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Unearthed from a 1,600-year-old Roman-era tomb That's c. 400 AD. Closer to today, than to the time of King Tut...and King Tut was closer to the TFA mummy than
by brudgers 5mo ago
Unearthed from a 1,600-year-old Roman-era tomb
That's c. 400 AD. Closer to today, than to the time of King Tut...and King Tut was closer to the TFA mummy than to the First Dynasty.
Ancient Egypt is really really old. The Great pyramid was 3000 years old at the time of the TFA mummy.
The TFA mummy is about equidistant between today and the events of the Iliad and the book was already more than 1000 years old in 400 CE.
- mattfrommars 5mo agoThat sounds about right. People generally under estimate how old Ancient Egyptian really are, me included and think it sometimes around the era of Middle Ages.
- brudgers 5mo agoIn Ancient Egypt Ancient Egypt was ancient.
- adastra22 5mo agoAncient Egypt had archeological museums showing dug up artifacts of even more ancient Egypt.
- Melatonic 5mo agoIsn't that just like our normal museums now ?
- fecal_henge 5mo agoYes but much further in the future when someone else digs them up.
- tclancy 5mo agoNo, the artifacts stayed where they were found. Different concept.
- adastra22 5mo agoNot the one I'm referring to. Which I just looked up and got the region wrong -- it was in Mesopotamia. It was an actual museum showing ancient artifacts in a building, 2,500 years ago. Some of the things in that museum were an additional 1,500 years old at the time they were on display. It's a funny story because the modern archeologists who dug it up were very confused by finding objects from different regions and separated by hundreds or thousands of years, all in the same layer.
- weirdmantis69 5mo agoYou must have been cheering when they blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan because at least white people didn't have them.
- tclancy 5mo agoWe had a party and everything. If you meet the Buddha on the road ...
- adolph 5mo agoAlso dinosaur bones. As Mayor shows, the Greeks and Romans were well aware that a different breed of creatures once inhabited their lands. They frequently encountered the fossilized bones of these primeval beings, and they developed sophisticated concepts to explain the fossil evidence, concepts that were expressed in mythological stories. . . . Like their modern counterparts, the ancient fossil hunters collected and measured impressive petrified remains and displayed them in temples and museums; they attempted to reconstruct the appearance of these prehistoric creatures and to explain their extinction. . . . https://classics.stanford.edu/publications/first-fossil-hunters-dinosaurs-mammoths-and-myth-greek-and-roman-times https://classics.stanford.edu/publications/first-fossil-hunt...
- mr3martinis 5mo agoWhat is the “TFA” mummy?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Induane 5mo agoThat Fucking Asshole mummy from Bubba Ho Tep.
- voidfunc 5mo agoGreat movie
- cfiggers 5mo agoThe mummy that is the subject of The Friendly Article (the post that we're all commenting under right now).
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- maksimur 5mo agoTFA originally meant "The Fucking Article" but on HN seems to have morphed its meaning to "The Fine Article" or "The Featured Article". I can't stop reading it as the former every time I come across it.
- adastra22 5mo agoThose multiple readings date back to Slashdot and have stayed consistent. It just means in plain speech the linked article in the original post. Now get off my lawn!
- latexr 5mo agoTo expand on this: It started as “RTFA”, which is a riff on RTFM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM#List_of_similar_initialisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM#List_of_similar_initialis... Doesn’t really work as OP used it, though, as it gets confusing. They wrote “the TFA mummy” every time, so it becomes “the the fucking article mummy”. Like saying you’re a fan of the The Beatles.
- airstrike 5mo agoObligatory "Cleopatra lived closer to the creation of the iPhone than she did to the building of the Great Pyramid"
- moi2388 5mo agoIn time, not space.
- airstrike 5mo agoSlow clap...
- raffraffraff 5mo agoWell, if space is expanding and earth is revolving and spinning around the sun which is spinning around the milkyway which is moving through space then.... Was it really close in space either?
- interstice 5mo agoLocal origin not global
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- raffraffraff 5mo agoOr universal
- elros 5mo agoOn a stressful day full of short deadlines and somewhat overwhelming work, thank you for the chuckle :-)
- altmanaltman 5mo agothey are both the same though
- vkazanov 5mo agoMost people kind of merge the kingdoms together, while every kingdom is unique in both the culture and, say, external influence. And the late period is quite long as well. There is a very strong connection between periods, of course. But 2500+ years of ancient egypt is a very long damn time. All of our modern history is, say, 3k years, starting with greeks, early chinese , india and all. But egypt to me is like a star in the vast ocean of nothingness of early history. We know NAMES and DEEDS of people who lived 4500 years ago. We see things they've built, we can read words they wrote. This is amazing.
- Razengan 5mo ago> But 2500+ years of ancient egypt is a very long damn time. To put that in perspective, consider how long 100 years ago feels.. not in technological terms, but in human perception of time: The USA was founded 250~ years ago. Try to recall your own life from 20, 40, 50 years ago.. it's a literal lifetime. Most people only meet people as far back as their grandparents, just 2 generations back. Great-grandparents and the eras they grew up in are already almost impossible to relate to.. 2500 years is FIFTY such lifetimes! So in "just" after 500 years the pyramids would already be a mythical unrelatable object to people from 2000 years before us... I like to think Ancient Egyptians were descendants of the survivors from a Green Sahara and the pyramids were meant to be their post-apocalyptic marker in case the world went to further shit..
- zikduruqe 5mo ago> To put that in perspective Star Wars debuted 37 years after World War II Star Wars debuted 49 years from now (Now I feel really old)
- Razengan 5mo agoThe iPhone launched 7 years after 2000 The iPhone launched 19 years from now
- Razengan 5mo agoSorry I meant "to people from 4000 years before us" because BC is negative years lol
- dmos62 5mo agoThe pyramids aren't actually datable, because it's rock. Maybe if you were to find something with carbon that's provably from the time of construction, that could be used, but I don't think that happened. The popular datings for the older pyramids are educated guesses. Edit: the Sphynx dating is even more controversial, because it seems to have rain erosion on it.
- adastra22 5mo agoThe construction work camps for the pyramids have been dug. There is also wood, an organic matter in the Kings chamber and mortar inside the pyramid, which can be dated.
- UberFly 5mo agoWithin the rock construction are wood beams, mortar and charcoal that are all datable.
- adolph 5mo ago> aren't actually datable, because it's rock To add to the methods shared by others, one way I think is really cool is optically stimulated luminescence. So, a grain of quartz destined someday to become the perfect OSL sample will begin its journey by emptying its electron traps. This typically happens through steady sunlight exposure, in a process called bleaching. Bleaching resets the OSL clock. In this example scenario, the grain is fully bleached by the sun as the wind blows it across the landscape, until it finally settles and additional wind-blown material buries it. Once it is cut off from light, the OSL clock begins running. The sediment now surrounding the quartz will include tiny amounts of radioactive isotopes, exposing the quartz to a steady flow of ionizing radiation. The quartz captures electrons from this radiation; the radiation flow is called the dose rate. This is like the steady ticking of a clock. The quartz begins trapping electrons, and because it is cut off from light, the trapped electrons will continue building up at a fairly steady, measurable rate. https://desert.com/osl/ https://desert.com/osl/
- psychoslave 5mo agoPedantic side note maybe and sorry about that, but I found disturbing to see multiple "the TFA", where I guess TFA stand for "the fine article", so "the the fine article"? If it’s about brevity, "the peg" is just as short and mean in journalism parlance "A topic of interest, such as an ongoing event or an anniversary, around which various features can be developed."
- tclancy 5mo agoI don’t think you’re reclaiming “peg”. Lost cause.
- psychoslave 5mo agoEveryone should be champion of some lost causes, not because their own have much chance to succeed, simply because otherwise they are all certain to never happen while in the first case, at scale, it’s almost guarantee that some will defeat the odds. That said, "TFA" is ok, but "the TFA" seems even more extravagant than "PDF format"
- eru 5mo agoPDF format is the same as EXE format or BMP format. They are named for the file extension. And the etymology of the file extension is treated as opaque.
- brudgers 5mo agoI used the phrase “the TFA mummy” where the “the” is the article for “mummy.” “The TFA mummy” has the same three articles as “the mummy in TFA” but one less word. And pedantically, pedantry leaves the house when “TFA” walks in the door.
- psychoslave 5mo agoFirst of all, do as you please, really. Just be aware that on the other side it might feel surprising/awkward. "The mummy in the fine article" is very aligned with the usual "preposition before article", while "the the fine article mummy" is apomediary¹ with its "article before article" structure. ¹ Distant from mean/median practices.
- NetMageSCW 5mo agoAnd I thought being able to trace my ancestors back 2600 years was impressive (okay, maybe 1500 non-apocryphal ancestors)!