alt Hacker News2k-year-old wine and the uncanny immediacy of the past
Comments
I agree these objects (just like colourised photos) help bridge the distance to the past. But I've had the same experience purely with text. If you read Cicero's letters and diaries, and then just imagine him - suffering writer's block, wracked with anxiety and self-doubt, desperate for his friends to cheer him up - as a neurotic, terminally-online Twitter user, it fits perfectly and breathes life into his every word.
The bakers stamp on the bread is interesting branding
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
The inscription on the Sword of Goujian, the translation for which is displayed in the article, says that the King of Yue made and used the sword himself. How literally do people with knowledge of the period take that? Is it surprising / unlikely for a king of that period to make anything themselves, especially something so ornate, rather than commission it?
One of the most interesting parts of Pompeii for me was seeing the area where they've restored a vineyard, to the point of planting the rows of vines in the exact spots that held vines 2000 years ago. While large areas of the city consists of ruins of buildings that you kind of have to infer the layout of from the floorplans, the vineyard was the one of the spots where I most felt like I was looking back in time, and seeing the spot more-or-less as it would have looked in 79CE.
The thing that surprised me the most was to discover that there was patchouli perfume. I always associated it hippies and the hippie trail from the 60s and was thinking it was from Asia
41 AD was a very good year.
Fascinating! The wine discovery reminds me one scene from the book 'The Dark Forest'[0] when the protagonist drinks a wine from some centuries before... spoiler: it wasn't good.
"All this has happened before, and all this will happen again" --Battlestar Galactica (originally from Peter Pan though)
While the tomb was sealed it wasn't a vacuum, so how did the liquid not evaporate over time?
How on earth did the wine not evaporate out of the vessel over such a long period of time?
The most profound story of this type is the account of finding a leaf, in 10's of million year old clay, that when exposed, was green, but then very very rapidly oxidised and crumbled.Ref: from somewhere in the great lakes region? 90's mag, likely sciam.Also similar storys of other very ancient soft tissues, somewhat contentious, though it is understood that,unless lithified, ancient organic remains are exceptionaly fragile and do crumble quickly without meticulous and complicated preservation tecniques, the three common reasons for presevation in situ are freezing ,water saturation, or drying/mumification. The shear volume of artifacts that humans have, and are leaving behind, insures plenty of interesting finds availible into the far future.
I can't wait to read about the uncanny immediacy of the unreasonable effectiveness of the timeless aesthetic of the past.
It is always fascinating when Americans re-discover that old things actually exist.
But, as they say, an American thinks that 100 years is a long time while a European thinks that 100 miles is a long way.
Nice article about artifacts that make the past more immediate, that allow us to connect our experiences to people hundreds or thousands of years ago.
My favorite example is the writings of Onfim, who was a little boy in the 1200s in present day Russia whose scribbling and homework were exquisitely preserved on birch bark fragments. It’s so immediately recognizable as a little boy’s endearing doodles about knights and imaginary beasts, yet its 800 years old.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim