Rendered at 10:58:21 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
ajxs 4 days ago [-]
In case anyone doesn't know, Oxyrhynchus is a major source of archaeological discoveries. Particularly ancient (Ptolemaic/Roman Egypt) papyrus fragments recovered from an ancient landfill on the outskirts of the city. Notably some of the earliest-known Christian textual artefacts were found there (the actual earliest fragments came from elsewhere in Egypt). It turns out that Egypt's hot and dry climate provides the perfect environment for their long-term preservation.
thaumasiotes 4 days ago [-]
> It turns out that Egypt's hot and dry climate provides the perfect environment for their long-term preservation.
Cold and dry would be just as good. It's the dryness that matters.
vlovich123 3 days ago [-]
heat speeds up oxidation/ accelerates reactions but also decreases relative humidity for a constant moisture constant.
tadfisher 3 days ago [-]
Only because humidity is measured relative to the vapor pressure at a given temperature. It only matters for preservation when humidity reaches 100%.
addaon 3 days ago [-]
">Is this true? Paper (and I assume papyrus) expands and contracts with varying humidity even below the saturation point, and this motion embrittles and cracks it, no? So consistent humidity is key, and "consistently dry" is much more achievable than "consistently at an arbitrary other point."
nerdsniper 3 days ago [-]
Your intuition is more correct: it is not true. The relative humidity of the air matters below 100% as well. I think the parent commenter mistakenly assumed that only "condensation" matters, but materials will absorb moisture from the air even if the water doesn't condense. Entropy drives the dispersion of moisture, and some materials are "hygroscopic", meaning they don't merely reach equilibrium with the air, but actually concentrate moisture from the air and get significantly more wet than the air which feeds it water.
Sadly, the article says nothing about how old the fragment is or how it compares to other early copies of the Iliad. Somewhat amazingly, the earliest complete copy of the Iliad is from around 950 C.E.
It's not that surprising. The earliest complete copies of many ancient texts is similarly dated. For example, the earliest copy of the Rg Veda is dated to about that age as well. It's hard to keep complete copies of big books.
wavefunction 3 days ago [-]
As well, both the Iliad and Vedas are originally oral traditions. Likely there were different versions and different parts of the stories were emphasized to appeal to their audiences and local tastes and current events. Something that can still be apparent in historical texts but probably greatly reduced by the function of printed versions presenting a singular "authoritative version."
TFNA 3 days ago [-]
Only in the beginning, in the wake of the Greek Bronze Age dark age, was Homeric epic an improvised oral tradition that could be tailored to a listening audience’s preferences. By fifth-century Athens, writers depict the text as already definite, composed by one guy named Homer (instead of a long series of anonymous bards). Greeks may still have been learning and passing on Homer orally, but it was as a text that one received and was expected to relay onward faithfully.
efavdb 3 days ago [-]
Alexander the Great (died 323 bc) famously kept a copy of the Iliad under his pillow.
WalterBright 3 days ago [-]
That's how I learned Calculus.
themaninthedark 3 days ago [-]
By keeping a copy of the Iliad under your pillow?
goodmythical 3 days ago [-]
Because alexander the great kept a copy of the illiad under his pillow
z3phyr 3 days ago [-]
The Vedas are surprisingly uniform across a very long time period.
oersted 3 days ago [-]
It's likely that there have been bottlenecks, where a single written version became the main common ancestor to copy from. Long after the oral tradition died down and other written versions were lost. Or because some patron decided to fund the dissemination of a particular copy, like Guttemberg or King James, or the Toledo School of Translators. Or because a particular heir of the oral tradition wrote it down, like Homer.
It doesn't necessarily mean that the story was stable, it's just the version that got to us.
z3phyr 1 days ago [-]
Could be but all across different regions across the subcontinent where the Vedas are orally recited, except for some technical tones and notes (which is the mechanical part of Vedic Sanskrit) there is little difference.
There are serious attempts made to write down the vedas. The thing is, historically, very few people learned all 4 vedas by heart; Instead different families recited very small part and passed the recitation as heirloom.
If you meet all those families and compile their recitation, it exactly matches to what we have from different earlier efforts of canonisation.
jaldhar 3 days ago [-]
What you are saying is generally true (and certainly true for many Indian texts), but the oral tradition of the Vedas really is old. Having been brought up in the West I only learned enough for daily and occasional rituals. My guru taught me without looking at a book and although I have such books now I bought them for curiosity only; if I had a question about recitation it would not occur to me to consult them. My son has learned the same way.
coliveira 3 days ago [-]
Most complete copies of anything were destroyed by the end of the ancient world. So that is not a surprise. Even the bible that most people considered sacred only has copies from the 4th century and at one point the only Hebrew sources available were from the middle ages.
varjag 3 days ago [-]
On the timescale it's like getting buried today with a copy of Beowulf.
GnarfGnarf 3 days ago [-]
It’s heartbreaking to think of what treasures were lost when they were using mummies as locomotive fuel in the 19th century.
CamelCaseCondo 3 days ago [-]
Elliott, Chris (2017). "Bandages, Bitumen, Bodies and Business – Egyptian mummies as raw materials". Aegyptiaca (1): 40–46.
wtf I’m going to wager that this is a local myth. Just using corpses as fuel feels a bit antithetical to human traditions
Starlevel004 3 days ago [-]
They were actually eaten (in the early modern era) or ground up for paint.
Tanoc 3 days ago [-]
Most commonly used for paint or to colour bricks, yes. It's disgusting, but the British and Italians didn't really care at that point because anthropology and archaeology were not respected professions in the 1820s. They were just hobbies of wealthy gentlemen who liked to travel.
Most disturbing is that apparently people kept using them for paint up until the last supplier ran out of mummies sometime around 1960. Yes. 1960.
sashank_1509 7 hours ago [-]
Was there no fear of being haunted by spirits?
krapp 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
jaldhar 3 days ago [-]
The trick is to find non-white people so indifferent to their traditions and culture* that they’ll sell it to white supremacists for material gain.
*Also did 19th century Muslim Egyptians really consider mummies part of “their” culture? Or is the idea of “Egypt” also a White imperialist imposition?
krapp 3 days ago [-]
We're specifically talking about the British Empire and its attitude towards colonized people and cultures. I'm sure that Muslim Egyptians had their own prejudice, but Muslim Egyptian prejudice didn't inform British people's alienation and dehumanization of non-white cultures whereas white supremacy did. They didn't use mummies for firewood, to garnish their soup or grind them into paint because Egyptian Muslims considered them pagans or whatever.
I don't know why you're being so defensive, this is just history.
jaldhar 3 days ago [-]
It is as a student of history that the more I learn, the more I realize that The "White people did colonialism and everyone was sad" attitude I grew up with is simplistic when not flat out wrong. Egyptians (who were technically not part of the British Empire) were willing participants in the mummy trade. To ignore that is also dehumanizing.
krapp 3 days ago [-]
But white people did do colonialism, and a lot of people were "sad." Genocide and slavery do tend to make people sad.
That the Egyptians were willing participants in the mummy trade doesn't somehow cancel out the nature or effects of British imperialism, any more than Africans participating in the slave trade cancels out chattel slavery.
But fine - "white people did colonialism and everyone was sad and Egyptians helped." Would that satisfy you?
jaldhar 2 days ago [-]
Sure. I’m not trying to whitewash colonialism just pointing out that it is a lot more complex than the standard anti-colonialist view would have you believe. E.g. in the context of Egypt, the Ottomans were also a colonial imperial power. To ignore that is also “White supremacist”.
I think the premise for the books is that the story is found on ancient papyrus.
notorandit 4 days ago [-]
I Hope more and more fragments of anything lost is found.
The burn down of Alexandria library was a pity
jmyeet 4 days ago [-]
This is a common refrain but in reality I'm not sure it made much difference. Papyrus just doesn't age well and most manuscripts from this era would've been on papyrus.
What really decided what texts survived and what didn't was monastic traditions in in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages [1]. At this time, a monk might spend their entire life transcribing a particularly long manuscript. The materials were also expensive. So monasteries were selective in what got retain and unsurprisingly it skewed heavily to texts of religious significance and then to texts of significance to, say, Roman and Greek tradition and history given that monasteries were European.
Greek was the language of most fields of learning besides law in the Roman Empire. But the Greeks themselves wrote works on these papyrus scrolls that crumbled fast, so anything not actively used by the Romans was quickly lost.
There's a good chance that if the papyrus scrolls in any library (Alexandria or otherwise) weren't being copied regularly they were crumbling even before they burned or were lost to time for other reasons.
Towards the end of the Roman Empire, a few philosophers took the time to transmit Greek knowledge in Latin as knowledge of Greek faded in western Europe. What these guys happened to translate was the basis of most of European learning in philosophy, math, and other fields for centuries.
But they weren't monks (the most famous, Boethius, was not Christian either but a lot of later writers thought he was), the monks in scriptorium came later and grew slowly.
St. Benedict said that monks should be taught to read and do so regularly, which required copying books, but he prioritized physical work (to create self-sufficient communities) and prayer. But future Benedictines responded to the incentives of the time and began scaling up the copying and doing less agricultural work as the years went on.
canjobear 3 days ago [-]
What’s the evidence Boethius wasn’t Christian? Wikipedia says he was.
montefischer 3 days ago [-]
Boethius was a Christian. He wrote a book explaining the Trinity, for example (De Trinitate). The work for which he is most famous today, the Consolation of Philosophy, does not mention Christ by name, which have led some to speculate that he lost his faith later in life. There is an absence of direct evidence for that claim.
nonethewiser 3 days ago [-]
Thanks for sharing. Maybe not as common as you think. I never heard that before.
thordenmark 3 days ago [-]
It is not an uncommon view among scholars that humidity and age caused more papyri to be lost than the burning down of the library of Alexandria did. Many of which would have survived by being repeatedly copied and disseminated throughout the region.
wavefunction 3 days ago [-]
It probably held a bunch of relatively boring local administrative records as far as "documents found only in the Library of Alexandria" from what I've read. Of course some scholars of the boring administrative history of the world would be thrilled though.
krapp 3 days ago [-]
As far as I know the vast majority of cuneiform we have is essentially administrative records, tax record and receipts. And homework.
That's the stuff that tells us how societies and cultures really worked.
wavefunction 3 days ago [-]
I don't discount the scholarly value of these works as you note. They provide a very important insight into these early and semi-documented societies but they don't have a visceral impact for the public like "The Hidden Mysteries of Things Previously Unknown" we accord to the Library of Alexandria in popular acclaim
krapp 3 days ago [-]
True, but sometimes something like the complaint tablet to Ea-Nasir[0] reaches meme status.
People say this without any evidence. This ai-post is just regurgitating hn-thread "received wisdom". The evidence for the existence of a library is thin and hard to piece together, but points to more than a myth.
I appreciate that people want real proof of anything, but dumping an ai-slop summary is hardly doing any better than accepting the existence of a large library.
adastra22 3 days ago [-]
The Library almost certainly existed. It is the destruction (by deliberate fire) that is probably myth.
z3phyr 3 days ago [-]
Its destruction multiple times (in sieges and uncontrolled fires) is current historical consensus.
adastra22 3 days ago [-]
The sieges and fires you are referring to were hundreds of years before the supposed destruction at the hands of Christian mobs (e.g. as depicted in the movie Agora or in Sagan’s Cosmos). The latter is unsupported.
toenail 3 days ago [-]
Historical consensus? So the non scientific view? Science is not consensus based.
tsimionescu 3 days ago [-]
If you want to know what the science says on some topic, you have exactly two valid options:
1. Become an expert in said topic, reading the broad literature, becoming familiar with points and counterpoints, figuring out how research actually works in the field by contributing some papers of your own, and forming your own personal informed opinion on the preponderance of the evidence.
2. Look at the experts' consensus on said topic
Of course, you have other options. A popular one is to adopt the view of one expert in the field that you happen to like, who may or may not accept the consensus view - but this is far more arbitrary than 1 or 2.
bluGill 3 days ago [-]
If you are not in the field, consensus is often almost impossible to figure out. Remember what gets published is things that are controversial. Thus, things that have consensus are things that are going to be silent in literature if you search for it. Thus, if you're searching for something, you may not actually find the consensus if you're looking, and so the study is hard when you're not already an expert.
jibal 8 hours ago [-]
This is quite false and the opposite of what is actually true. Textbooks and other teaching materials are entirely based on consensus science, surveys report on consensus, meta-analyses identify consensus, the abstracts of novel studies lay out the consensus that they are reconfirming, adding to, or challenging. Your statements about "what gets published" and "things that are going to be silent" are completely nonsensical and have no relationship with reality. There isn't a single field where there is a consensus where I can't immediately find out what it is.
"Scientific consensus is the collective judgment, position, and opinion of the vast majority of active, qualified experts on a conclusion in a specific scientific discipline.[1] Scientific consensus results from the self-correcting scientific process of peer review, replication of the event through the scientific method, scholarly debate, meta-analysis, and publication of high-quality review articles, monographs, or guidelines in reputable books and journals to establish facts and durable knowledge about the topic."
The whole point of that publication is to make the "durable knowledge" accessible.
thaumasiotes 3 days ago [-]
> Thus, things that have consensus are things that are going to be silent in literature if you search for it.
Not really; generally consensus ideas will be mentioned in passing while discussing something else. You can get a strong sense of the consensus that way.
For example, I bought several textbooks on early Mesopotamian history, which taught me that Marxism enjoys a strong consensus in that field. And it's not even relevant to the field!
b112 3 days ago [-]
As a Canadian I love the US, think of them as family, but also view them as some sort of relative which has lost their senses. Before most recent times, we'd sadly shake our heads, as this relative does weird things, yet still hope for the best for them. Yet while rambling blathers about invading Canada and compelling 51st statehood would be fondly tolerated in grandpa, not so much for a nation with a massive army and a joy in using it.
So I purpose we strengthen another aspect of American "democracy" that Canadians find amusing, the concept of "hiring people for popularity not competency". Americans, especially at the local level, vote for judges, police chiefs, even dog-catchers, so why not a local scientist! Rather than 1 or 2, we can conjoin this concept with your third option, yet with the officiousness that only a vote can provide!
Each municipality can have a local head scientist, which will proclaim what scientific fact is correct. People can vote on such candidates, and their platform of scientifically correct "things" during election time.
It will all work out very well for them I'm sure, and hopefully, with science thus democratized, perhaps they will be less of a threat over time.
(Sorry, I don't know why your comment made this pop into my head)
jibal 8 hours ago [-]
Consensus in science has nothing to do with voting. It's a consequence, not a cause, and arises when the accumulated evidence is clear enough and unambiguous enough that there is general agreement among experts in the field--that is, those who are intimately involved in the production and tracking of that evidence.
Why not just have them vote on the truth. That would be very entertaining and keep them all busy
jibal 3 days ago [-]
Of course science is consensus based ... consensus is a fundamental part of the scientific process, which is conducted by a community of scientists. Consensus is the end result of attempts at reproducibility and falsification, of the ongoing process by which scientists challenge the claims and purported findings of other scientists. Without it, all you have are assertions from which people can pick and choose based on their biases (as we see, for instance, with people who deny climate or vaccine science by cherrypicking claims).
And even if you reject consensus as being essential to science, calling the consensus view "the non scientific view" is obviously mistaken, a basic error in logic.
This is all well understood by working scientists so I'm not going to debate it or comment on it further.
3 days ago [-]
bluGill 3 days ago [-]
I have seen several real historians say the same thing. I'm not a historian myself, but when I see professors of history in various institutions saying something, I tend to suspect they actually have a consensus, although as others pointed out, maybe it's not a consensus and I would have no way of knowing.
I'm not doubting the library existed and it was destroyed possibly burned more than once but the common trope that Christians did it does not seem to be backed up by history.
WalterBright 3 days ago [-]
What bothers me is the Vatican library. It's too vulnerable to fire. There should be staff taking photos of the pages, and store those copies elsewhere.
Yes, you can quickly photograph an entire book with a phone camera. No, you do not need archivists to do it. No, you do not need a scanner. No, you do not need special lighting.
Don't believe me? Pick a book of yours, open it, and take a photo with your phone.
notorandit 3 days ago [-]
Well, the library surely is not there anymore.
andrepd 3 days ago [-]
Everybody knows it's under Uncle Scrooge's money bin. Spoiler alert.
ButlerianJihad 3 days ago [-]
For some reason, there is a gigantic and ancient monastery on Mount Sinai with a commensurate collection of ancient manuscripts and papyri. Totally coincidence.
How did all that stuff get up there? It was holy angels. #itsalwaysangels
Pay08 3 days ago [-]
I don't get the point of this comment. What are you implying?
mistrial9 3 days ago [-]
those are certainly Christian curated documents. The previous six hundred+ years had seen the development of vivid and exotic religion, philosophy and arts. The Christians famously slew the Dragons, condemned Herod as a sorcerer and astrologer, and replaced the Apollo cults with the scripture that many know well.
I imagine that the Library of Alexandria was plural and diverse with respect to the traditions and inquiry that was represented there.
wavefunction 3 days ago [-]
The early Egyptian Christians were a particularly violent bunch. Lots of murders and political scheming against each other and other Christian authorities in the larger world of the Late Antique. They came to power in Alexandria by murder and looting, specifically
mistrial9 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
shevy-java 3 days ago [-]
That's a head scratcher.
Why did the person have that fragment? Was it like a comic book or something?
rwmj 3 days ago [-]
Imagine that paper is insanely expensive because it is very labour-intensive to make. People reused paper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest). Cloth is also insanely expensive. People wore clothes long after we'd consider them worn out.
Your job is to wrap mummies, so you use and reuse whatever is available, scraps of completely worn out clothing, or in this case some scraps of paper that happen to have writing on them. Which you cannot read because literacy rates are fairly low, especially amongst the poor working class.
caycep 3 days ago [-]
for some reason this read like the "Headless Body in a Topless Bar" headline...maybe the antiquities equivalent
andsoitis 3 days ago [-]
According to Iliad 2.645-670, in the direct vicinity of Egypt (notably 1000+ years before those mummies got wrapped) ships from Rhodes (Lindos, Ialysos and Kameiros) and also Crete had taken part in the Trojan War (Knossos and Gortyn, Phaistos and Rhytion).
horsh1 3 days ago [-]
So why would they bury a man with a book?
tollenda 3 days ago [-]
It wasn't a whole book, it was cartonnage: scrap paper from discarded books and documents, assembled and glued together like papier-mâché. The cartonnage was used to make funerary masks and some other parts of the mummification apparatus.
There is a whole subfield of archaeology that deals with deciphering and identifying book fragments found in the form of scrap paper in Greco-Roman era Egyptian mummies.
jrumbut 3 days ago [-]
I find it interesting how uncommon it is for this to yield new works.
It seems like it's always the same handful of texts. Ancient readers liked what they liked and weren't out for variety it seems.
At the same time, Juvenal has a whole satire about how everyone is trying their hand at writing books and mentions in another how booksellers are always getting new volumes.
I spend way too much time pining for the chance to read the other parts of the Trojan Cycle, even though the ancient said they were much lower quality. Like your favorite show getting canceled.
vulcan01 3 days ago [-]
You are falling victim to frequency bias. Popular books are popular – and especially before mass printing technologies, really popular. A lot of people may have tried to write books doesn't mean they're writing books good enough to dedicate an actual person's time towards copying them down.
Also, Juvenal was a poet. He most likely knew other poets, or aspiring poets, or at least people who liked writing. Your average, generally functionally illiterate, individual at the time is not trying their hand at writing books.
RobotToaster 3 days ago [-]
I imagine it's easier to attribute a fragment of writing to a well known work, rather than a previously unknown one.
AlexeyBrin 3 days ago [-]
Many cultures bury their dead with objects that the person enjoyed during their lifetime.
This is present even today, I saw a burial in Eastern Europe where the parents put a game of chess and toys in the coffin. While it will do no good to the deceased my theory is that it is a way for the living to deal with the loss.
card_zero 3 days ago [-]
I wonder now and then about the extent of dissent and cynicism in ancient Egypt. This is a vague question, I know, not least because the scope covers thousands of years. But officially, everybody gets grave goods in proportion to their status, especially their closeness to royalty, and these are provided so that they can have chairs and games and sports and clothes and food and so on in the next world, to make approximately four out of their eight forms of soul feel comfortable. Then these grave goods are often immediately stolen, probably by the same priestly officials who organized the burial. I wonder if ancient Egyptians silently thought their own religion ridiculous.
lukan 3 days ago [-]
"I wonder if ancient Egyptians silently thought their own religion ridiculous."
The more who believed that, the less power their religion had at holding the empire together until it transcended into becoming a vassal and later out of existing.
Religion was the foundation of the empire, but judging from the many artifacts we have, at least some did take it very seriously.
kelnos 3 days ago [-]
Well, sure. All of our death rituals are for the living left behind, not for the dead.
IAmBroom 22 hours ago [-]
The religiously faithful would disagree somewhat, but not I.
I wonder, however, why such Christians (for example) think a prayer for the soul of the deceased would alter God's plan in any way. "Gee," he says to Michael, who happens to be flying nearby, "John Doe was a dirtbag sinner, but that was a really nice funeral mass... Screw what I said in Scripture; let him in!"
zozbot234 3 days ago [-]
> This is present even today, I saw a burial in Eastern Europe where the parents put a game of chess and toys in the coffin. While it will do no good to the deceased my theory is that it is a way for the living to deal with the loss.
Spoiler: they do that so that future grave robbers and archaeologists will know all about the dead person's lifestyle. Surely that kind of everlasting glory has to be worth something to the deceased, one would think?
callamdelaney 3 days ago [-]
Maybe it's more like how they used to wrap fish and chips in newspaper
nextaccountic 3 days ago [-]
Maybe he liked that book? Not different from modern day burials
While the collection is now termed by modern scholars as "Book 2 of the Iliad", there was no such thing as a "book" as we know it, in those times; there were codices and scrolls and manuscripts, etc., and everyone's favorite: the palimpsest!
"Book" has been used to translate the Latin word "liber", which is the word used by the Ancient Romans for the parts of a bigger document, each of which would have been written on a different scroll.
Latin "liber" was used to translate the Greek words "biblion" or "byblos", which are thus the oldest source of the word "book". "Byblos" originally meant papyrus in Greek, but later it was also used for the parts of a big document. A later form of this word, which was more specialized with the meaning of "material for writing" or "book", is "biblion" (a diminutive), having the plural "ta biblia" = "the books", which is the source of English "bible".
quantummagic 3 days ago [-]
Why do we bury men in a suit?
analog31 3 days ago [-]
So your friends know you were standing pat when you died.
(See "Saint James Infirmary Blues").
0x1ceb00da 3 days ago [-]
Pearly gates is basically an interview.
castis 3 days ago [-]
Pearly gates is the performance review.
IAmBroom 22 hours ago [-]
It's actually a modern innovation, AFAIK. Common people were stripped and wrapped in linens (or equivalent). Obviously, mummy wrapping would be the extreme example of it, but wills often designated who would inherit "my best tunic", because the clothes were quite valuable if still wearable.
I'm speaking of the common people; kings and bishops were buried in finery. And it's not universal by any means. In times of disaster or plague bodies were buried quickly in their current clothes. This leads to some interesting finds, as when all that remains of an entire outfit is the silk stitching and things like metal buttons.
3 days ago [-]
dekhn 3 days ago [-]
Now what would be great is if they found a complete Telegony- the ostensible "third book" of the Iliad trilogy.
stevenwoo 3 days ago [-]
Recency bias probably colors my perception but I really enjoyed Stephen Fry's audiobook performance of his four book series on Greek and Roman myths, mostly dramatized by him but asides with etymology, history and other source references so it's a synthesis of many works into one coherent narrative, with about the last 45 minutes dedicated to what happened to Aeneas and the Telegony, for anyone else new to this, Telegonus was son of Odysseus via Circe.
lostlogin 3 days ago [-]
Imagine digging in that material. Tunnelling that out would be awful.
