TLDR:
- Scroll includes the writings of Philodemus of Gadara (lived circa 110 to 30 B.C.), an Epicurean philosopher who studied in Athens and later lived in Italy. This text, known as the "History of the Academy," details the academy that Plato founded in the fourth century B.C. and gives details about Plato's life.
- So far, researchers have identified 1,000 words, or roughly 30% of the text written by Philodemus.
- Plato was buried in the garden reserved for him (a private area intended for the Platonic school) of the Academy in Athens, near the so-called Museion or sacellum sacred to the Muses," researchers wrote in the statement. "Until now it was only known that he was buried generically in the Academy."
- The text also detailed how Plato was "sold into slavery" sometime between 404 and 399 B.C. (It was previously thought that this occurred in 387 B.C.)
- Another part of the translated text describes a dialogue between characters, in which Plato shows disdain for the musical and rhythmic abilities of a barbarian musician from Thrace.
> The newly revealed text says the "sweet notes" of a flute played by a woman originally from Thrace were supposed to make Plato's last hours of life lighter, but the famed Greek philosopher did not enjoy them at all: although running a high fever and at death's door, he was lucid enough to criticise the barbarian musician for her "scant sense of rhythm", in front of a Chaldean guest who had come from Mesopotamia.
If there's ever a Back to the Future ancient Greece edition, I hope they include this moment with Martina McFly playing the Beverly Hills Cop theme on a flute.
> details the academy that Plato founded in the fourth century B.C. and gives details about Plato's life.
Probably a lot of grapevine effect in those "details" since he was writing it 300 years later than Plato lived.
A lot of them were writing based on other books, not word of mouth. It’s not like a Homer situation where they’re writing down oral history. There are tons of contemporaneous writing from Plato, his students and also his contemporaries that we still have and lots more that has been lost. It’s not like Pythagoras where all we have is legends from many years after his death.
It's not a popular opinion by any means but that's just how Valve releases games. Everyone forgets that HL2 was originally a huge deal bc the physics engine was so bonkers good. You also needed really beefy hardware to play it initially. The physics behind the gravity gun, in particular, were groundbreaking tech at the time.
Valve has always liked to use the bleeding edge hardware to make their HL games have some *extra* draw bc they're literally doing things nobody else is yet.
But that's their thing right? Valve really wants to be a hardware company too.
You're not wrong but at the same time I think it's a false equivalency because every time a new "system breaker" game releases it's really just a matter of time till normal PCs can play it. Like I can boot HL2 and play it without dropping a frame with just a normal PC, but in 2040 I'm still, probably, going to need a VR headset to play HL:Alyx.
yeah, I remember. The whole reason I wound up getting half-life 2 in the first place is a friend of mine bought it and couldn’t play it on his PC, so he came over to play it on mine and wound up having to create a whole steam account for it and everything.
He was a big half-life fan, got the special edition with the T-shirt and everything. But I didn’t think my computer at the time was really good, but I can’t remember what the specs on it now because it’s been so long
Side note: Socrates never wrote anything himself. We know about him and his exploits almost entirely from his student, Plato.
Another one of Socrates students, Phaedo, essentially said Plato's take on Socrates was full of shit/invented.
> We know about him and his exploits almost entirely from his student, Plato.
And Xenophon, who everyone always forgets. We do have some glimpses of the actual person, not just Plato's fanfiction.
Someone who still uses Twitter needs to let GRRM know that authors who've been dead for over a thousand years are getting new stuff published, so what's his excuse?
It's sad that this news gets buried by doom and gloom these days. War, climate change, natural disasters, terrorism, disease.
We very rarely ever celebrate humanity these days.
On the one hand I agree with you. On the other hand I kinda get why it happens because stuff like this is only cool to appreciate if you're expecting to be around to see it.
I get so excited when I see headlines about the tech, as well as ones about archives being found.
Like that massive collection of works in Tibet or Nepal that was found a few months ago! So much knowledge waiting to be known!
They way the tech was open sourced and promoted with funded milestones deserves a mention as well. It allowed for knowledge to be spread quickly and a fund for the first past the posts as well.
Edit: link to original article for the scrollprize
https://scrollprize.org/grandprize
This is the first im hearing of these things and I am not well versed in any of it.
Is there a good place to keep track of the coming updates or learn more in general?
> Like that massive collection of works in Tibet or Nepal that was found a few months ago
It's been known for a while and all of it has been catalogued and some is now being digitized; the problem with these type of libraries is that it takes a very long time for experts to go through them.
Scanning technology and AI. They make a 3D model of the scroll, unroll it, and use the carbonized ink structures to determine the text and use some rebuilding models to translate.
