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Lost Languages Discovered in One of the World's Oldest Continuously Run Libraries (smithsonianmag.com)
Saint Catherine's Monastery, a sacred Christian site nestled in the shadow of Mount Sinai, is home to one of the world's oldest continuously used libraries. Thousands of manuscripts and books are kept there -- some of which contain hidden treasures. An anonymous reader shares a report: Now, a team of researchers is using new technology to uncover texts that were erased and written over by the monks who lived and worked at the monastery. Many of these original texts were written in languages well known to researchers -- Latin, Greek, Arabic -- but others were inscribed in long-lost languages that are rarely seen in the historical record. Manuscripts with multiple layers of writing are known as palimpsests, and there are about 130 of them at St. Catherine's Monastery, according to the website of the Early Manuscript Electronic Library, which has been leading the initiative to uncover the original texts. With the rise of Islam in the 7th century, Christian sites in the Sinai Desert began to disappear, and Saint Catherine's found itself in relative isolation. Monks turned to reusing older parchments when supplies at the monastery ran scarce. To uncover the palimpsests' secret texts, researchers photographed thousands of pages multiple times, illuminating each page with different-colored lights. They also photographed the pages with light shining onto them from behind, or from an oblique angle, which helped "highlight tiny bumps and depressions in the surface," Gray writes. They then fed the information into a computer algorithm, which is able to distinguish the more recent texts from the originals.
You can lift multiple layers of writing from a piece of paper.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Once again AI is robbing researchers of jobs. Once upon a time this would have been done by university researchers, now AI is cheaper, better, and faster.
But perhaps the most intriguing finds are the manuscripts written in obscure languages that fell out of use many centuries ago. Two of the erased texts, for instance, were inked in Caucasian Albanian, a language spoken by Christians in what is now Azerbaijan. According to Sarah Laskow of Atlas Obscura, Caucasian Albanian only exists today in a few stone inscriptions. Michael Phelps, director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, tells Gray of the Atlantic that the discovery of Caucasian Albanian writings at Saint Catherine’s library has helped scholars increase their knowledge of the language’s vocabulary, giving them words for things like “net” and “fish.”
Other hidden texts were written in a defunct dialect known as Christian Palestinian Aramaic, a mix of Syriac and Greek, which was discontinued in the 13th century only to be rediscovered by scholars in the 18th century.
Of course, with sea related words discovered, the obvious line of jokes is to connect this with the Deep Ones, Dagon and Cthulhu. No doubt, the true horror in the more obscure texts is being kept quiet, possibly known only to the Laundry and the Black Chamber.
...that Islam is a relatively new religion in the Middle East, and that both Judaism and Christianity predated it by centuries? How can that be?
A co-worker has complained to our manager, when I pointed a similar fact out during a conversation.
The manager then reprimanded me pointing out the company's policy against "harassment" — even though no one on our team is a Muslim.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I wonder if they'll find some Klingon texts.
"Today, I am to do battle with this book. I will mercilessly stab the book with my pen, until it dies the final death. On the way to Kahless, it will bleed the appropriate text onto its page-like corpse."
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The parchment was much to expensive, much to valuable to simply burn. It was a relatively easy task to scrape off the old ink.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
researchers have photographed 74 palimpsests, which boast 6,8000 pages between them
That's a lot.
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Javascript?
PHP?
C++?
Python?
What are we doing?
#DeleteFacebook
It's not another language, it's just scribes writing random things over the old text a million times to obscure what was originally there.
Nullius in verba
Really their algorithm is AI and has become sentient writing its own languages. Once they finally decode the language they will find its full of "your floppy disk is so small, even if you could upgrade to a hard disk, you still couldn't get an OS to boot with you." Jokes.
Because there's a difference between burning books at some points in time (which Christianity certainly did, as did many other religious and ideologies) and burning books being such a complete default that one should be "surprised" by it. In that context, just like some of the other Islam related comments in this thread, it is classic trolling, and if sincere says more about the people making the statements than it does about the groups they are making comments about.
Why? Because it is? I know that you're a small minded individual unable to critically think but you might be shocked to learn that religion is not immediately anti-education or anti-science. For example, evolution has been considered "most probably fact" within the catholic church since the late 1800s. The pioneering work in evolution being done by a monk of all people. Toss in that for a very long time (we're talking centuries) if you wanted a science based education you went to the Jesuits (you'll be shocked to find out who they're associated with) and you'll start to understand what a moronic statements the OP as well as your post are making.
