6 ms·

Bad Moon Rising

43 points by samclemens 2y ago

LeonenTheDK 2y ago
That's brutal they'd execute the stand-in after the celestial omen was deemed to have passed. I wonder if the person standing in knew it was coming? Was it a great honour to take the king's place during a crisis, or was the person put there in a more deceptive way?
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  Sounds like the premise for a Babylonian fish-out-of-water comedy. “It’s like Trading Places meets Gilgamesh!”
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    With lots of Assyrian butt jokes.
    - krapp 2y ago
      Kra-merggu slides into Jer-ishtal's apartment and exclaims "I can't see a thing." Jer-ishtal looks on bemused, and says "open that one." laugh track ensues [cut to commercial for Crazy Ea-Nasir's Copper Emporium]
- yyx 2y ago
  You can look up Ellen Pao and her time as interim CEO of Reddit for recent example.
- InsideOutSanta 2y ago
  In pre-scientific societies, "let's just murder a bunch of people and see if it helps" seems to be a surprisingly common way of handling all kinds of things. Google "Children of Llullaillaco" for an absolutely heartbreaking example of this.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    There is a non-zero chance I will be part of the stand-in pool for the USA in the next 4 years :) It's not gonna help anything, but you know
  - barbazoo 2y ago
    They didn't even have a control group?!?
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    Those societies were usually operating in a state of Malthusian equilibrium. There were always surplus people around who were going to die anyway. Culling this surplus was a problem they constantly had to solve; I imagine this drove warfare, for example, just to use some of the surplus before it inevitably died off in a lean year.
nico 2y ago
> houses around 130,000 clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia > Since so few scholars can read the languages on the tablets—the overwhelming majority remain untranslated This would be an awesome job for AI. Get these scholars to train the AI, then have it automatically translate all the other tablets Also, are there online scans of the tablets? Maybe the problem is not the scarcity of scholars, but gatekeeping? On a tangent: > These tablets, which likely come from Sippar, a Babylonian city in modern Iraq, were acquired by the museum more than a century ago and date to between 1900 and 1600 B.C. Is "acquired" a euphemism for stolen here?
- mangamadaiyan 2y ago
  How would we know that the AI didn't hallucinate when it translated a tablet? In other words, how could one trust the translation? A human translator can still provide some justification for their interpretation. Also, "acquired" could simply mean that the museum paid money to a third party to, well, acquire the piece(s) in question while not inquiring too deeply into how said third party came into possession of the objects that they sold.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    At the very least one could see from the AI if the tablet is interesting or not. That could triage tablets for human translation.
    - mangamadaiyan 2y ago
      Sure, as long as one has some means of predicting the probability of false positives as well as false negatives. Until then, colour me unconvinced of the (f)utility of this approach :)
      - timschmidt 2y ago
        LLMs do a pretty darn good job of translating other languages, even preserving inflection and tone and rhyme in some cases. Same when translating programming languages. If the training pool is large enough, they should be quite good at it. No problem marking them as machine translated and keeping track of which have been spot-checked by experts either.
alganet 2y ago
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/newly-deciphered-4000-year-old-cuneiform-tablets-used-lunar-eclipses-to-predict-major-events-180984871/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/newly-deciphered-4... > “This eclipse is … set aside for testing,” the newly translated cuneiform reads at one point, indicating the need for another round of rigorous omen-checking before the future could be foretold. I wonder how would they know if an omen test "passes". What if these are not omens, but something else? Maybe it was a school lesson, and the "set aside for testing" is some teacher note. This would not be unusual, as we already know sumerians used tablets as school notebooks. I don't know which parts of these media articles talk about the content of the tablet or the interpretation of the scholars. Is the thing about entrails on the newly translated tablet itself, or is that from another place and the scholars made an association? Again, I would love to be able to read the tablet (digital transliteration + translation).
hnlmorg 2y ago
> “The eclipse of one of the great celestial lights—the sun or the moon—meant that on Earth a great figure would be eclipsed,” says George. “That is, a king would die.” > the king would go into hiding and a temporary substitute would be placed on the throne. Once the threat was deemed to have passed, the king would reassume his position. To dispose of any lingering evil, his stand-in would then be executed. I love how people can believe in an all seeing, all knowing, and all powerful god and yet also believe that deity can be tricked with such an obvious ruse. I don’t know if that’s arrogance, stupidity or desperation. Perhaps a combination of all three.
- olddustytrail 2y ago
  But the Babylonians didn't believe in an all seeing, all knowing, all powerful god. They weren't even monotheistic.
  - toss1 2y ago
    Still, you'd agree any God that can control the heavens and the fate of the earth, if you thought about it for 2 seconds would be quite unlikely to be fooled by that ruse, even if they are 'only' a lesser God..., right?
    - kbelder 2y ago
      They probably did the ruse, and it worked. The king lived. From that point on, it was a tried and tested solution.
- cam_l 2y ago
  It wasn't the god they tricking, it was the populace (and the next in line to the throne).
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
  Remember Prometheus? He stole fire from the gods of Olympus and gave it to the humans. In a different legend the gods held counsel to decide what parts of a ritual sacrifice would go to them, and what part to the humans. Prometheus gathered up the sacrificed animal's bones, polished them with its fat, wrapped them up in its hide and presented them to Zeus who was delighted at the artful arrangement, apparently, and accepted them in place of the bloody and dodgy looking meat and guts of the animal. So the humans kept the meat and guts, the gods got the bones. No wonder Zeus punished Prometheus cruelly, for a thousand years until Hercules saved him. You probably know the story - rock, chains, eagle, liver, etc. In yet other legends the gods fought the Titans (Prometheus was a Titan), and the Giants. The war with the Giants being especially bloody to the point that one Giant caught Zeus and cut the nerves from his arms and legs and left him paralysed, until Hermes stole the nerves and took them back to Zeus. The legend is a bit poor on details regarding how exactly he achieved this, but hey, gods. All this is to say- yeah, the Gods were more powerful than humans. They commanded the weather, the sea, the earth and the sun; but they weren't omnipotent beings and they weren't even the creators of the world. Chaos was the creator of the world. Or possibly Chaos and Nyx together with Eros. From Chaos sprang Ouranos the sky, Gaia, the earth, and everything else in between and above. The Olympians came much later. In a sense they were the young upstarts. Zeus ... well, maimed his own father, Kronus (time?). Who had been eating all his children. So that's how Zeus became king of the gods: he usurped his Dad and fought two big wars against other pretenders to the throne. Hardly omnipotent. But very powerful nonetheless. The Moirai -the Fates- were more powerful than Zeus, and all the other Gods combined: whatever the Fates decided, happened. When the Fates decided Hercules, the son of Zeus, would die, nothing Zeus could say or do would change their mind. Hercules died, and in a horrible, gruesome manner. The gods were not omnipotent. Not the Olympians. Not, apparently, those of the Babylonians also. But their stories I don't know (I grew up in Athens, not Babylon).
pwillia7 2y ago
how do we feel about messing with history trying to repair broken statues? https://imgur.com/a/sAeWnCp https://imgur.com/a/sAeWnCp
harywilke 2y ago
There is a really excellent podcast on the history of astronomy called The Song of Urania[0] that goes into a ton of depth about eclipses and how different cultures viewed and recorded the events of the sky. [0]https://songofurania.com/ https://songofurania.com/