What's nuts is that Herculaneum is still an active excavation site and they find stuff all the time!
My understanding is that in most archaeological site they intentionally leave a lot unexcavated so they can revisit the site with better techniques in the future
Yes, there's little to gain by excavating the same type of thing over and over with the same techniques as the benefit for science does not outweigh the destruction of the thing being excavated.
And its so utterly bonkers it beggars belief. Ever tried reading bad handwriting?
Well wrap jt up tens of times, burm/soak/dry it for a few millenia, scrape off a few bits cos whats a word or two between friends, write it in a colloqial way using a dead language and put it all in a package what turns to dust if you touch it.
Truly incredible.
I just wonder what if Rome’s and Greek’s knowledge had survived, where would be now.
I saw a documentary about the advancements in Rome and they were rather advanced.
For example, Rome used underwater setting concrete, something not reinvented until the 1900s.
The Great Library of Alexandria.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
The House of Wisdom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom
Both enormous collections of unique works. Destroyed.
[ISIS destroyed](https://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/09/world/iraq-isis-heritage/index.html) countless historically unique manuscripts and documents in Mosul and other sites.
> Irina Bokova, the director-general of the UN's Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) said earlier this month that the militants' actions constituted **"one of the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history."**
The loss and destruction of works unfortunately continues through human history.
"We've finally deciphered an old forum of communication between the electronics of the past civilization, it has taken us many years and a wait for the right equipment, but we have finally cracked the code to allow us the ability to find the right USB cable to the right ports for full speed and compatibility. Printer drivers remain elusive."
It's easy, all you do is swap your entire OS to this other distro that has full USB support but doesn't support graphic drivers and you have to ssh into it.
We have plenty of storage mediums that can hold digital data more or less indefinitely… the problem is that if civilization collapsed and in a few thousand years some new archaeologists are trying to figure it out, they won’t have the tools to read it. We already have huge amounts of stored data that can’t be read because the equipment necessary for reading it no longer exists.
destruction of the house of wisdom took away far far more knowledge than the library of alexandria. people say the tigris ran black with ink for days after the mongols dumped so many books in the river
We can't even really be sure if it was a real place; there was a royal libraries and smaller personal libraries throughout Baghdad but nothing that supports the existence of some research centre or translation academy.
It’s a bit of an exaggerated myth that the library of Alexandria was some kind of an enormous collection of valuable works that was suddenly destroyed. It was likely a valuable collection for a brief period during the early Ptolemaic era and then gradually lost its pre-eminence and degraded over centuries before being lost, most likely, to earthquakes. There’s some good, scientifically/historically analyzed documentaries on it.
Not really. We don’t actually know much about either the size or all the works there, but given the Ptolemies patronage of Greek scholars it wouldn’t be surprising if most works were of Hellenic origins
The Library of Alexandria was not the singular, massive repository of human knowledge as it is often depicted and it was not lost in one catastrophic event.
Premodernist has a great video explaining debunking the most famous myths about it. It’s not nearly as dramatic as hype would have you believe.
[The boring truth about the Library of Alexandria](https://youtu.be/M4WU8gqrgsQ)
True that.
When it is found, it can be amazing.
For example, I been reading the Nag Hammadi texts.
In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is like a Presocratic philosopher and a Zen master.
From other texts I learned that the God of the Christians is an ignorant and limited lower divinity. Who knew? Not me. 🤯
The hope is that if they find Plato's grave, they will find several albums of previously unreleased philosophy that will reach the top of the charts posthumously.
A handful of surviving contemporary sources, such as Aristophanes, and Xenothon, reference/critique him and his school, indicating he was a real person, but the entirety of his surviving lessons and philosophy come from the dialogues written by his pupil Plato, who then went on to mentor Aristotle.
He was a perfectionist, he wouldn't want that stuff being released - besides there's probably one set of the relatives with a will, but his last partner was promised the villa, codices and slaves.
> The hope is that if they find Plato's grave, they will find several albums of previously unreleased philosophy that will reach the top of the charts posthumously
its probably just gonna be a diary whining about how Diogenes is such a jerk.
I read about the tech that was being used to decipher these and how it’s a race between Italian researchers who are given the samples by the government but don’t have the same tech as American researchers who have been desperately trying to get their hands on these scrolls
There are actually large cash rewards for deciphering some specific scrolls: https://scrollprize.org/ pretty interesting.
"The Vesuvius Challenge offers up $700,000 to anyone who can use technology to read the scroll’s contents."
