12 ms·

More so than the art and tools/homeware (which are very modern - often better than utensils I own now!), the Pompeii graffiti really changed how I think about t

More so than the art and tools/homeware (which are very modern - often better than utensils I own now!), the Pompeii graffiti really changed how I think about the past. When you're growing up, it seems like the older generation is so different, and the generation before that is unrecognizable. I assumed that modern day life would be absolutely foreign to someone from 2000 years ago. Then you read the graffiti and realize, nothing has changed! https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-pompeii-and-herculaneu https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-p...

kilroy123 6y ago
I agree! I love reading the graffiti. I highly recommend seeing Herculaneum if you're ever in the area. It's very impressive to see all this up close. We really haven't changed that much.
JorgeGT 6y ago
In this line, I recommend A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome by Alberto Angela. The book is exactly that: a description of a day, from sunrise to sundown, in 115 CE Rome.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  Thanks. I looked for it at the library online and couldn’t find it. I got ‘24 hours in Ancient Rome ’ (looks like it’s part of a series) instead. The author is Philip Matyszak. Will review once i am done with it. Will keep an eye out for your title.
vmception 6y ago
Go even further back and read Plato, Socrates and Aristotle’s work from nearby regions, much of it never stops being relevant. Go even further back on the other side of that sea and our earliest cunieform tablets - earliest records of structured language - is about someone trying to amicably resolve a contractual dispute on a simple failure to deliver I think before then we just lack records and have just put way too much weight on children doodling in caves There is nothing linear about human advances and customs
- akiselev 6y ago
  > Go even further back on the other side of that sea and our earliest cunieform tablets - earliest records of structured language - is about someone trying to amicably resolve a contractual dispute on a simple failure to deliver A quality assurance dispute, no less! The customer rejected the initial delivery of copper ingots because they weren't up to his standards and the vendor kept the money. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
andi999 6y ago
About things foreign 2000 years ago (the Roman empire seems to be more relatable) : Greek considered the past in view in front of them and the future coming from behind (we usually view it the other way). Also colors were perceived differently (this one is hearsay for me): like violett or so referred to shiny.
- pilsetnieks 6y ago
  > Also colors were perceived differently (this one is hearsay for me): like violett or so referred to shiny It's from Homer's Illiad and Odyssey where he refers to sea the color of wine. However: 1) it's possible he's referring to the darkness, not color, or some other aspect like turbulence; 2) he was also supposedly blind, so not the best judge of colors and 3) it's possible that he didn't really exist at all.
  - fpoling 6y ago
    There is even speculation that he referred to some distilled spirit in which case the color was indeed blue.
    - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
      Distillation to make alcoholic beverages wasn’t known to Bronze Age/early Iron Age Greece. It didn’t take off until the early centuries AD.
      - fpoling 6y ago
        We do not know if the distillation was not known. We just do not have evidence that it existed. Technology necessary to produce distilling equipment was available.
        Mediterraneo10 6y ago
        It is extremely unlikely that distillation of alcoholic beverages was known to the Ancient Greeks. Once distillation took off at the point when it is documented in the early first millennium, it swiftly spread through Eurasia. It beggars belief to think that the Homeric-era Greeks had these beverages and kept them to themselves.
edflsafoiewq 6y ago
The stiff translations are hilarious.
rriepe 6y ago
There's a really compelling theory that most of what's buried at Pompeii (and presented as being from the ancient eruption) is actually from the 1700s eruption.
- pjc50 6y ago
  .. what, the stuff with the Latin inscriptions and Roman-era pottery?
  - rriepe 6y ago
    Do you think there's more of that stuff than stuff from a bigger city and bigger eruption in the same place nearly 2000 years later? How does archaeology work in your mind, pjc50? It's centuries-old new media hype from landowners who realized their 200-year-old ruins wouldn't sell nearly as well as 2000-year-old ruins. It's everyone clinging to one man's account of an event that happened millennia ago while ignoring the mountain that fell on them centuries ago. It might be the world's first tourist trap. Both eruptions happened and there's stuff to see from both, yes, but 95% of what's on display in Pompeii is from the more recent major eruption, in my opinion. The tools and buildings look so modern because they are so modern.
    - codesnik 6y ago
      omg. Do yourself a favor, come visit Italy one day and go the museum or two. See whole range of stuff from stone age, to etruscan art, to roman, to early medieval. It's not like it was buried only in one particular place, and period attribution isn't that hard and very visible from the art style. Italy is a giant museum under the open sky, some buildings are still standing, rebuilt and repurposed multiple times.
