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The methods are incredible, but it seems like the text is ordinary and nothing to write home about
by imranq 3y ago
The methods are incredible, but it seems like the text is ordinary and nothing to write home about
- s0rce 3y agoNot too surprising, but I like the random ancient texts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81%E1%B9%A3ir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...
- f5ve 3y agoThere really is one for everything: https://xkcd.com/2758/ https://xkcd.com/2758/
- hoten 3y agoI dunno, I found it pleasurable.
- namaria 3y agoWe don't decipher ancient texts to have our minds blown about the universe but to know more about what life was like back then and to conduct historical research about it.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoSturgeon's law would imply that the overwhelming likelihood that any random unknown text we find from the ancient world _in situ_ is likely to be not be very good. Most of what we have left from the ancient world is material that people felt worth copying for _centuries_ after they were written. That's a fairly amazing quality filter and gives people a skewed perspective on the overall quality of material written at the time. A selection of work from a random library has also likely to be filtered for quality to an extent, and for the most part, the "good stuff" is going to be works that we _already_ have copies of or fragments from. Anything we don't already have a copy is is most likely going to be something that there weren't many copies made of, and usually there's a reason for that. Which isn't to say that anything we find isn't going to be interesting for other reasons -- even bad writing is going to be incredibly useful for historical research.