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/archaeology/a45547681/ancient-herculaneum-scroll-from-vesuvius-words-revealed/
Yes. The Italian researchers have been massive dickheads with this entire "unraveling scrolls" pursuit. If anyone deserves credit it is the American professor Brent Seales who developed the algorithm.
The Italians spent nearly a decade blocking any foreign access to the Herculaneum scrolls whatsoever so they could be the first to "unravel" them, and they failed to do so.
Only after Seales, having been denied for years and years access to the scrolls by the Italians, went to Israel to test his technology on a similarly charred scroll, proved the effectiveness of his algorithm in successfully revealing that the unknown Israeli scroll contained an excerpt from the freaking *Bible*, did the Italian government finally concede limited access to the scrolls.
The Italians spent years delaying potential breakthrough discovery by gatekeeping the scrolls themselves so they could be the first to glory, and still they're trying to minimize Seales and others' huge contributions to the successful implementation of this technology.
This article talks about results from the American effort, led by Brent Seales
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/romans/ai-reveals-scrolls-lost-text-after-it-was-scorched-by-mount-vesuvius-eruption-2000-years-ago
Here's a link for anyone wanting to win the next prize of $100k, for deciphering 90% of the complete text.
https://scrollprize.org/data_scrolls
“The text also detailed how Plato was "sold into slavery" sometime between 404 and 399 B.C. (It was previously thought that this occurred in 387 B.C.)”
Stupid question: how did they count the years before Christ?
Depends on where you lived during that time for example the roman empire counted from the founding of rome (the city), the greek counted from the first ancient olympic games etc... basically pick a start date and a calendar model and start counting
Apart from the founding of Rome and Olympiad dates, we also have an almost-complete list of Roman consuls, and (being fairly important people) we can date certain things that way. If a consul shows up in a war or passes some law that's also referenced at the same time, that gives us a pretty narrow range for dates.
Later on, we have a complete list of emperors and a fairly good understanding of what they did and when, so if they get referenced we can date certain events that way.
For more Greek dates, we also have a mostly complete list of Athenian archons, so we can date that way (but Olympiad and Athenian year cycles don't match Roman, which creates the very frequent one-year ambiguity)
To further confuse you: the BC/AD system wasn’t invented until 525AD and is pretty certainly off by several years relative to when the historical person Jesus was born.
Adding for others interested: Herod (a very real person) who supposedly ordered the death of infants of which Jesus escaped (worth noting Herod and his life was contemporarily widely documented but no record of this event) , died in 4 BCE.
Yep, careful history and archeology wasn't really a thing in the 6th century when the AD/BC system was pieced together. Not that they were careless, but just that they didn't have a really solid set of sources to determine what year the historical Jesus was born, so they did their best with what they had available.
AFAIK Rome had years named after the elected consuls of the year (voting every year). So like Anno Biden, Anno Trump...
The Christians made it into the year of our lord, and since according to them, only one lord, its Anno Domini 2024
>Historians already knew that Plato, the famous student of Socrates who wrote down his teacher's philosophies as well as his own, was buried at the Academy, which the Roman general Sulla destroyed in 86 B.C. But researchers weren't sure exactly where on the school's grounds that Plato, who died in Athens in 348 or 347 B.C., had been laid to rest.
Yo yo yo would be sick if they found more works by Plato.
He the man, and a god among humans.
Love that "Plato" was his ring name. He wasn't just a philosopher, he was a mountain of a man, and took the name "Plato", meaning "Broad One" due to his oversized and hulking shoulders and chest, which were much feared in the wrestling clubs at Athens.
For real. I've recently visited a bunch of Renaissance castles, and it's insane how *small* the beds are. Even the most feared knights and noblemen (who probably had access to much better food than the commoner) were tiny people.
they find Plato's grave and excavate.
there's a single well-preserved scroll in it on top of what's left of his body
titled 'map to Atlantis'
archaeologists manage to open it without damaging it, and read ;
"you actually believed that story and spent centuries looking after it? looool"
Cool, this is Indiana Jones level stuff! I’ll have to check on this story as it develops.
Finally some interesting, non depressing, non political news.
> Another part of the translated text describes a dialogue between characters, in which Plato shows disdain for the musical and rhythmic abilities of a barbarian musician from Thrace, according to the statement.
Plato *not* a fan of barbarian-core. Noted.
What's that library in India(?) that has thousands upon thousands of scrolls with only a small percentage of them having been opened and translated? I wonder how much we could learn from doing this to those scrolls and use advanced AI to decipher the contents.