Current Text: Jesus wept... ...and said, "Damn those hot wings are spicy!"
Recovered Text:
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
...I was sure of it.
Why is this modded troll? Why not post proof that the Christian religion did not burn books instead of putting your head in the sand?
Why not stop being a douchebag and realize that just because Christians did, at times, burn books, that is not the de-facto standard of Christianity? Sounds like you're the one with your head in the sand and it's really a shame that tiny-brained cowards like you are allowed to post anonymously here.
With the rise of Islam in the 7th century, Christian sites in the Sinai Desert began to disappear,
The same thing is happening now in Europe
Book burnings, although they did happen, didn't happen early on. Before the printing press, books were very, very expensive and thus reserved only for the very rich and the church which, even after the printing press became ubiquitous, the church wanted to keep it that way, hence the book burnings. It's also why the mass is still held in Latin in many denominations or why Mother Teresa didn't actually help anyone, it's just a matter of keeping the poor dumb, sick and dependent on the church.
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I'm surprised they didn't burn it.
You're confusing Christianity with Islam.
After 1,700 years, Buddhas fall to Taliban dynamite
The propensity of Muslims to destroy things even has multiple Wikipedia pages.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sure some Thalidomide-brained idiot is going to drag up the Crusades or something else that happened a thousand fucking years ago in order to justify Islamic barbarity TODAY.
If he is referring to Gregor Mendel(d. 1884), the founder of modern genetics, no they didn't.
They did promote him to be abbot of his abbey, where he didn't have time from science. I guess that's technically a confirmation of the Peter Principle.
Mass is not held in Latin except in rare situations. A few churches have a single Latin Mass celebration out of many. And the word "denominations" inherently means "Protestant", which by definition: A. do not call it a "Mass", with the possible exception of the Anglicans and Episcopals, and B. do not use Latin at all. In fact, one of the major driving factors behind the Protestant Reformation was the desire to use the vernacular in worship.
Sure they did. Ever look for the writings of Arius? Priscillian of Ávila? Nestorius? Non-Christian literature from the library of Antioch? Eutychius? Arnold of Brescia? That's just the list of Catholic writings destroyed by Catholics up through the 1100s. The burning of books believed to be heretical is a longstanding tradition in Christianity, and is more a dubious and archaic method than a modern one.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Because there's a difference between burning books at some points in time (which Christianity certainly did, as did many other religious and ideologies) and burning books being such a complete default that one should be "surprised" by it. In that context, just like some of the other Islam related comments in this thread, it is classic trolling, and if sincere says more about the people making the statements than it does about the groups they are making comments about.
Says more what?
This is a nice example of "innuendo from nothing". It implies that the people in a debate are somehow inferior, while saying exactly nothing about them.
It's a cross between an ad-hominem attack and a stand-alone complex.
Shouldn't we focus on the debate instead of the character of the debater?
Why? Because it is? I know that you're a small minded individual unable to critically think but you might be shocked to learn...
Does this address the points he made, or is it an attempt to derail the issue by getting into a shouting match?
How does something like this get modded up?
If we allow this sort of thing on our debate floor (and yes, this forum is ours) we will never have reasoned debate.
It'll be trivial to take any subject out of view by derailing it.
If we let it. Please don't mod this crap up.
The confusion is deliberate. The left hates religion in general but Christians specifically. Thus they tend to assume Christians are guilty of things when in fact they aren't. For example most people don't know that in the crusades the Muslims were the original invaders and will self righteously say how Christians did the crusades just to kill brown people.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sure some Thalidomide-brained idiot is going to drag up the Crusades or something else that happened a thousand fucking years ago in order to justify Islamic barbarity TODAY.
Christ on a bike, that's the most insult-dense post I've read in a while. Islamophobia, ableism and insulting people who disagree with you all rolled into one.
Every broad group has contained some iconoclasts at some point, and you don't have to go as far back as the Crusades to see Christians destroying totems of other religions (we did it throughout the Imperial era). However, the acts of the extremists of I.S. do not represent the mainstream of Islam in any way.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Javascript? PHP? C++? Python?
What are we doing?
It's the modern form of a palimpsest: a CVS repository showing all the different fad languages your PHB insisted the company codebase be rewritten in over the decades.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
No, they're not. I live in the middle of one of those purported no-go zones. I'm no unsafer than anywhere in the country.
Oh... "lost languages".
I miss coffee.
#DeleteFacebook
bugs2squash explained:
It's not another language, it's just scribes writing random things over the old text a million times to obscure what was originally there.
Somebody mod parent +1 Funny, please ... !
Check out my novel.
"...Christian sites in the Sinai Desert began to disappear." That tends to happen when the inhabitants are brutally murdered and the structures burned, as was usually the case.
Oh, like in the Crusades when sacking Christians armies would often wipe out every inhabitant-whether Jewish, Muslim, or Christian-of a conquered city?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
>Oh, like in the Crusades when sacking Christians armies would often wipe out every inhabitant-whether Jewish, Muslim, or Christian-of a conquered city?
I know you are playing the moral equivalence game here, so it might be worthwhile for me to point out some salient facts:
1) I am not Christian, so I do not excuse any specific or general barbarity on the part of the Crusades by Christians.
2) Muslim conquests of the Levant and North Africa starting in the 7th Century triggered a three century long archeology dark age (also, a similar dark age throughout the Mediterranean). Populations collapsed from their Roman and post-Roman levels. The ecologies of the North Africa and Levant regions were destroyed, and to this day have yet to recover. Numerous Roman settlements were sacked and the inhabitants slaughtered, never to return. That's why you can go to Algeria or Libya or Syria and find intact Roman ruins today.
3) Christianity didn't have the concept of Holy War until exposed to Islamic Jihad. The Crusades were basically a Christian reaction to the Muslim Jihad which had been attacking Christian lands for a solid 350 years before the first Crusade kicked off, during which millions were killed, and millions more sold into slavery. The time frame of these Christian sites "disappearing" was during the initial Muslim conquest, when Christians and Christianity had done nothing to Islam or Muslims except not converting when it was demanded by Mohammed and his acolytes. So they got murdered by him and his followers, their books and buildings burned, and their children sold into slavery.
4) Despite all the supposed raping, plundering, and massacres at the hands of the Crusaders, they had almost no demographic impact on the region. Contrast that with the demographic impact of the initial Muslim conquests, and you come up with two different tales. Islam didn't fall into a dark age because the Crusades destroyed their cities, murdered their people, and destroyed their culture.
Never mind, it's merely the left wing brainwashing called 'public school' which tells people that EVERYTHING about western culture is a horror, just a horror. You know, things like sanitation, the scientific method, limitations of government power, separation of church and state, etc.
However, the acts of the extremists of I.S. do not represent the mainstream of Islam in any way.
They do. Destroying pagan totems is something that goes as far back as Mohammed destroying the idols in the kaaba. You should learn something about Islam before you presume to speak for mainstream Islam.
If he is referring to Gregor Mendel(d. 1884), the founder of modern genetics, no they didn't.
They did promote him to be abbot of his abbey, where he didn't have time from science. I guess that's technically a confirmation of the Peter Principle.
If the Peter Principle is divinely proven, does that mean it applies to God as well??
That would explain sooo much.
"...Christian sites in the Sinai Desert began to disappear."
That tends to happen when the inhabitants are brutally murdered and the structures burned, as was usually the case.
They didn't. This is not an understatement. They started to disappear. Very slowly. Islam discriminated against Christians by making them pay taxes and making muslims tax free. That in turn meant muslims states before the crusades went out or their way to not harm Christians and Jews because they were their tax-payers. Of course over time people converted to get the priviledges of being Muslim at which point the priviledges went away and the harasment of minorities begin, but that is a lot more recent (the last couple of centuries).
Melted butter?!?!?
Heretic! The butter is to be solid, fresh from the churn, lightly salted, then lovingly applied to the pasta by the worshiper. The only exception to this allowed by the canon is when The Sauce is to be applied, and yea, verily, it is still holy to use the butter with the sauce. Cheese also is holy, very holy. And I'm not talking about the Swiss; for that, we have to go back to the vat again.
Ramen
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Like every other War the Crusades were all about pillaging and plunder
Well, I would not call it "the left", considering people like Ayn Rand would be considered nowhere near "left", and Ayn Rand found religion, and Christianity in particular, to be moronic.
Yes we are all grateful to you Christians it you hadn't burned all the witches they would still be bothering us today.
