Recent comments in /f/history

elmonoenano t1_iwnbc82 wrote

Reply to Bookclub Wednesday! by AutoModerator

Through a fluke of the universe I kind of ended up with too many things to read at one time but I ended up with the new Meacham Lincoln biography, And There Was Light. I'm only about 1/4 of the way through it and am going to have to put it down for a few weeks to catch up on some of my other reading responsibilities.

I will say that so far as a biography goes it seems like it would be a good first or 2nd Lincoln biography. I'm only a quarter of the way through like I said, but so far it's pretty similar to the the outline laid down by the Herndon biography and hits a lot of the same points about Lincoln seeing the slave market in New Orleans, his dislike of working for his dad, his mom's early loss. It doesn't make as big a point about his father's neglect when he was young as some other books do.

If you wanted a Lincoln biography to kind of get a start on the topic I think it would be a good one. If you needed a gift for a "history dad" or uncle it'd be a good choice. There are better ones out there, but you don't need much knowledge of Lincoln's life or the political situation of the times to read this one.

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MeatballDom t1_iwn9szu wrote

Reply to comment by ProfessorCal_ in Zakhiku: The ancient city in Iraq revealed by severe drought by IslandChillin

"Checkmate" comes from Persian

>شاه مات‎ (šâh mât, “the king [is] amazed”). Perhaps conflated with Arabic مَاتَ‎ (māta, “to die”).

The origins of the game itself are a bit blurrier, but not four thousand years old blurry. But, there were games four thousand years old that if we went back in time and saw people playing we would probably describe them as "like chess" as they had similar elements.

There's a lot of games from antiquity that we would recognise or be somewhat familiar with, and probably pick up the rules of relatively quickly. https://www.joshobrouwers.com/articles/ancient-greek-heroes-play/

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TrevorsMailbox t1_iwn4w18 wrote

Reply to comment by Netsuko in Hundreds of mummies and pyramid of an unknown queen unearthed near King Tut's tomb by IslandChillin

I think you underestimate how big earth is big, how many stones there are and how long people have been hanging out here.

In places like Egypt, check out old black and white photos (and old drawings made before we had cameras) of things like the sphynx and old temple structures... They were so buried in sand it's a miracle anyone even saw half this stuff. There's a lot of sand and dirt dude. Then you add in things like floods...cities get abandoned and in a few decades they were forgotten even by locals because they got buried so deep so fast.

Think land is big? Try the oceans and seas. Humans have been surfin' them waves like bosses for millenia...aaannnddd been drowning for millenia. Ancient ship wrecks offer more context but they're still rare (to discover) and incredibly hard to get to. Sometimes we can't get to them and we have to send WALL-E.

Places like ancient costal cities allllll over the world and huuuuge swaths of land like Doggerland are places 100000x harder to locate, let alone get artifacts from. Managing to discover them is hard enough to begin with, and if we find anything it's usually accidentally stumbled on while diving or fishing. Even then we almost never have much context for those finds.

Rivers man, rivers move over time. Settlements on the banks of rivers and coastlines are now 20 feet under dirt and 5 km inland from where the coast was a few thousand years ago or miles away from where a river may be flowing now. It's hard to find old river settlements when the damn rivers won't sit still. Like the Nile, parts of that bitch have been moving constantly over time. Happens in Europe a lot, they find a settlement that was clearly by a water source like a river at some point, but the damn river is gone...And the coastal villigaes and cities are sooo cool. You can just imagine them all dry and shit and bustling with people. We've found some and know where a few are, but 9 times out of 10 most of the older sites are probably miles out from the modern coast and scattered 100 meters under the sea by now.

Hell, there's still shit locked up in glaciers and permafrost! Unfortunately we're melting them like pros, but yeah, we're finding stuff that's been frozen under ice for thousands of years as the glaciers receed.

And bogs?! Bogs are cool as fuck bro! People don't generally go playing in bogs, that's a bad idea, especially in crazy remote places like Northern Russia or deep in the Congo. Buuuutttt those places weren't so remote to the people who used to live there thousands of years ago and they 100% tossed all kinds of shit in the bogs. We find awesome stuff in bogs all over the world when we go looking...and again, there's a whole bunch of bogs...bogs not on any maps...in places humans haven't set foot anywhere near since the time when ancient bog dudes were chilling, just tossin' other ancient bog dudes in bogs.

Cities and construction. This shit is so irritating, I mean I get it, but damn. Look at places like Mexico city that have been inhabited for thousands of years up until now. They just found some buried 800 year old Aztec shit this year when a pawn shop was being renovated. I mean Mexico city is huuuuge and coooovered in buildings, imagine all the badass stuff that's hiding beneath. It's the same all over the world, when ancient people found a good place to kick up their feet they tended to stay...and so did the generation after them... And after that... And after that... Until you're finding fucking Kings buried under parking lots. Hell, do you know how many damn Tells there are? Cities built on towns built on villages built on settlements and then forgotten for sooo long they're just big ass dirt mounds, sometimes with new stuff built on top of them too! People just thought, oh cool a mound and walked on by, and didn't realize that that mound represented centuries of occupation. Layers and layers of history. Aleppo is another good example. Dude Aleppo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world; it may have been inhabited since the sixth millennium BC! and there's STILL mother fuckers pumpin' gas and getting groceries there! How insanely mind blowing is that?!

Climate plays a big part too, places that used to be rainforest or lush savannah or forests thousands or even seas hundreds of thousands of years ago have completely changed. To the point where the ancient people who lived there wouldn't even recognize it. Bro, fucking ice ages and come and gone since we started poking each other with pointy sticks.

Caves? Humans and our ancestors have always loved caves just as much as we do now. But caves are hard to find, explore and them shits disappear in over growth or collapse, never to be found again. It's been what, like less than 100 years since we discovered Lascaux and that awesome place had people painting in it like 17,000+ years ago when there were still rhinos in France.

I'm not even going to start talking about how up until very very recently we thought humans had only been in the America's for like 16,000 years...until they found some damn foot prints of humans walking for miles with giant sloths... Those foot prints are 23,000 years old! And if there were humans there at that point you can almost say with 100% certainty that there were humans there before 23,000 years ago.

That just shows you how little we know and how much we have yet to find.

Yo, aboriginals of Australia have been there so long they have stories (that the still tell!) about straight chillin' with mega-fauna...stories about walking through valleys and mountains...stories so old that those mountains are under the ocean now...at least 60,000-75,000 years they've been there, AT LEAST.

BRUH...The San people of Southern Africa...those straight up hardcore badasses...Their culture is estimated to have been active for 140,000-100,000 years, if not longer...and they're still doing their damn thing with bows and arrows man, chasing prey to exhausting like the good old days...100,000 years PLUS that they've been doing the stuff their still doing TODAY.

It helps that there's been a huge leap in technology in the past 20 years, like LiDAR and GPR. Even then, I'd say most of the stuff we've discovered using tech are still a "mystery" because they're damn hard to get to....too deep into jungles or too remote (like all those cities we've found in the Amazon) to explore for years to come.

We've still got lifetimes of stuff to discover and we've already been digging up old shit and trying to figure out the lives of those that came before us for thousands of years.

Like ancient dudes used to have museums too. They dug up stuff from people who were ancient to them too and filled the museums. Ancient dudes wrote books that are ancient to us about the old stuff they found from dudes that were ancient to them. Ancient museums dude, how crazy is that to think about. Ancient libraries too. Just love this shit.

Since this started there's always been someone who came before us... We've always been fascinated, in one way or another, with things that are older than us made by us.

Humans and our biological ancestors have been playing the game of life for millions of years and it's only in the past few thousand years that we've been doing the archaeology thing and only a hundred years since we've been good at it. We've found and then lost and then found and lost again more stuff than you can wrap your head around.

Archaeology is a trip.

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