43 points by samclemens 2y ago

That's brutal they'd execute the stand-in after the celestial omen was deemed to have passed. I wonder if the person standing in knew it was coming? Was it a great honour to take the king's place during a crisis, or was the person put there in a more deceptive way?

shermantanktop 2y ago
Sounds like the premise for a Babylonian fish-out-of-water comedy. “It’s like Trading Places meets Gilgamesh!”
- pfdietz 2y ago
  With lots of Assyrian butt jokes.
  - krapp 2y ago
    Kra-merggu slides into Jer-ishtal's apartment and exclaims "I can't see a thing." Jer-ishtal looks on bemused, and says "open that one." laugh track ensues [cut to commercial for Crazy Ea-Nasir's Copper Emporium]
yyx 2y ago
You can look up Ellen Pao and her time as interim CEO of Reddit for recent example.
InsideOutSanta 2y ago
In pre-scientific societies, "let's just murder a bunch of people and see if it helps" seems to be a surprisingly common way of handling all kinds of things. Google "Children of Llullaillaco" for an absolutely heartbreaking example of this.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  There is a non-zero chance I will be part of the stand-in pool for the USA in the next 4 years :) It's not gonna help anything, but you know
- barbazoo 2y ago
  They didn't even have a control group?!?
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Those societies were usually operating in a state of Malthusian equilibrium. There were always surplus people around who were going to die anyway. Culling this surplus was a problem they constantly had to solve; I imagine this drove warfare, for example, just to use some of the surplus before it inevitably died off in a lean year.

nico 2y ago

> houses around 130,000 clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia > Since so few scholars can read the languages on the tablets—the overwhelming majority remain untranslated This would be an awesome job for AI. Get these scholars to train the AI, then have it automatically translate all the other tablets Also, are there online scans of the tablets? Maybe the problem is not the scarcity of scholars, but gatekeeping? On a tangent: > These tablets, which likely come from Sippar, a Babylonian city in modern Iraq, were acquired by the museum more than a century ago and date to between 1900 and 1600 B.C. Is "acquired" a euphemism for stolen here?