Cold and dry would be just as good. It's the dryness that matters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetus_A
It doesn't necessarily mean that the story was stable, it's just the version that got to us.
There are serious attempts made to write down the vedas. The thing is, historically, very few people learned all 4 vedas by heart; Instead different families recited very small part and passed the recitation as heirloom.
If you meet all those families and compile their recitation, it exactly matches to what we have from different earlier efforts of canonisation.
https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/aegyp/articl...
Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown
Most disturbing is that apparently people kept using them for paint up until the last supplier ran out of mummies sometime around 1960. Yes. 1960.
*Also did 19th century Muslim Egyptians really consider mummies part of “their” culture? Or is the idea of “Egypt” also a White imperialist imposition?
I don't know why you're being so defensive, this is just history.
That the Egyptians were willing participants in the mummy trade doesn't somehow cancel out the nature or effects of British imperialism, any more than Africans participating in the slave trade cancels out chattel slavery.
But fine - "white people did colonialism and everyone was sad and Egyptians helped." Would that satisfy you?
I think the premise for the books is that the story is found on ancient papyrus.
The burn down of Alexandria library was a pity
What really decided what texts survived and what didn't was monastic traditions in in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages [1]. At this time, a monk might spend their entire life transcribing a particularly long manuscript. The materials were also expensive. So monasteries were selective in what got retain and unsurprisingly it skewed heavily to texts of religious significance and then to texts of significance to, say, Roman and Greek tradition and history given that monasteries were European.
[1]: https://spokenpast.com/articles/medieval-monks-erased-preser...
Greek was the language of most fields of learning besides law in the Roman Empire. But the Greeks themselves wrote works on these papyrus scrolls that crumbled fast, so anything not actively used by the Romans was quickly lost.
There's a good chance that if the papyrus scrolls in any library (Alexandria or otherwise) weren't being copied regularly they were crumbling even before they burned or were lost to time for other reasons.
Towards the end of the Roman Empire, a few philosophers took the time to transmit Greek knowledge in Latin as knowledge of Greek faded in western Europe. What these guys happened to translate was the basis of most of European learning in philosophy, math, and other fields for centuries.
But they weren't monks (the most famous, Boethius, was not Christian either but a lot of later writers thought he was), the monks in scriptorium came later and grew slowly.
St. Benedict said that monks should be taught to read and do so regularly, which required copying books, but he prioritized physical work (to create self-sufficient communities) and prayer. But future Benedictines responded to the incentives of the time and began scaling up the copying and doing less agricultural work as the years went on.
That's the stuff that tells us how societies and cultures really worked.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/the-great-library-of-a...
1. Become an expert in said topic, reading the broad literature, becoming familiar with points and counterpoints, figuring out how research actually works in the field by contributing some papers of your own, and forming your own personal informed opinion on the preponderance of the evidence.
2. Look at the experts' consensus on said topic
Of course, you have other options. A popular one is to adopt the view of one expert in the field that you happen to like, who may or may not accept the consensus view - but this is far more arbitrary than 1 or 2.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus
"Scientific consensus is the collective judgment, position, and opinion of the vast majority of active, qualified experts on a conclusion in a specific scientific discipline.[1] Scientific consensus results from the self-correcting scientific process of peer review, replication of the event through the scientific method, scholarly debate, meta-analysis, and publication of high-quality review articles, monographs, or guidelines in reputable books and journals to establish facts and durable knowledge about the topic."
The whole point of that publication is to make the "durable knowledge" accessible.
Not really; generally consensus ideas will be mentioned in passing while discussing something else. You can get a strong sense of the consensus that way.
For example, I bought several textbooks on early Mesopotamian history, which taught me that Marxism enjoys a strong consensus in that field. And it's not even relevant to the field!
So I purpose we strengthen another aspect of American "democracy" that Canadians find amusing, the concept of "hiring people for popularity not competency". Americans, especially at the local level, vote for judges, police chiefs, even dog-catchers, so why not a local scientist! Rather than 1 or 2, we can conjoin this concept with your third option, yet with the officiousness that only a vote can provide!
Each municipality can have a local head scientist, which will proclaim what scientific fact is correct. People can vote on such candidates, and their platform of scientifically correct "things" during election time.
It will all work out very well for them I'm sure, and hopefully, with science thus democratized, perhaps they will be less of a threat over time.
(Sorry, I don't know why your comment made this pop into my head)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus
https://skepticalscience.com/explainer-scientific-consensus....
https://tomhopper.me/2011/11/02/scientific-consensus/
And even if you reject consensus as being essential to science, calling the consensus view "the non scientific view" is obviously mistaken, a basic error in logic.
This is all well understood by working scientists so I'm not going to debate it or comment on it further.
I'm not doubting the library existed and it was destroyed possibly burned more than once but the common trope that Christians did it does not seem to be backed up by history.
Yes, you can quickly photograph an entire book with a phone camera. No, you do not need archivists to do it. No, you do not need a scanner. No, you do not need special lighting.
Don't believe me? Pick a book of yours, open it, and take a photo with your phone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Catherine%27s_Monastery#...
How did all that stuff get up there? It was holy angels. #itsalwaysangels
I imagine that the Library of Alexandria was plural and diverse with respect to the traditions and inquiry that was represented there.
Why did the person have that fragment? Was it like a comic book or something?
Your job is to wrap mummies, so you use and reuse whatever is available, scraps of completely worn out clothing, or in this case some scraps of paper that happen to have writing on them. Which you cannot read because literacy rates are fairly low, especially amongst the poor working class.
It seems like it's always the same handful of texts. Ancient readers liked what they liked and weren't out for variety it seems.
At the same time, Juvenal has a whole satire about how everyone is trying their hand at writing books and mentions in another how booksellers are always getting new volumes.
I spend way too much time pining for the chance to read the other parts of the Trojan Cycle, even though the ancient said they were much lower quality. Like your favorite show getting canceled.
Also, Juvenal was a poet. He most likely knew other poets, or aspiring poets, or at least people who liked writing. Your average, generally functionally illiterate, individual at the time is not trying their hand at writing books.
This is present even today, I saw a burial in Eastern Europe where the parents put a game of chess and toys in the coffin. While it will do no good to the deceased my theory is that it is a way for the living to deal with the loss.
The more who believed that, the less power their religion had at holding the empire together until it transcended into becoming a vassal and later out of existing. Religion was the foundation of the empire, but judging from the many artifacts we have, at least some did take it very seriously.
I wonder, however, why such Christians (for example) think a prayer for the soul of the deceased would alter God's plan in any way. "Gee," he says to Michael, who happens to be flying nearby, "John Doe was a dirtbag sinner, but that was a really nice funeral mass... Screw what I said in Scripture; let him in!"
Spoiler: they do that so that future grave robbers and archaeologists will know all about the dead person's lifestyle. Surely that kind of everlasting glory has to be worth something to the deceased, one would think?
https://notebookofghosts.com/2016/11/21/a-list-of-weird-thin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest
"Book" has been used to translate the Latin word "liber", which is the word used by the Ancient Romans for the parts of a bigger document, each of which would have been written on a different scroll.
Latin "liber" was used to translate the Greek words "biblion" or "byblos", which are thus the oldest source of the word "book". "Byblos" originally meant papyrus in Greek, but later it was also used for the parts of a big document. A later form of this word, which was more specialized with the meaning of "material for writing" or "book", is "biblion" (a diminutive), having the plural "ta biblia" = "the books", which is the source of English "bible".
(See "Saint James Infirmary Blues").
I'm speaking of the common people; kings and bishops were buried in finery. And it's not universal by any means. In times of disaster or plague bodies were buried quickly in their current clothes. This leads to some interesting finds, as when all that remains of an entire outfit is the silk stitching and things like metal buttons.