One of Darwin's mysteries, which he talks about in The Origin of Species, was how variability didn't just get washed out in populations, in the same way that a spoonful of sugar gets washed out in a bathtub of water. The answer was that inheritance was a discrete variable, not a continuous variable, i.e. genes. While it's true that Mendel didn't (afaik) set out to solve this mystery, nor does it make him the person who did "the pioneering work in evolution" (in the words of the poster at the top of this thread), it did have a huge influence on the study of evolution.
(IIRC, Darwin's other big mystery was the apparently sudden appearance of fossils at the base of the Cambrian.)
>They didn't. This is not an understatement. They started to disappear. Very slowly. Islam discriminated against Christians by making them pay taxes and making muslims tax free. It actually is an understatement.
Islamic conquests were usually preceded by years of Islamic raiding, by which the Muslims would raid settlements with cavalry, disrupting food production and causing famine over successive years in order to weaken the state(s) under attack.
Initial Muslim conquests usually had relatively benign treatment of the local population once conquered and once they acquiesced the Jizya. Prior to that, non-Muslims were fail game for murder and/or being captured and sold into slavery. This is what happened all across the Mediterranean once Islam reached the Med. This was the period during which coastal settlements all along the Mediterranean were burned to the ground, and you see the re-emergence of populations protected by hill forts.
Additionally, Muslim conquerors initially weren't too bad on the local Christian population, but they tended to treat churches, priests, and nuns a *tad* bit more harshly.
Lastly, Muslims came from somewhat nomadic, herding stock. They were completely unsuited to administer Roman and post-Roman agricultural areas, and had no problem letting their sheep and goat flocks overgraze Christian cropland, which resulted in ecological destruction of these areas over time and the inability of those areas to support the populations they had previously. Consider, Carthage used to support all of Rome and much of Italy. Today, Tunisia is a net food importer.
Look, in a historic context, Islam of the 7th century wasn't any worse than it's contemporaries. In some modest ways, it was actually more liberal and more advanced (ironically, in the area of women's rights). But the archeological evidence is pretty clear - Europe (including Western Europe under the "barbarians") and North Africa and the Levant were flourishing right up until the breakout of Islam. After that, the end of large scale construction, burn back of settlements (so much so that there is a carbon sediment layer in many areas between 700 and 950), and the general decline in literacy and writings (exacerbated by the cutoff of papyrus from Egypt).
Which is the Old Testament, hence it goes back to Judaism. The whole Abrahamic tradition is against idol worship (see the golden calf in Exodus), and yet even then, the Abrahamic tradition hasn't even been unusual in terms of iconoclasts -- see also the Russian revolution, the pre-Christian vikings and their sacking of monasteries etc.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Hmm, hand-wavy tone, entirely unlike Wikipedia. What could possibly go wrong?
Wikipedia:
Now the stool has three legs of decline, and two of them are inside jobs.
>Now the stool has three legs of decline, and two of them are inside jobs.
Except the population decline was universal across the former Roman Empire - not just the ERE under control of Constantinople, and only started in earnest after the Arab conquests. Sure, Italy was devastated by the Gothic wars and the later Langobard invasion, but Spain under the Goths? Carthage under the Vandals? Egypt under the ERE? Gaul under the Franks? They were all prospering after the end of the barbarian invasions and the re-stabilization of Mediterranean trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Some historians such as Josiah C. Russell (1958) have suggested a total European population loss of 50 to 60 per cent between 541 and 700"
Some of those deaths were from recurring plagues, but a lot of them were also due to the disruption by Arab invasion of the areas that formerly fed much of Roman Europe (i.e., Carthage, Egypt), and the follow-on raiding from Muslim pirates that destroyed undefended or poorly defended settlements along the Mediterranean coasts. Are you really contesting the ecological health of, say Tunisia in 800 vs. Carthage in 570 and the impact of the cessation of Mediterranean food trade on European populations?
My friends in the Christian Left would disagree with your statement. Leftists tend to be against most organized religion, and against religion playing a role in politics. Religion itself isn't that big a deal.
The Muslims were not the original invaders of that area. Very likely ancient Egypt wasn't the first either, but it's the earliest invader I can think of offhand. That area has seen invasion after invasion.
The Crusaders were in general not the people kicked out by Muslims, or even their descendants. The Crusades were entirely new invasions, spurred on by the prospect of junior sons who'd inherit nothing in Germany or France. One of them sacked Constantinople instead, so it probably wasn't just brown people.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Strange...I have distinct memories of reading of wars the Jews were commanded by God to wage, sometimes without mercy. At least some of these were described in the collection of books that became the Christian Bible.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes