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Egypt's newly discovered tombs hold mummies, animal statues
- gersh 8y agoI can imagine the Egyptians like cat pictures like people today. However, the statutes don't look like the most beautiful of cats. Have the aesthetics of cat pictures changed over time?
- gwern 8y agoEgyptian art had very different conventions and esthetics. But also the cats themselves seem to be different (larger, IIRC, and different colored than the European cats you're probably more familiar with). If you want to take a look at all the kinds of cat-related artwork (including cartoons which I can only call cat memes, like artwork of rats laying siege to a cat fortress or cats whipping a human for unknown offenses), take a look at all the illustrations in Malek's _The Cat in Ancient Egypt_. You can get a high-quality scan from, ahem, the usual place. One interesting thing about the cat mummies here is that they'll provide additional datapoints on how well fed temple-sacrificial cats were and how they were killed. And perhaps at some point some ancient DNA can be sequenced? Which will give interesting data about how domesticated they were. Bradshaw in _Cat Sense_ argues that the core work of domesticating cats was accomplished by the Ancient Egyptians as a byproduct of their large-scale breeding, necessary for the raising the vast volumes of cats to be sacrificed as offerings.
- dmix 8y agoIs putting underscores around titles a convention for some format? I see it around once in a while.
- scrollaway 8y agoProbably trying to make it italic, which is indeed a convention. Asterisks will work better on hn.
- gwern 8y agoI'm too lazy to remember how HN's pseudo-Markdown does (not) work.
- kylek 8y agoUnderscores usually means underline the words they're around. I believe underlining book titles is a MLA format thing (brb highschool english class flashbacks).
- wyck 8y agoIt's a little deeper than that, cats were revered because they killed snakes, scorpions, rats, etc, around the house that did harm, pharaoh's having a particularity good pick of the litter, breeding was a part of temple life. The most common cats in ancient Egypt are still around today, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_wildcat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_wildcat and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle_cat
- drdeadringer 8y agoThere is an [ancient] Egyptian museum near where I live. Mummies, trinkets, sarcophagi, other artefacts. The cats pictured in the article are in line with what is in the museum, in both sarcophagus and trinket form. I know this does doesn't quite answer your "changed over time" question, but it is a data point.
- woodpanel 8y agoI'd put it differently. Not that aesthetics have changed, rather that the technique of displaying what you see (through painting or sculpting) has gone through considerable evolution since the days of the pharaohs. And thus the aesthetics of things were a result of that.
- Alex3917 8y agoIf they want more tourism dollars they should just let YouTubers decide where to dig. As long as it’s not damaging anything, it doesn’t cost anything to look at things people are curious about.
- beshrkayali 8y agoNo.
- dang 8y agoMaybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here. See the guidelines re "shallow dismissals": https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- craftyguy 8y ago> As long as it’s not damaging anything And who decides that? The people receiving ad money for producing entertaining content that people want to watch? The armchair archaeologists watching the videos? The platform on which the video is hosted, who is heavily incentivized to host entertaining content that people want to watch?
- Alex3917 8y agoThe Egyptian antiquities authority would obviously need to do the excavations themselves or oversee them, I’m just saying the process could be democratized a little. There are hundreds of square miles of sites, letting armchair archeologists vote on what should be looked at isn’t going to break anything.
- njharman 8y ago> isn’t going to break anything Boaty McBoatface would disagree.
- beaconstudios 8y agowhy would you want to democratise a process that benefits highly from expert knowledge? The last thing the world needs is Jake Paul directing archaeologists to dig in the middle of a desert that was never inhabited.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoWhy does the article say nothing about dates except "Pharaonic Age"? That title was in use for about 1400 years.