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Oldest Submerged City Visualized With CGI
Stirling Newberry writes "Nottingham University's Pavlopetri project spent months measuring a city that sank beneath the waves 3,000 years ago, perhaps in a tsunami. The result is a BBC documentary that features a detailed CGI reconstruction. 'The entire city – covering 20 acres – has been surveyed in ultra-high definition, with error margins of less than three centimeters. ... [T]he survey team has so far located scores of buildings, half a dozen major streets and even religious shrines and tombs.' eScience News chimes in about the oldest known submerged city, first inhabited 5,000 years ago and rediscovered in 1967. Of course, Slashdot readers will probably want to dig into the details of how stereo-vision mapping was used (PDF) to create the map in the first place."
I just want to see the pictures.
Maybe I'm wrong, but ISTM that a tsunami would only submerge a city temporarily. To stay under for 3000 years you need rising sea, sinking ground, or perhaps a sea breaking into a previously dry area below sea level.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Clearly submerged mortages sunk the housing market and all assets were lost when liquidity flooded the market.
Someone suggests its Atlantis. Atlantis never existed. It was a rhetorical device.
But it usually gets "discovered" every six months or so, and unless I haven't been following the news closely enough, we're overdue. So we may have to let this one in just to avoid a statistical fluke.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
People used to think the same thing about Troy. Then some German guy found it in the late 1800s.
Of course, the real Troy wasn't nearly as large as what Homer's story would have you believe, and there's no evidence of involvement by deities, but the city is real. Similarly, Atlantis, if it exists at all, probably doesn't have any advanced technology like flying machines and the like, but there could very well be a real city somewhere that used to be called Atlantis. After all, this currently unnamed city was once above sea level, and then some earthquakes happened causing the land to subside, and the city sunk; people back then probably assumed it was "the work of the gods".
It's not exactly far-fetched to say the story was based on an actual city that sank into the sea (*cough* Akrotiri *cough*). After all, modern story-tellers use historical events to make political points all the damn time.
Tried to view the video on the BBC site. Says "not available in your area".
The irony is that I am in Greece...
Thanks BBC.
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And then that guy proceeded to utterly ruin the city, smashing through all the upper layers without even pretending to analyze or catalogue them in search of the gold or whatever he expected to find at the bottom.
I forget the exact details, but I know he trashed damn near 90% of the place; even by the looser standards of the 1800's he was a reckless, arrogant fuck. His own partner castigated him for his methods. It must have been inspirational for archeologists I suppose, to know that great things were still out there, but it quickly became one of the bigger archeological tragedies man has ever witnessed.
You're trying to inject realism into a story where there was little, and exaggeration was normal. This isn't confined to the Greeks, just look at any Hollywood movie; there's no realism there. The "true stories" of Troy are probably rather dull: there was some stupid diplomatic gaffe (nothing as romantic as a stolen love), some sociopathic king got pissed and declared war, took a couple dozen ships and crossed the Aegean, and invaded some small town. The town's defenses helped for a short time, but were fairly quickly overcome with a battering ram or similar. King sacks city, survivors flee, end of story. Who wants to read a story about that, when they can read about a beautiful woman being taken by a foolish prince to his grandiose city, the other King angrily assembling a fleet of thousands of ships and traveling a great distance, then a great war being fought between tens of thousands of soldiers, and finally the King conquering the city through clever subterfuge, plus some stuff about various gods and super-warriors being thrown in for good measure?
It's not exactly far-fetched to say the story was based on an actual city that sank into the sea (*cough* Akrotiri *cough*). After all, modern story-tellers use historical events to make political points all the damn time.
Perhaps it was, though if so it was more likely based on the famous circular harbor at Carthage than on Thera.
But Plato introduces it in a fictional account of a dinner party where one of the characters reports that a friend of a friend of ... (insert 7-8 removes) heard it from an Egyptian priest. We know that these stories of Plato, called Dramatic Dialogues, are just fictions to let him insert his opinions into the mouth of Socrates. So maybe he did drop in some common (or esoteric) knowledge about an ancient city - he does mention real cities - but there's absolutely no reason to suppose that he was doing so in the case of Atlantis. And there certainly weren't any Athenians around 7000 years earlier to fight these hypothetical Atlanteans.
Face it: he made up a story to make a point, and one facet of the story has caught the popular imagination. But almost no one who fancies that facet has the least idea where it came from, nor what else was in the story, nor why it was being told. Belief in Atlantis is the triumph of ignorance and wishful thinking over education, comprehension, and the expectation that claims should be supported by evidence.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If you think Schliemann was bad, you should check out what Evans did to Knossos. He didn't just dig right through all the previous layers with wild abandon, he plastered over and repainted what he found until it was a sort of Disney recreation.
A submerged city would have be covered with sediment, coral and fauna. A 1970's archeological survey map simplified for audiences would consist of some black squiggly lines superimposed over a blurry underwater photograph, providing conclusive proof that the structure was man-made.
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That would belong to this city http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1768109.stm It was found in 2002
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your politician, and hitting them?"
What about the submerged city in the Gulf of Cambay, India? This is reported as being up to 9000 years old (possibly) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1768109.stm