[HN Gopher] Ancient Greek 'pop culture' discovery rewrites histo...
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       Ancient Greek 'pop culture' discovery rewrites history of poetry
       and song
        
       Author : diodorus
       Score  : 53 points
       Date   : 2021-09-14 00:16 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.joh.cam.ac.uk)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.joh.cam.ac.uk)
        
       | leoc wrote:
       | Fun fact: Irish [Gaelic] poetry only switched from syllabic to
       | stressed metre about the eighteenth century. One product of the
       | transition was poems in the form of _tri rainn agus amhran_ ,
       | having three stanzas of syllabic metre then a final stanza of
       | stressed metre, for example "Tithe Chorr an Chait":
       | http://www.clanntuirc.co.uk/TRAA/TRAA40.html .
        
       | BoumTAC wrote:
       | Do we know what ancient music sound like ?
        
         | yyyk wrote:
         | Sumerian music had a notation, a bit of which was recovered.
         | Interpretation is however difficult and not yet agreed upon.
         | 
         | https://openculture.com/2014/07/the-oldest-song-in-the-world...
        
         | batrachos wrote:
         | We have the notation for a small amount of Hellenistic and
         | Roman era music, and I think a tiny little bit of Euripides.
         | We'll never know what Sappho sounded like, though.
        
         | irrational wrote:
         | There is an audiobook called How to Listen to and Understand
         | Great Music. The author starts way way back with the oldest
         | music we have and then little by little moves forward to more
         | modern times showing how music grew little by little over the
         | millennia. The audiobooks includes audio excerpts of the music.
         | I found it fascinating up until the classical music time when
         | it started bogging down and going a lot slower.
        
         | ARandomerDude wrote:
         | Yes, actually. Here's one example:
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
        
           | sherr wrote:
           | Will Astley ever get old?
        
         | sherr wrote:
         | I believe it is still quite a hard thing to be truly certain of
         | but there are some indications around. Harmonia Mundi produced
         | an album a few years ago that included some ancient Greek music
         | [1].
         | 
         | [1] La Musique De L'Antiquite https://www.discogs.com/Various-
         | La-Musique-De-LAntiquit%C3%A...
        
         | cblconfederate wrote:
         | A little older than sibling comment
         | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph
        
       | MatteoFrigo wrote:
       | > Until now, 'stressed poetry' of this kind has been unknown
       | before the 5th century, when it began to be used in Byzantine
       | Christian hymns.
       | 
       | FWIW, some scholars argue that the Roman Saturnian verse (3rd
       | century BC or earlier) is stressed poetry. See
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturnian_(poetry) for examples.
        
         | batrachos wrote:
         | Different language though. Greek poetry was so conservative it
         | can be hard to tell what is a living form and what is a clever
         | pastiche, especially as the Hellenistic era goes on.
        
       | mseepgood wrote:
       | Extremely dumb lyrics. What's next? "Ooh baby ... I care for you
       | ... I'll always be there for you ... I know that you want me to"
        
         | grillvogel wrote:
         | the original LIVE LAUGH LOVE sign
        
         | laylomo2 wrote:
         | Next headline: twerking found in 35,000 year old cave art
        
         | thriftwy wrote:
         | A lot of songs from the 2nd half of XX century till now have
         | dumber lyrics.
         | 
         | And their authors should have known better, whereas Greeks had
         | to invent pop culture from scratch.
        
       | kgeist wrote:
       | "Rewriting history" based on a single poem? Could as well be a
       | unique style of a particular poet/whoever made it?
        
         | irrational wrote:
         | My reading was that it wasn't a single poem (by which I think
         | you mean, a single instance of the poem). Apparently this poem
         | was found all over the place, both with and without the final 2
         | lines, and that basically factories were churning out kitsch
         | with the poem on it for sale.
        
       | grillvogel wrote:
       | its always seemed strange to me that we just assume something
       | didn't exist before a certain time just because that was the
       | earliest artifact we've found so far.
       | 
       | so much of ancient history which is assumed to be truth is really
       | just based on assumptions and suppositions
        
         | mjw1007 wrote:
         | In my experience historians don't assume that, but when
         | journalists write up a discovery that pushes the earliest-known
         | date back they like to write it up as if they had.
        
         | colechristensen wrote:
         | Especially Greek and Roman history. Some of what is "known" is
         | based on as little as a word or two carved into some stone
         | monument... other things are based on thousands upon thousands
         | of written works that survived antiquity (in some cases we know
         | more about Rome 2000 years ago than we do anywhere else until
         | the renaissance)
         | 
         | There is this transition between scant evidence and near modern
         | levels of familiarity in a rather short time.
        
           | pradn wrote:
           | And if you compare histories, it gets even more absurd. We
           | almost know what Cicero did hour-to-hour on some important
           | days. We don't even know which century Kalidasa, the most
           | important Sanskrit poet, was active in.
        
       | sushisource wrote:
       | Sounds like "haters gonna hate" is as old as it gets.
        
       | roywiggins wrote:
       | they say what they like / let them say it / I don't care / Burma
       | Shave
        
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