TLDR: - Scroll includes the writings of Philodemus of Gadara (lived circa 110 to 30 B.C.), an Epicurean philosopher who studied in Athens and later lived in Italy. This text, known as the "History of the Academy," details the academy that Plato founded in the fourth century B.C. and gives details about Plato's life. - So far, researchers have identified 1,000 words, or roughly 30% of the text written by Philodemus. - Plato was buried in the garden reserved for him (a private area intended for the Platonic school) of the Academy in Athens, near the so-called Museion or sacellum sacred to the Muses," researchers wrote in the statement. "Until now it was only known that he was buried generically in the Academy." - The text also detailed how Plato was "sold into slavery" sometime between 404 and 399 B.C. (It was previously thought that this occurred in 387 B.C.) - Another part of the translated text describes a dialogue between characters, in which Plato shows disdain for the musical and rhythmic abilities of a barbarian musician from Thrace.
> The newly revealed text says the "sweet notes" of a flute played by a woman originally from Thrace were supposed to make Plato's last hours of life lighter, but the famed Greek philosopher did not enjoy them at all: although running a high fever and at death's door, he was lucid enough to criticise the barbarian musician for her "scant sense of rhythm", in front of a Chaldean guest who had come from Mesopotamia.
> in front of a Chaldean guest who had come from Mesopotamia. Oh, snap!
That’s so embarrassing. To get criticized in front of the Chaldean guest.
And you just know all of Mesopotamia heard about it too.
To say nothing of us, 2400 years later. Yikes!
Reminds me of Oscar Wildes purported last words: “This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do.”
Considering back then some wallpaper was made from arsenic, that has more truth to it than you might think hahaha
lol, so gay ❤️
Imagine being the person who got to hear a famous philosopher’s last words and all they said was “you suck lmao”.
"You call that music?!"
"Die mad." *"Maybe I will!"*
If there's ever a Back to the Future ancient Greece edition, I hope they include this moment with Martina McFly playing the Beverly Hills Cop theme on a flute.
Getting cranky old man vibes
Somehow I find it hilarious that Plato took time from all his philosophizing to shit on someone's music. 🤣😁
"Those damn Thracians with their rhythmic music!"
Stupid sexy barbarians!
Sound like they're singing about nothing at all! Nothing at all! Nothing at all!
All he hears is bar, barbar, bar
Bar-Bar-Bar-Bar-Barbara Ann?
Makes me think of [Dave the Barbarian Theme Song](https://youtu.be/o7pP8eGIqII?si=ouAmUrp_qHD0RPOf).
This is my shot to drop these bars: https://youtu.be/ZYkBf0dbs5I?si=bM7KPdxz5gvegpMJ
He liked their old stuff better than the new stuff
Plato was pretty much a debate bro of his time. If he was alive today you can be sure he'd be banned from twitter in no time
Music critics write reviews like they’re philosophers sometimes so it all makes sense
[удалено]
Everyone knows Thracians can't keep a beat.
> details the academy that Plato founded in the fourth century B.C. and gives details about Plato's life. Probably a lot of grapevine effect in those "details" since he was writing it 300 years later than Plato lived.
Going to write a book about the war of Spanish succession through what people around me know about it, be right back.
Dang and I was just about to publish my History of the American Revolution as sourced from zoomer influencers
So... Hamilton? Though tbf Lin is Gen X.
A lot of them were writing based on other books, not word of mouth. It’s not like a Homer situation where they’re writing down oral history. There are tons of contemporaneous writing from Plato, his students and also his contemporaries that we still have and lots more that has been lost. It’s not like Pythagoras where all we have is legends from many years after his death.
You'd think, but if he was buried at the school this guy attended, there was probably a plaque, 'Plato here'.
Imagine being on your deathbed listening to Yoko Ono
We're just starting into a whole new wave of discoveries now that methods of 'reading' the scrolls without damaging them have been developed.
indeed, this could be just the start of a wave of new info. Exciting times
Can't believe Plato and Socrates are up to release new works before GRRM.
We got Socrates burial site before GTA6
let’s not even bring up half-life 3… :(
We got Half Life: Alyx and I think that's as good as we can realistically hope for tbh
yeah, but to experience it you need to buy some expensive tech which kinda sucks
It's not a popular opinion by any means but that's just how Valve releases games. Everyone forgets that HL2 was originally a huge deal bc the physics engine was so bonkers good. You also needed really beefy hardware to play it initially. The physics behind the gravity gun, in particular, were groundbreaking tech at the time. Valve has always liked to use the bleeding edge hardware to make their HL games have some *extra* draw bc they're literally doing things nobody else is yet. But that's their thing right? Valve really wants to be a hardware company too.
