As a Classics major in college and with continuing love for that decaying old grande dame of a discipline, this is pretty cool and I hope the identification holds up to scrutiny (because it would be a big deal).
Then there’s this:
The two scholars have also recently discovered the upper half of a colossal statue of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II in their joint excavation project at Hermopolis Magna.
Percy Bysshe Shelley is practically shouting from the grave.
If you are a student of history, you realize that human nature has always been a constant.
We should teach kids in K-12 "Most people are crap, but some of the crap people did amazing things and there were also a few non-crap people out there, of varying impact."
There's such a volume of lost plays. Athens held annual festivals where you'd have perhaps 20 tragedies and 5 comedies over 5 days[1]. That's just one city state. Only 32 full plays survive.
Edit: Reading the article, I'm surprised they don't seem to have done any computer-based textual analysis of the authorship. We have other plays attributed to Euripides so matching 98 lines of text shouldn't be too difficult.
> There's such a volume of lost plays. Athens held annual festivals where you'd have perhaps 20 tragedies and 5 comedies over 5 days[1]. That's just one city state. Only 32 full plays survive.
There's such a volume of lost everything. Original masters taped over, archive fires, etc. Now we have new problems like obsolete formats and failing to pay your cloud bills (no more recovering something from an old tape forgotten in a warehouse).
In 2000 years, I wouldn't be surprised if no contemporary television managed to survive.
All that survives is The Love Boat, and future humans will fashion their entire understanding of ancient American history, culture, and religion around this show.
> There's such a volume of lost everything. Original masters taped over . . .
Michael Bond deftly develops this problem in Chapter 5, "Paddington and 'The Old Master'", of the masterpiece "A Bear Called Paddington." [0] Even a read of the linked synopsis brings to light the combinatorial Ship of Theseus nature of all human-interpretation. The pathos brings tears to my eyes: Paddington's failure to recreate a present scrambled by a search for the past is victorious-by-proxy, despite the judges viewing it upside down--just as an artist might draw. [1]
In 2000 years, I wouldn't be surprised if no contemporary television managed to survive.
Maybe most everything doesn't deserve to survive. Future humans will be busy enough living their lives, to learn an ever growing history of long dead ancestors. For them, it'll be mildly interesting to know that something was invented one thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand years ago, maybe the name of a chosen few relevant persons that first did something. But a complete record of everything that ever happened? I don't think so.
Most TV and movies feel horriby dated in a few decades.
Actually, I watch TV and movies done now that seem horribly dated.
We lost the entirety of MySpace, which was a significant cultural moment.
I know people who have almost zero photos of their entire childhoods because they were all digital and stored on computers/online and have been lost to the ether.
My understanding from reading the article, is that the issue is not so much matching the deciphered lines, but the interpretation of that deciphering. So they want the scholarship agreement on what is actually written on the papyrus.
I imagine there are plenty of missing words being inserted, unreadable letters being guessed and so on.
So the way to do it for now, has to rely more on experience and intuition than a database search.
I just hope there are good archival structures in place in society nowadays, because there are a lot of theaters worldwide performing plays known and unknown every day, but AFAIK only the best known ones get statues made and I don't believe they contain a list of their works (for example).
I mean that would make sense; make sturdy statues of authors / playwrights / etc, and embed copies of their work in a compartiment inside of them or in the material itself. Lose a few in interesting looking hills.
I named my home server (that I mostly run machine learning experiments on) euripides, because I found a quote by him very insightful: “Man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.”
> Using the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a comprehensive, digitized database of ancient Greek texts maintained by the University of California, Irvine
I always love to hear about a school or organization that says "Hey everyone! We are going to store the central digital index and database of the thing we care about. Come check it out!"
It used to be distributed as a CD to university libraries, but these CDs were supposed to be surrendered when the online version came out. I have heard
that at least one of these copies (perhaps “out of date” in terms of “new” texts added since the web version debut) exists on some sort of distributed distribution network.
TLG is pretty easy to get hold of. You also want Diogenes, an app that allows you to use that database. It’s very useful if you study Latin or Greek, even as a hobby.
Especially notes of Aristotle’s oral ramblings about others’ works, when we know those are wildly casual about accuracy when we can actually compare them to pieces of text.
Tangentially related, but I recently read Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon [1]
It's set after Sicily defeats Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Two unemployed potters decide to stage two plays by Euripides using the Athenian prisoners kept in the infamous quarry.
Readit News
Then there’s this:
The two scholars have also recently discovered the upper half of a colossal statue of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II in their joint excavation project at Hermopolis Magna.
Percy Bysshe Shelley is practically shouting from the grave.
I MET A TRAVELER FROM AN ANTIQUE LAND…
We should teach kids in K-12 "Most people are crap, but some of the crap people did amazing things and there were also a few non-crap people out there, of varying impact."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysia
Edit: Reading the article, I'm surprised they don't seem to have done any computer-based textual analysis of the authorship. We have other plays attributed to Euripides so matching 98 lines of text shouldn't be too difficult.
There's such a volume of lost everything. Original masters taped over, archive fires, etc. Now we have new problems like obsolete formats and failing to pay your cloud bills (no more recovering something from an old tape forgotten in a warehouse).
In 2000 years, I wouldn't be surprised if no contemporary television managed to survive.
Michael Bond deftly develops this problem in Chapter 5, "Paddington and 'The Old Master'", of the masterpiece "A Bear Called Paddington." [0] Even a read of the linked synopsis brings to light the combinatorial Ship of Theseus nature of all human-interpretation. The pathos brings tears to my eyes: Paddington's failure to recreate a present scrambled by a search for the past is victorious-by-proxy, despite the judges viewing it upside down--just as an artist might draw. [1]
0. https://paddingtonbear.fandom.com/wiki/Paddington_and_%22The...
1. https://www.allaboutdrawings.com/upside-down-drawing.html
Maybe most everything doesn't deserve to survive. Future humans will be busy enough living their lives, to learn an ever growing history of long dead ancestors. For them, it'll be mildly interesting to know that something was invented one thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand years ago, maybe the name of a chosen few relevant persons that first did something. But a complete record of everything that ever happened? I don't think so.
Most TV and movies feel horriby dated in a few decades.
Actually, I watch TV and movies done now that seem horribly dated.
I know people who have almost zero photos of their entire childhoods because they were all digital and stored on computers/online and have been lost to the ether.
I imagine there are plenty of missing words being inserted, unreadable letters being guessed and so on.
So the way to do it for now, has to rely more on experience and intuition than a database search.
Also, the classical corpus is so small that humans still beat the computers for authorship analysis.
I mean that would make sense; make sturdy statues of authors / playwrights / etc, and embed copies of their work in a compartiment inside of them or in the material itself. Lose a few in interesting looking hills.
And then kde neon Just Worked.
although I have to say, Linux installations are a walk in the park these days ;)
I always love to hear about a school or organization that says "Hey everyone! We are going to store the central digital index and database of the thing we care about. Come check it out!"
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So much is still lost and we rely on such tiny fragments or worse hearsay by other authors rehashing their ideas
It's set after Sicily defeats Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Two unemployed potters decide to stage two plays by Euripides using the Athenian prisoners kept in the infamous quarry.
Really enjoyable tragi-comedy.
[1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/295543/ferdia-lennon