothing about the angles. These look like neither... and that's damn weird! Almost like what a blind carver would make from listening to a description of a thing he never saw and carving it. Probably the oldest cave paintings are like this, but those are like "simplest thing one can do" while these imply effort, but... somehow "skillfully retarted", like there was something "messed up" with the minds of the designers, or simply very different from our own.

qubex 9y ago

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.)

dkersten 9y ago
There are thousands of sumerian cuneiform tablets left to translate, if you're bored ;-) Many of these predate the pyramids by a thousand years or so. Most translated ones contain mundane enough stuff, so its likely that the rest are similar, but if you're looking for something ancient to discover something in, I can't think of a better place to look given their age and that they're already found (ie available to read).
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  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 works that are likely to yield interesting output, and sources to aid in that? What software is good for aiding such translation work?
  - dkersten 9y ago
    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 cuneiform would be to physically visit the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum (not sure if anybody can make an appointment for the cuneiform study rooms or what though...) If you or anybody else were to find a collection/library of digitized cuneiform tablets, I would be very much interested myself, more so if there are any notes or commentary.

the_rosentotter 9y ago

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.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
megaman22 9y ago
The Pyramids were originally cased in a layer of white limestone. Almost all of that is gone, since, if I recall, they were small enough that they could be carted away, unlike the granite that remains. Monumental buildings almost always end up being wholesale building supply once they aren't revered and maintained.
InclinedPlane 9y ago
Almost every pyramid was looted nearly immediately, and the limestone covers on the pyramids were stolen long ago. Most of the reason the pyramids remain as they are is because they are made of very large blocks which are inordinately difficult to move and impractical to use for other purposes.
eponeponepon 9y ago
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 burial, so it's far from uncommon to find people interred with spells on papyri that are centuries older than them, but have had the original owner's name scratched out and the new one inserted. If anything, the respect shown for the Giza complex in the last hundred years or so is the exception in its history. Heck, one of the two smaller pyramids has a huge hole in the side from where a 16th or 17th century caliph tried to demolish it. Essentially, humans have always been garbage.

powertower 9y ago

Also the giant monolith/megalith structures in Russia are out of this world. Personally I think some of the footage and pictures of them are more impressive than the pyramids. The size of the blocks compared to a human is just incredible.

HatchedLake721 9y ago
Like?
- danbruc 9y ago
  Gornaya Shoria megaliths [1] maybe? But they are not man-made. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gornaya_Shoria_megaliths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gornaya_Shoria_megaliths
  - jrimbault 9y ago
    The Talk section of that article is really two men's polite war

bromuro 9y ago

In Sardinia, Italy, there are also hundreds of neolithic sites called Domus de Janas (House of the Fairies) dating back to 3000 BC. Some of them are quite impressive: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domus_de_Janas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domus_de_Janas