      - rriepe 6y ago
        > and period attribution isn't that hard and very visible from the art style ...right, and everyone who looks at Pompeii says "It looks so modern!" I'm not the one denying history here. It's all of Pompeii acting like the second eruption/burial didn't happen.
loosetypes 6y ago
This is great, thanks for sharing! Similarly, you might appreciate The Satyricon by Petronius. Civility of yore my ass! (Staying in theme)
simias 6y ago
I often wonder how future generations are going to view the past. For us we can only really see footage and pictures a little over a century in the past (and exponentially more as we near the present) but 2000 years from now, should humanity make it that far, people will be able to watch some of your tiktok videos. They'll even probably be able to read this very comment (modulo some translation software probably). Can you imagine if we could watch millions and millions of hours of romans doing mundane things? Of vikings giving cooking tips? Of ancient mesopothamians freestyling on some ancient instruments? Our vision of the past would be radically different I think. We're at the beginning of an entirely new era of human history, where future humans will be able to analyse the most mundane aspects of our existences documented thoroughly online. I wonder how it's going to influence languages and cultures. Can you imagine following a video of a recipe recorded 700 years ago for instance? That'd be wild, yet it's probably going to become commonplace in the future. Meanwhile I feel weird watching century old photos and videos because I can't help thinking "everybody I see here is now dead".
- gen220 6y ago
  Now I can’t stop feeling bad for the poor soul in 4020, trying to reconstruct “World’s Best Banana Bread” from Allrecipes through the inter generational strata of autoplaying ads and scroll jacking pop ups, only to find that the recipe’s reviews were all bot generated, and that the recipe’s 10-paragraph lead-in inspirational story apparently is the ingredients list, since none can be found.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    They’ll also probably run into trouble getting the correct bananas. Someone following a century old banana-centric recipe today would struggle with that.
- konjin 6y ago
  I think people will become even more willfully blind because 'people in the past were gross'. You can see that on a lot of forums where anything from before 2000 is viewed with suspicion because it isn't lgbtqia+ friendly. Funnily enough that's how a lot of ancient culture was lost in the middle ages because heresy and paganism.
pjc50 6y ago
The 20th century has been absolutely exceptional in the amount of technologically and politically driven social change and discontinuity; a lot of ""olds"" got swept away, sometimes by uncoolness, sometime at gunpoint. But I think in some ways the bigger disconnect for us in the Anglosphere was Victorian/Puritan "bowdlerisation" taking sex and bodily humor out of "public discourse" until the 1960s.
bsder 6y ago
As an engineer touring Roman ruins and the museums, what was striking to me was how modern the Romans were. For example, we toured Pompeii in early December and it was raining lightly. We got to see the rain systems in action--2000+ year old road grading and rain capturing systems (compluvium/impluvium/subfloor cistern) working as designed. The Romans had water fountains on every block fed by pressure from the aqueduct, and they were all marked with different figures so that you effectively had a street address even if you were illiterate. It was also quite stunning to me that the Romans worked glass, and it was common. That's just amazing to me given the temperatures and skill involved. And, as people noticed, the art of the time was quite good. These food stalls are decorated with quite workable figures as they had to be--common people weren't literate. And the art in the better houses was actively good. The artists had working knowledge of their medium, tools and techniques--no crappy flat faces without depth and perspective here. We are clever monkeys in any time.
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  You might want to read the book The Ancient Engineers
rsynnott 6y ago
> When you're growing up, it seems like the older generation is so different, and the generation before that is unrecognizable. I assumed that modern day life would be absolutely foreign to someone from 2000 years ago. Funnily enough, one way that life 2000 years ago was familiar was that it included a lot of inter-generational moaning; we have written records of Romans complaining about the youth of today.
oblio 6y ago
If you want to witness some eerie moments, check out some re-colored early photos or video recordings. In black and white everything looks vintage, antiquated, slightly alien. When they're colored you can really see the people and make an emotional attachment. I know that the coloring process uses some artistic license, but in many cases the reproductions are based off of authentic materials, paints, etc so they're quite realistic.

kilroy123 6y ago

I agree! I love reading the graffiti. I highly recommend seeing Herculaneum if you're ever in the area. It's very impressive to see all this up close. We really haven't changed that much.

