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Let me share something related I learned about recently. Mansa Musa was a king of Mali. He was the richest man alive during the 14th century, possibly the rich

by Iv 7y ago

Let me share something related I learned about recently. Mansa Musa was a king of Mali. He was the richest man alive during the 14th century, possibly the richest of history. He owned about half of the world's production of gold. He is mostly known through the pilgrimage he did to Mecca, where he distributed gifts in such a generous fashion that he possibly crashed the Egyptian economy. He is also known for ordering the building of the Djinguereber Mosque. Thing is, we only know him through the eyes of foreigners. Either because of his pilgrimage or because of the european architects he brought. We only know the things that involve foreigners. I would like to know more about his predecessor, who, according to a single Arab source citing Musa, transmitted the crown as he was decided to sail west on the pacific to make a trip around the world. Unlike Colombus, he had calculated the trip duration correctly and allegedly led an expedition of 3000 (!) boats. They were never heard from again. However, some pre-columbian historians suspect they have found some possible places where trade occurred in south America. Why have I never heard about it? Why don't we have more sources about it? Then I remembered another piece of news I have read a few years ago. My country (France) was involved in a conflict in Mali recently. I followed it a bit. I remember reading an article about a heroic museum director who, upon seeing islamist fighters approaching and knowing what they do to historical artifacts [1] decided to disregard all typical precaution, loaded all he could in a pick-up truck and drove like crazy to the safe territories. A lot of what he saved were manuscripts from Mansa Musa's period and the next century. Most were undigitized and untranslated. This is why we need to save knowledge of ancient languages. Can you imagine the numerous epic stories we are missing? Maybe along those burnt books are the discussions of the western expedition. Maybe similar expeditions are sketched out. Maybe they give insights of civilizations or trading routes we did not know exist. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/28/mali-timbuktu-library-ancient-manuscripts https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/28/mali-timbuktu-...

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
I think this points more to the need to preserve source material. Even if the language is known, if the source material is gone, the information that was in the source material may be gone forever. On the other hand, with enough source material, languages that have no living speaker( and in fact, have had no living speakers for centuries) have been successfully decoded (for example ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics, ancient Sumerian, etc).
- Iv 7y ago
  Yes, you need the source material, but the things you can infer from it alone are less numerous. With no living speakers, you can map writing to meanings but not to phonetics, which are one of the main sources to trace language lines. Is the city of "Ass'n" in one language the city of "Hassim" in another? Are two sources talking about the same person or are the names different? Is this text poetry? Is this word here for the rhyme or does it have a specific meaning?
sudosteph 7y ago
That's an awesome story indeed! For me, it was the Nag Hammadi library discovery, which recovered certain texts from the earliest days of Christianity and Gnosticism that has brought me into this subject. Those writings, including "The Gospel of Thomas" and "The Gospel of Truth" (great reads btw) were purged as herethical years ago. The original greek copies cannot be found. But thanks to the foresight of some Egyptian scribes to preserve this history, we have amazing copies that were translated into Coptic. Coptic is unfortunately no longer widely spoken outside the Coptic church, and due to the lack of knowledge on it and having only that one copy, it took a very long time for good English translations of these works to become available. Still, the historical value of those texts is unbelievable so it has really made me wonder what else is out there waiting to be found and translated? And how hard will it to be translated when they're found? Totally agree with what you're saying. Wish we had a single digitized source for these sorts of things.

by Iv 7y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

I think this points more to the need to preserve source material. Even if the language is known, if the source material is gone, the information that was in the source material may be gone forever. On the other hand, with enough source material, languages that have no living speaker( and in fact, have had no living speakers for centuries) have been successfully decoded (for example ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics, ancient Sumerian, etc).

Iv 7y ago
Yes, you need the source material, but the things you can infer from it alone are less numerous. With no living speakers, you can map writing to meanings but not to phonetics, which are one of the main sources to trace language lines. Is the city of "Ass'n" in one language the city of "Hassim" in another? Are two sources talking about the same person or are the names different? Is this text poetry? Is this word here for the rhyme or does it have a specific meaning?

sudosteph 7y ago

That's an awesome story indeed! For me, it was the Nag Hammadi library discovery, which recovered certain texts from the earliest days of Christianity and Gnosticism that has brought me into this subject. Those writings, including "The Gospel of Thomas" and "The Gospel of Truth" (great reads btw) were purged as herethical years ago. The original greek copies cannot be found. But thanks to the foresight of some Egyptian scribes to preserve this history, we have amazing copies that were translated into Coptic. Coptic is unfortunately no longer widely spoken outside the Coptic church, and due to the lack of knowledge on it and having only that one copy, it took a very long time for good English translations of these works to become available. Still, the historical value of those texts is unbelievable so it has really made me wonder what else is out there waiting to be found and translated? And how hard will it to be translated when they're found? Totally agree with what you're saying. Wish we had a single digitized source for these sorts of things.