mangamadaiyan 2y ago
How would we know that the AI didn't hallucinate when it translated a tablet? In other words, how could one trust the translation? A human translator can still provide some justification for their interpretation. Also, "acquired" could simply mean that the museum paid money to a third party to, well, acquire the piece(s) in question while not inquiring too deeply into how said third party came into possession of the objects that they sold.
- bruce511 2y ago
  At the very least one could see from the AI if the tablet is interesting or not. That could triage tablets for human translation.
  - mangamadaiyan 2y ago
    Sure, as long as one has some means of predicting the probability of false positives as well as false negatives. Until then, colour me unconvinced of the (f)utility of this approach :)
    - timschmidt 2y ago
      LLMs do a pretty darn good job of translating other languages, even preserving inflection and tone and rhyme in some cases. Same when translating programming languages. If the training pool is large enough, they should be quite good at it. No problem marking them as machine translated and keeping track of which have been spot-checked by experts either.

alganet 2y ago

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/newly-deciphered-4000-year-old-cuneiform-tablets-used-lunar-eclipses-to-predict-major-events-180984871/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/newly-deciphered-4... > “This eclipse is … set aside for testing,” the newly translated cuneiform reads at one point, indicating the need for another round of rigorous omen-checking before the future could be foretold. I wonder how would they know if an omen test "passes". What if these are not omens, but something else? Maybe it was a school lesson, and the "set aside for testing" is some teacher note. This would not be unusual, as we already know sumerians used tablets as school notebooks. I don't know which parts of these media articles talk about the content of the tablet or the interpretation of the scholars. Is the thing about entrails on the newly translated tablet itself, or is that from another place and the scholars made an association? Again, I would love to be able to read the tablet (digital transliteration + translation).

hnlmorg 2y ago

> “The eclipse of one of the great celestial lights—the sun or the moon—meant that on Earth a great figure would be eclipsed,” says George. “That is, a king would die.” > the king would go into hiding and a temporary substitute would be placed on the throne. Once the threat was deemed to have passed, the king would reassume his position. To dispose of any lingering evil, his stand-in would then be executed. I love how people can believe in an all seeing, all knowing, and all powerful god and yet also believe that deity can be tricked with such an obvious ruse. I don’t know if that’s arrogance, stupidity or desperation. Perhaps a combination of all three.

olddustytrail 2y ago
But the Babylonians didn't believe in an all seeing, all knowing, all powerful god. They weren't even monotheistic.
- toss1 2y ago
  Still, you'd agree any God that can control the heavens and the fate of the earth, if you thought about it for 2 seconds would be quite unlikely to be fooled by that ruse, even if they are 'only' a lesser God..., right?
  - kbelder 2y ago
    They probably did the ruse, and it worked. The king lived. From that point on, it was a tried and tested solution.
cam_l 2y ago
It wasn't the god they tricking, it was the populace (and the next in line to the throne).
YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
Remember Prometheus? He stole fire from the gods of Olympus and gave it to the humans. In a different legend the gods held counsel to decide what parts of a ritual sacrifice would go to them, and what part to the humans. Prometheus gathered up the sacrificed animal's bones, polished them with its fat, wrapped them up in its hide and presented them to Zeus who was delighted at the artful arrangement, apparently, and accepted them in place of the bloody and dodgy looking meat and guts of the animal. So the humans kept the meat and guts, the gods got the bones. No wonder Zeus punished Prometheus cruelly, for a thousand years until Hercules saved him. You probably know the story - rock, chains, eagle, liver, etc. In yet other legends the gods fought the Titans (Prometheus was a Titan), and the Giants. The war with the Giants being especially bloody to the point that one Giant caught Zeus and cut the nerves from his arms and legs and left him paralysed, until Hermes stole the nerves and took them back to Zeus. The legend is a bit poor on details regarding how exactly he achieved this, but hey, gods. All this is to say- yeah, the Gods were more powerful than humans. They commanded the weather, the sea, the earth and the sun; but they weren't omnipotent beings and they weren't even the creators of the world. Chaos was the creator of the world. Or possibly Chaos and Nyx together with Eros. From Chaos sprang Ouranos the sky, Gaia, the earth, and everything else in between and above. The Olympians came much later. In a sense they were the young upstarts. Zeus ... well, maimed his own father, Kronus (time?). Who had been eating all his children. So that's how Zeus became king of the gods: he usurped his Dad and fought two big wars against other pretenders to the throne. Hardly omnipotent. But very powerful nonetheless. The Moirai -the Fates- were more powerful than Zeus, and all the other Gods combined: whatever the Fates decided, happened. When the Fates decided Hercules, the son of Zeus, would die, nothing Zeus could say or do would change their mind. Hercules died, and in a horrible, gruesome manner. The gods were not omnipotent. Not the Olympians. Not, apparently, those of the Babylonians also. But their stories I don't know (I grew up in Athens, not Babylon).

pwillia7 2y ago

how do we feel about messing with history trying to repair broken statues? https://imgur.com/a/sAeWnCp https://imgur.com/a/sAeWnCp

harywilke 2y ago

There is a really excellent podcast on the history of astronomy called The Song of Urania[0] that goes into a ton of depth about eclipses and how different cultures viewed and recorded the events of the sky. [0]https://songofurania.com/ https://songofurania.com/