JorgeGT 6y ago

In this line, I recommend A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome by Alberto Angela. The book is exactly that: a description of a day, from sunrise to sundown, in 115 CE Rome.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago
Thanks. I looked for it at the library online and couldn’t find it. I got ‘24 hours in Ancient Rome ’ (looks like it’s part of a series) instead. The author is Philip Matyszak. Will review once i am done with it. Will keep an eye out for your title.

vmception 6y ago

Go even further back and read Plato, Socrates and Aristotle’s work from nearby regions, much of it never stops being relevant. Go even further back on the other side of that sea and our earliest cunieform tablets - earliest records of structured language - is about someone trying to amicably resolve a contractual dispute on a simple failure to deliver I think before then we just lack records and have just put way too much weight on children doodling in caves There is nothing linear about human advances and customs

akiselev 6y ago
> Go even further back on the other side of that sea and our earliest cunieform tablets - earliest records of structured language - is about someone trying to amicably resolve a contractual dispute on a simple failure to deliver A quality assurance dispute, no less! The customer rejected the initial delivery of copper ingots because they weren't up to his standards and the vendor kept the money. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir

andi999 6y ago

About things foreign 2000 years ago (the Roman empire seems to be more relatable) : Greek considered the past in view in front of them and the future coming from behind (we usually view it the other way). Also colors were perceived differently (this one is hearsay for me): like violett or so referred to shiny.

pilsetnieks 6y ago
> Also colors were perceived differently (this one is hearsay for me): like violett or so referred to shiny It's from Homer's Illiad and Odyssey where he refers to sea the color of wine. However: 1) it's possible he's referring to the darkness, not color, or some other aspect like turbulence; 2) he was also supposedly blind, so not the best judge of colors and 3) it's possible that he didn't really exist at all.
- fpoling 6y ago
  There is even speculation that he referred to some distilled spirit in which case the color was indeed blue.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    Distillation to make alcoholic beverages wasn’t known to Bronze Age/early Iron Age Greece. It didn’t take off until the early centuries AD.
    - fpoling 6y ago
      We do not know if the distillation was not known. We just do not have evidence that it existed. Technology necessary to produce distilling equipment was available.
      - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
        It is extremely unlikely that distillation of alcoholic beverages was known to the Ancient Greeks. Once distillation took off at the point when it is documented in the early first millennium, it swiftly spread through Eurasia. It beggars belief to think that the Homeric-era Greeks had these beverages and kept them to themselves.

edflsafoiewq 6y ago

The stiff translations are hilarious.

rriepe 6y ago

There's a really compelling theory that most of what's buried at Pompeii (and presented as being from the ancient eruption) is actually from the 1700s eruption.

pjc50 6y ago
.. what, the stuff with the Latin inscriptions and Roman-era pottery?
- rriepe 6y ago
  Do you think there's more of that stuff than stuff from a bigger city and bigger eruption in the same place nearly 2000 years later? How does archaeology work in your mind, pjc50? It's centuries-old new media hype from landowners who realized their 200-year-old ruins wouldn't sell nearly as well as 2000-year-old ruins. It's everyone clinging to one man's account of an event that happened millennia ago while ignoring the mountain that fell on them centuries ago. It might be the world's first tourist trap. Both eruptions happened and there's stuff to see from both, yes, but 95% of what's on display in Pompeii is from the more recent major eruption, in my opinion. The tools and buildings look so modern because they are so modern.
  - codesnik 6y ago
    omg. Do yourself a favor, come visit Italy one day and go the museum or two. See whole range of stuff from stone age, to etruscan art, to roman, to early medieval. It's not like it was buried only in one particular place, and period attribution isn't that hard and very visible from the art style. Italy is a giant museum under the open sky, some buildings are still standing, rebuilt and repurposed multiple times.
    - rriepe 6y ago
      > and period attribution isn't that hard and very visible from the art style ...right, and everyone who looks at Pompeii says "It looks so modern!" I'm not the one denying history here. It's all of Pompeii acting like the second eruption/burial didn't happen.

loosetypes 6y ago

This is great, thanks for sharing! Similarly, you might appreciate The Satyricon by Petronius. Civility of yore my ass! (Staying in theme)

simias 6y ago

I often wonder how future generations are going to view the past. For us we can only really see footage and pictures a little over a century in the past (and exponentially more as we near the present) but 2000 years from now, should humanity make it that far, people will be able to watch some of your tiktok videos. They'll even probably be able to read this very comment (modulo some translation software probably). Can you imagine if we could watch millions and millions of hours of romans doing mundane things? Of vikings giving cooking tips? Of ancient mesopothamians freestyling on some ancient instruments? Our vision of the past would be radically different I think. We're at the beginning of an entirely new era of human history, where future humans will be able to analyse the most mundane aspects of our existences documented thoroughly online. I wonder how it's going to influence languages and cultures. Can you imagine following a video of a recipe recorded 700 years ago for instance? That'd be wild, yet it's probably going to become commonplace in the future. Meanwhile I feel weird watching century old photos and videos because I can't help thinking "everybody I see here is now dead".

gen220 6y ago
Now I can’t stop feeling bad for the poor soul in 4020, trying to reconstruct “World’s Best Banana Bread” from Allrecipes through the inter generational strata of autoplaying ads and scroll jacking pop ups, only to find that the recipe’s reviews were all bot generated, and that the recipe’s 10-paragraph lead-in inspirational story apparently is the ingredients list, since none can be found.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  They’ll also probably run into trouble getting the correct bananas. Someone following a century old banana-centric recipe today would struggle with that.
konjin 6y ago
I think people will become even more willfully blind because 'people in the past were gross'. You can see that on a lot of forums where anything from before 2000 is viewed with suspicion because it isn't lgbtqia+ friendly. Funnily enough that's how a lot of ancient culture was lost in the middle ages because heresy and paganism.

pjc50 6y ago

The 20th century has been absolutely exceptional in the amount of technologically and politically driven social change and discontinuity; a lot of ""olds"" got swept away, sometimes by uncoolness, sometime at gunpoint. But I think in some ways the bigger disconnect for us in the Anglosphere was Victorian/Puritan "bowdlerisation" taking sex and bodily humor out of "public discourse" until the 1960s.

bsder 6y ago

As an engineer touring Roman ruins and the museums, what was striking to me was how modern the Romans were. For example, we toured Pompeii in early December and it was raining lightly. We got to see the rain systems in action--2000+ year old road grading and rain capturing systems (compluvium/impluvium/subfloor cistern) working as designed. The Romans had water fountains on every block fed by pressure from the aqueduct, and they were all marked with different figures so that you effectively had a street address even if you were illiterate. It was also quite stunning to me that the Romans worked glass, and it was common. That's just amazing to me given the temperatures and skill involved. And, as people noticed, the art of the time was quite good. These food stalls are decorated with quite workable figures as they had to be--common people weren't literate. And the art in the better houses was actively good. The artists had working knowledge of their medium, tools and techniques--no crappy flat faces without depth and perspective here. We are clever monkeys in any time.

selimthegrim 6y ago
You might want to read the book The Ancient Engineers

rsynnott 6y ago

> When you're growing up, it seems like the older generation is so different, and the generation before that is unrecognizable. I assumed that modern day life would be absolutely foreign to someone from 2000 years ago. Funnily enough, one way that life 2000 years ago was familiar was that it included a lot of inter-generational moaning; we have written records of Romans complaining about the youth of today.

oblio 6y ago

If you want to witness some eerie moments, check out some re-colored early photos or video recordings. In black and white everything looks vintage, antiquated, slightly alien. When they're colored you can really see the people and make an emotional attachment. I know that the coloring process uses some artistic license, but in many cases the reproductions are based off of authentic materials, paints, etc so they're quite realistic.