[HN Gopher] Sarcophagi buried for 2,500 years unearthed in Saqqara
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Sarcophagi buried for 2,500 years unearthed in Saqqara
Author : stevekemp
Score : 78 points
Date : 2020-09-20 17:02 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| mothsonasloth wrote:
| I think cryogenically frozen people will be the mummies for the
| futur.
|
| Imagine you're in the year 4000 and you goto a museum.
|
| "Here in the 2000s museum we have the head of Walt Disney, he was
| a famous warlord who destroyed his enemies and demanded
| caricatures of animals like the extinct Mouse and Dog to be
| drawn. He had many castles built around the old world in places
| like Florida, France and China"
| tokai wrote:
| Wont they rot when the power goes out?
| kaielvin wrote:
| They are preserved in liquid nitrogen. There is no need for
| electricity, although the liquid nitrogen must be refilled
| once in a while (something like once a month I think). Liquid
| nitrogen is pretty simple and cheap to produce. Now of course
| if society collapses before we are able to bring those people
| back to life, then they will indeed rot.
| onion2k wrote:
| Walt Disney was cremated.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| You missed the point of the post.
| rootsudo wrote:
| I read the post in jest/sarcasm, but I am aware many people
| do think he really was frozen.
|
| So 50/50?
| gibolt wrote:
| I feel we are quite lucky that Egypt is a relatively stable
| country throughout the time that modern tools have become
| available to find ancient burial sites.
|
| They are able and incentivized to use proper scientific methods
| and slow exhuming to preserve as much information about an
| ancient human culture as possible.
|
| Considering how much political and societal turmoil has been and
| still is in the surrounding regions, all of these finds could
| have easily been pilfered and lost as they had been through
| Egypt's earlier history.
| vital wrote:
| Ancient Architects' (a YouTube channel) summary -
| https://youtu.be/GYr3PBzNyI0
| qwertox wrote:
| Interesting comments on that page.
| pcan77 wrote:
| This is the wrong year for this LOL
| ceejayoz wrote:
| What's one more curse at this point?
| irrational wrote:
| Might as well get them all done at once?
| jagannathtech wrote:
| You never know... so always be careful of what you wish for
| ardit33 wrote:
| on a more practical side, i wonder if by unearthing older
| stuff, old variants of the plague get unearthed as well....
| d3ntb3ev1l wrote:
| What could go wrong opening them in 2020
| sgt wrote:
| Opening is fine, but removing them from a specific spot will
| definitely trigger some kind of cave-in.
| dmosley wrote:
| For the love of god(s) and what is left of the world; Stop.
| Opening. Mysterious. Tombs.
|
| P.s. please. Save it until next year.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| I grew up near Saqqara (few miles away). It's amazing that there
| are still things to be discovered there. We would actually often
| hear that artifacts would be discovered and just sold/smuggled.
| But i guess there is just so much stuff buried near and around
| Saqqara that there is still more to discover.
| qwertox wrote:
| Why do we think that it is just fine that we open these tombs? I
| do have a problem with that attitude. If they had been found 500
| years ago, we'd probably have almost nothing of real value from a
| scientific point of view.
|
| Are we so much better nowadays that we can allow us to alter the
| state of the tomb without significantly destroying it?
| canjobear wrote:
| > Are we so much better nowadays that we can allow us to alter
| the state of the tomb without significantly destroying it?
|
| We're still not perfect of course, but modern archaeology is
| extraordinarily careful and meticulous. If we wait for perfect
| procedures we may be waiting forever.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Good question. I read a few books on excavations and
| discoveries in Egypt over the modern centuries recently, and
| the quantity and degree of destruction from sheer careless to
| lack of method is quite staggering. I walked away with the
| impression that we lost more artifacts than we retained.
|
| Archeology eventually invented itself and practitioners got
| more careful as time went on, but then seeing photos embedded
| into the article of opening coffins on site ...
| monadic2 wrote:
| Tourism $$$.
|
| You can see many other sites that specifically allocate the
| majority of dig work to the future on the premise that our
| future technology will better be able to process and preserve
| our findings.
|
| I suspect that tombs in particular are large tourism draws, or
| can yield attractive museum exhibits.
| viach wrote:
| What are the alternatives? As soon as these tombs found you can
| either open them now or set up 24/7 security around. The latter
| will be difficult to justify economically.
| liability wrote:
| _" Somebody will loot it, so it may as well be us"_? If
| that's the best we can do, maybe we should stop looking for
| them in the first place. Let the corpses lay in peace, our
| modern approach to this lacks dignity.
| unlaxedneurotic wrote:
| I think the issue is that someone somewhere is always going
| to look for it. Robbers have been there for centuries. If
| they find it first, it's going to end up in the black
| market. I'm not saying whether its right or wrong. It is
| just how it is.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > If they had been found 500 years ago, we'd probably have
| almost nothing of real value from a scientific point of view.
|
| 500 years ago they would have been looted by whoever found
| them. At least now it follows some kind of process.
| downut wrote:
| My understanding is that almost all Egyptian tombs, at least,
| were looted, as the euphemism goes, "in antiquity".
| Tutankhamun's being a very big exception.
|
| The story I learned while doing deep background for my own trip
| to Egypt is that "in antiquity" means roughly the next period,
| usually between dynasties, when religious respect for the
| centralized royalty passed through lows. So for Egypt, that
| could be even 4000 years ago.
|
| I found this astounding at the time. Egypt has a way of
| expanding a person's sense of time. I am learning China is sort
| of the same thing.
| virtuallynathan wrote:
| I wonder what the "more secrets" are. I suspect with the
| discovery of Gobekli Tepe, and other older sites, we may discover
| the current timeline for ancient Egypt doesn't go back far
| enough. The Turin kings list is pretty interesting.
| antman wrote:
| We should thank the advances in signal processing, ground
| penetrating radars and LIDARs that have given us such a plethora
| of new archeological discoveries we see in the media. Egypt's
| climate and lack of wood which made it expensive and unreachable
| as a building material, as particularly helpful factors for the
| preservation history. Through Egyptian sources that have a more
| detailed chronology historical analysis of surrounding areas is
| also assisted. Egypt is a magestical place and I am eagerly
| waiting for the completion of the new Cairo museum to revisit it.
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