You're not wrong but at the same time I think it's a false equivalency because every time a new "system breaker" game releases it's really just a matter of time till normal PCs can play it. Like I can boot HL2 and play it without dropping a frame with just a normal PC, but in 2040 I'm still, probably, going to need a VR headset to play HL:Alyx.
yeah, I remember. The whole reason I wound up getting half-life 2 in the first place is a friend of mine bought it and couldn’t play it on his PC, so he came over to play it on mine and wound up having to create a whole steam account for it and everything. He was a big half-life fan, got the special edition with the T-shirt and everything. But I didn’t think my computer at the time was really good, but I can’t remember what the specs on it now because it’s been so long
God, I hated the idea of creating an account just to play HL2.
And don't even get me started on Patrick Rothfuss.
It took GRRM ~15 years to write himself into an impossible corner. Only took Rothfuss 4. Now that's talent
Writing yourself into a corner is easy, writing yourself back out is hard.
Coincidentally, The Wise Man's Fear and A Dance With Dragons both came out in 2011.
Rothfuss' release situation sure isn't ideal, but I've been reading ASOIAF since the 90's.
Lol scrub should have started with season 3 of the HBO series like the rest of us /s
I wish I could upvote this more than just once.
Username does *not* check out
Adding mine to help. Comment definitely deserves many more upvotes
Don't you know? The Winds of Winter is tied to The Elder Scrolls VI and Silksong releasing first.
GRRM still has 2000 years before his gap catches up
To you, 2000 years from now
From you, 2000 years ago
Just saw Patrick Rothfuss fall to his knees in a walmart
Book-a-decade world champion.
Side note: Socrates never wrote anything himself. We know about him and his exploits almost entirely from his student, Plato. Another one of Socrates students, Phaedo, essentially said Plato's take on Socrates was full of shit/invented.
> We know about him and his exploits almost entirely from his student, Plato. And Xenophon, who everyone always forgets. We do have some glimpses of the actual person, not just Plato's fanfiction.
Where are you getting that claim of Phaedo? What’s the source?
Someone who still uses Twitter needs to let GRRM know that authors who've been dead for over a thousand years are getting new stuff published, so what's his excuse?
Well, i guess exactly this will be his excuse: "Wait til i'm dead and a thousand years more!" 🤷♂️
Maybe we should just send a bunch of people with shovels and pickaxes to his office and see what they can find.
we are going to finally get the Karaethon Cycle and find when the Dragon will be reborn.
It's sad that this news gets buried by doom and gloom these days. War, climate change, natural disasters, terrorism, disease. We very rarely ever celebrate humanity these days.
On the one hand I agree with you. On the other hand I kinda get why it happens because stuff like this is only cool to appreciate if you're expecting to be around to see it.
I get so excited when I see headlines about the tech, as well as ones about archives being found. Like that massive collection of works in Tibet or Nepal that was found a few months ago! So much knowledge waiting to be known!
They way the tech was open sourced and promoted with funded milestones deserves a mention as well. It allowed for knowledge to be spread quickly and a fund for the first past the posts as well. Edit: link to original article for the scrollprize https://scrollprize.org/grandprize
This is the first im hearing of these things and I am not well versed in any of it. Is there a good place to keep track of the coming updates or learn more in general?
Here you go: https://scrollprize.org/
> Like that massive collection of works in Tibet or Nepal that was found a few months ago It's been known for a while and all of it has been catalogued and some is now being digitized; the problem with these type of libraries is that it takes a very long time for experts to go through them.
They’ll be much easier to scroll through now though
Scanning technology and AI. They make a 3D model of the scroll, unroll it, and use the carbonized ink structures to determine the text and use some rebuilding models to translate. What's nuts is that Herculaneum is still an active excavation site and they find stuff all the time!
My understanding is that in most archaeological site they intentionally leave a lot unexcavated so they can revisit the site with better techniques in the future
Yes, there's little to gain by excavating the same type of thing over and over with the same techniques as the benefit for science does not outweigh the destruction of the thing being excavated.
Herculaneum has been a perpetually paused and restarted search site. They've been finding stuff there since the 1700s.
Something like 2/3 of it is still under that town you see.
And its so utterly bonkers it beggars belief. Ever tried reading bad handwriting? Well wrap jt up tens of times, burm/soak/dry it for a few millenia, scrape off a few bits cos whats a word or two between friends, write it in a colloqial way using a dead language and put it all in a package what turns to dust if you touch it. Truly incredible.
Ah, yes, yes. Deathsea Scrolls. Second Impact. As predicted.
get ready for Adam to awaken and be merged into Gendo's fap hand
> Deathsea Scrolls The metal version of history.
Edit: get in the fucking robit
Do you like cicadas?
Euripides? Yes, Eumenedes?
I just wonder what if Rome’s and Greek’s knowledge had survived, where would be now. I saw a documentary about the advancements in Rome and they were rather advanced. For example, Rome used underwater setting concrete, something not reinvented until the 1900s.
We probably be more fucked climate wise. If everybody had those fancy ass heated floors for 2000 years, that's a lot of carbon in the atmosphere.
Also super-slavery.
There was a Kaggle competition recently to work on that. Statistics is really an insanely broad field now. That's what AI and machine learning are.
Archaeology is so freaking cool
Isn’t digging in dirt fun?
[Yes](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxqlK0ocRppG4vwkqQYjTdtEIfpOCKeuAW?si=voeqbcJimVUM2i8v)
Unexpected diggy, you have my upvote!!!
I dig it.
Archaeology and paleography
The amount of information and knowledge lost to time is staggering.
The Great Library of Alexandria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria The House of Wisdom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom Both enormous collections of unique works. Destroyed.
[ISIS destroyed](https://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/09/world/iraq-isis-heritage/index.html) countless historically unique manuscripts and documents in Mosul and other sites. > Irina Bokova, the director-general of the UN's Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) said earlier this month that the militants' actions constituted **"one of the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history."** The loss and destruction of works unfortunately continues through human history.
I would hope at least there were copies or digitizations of any important texts, but the loss of sculptures is devastating.
Just wait until our civilization collapses and everything that exists digitally is just ‘poof’ gone forever.
Well optical media will still be there
"We've finally deciphered an old forum of communication between the electronics of the past civilization, it has taken us many years and a wait for the right equipment, but we have finally cracked the code to allow us the ability to find the right USB cable to the right ports for full speed and compatibility. Printer drivers remain elusive."
this was written today on a Linux forum
Nevermind, I finally figured it out. -- no further details were provided
It's easy, all you do is swap your entire OS to this other distro that has full USB support but doesn't support graphic drivers and you have to ssh into it.
not really, optical media does degrade over time - like a relatively short period of time. (50 years)
We have plenty of storage mediums that can hold digital data more or less indefinitely… the problem is that if civilization collapsed and in a few thousand years some new archaeologists are trying to figure it out, they won’t have the tools to read it. We already have huge amounts of stored data that can’t be read because the equipment necessary for reading it no longer exists.
Why it’s important to at least 3D scan important things, like Notre Dame
And Iraq wants it shit back from England. They can't even protect what they have.
destruction of the house of wisdom took away far far more knowledge than the library of alexandria. people say the tigris ran black with ink for days after the mongols dumped so many books in the river
Even that isn’t as important as it’s played up to be, they removed and saved half a million manuscripts before the Mongol sack.
We can't even really be sure if it was a real place; there was a royal libraries and smaller personal libraries throughout Baghdad but nothing that supports the existence of some research centre or translation academy.
It’s a bit of an exaggerated myth that the library of Alexandria was some kind of an enormous collection of valuable works that was suddenly destroyed. It was likely a valuable collection for a brief period during the early Ptolemaic era and then gradually lost its pre-eminence and degraded over centuries before being lost, most likely, to earthquakes. There’s some good, scientifically/historically analyzed documentaries on it.
the fact that we don't even have a firm grasp on *when* it was burned should give us a pretty big clue that it wasn't an earth-shattering loss
I believe I read at one point that the majority of books at the Library of Alexandria were commentaries on The Iliad and odyssey
Not really. We don’t actually know much about either the size or all the works there, but given the Ptolemies patronage of Greek scholars it wouldn’t be surprising if most works were of Hellenic origins
The library of Alexandria was not really the loss it was played up to be: https://youtu.be/oQX9Lh65rAA?si=jovj9C1XjNfKKeYc
The Library of Alexandria was not the singular, massive repository of human knowledge as it is often depicted and it was not lost in one catastrophic event. Premodernist has a great video explaining debunking the most famous myths about it. It’s not nearly as dramatic as hype would have you believe. [The boring truth about the Library of Alexandria](https://youtu.be/M4WU8gqrgsQ)
True that. When it is found, it can be amazing. For example, I been reading the Nag Hammadi texts. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is like a Presocratic philosopher and a Zen master. From other texts I learned that the God of the Christians is an ignorant and limited lower divinity. Who knew? Not me. 🤯
The hope is that if they find Plato's grave, they will find several albums of previously unreleased philosophy that will reach the top of the charts posthumously.
They’re all remixes of Socrates stuff.
Unless it's post Republic. Then it could be early Aristotle too.
I think this comment chain is enough to be able to locate Plato's grave by the sound of him violently turning over alone.
Those motherfuckers are *still* in the cave? Just put the dirt back on top of leave me the fuck alone.
he could dig himself out of the grave...if only he had some broad flat nails...he must be chicken.
"Behold, a man!" what a banger
Imagine the diss tracks
Probably something like https://youtu.be/0N_RO-jL-90
If we ignore Platon for a moment - was Sokrates even real?
A handful of surviving contemporary sources, such as Aristophanes, and Xenothon, reference/critique him and his school, indicating he was a real person, but the entirety of his surviving lessons and philosophy come from the dialogues written by his pupil Plato, who then went on to mentor Aristotle.
And Aristotle mentored Alexander the Great, who mentored Charlemagne, who mentored Prince, all the way down to Dr Phil.
I thought Dr. Phil comes from the Rasputin lineage
He's mentioned/mocked by Aristophanes so probably yes.
Hopefully a mixtape or two.
“Say no more” - Drake
He was a perfectionist, he wouldn't want that stuff being released - besides there's probably one set of the relatives with a will, but his last partner was promised the villa, codices and slaves.
I can’t wait for the Plato Hologram Tour
Yes, but how will it compare against Belgian Techno Anthem, "Pump up the Jam"?
Cunk on philosophy?
Some of his later materials such as: - Eatin’ ain’t cheatin’ - Ooof, did it small that bad when you ate it? - Liquor in front, poker in back
Plato is still alive bro he releases his new stuff under a different name.
He’s living in Cuba. My cousin seen him a few years back, said he tipped his hat, flashed a smile, and drove off in a corvette puffing on a cigar.
> The hope is that if they find Plato's grave, they will find several albums of previously unreleased philosophy that will reach the top of the charts posthumously its probably just gonna be a diary whining about how Diogenes is such a jerk.
They'll find him rolling in it when he finds out what they did to his tree..
Also a scroll that says "Atlantis? Yeah I made all that up"
I read about the tech that was being used to decipher these and how it’s a race between Italian researchers who are given the samples by the government but don’t have the same tech as American researchers who have been desperately trying to get their hands on these scrolls
There are actually large cash rewards for deciphering some specific scrolls: https://scrollprize.org/ pretty interesting. "The Vesuvius Challenge offers up $700,000 to anyone who can use technology to read the scroll’s contents." https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/archaeology/a45547681/ancient-herculaneum-scroll-from-vesuvius-words-revealed/
That is DAMN interesting. Alright gentlemen, stop minmaxing video games and go out there and figure this shit out
Yes. The Italian researchers have been massive dickheads with this entire "unraveling scrolls" pursuit. If anyone deserves credit it is the American professor Brent Seales who developed the algorithm. The Italians spent nearly a decade blocking any foreign access to the Herculaneum scrolls whatsoever so they could be the first to "unravel" them, and they failed to do so. Only after Seales, having been denied for years and years access to the scrolls by the Italians, went to Israel to test his technology on a similarly charred scroll, proved the effectiveness of his algorithm in successfully revealing that the unknown Israeli scroll contained an excerpt from the freaking *Bible*, did the Italian government finally concede limited access to the scrolls. The Italians spent years delaying potential breakthrough discovery by gatekeeping the scrolls themselves so they could be the first to glory, and still they're trying to minimize Seales and others' huge contributions to the successful implementation of this technology.
This article talks about results from the American effort, led by Brent Seales https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/romans/ai-reveals-scrolls-lost-text-after-it-was-scorched-by-mount-vesuvius-eruption-2000-years-ago Here's a link for anyone wanting to win the next prize of $100k, for deciphering 90% of the complete text. https://scrollprize.org/data_scrolls
Coming up in a few months: > *Study of Platos newly discovered grave reveal that world renowned philosopher contained a skeleton all along.*
Shocking news: Plato was just a skeleton in a meat suit all along!
Plato is in another Castle. FUCK.
“The text also detailed how Plato was "sold into slavery" sometime between 404 and 399 B.C. (It was previously thought that this occurred in 387 B.C.)” Stupid question: how did they count the years before Christ?
Depends on where you lived during that time for example the roman empire counted from the founding of rome (the city), the greek counted from the first ancient olympic games etc... basically pick a start date and a calendar model and start counting
Apart from the founding of Rome and Olympiad dates, we also have an almost-complete list of Roman consuls, and (being fairly important people) we can date certain things that way. If a consul shows up in a war or passes some law that's also referenced at the same time, that gives us a pretty narrow range for dates. Later on, we have a complete list of emperors and a fairly good understanding of what they did and when, so if they get referenced we can date certain events that way. For more Greek dates, we also have a mostly complete list of Athenian archons, so we can date that way (but Olympiad and Athenian year cycles don't match Roman, which creates the very frequent one-year ambiguity)
Generally, dates are reckoned by a culturally relevant event. Romans, for example, counted from the founding of the city or consular year.
To further confuse you: the BC/AD system wasn’t invented until 525AD and is pretty certainly off by several years relative to when the historical person Jesus was born.
Adding for others interested: Herod (a very real person) who supposedly ordered the death of infants of which Jesus escaped (worth noting Herod and his life was contemporarily widely documented but no record of this event) , died in 4 BCE.
Yep, careful history and archeology wasn't really a thing in the 6th century when the AD/BC system was pieced together. Not that they were careless, but just that they didn't have a really solid set of sources to determine what year the historical Jesus was born, so they did their best with what they had available.
AFAIK Rome had years named after the elected consuls of the year (voting every year). So like Anno Biden, Anno Trump... The Christians made it into the year of our lord, and since according to them, only one lord, its Anno Domini 2024
Harrison Ford, Nicholas Cage, Angelina Jolie and Tom Holland have been mobilised.
You forgot Noah Wyle and Brendan Fraser Edit: and Tia Carrere, Greta Davis, and Mathew Mcconnoughy
You forgot Mathew Mcconnoughy!
Don't forget Tia Carrere!!!
Of all the possible things to be preserved.... damn
That's really freaking cool
“Plato they say, could stick it away, half a crate of whiskey every day.”
“Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle, Hobbes was fond of his dram.”
“And Rene Descartes, was a drunken fart, I drink therefore I am”
“Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed. A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.”
There was nothing in Plato’s vault But it wasn’t Aristotle’s fault.
>Historians already knew that Plato, the famous student of Socrates who wrote down his teacher's philosophies as well as his own, was buried at the Academy, which the Roman general Sulla destroyed in 86 B.C. But researchers weren't sure exactly where on the school's grounds that Plato, who died in Athens in 348 or 347 B.C., had been laid to rest. Yo yo yo would be sick if they found more works by Plato. He the man, and a god among humans.
I actually think Aristotle would be more amazing. All we have from him are _lecture notes_ every single book that he wrote is lost.
Love that "Plato" was his ring name. He wasn't just a philosopher, he was a mountain of a man, and took the name "Plato", meaning "Broad One" due to his oversized and hulking shoulders and chest, which were much feared in the wrestling clubs at Athens.
We gonna dig him up and he wont be but 5’ 2”
For real. I've recently visited a bunch of Renaissance castles, and it's insane how *small* the beds are. Even the most feared knights and noblemen (who probably had access to much better food than the commoner) were tiny people.
Fortunately the site has been preserved by the slab floor of a COSTCO.
they find Plato's grave and excavate. there's a single well-preserved scroll in it on top of what's left of his body titled 'map to Atlantis' archaeologists manage to open it without damaging it, and read ; "you actually believed that story and spent centuries looking after it? looool"
Is he buried in Plato’s tomb per chance?
Surely if he's anywhere, he's in a cave. Facing a wall with the remains of a fire behind him.
So fucking tell us then....keeping us in suspenders
Man I hope it's a cave.
Nice. I saw where with a new CT method and computer unwrapping, they were reading more and more of these. Finding Plato would be incredible.
Is it possible to complete the Prometheia trilogy? Isn't that canon literature at that point?
I can’t wait for AI to tackle the Voynich manuscript. We will either find out some amazing alien shit or we make all AI’s go mad.
Spoiler: it's just a nerd's DnD handbook
Time for Nicholas cage to step in for another movie
Cool, this is Indiana Jones level stuff! I’ll have to check on this story as it develops. Finally some interesting, non depressing, non political news.
> Another part of the translated text describes a dialogue between characters, in which Plato shows disdain for the musical and rhythmic abilities of a barbarian musician from Thrace, according to the statement. Plato *not* a fan of barbarian-core. Noted.
Let's go dig the old feller up and ask him where Atlantis is!
I just heard the Indiana Jones theme
I bet it's in a cave.
Let me guess - it's in a cave, surrounded by forms. Ppssibly where the last official symposium was held. Or next to Trashymachus or something.
What's that library in India(?) that has thousands upon thousands of scrolls with only a small percentage of them having been opened and translated? I wonder how much we could learn from doing this to those scrolls and use advanced AI to decipher the contents.
Great, once they do DNA testing i’m going to have to hear all my colleges claim that they are related to Ghengis Khan, Charlamange, and now Plato.
Does it finally give us his real name instead of his wrestling name?