This is why archeologists and anthropologists love boring people. Researching Alexander the Great is fine, but we already know the broad strokes. The actual useful “how people lived from day to day” information is almost always found in some boring person’s journal.
{Date} I walked down to the market to get more salt, flour, vinegar, and some wool thread to darn my socks. The morning walk took approximately 20 minutes with the sun at my back. The fish seller has increased his prices to {amount} due to the war. I saw an interesting flock of birds today during my walk back from the market, I believe they may be passing through the area. I decided to make my dinner bread with a slightly different recipe today. {Full recipe listed below}. It was nice, but I’ll probably only use half as much salt next time, like I normally do. The dairy cow has produced a lot of milk this year because of the heavy rain making the grass grow well. So I’ve had a lot of butter to put on my bread. The neighbor has agreed to trade some of my excess cream for fresh veggies. I’ll probably make them into a stew for tomorrow’s dinner {recipe listed below}.
Wait, is this someone’s actual ancient journal??? How incredibly exciting? And what was that slightly different recipe?
The Spectrum Through The Ages.
If we actually had lots of surviving material like that it would be amazing.
Before the early modern period it was rare for people to write down boring or mundane shit because writing was hard and expensive.
Now writing is very easy, though I’m somewhat glad the whole bullshit going on on social media is rather easily lost as well. 🫠
I keep a paper diary which I just assumed would rot away as a write-only set of documents, but then I think of all the digital work from 10+ years ago I’ve lost to plain bit rot, and I wonder if these chickenscratch braindumps on graphite and cheap recycled paper aren’t the more durable medium.
Ye olde version of looking up a weird specific software problem and the guy answered his own post with just ‘nvm fixed it!’
(exactly the problem you’re having)
[Deleted]
Thanks! Nothing else worked at all, but that solution worked perfectly!
Too many damn times…
I was promised an immortal repository of knowledge in my youth. Now most of my bookmarks are dead links and finding answers is just like your example half the time.
I had the same problem and this forum post solved it: (link to a website that no longer exists)
But that is at least solvable with the internet archive (most of the time)
“Read the wiki” but the part of the relevant wiki page for the subject was removed years ago and the edit history was purged after the server ran out of disk space.
Return to thread and complain that people are clueless and directing you to a useless resource. Mod locks thread and threatens you with a ban.
Ugh, yes. I try to always remember to update with what I did to fix it. Although if I’m honest, what probably happens 95% of the time is I just forget about the post entirely.
Or you fix it through such a convoluted process of randomly trying things that you can barely articulate the solution yourself.
‘Eh, I’ll copy these writings later’
-Diotrophes of Miletus, probably.
It’s sad to think that probably about 90% of writing from antiquity is lost. Then again, 100% of all history from before writing was invented is lost. And that’s by far the largest part of human history.
You never know. It might well be there are some ancient alien Bracewell probes out there that have been recording Earth’s Funniest Caveman videos for millions of years.
Same for fossils. Heavily forested areas often had soil too acidic to create fossils at all. Fossils take some real luck and the right conditions to make. Otherwise, bones just slowly disintegrated. I’ve seen estimates that 90%+ of species that ever existed left no fossil evidence.
It’s also why there’s large gaps in the Human and Great Ape fossil records. Australopithecus fossils appear in Chad, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and South Africa… And no where in between. But is not like none of them existed in the lush jungles of central Africa. The soil dissolved the bones. Same with gorillas. There are no gorilla fossils.
Australia: 😂
Explanation: Australian oral histories have survived for tens of thousands of years, far longer than any European written histories. Australia has had the best historians in the world for longer than European civilisation has existed.
Which raises the question, is this just the percentage that’s left?
100% of all history from before writing was invented is lost
Not entirely true. Some aboriginal oral traditions have accurately described the Budj Bim and Tower Hill Eruptions that happened 37k years ago, and the dramatic rise in sea levels 7-10k years ago.
The oral traditions of aboriginal tribes is kinda crazy. During the European colonization of australia there are times where you get to see encounters from written documents by Europeans and the history recalled by oral and dance traditions recorded by aboriginals. They tend to match in everything but perspective and often the aboriginal depictions are often more detailed.
The local Aboriginals to me have oral stories about the most recent ice age.
Yeah, some of the stuff that has been able to be confirmed via geological studies is just insane. It’s crazy to me how they aren’t more widely known for disrupting the idea of prehistory.
Blame the people who don’t look like them but run the country. Anglo fragility won’t give brown people have a chance.
I wouldn’t say the idea of prehistory is disrupted per se. But we have to accept that it’s region-dependent. In any given region (recorded) history started when the oldest still available account was preserved.
Some regions are far better at preserving very old accounts than others.
That’s not how we classically define prehistory though. Technically pre-history is defined as the period of time beginning when the first humans started using stone tools and ending when different cultures developed writing systems.
My criticism is that western scholars put too much importance on the written word.
That’s my point: The classical definition makes the assumption that written records are the only records with any kind of reliability, which doesn’t hold everywhere.
I could’ve phrased it better.
If I had money I’d spend all my time learning from these people
That’s actually amazing that information that old survived the telephone game
Well, cultures that heavily relied on oral traditions developed systems that prevented a telephone type scenario from happening. Aboriginals combine oral traditions with ceremony, song, dance, and different medias of physical art. They also had respected leaders whose whole position was telling the right stories during specific times, at specific places, and to specific people in the tribe.
Fascinating, these people are remarkable
Aboriginal cultures have very advanced psychological technology which they use for the preservation of knowledge and the organisation of society. To white people, technology just means machines. But under a more holistic view, technology can be an idea that you use as a tool to do work. And Aboriginal cultures have very advanced mental tools. These tools have preserved knowledge for much longer than any book or clay tablet ever has, thanks to the expertise in psychology which was used to invent them.
Karl Marx referred to the economic organisation of cultures in Turtle Island and Australia as “primitive communism.” But there’s nothing primitive about it. Ask Me about Aboriginal farming.
What happened to the Celts’ oral traditions? How are indigenous Australians’ historical depictions still stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive?
(Is it because ignorant bozos like me are oblivious to them?)
While the aboriginals underwent and still endure settler colonialism it hasn’t been as long or quite as thorough as the Roman occupation and then christianization that the celts went through. Australia is also so much bigger than the UK, so it would be hard to complete a very effective act of genocide against spiritual or tribal leaders as they did to the druids.
Even so some Celtic oral traditions were still going on strong up till the 19th century, often being little changed over thousands of years.
Hey just a language note, Aboriginal is not a noun, we don’t say “aboriginals”. We say “Aboriginal people”.
Ahh, my bad. I am remembering from old American text books from my college days that utilized Aboriginals and Aborigine, both of which i am discovering are incorrect, outdated, and offensive.
My college days were a long time ago and I don’t get many opportunities to speak about aboriginal people, so I’m not surprised I’m behind the times. Thanks for the update!
No worries, mate. Progress comes from teaching one person one thing at a time!
Well… The Romanisation of Europe happened.
Which could be described as a genocide of Celtic people
And so many more cultures.
Holy shit that’s crazy. I didn’t know we had oral histories from that far back.
What if some of the surviving neolithic monuments were shitposts?
Judging by the amount of dicks drawn on walls in Pompeii, shitposting tradition spans millennia. I wouldn’t discount it.
You might enjoy reading about Göbekli Tepe.
And that’s by far the largest part of human history.
Eh… Depends how you measure the amount of ‘history’.
If just going by length of time, yes. But if you also take into account how many people exist at that time (how much history is happening per unit of time), then there’s an argument to be made that modern history is a much more significant portion, since our population sizes are so much larger than the relatively tiny populations in prehistory. The vast majority of people who have ever existed lived during the period of modern recorded history.
the vast majority of people who have ever existed lived during the period of modern recorded history
You sure about that, this says that 117 billion people of our species have ever lived. Writing is around 5,000 years old, and initially was used for accounting so history doesn’t come around until later, whereas the species is 200,000 years old.
Idk what your classifying as the period of modern recorded history though. Maybe you could say that period started in the 2nd or 3rd millennium BC in the middle east, but that doesn’t mean it started everywhere. At that time there were tons of people who lived without writing, and that continues on until very recently. So even after history was “invented” only a fraction of people lived under societies that practiced it until ~200 years ago.
I’m not going to do all the math but it seems to me a majority of people who ever lived, were not a part of societies that recorded history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population?wprov=sfla1
According to the wiki about half of all humans have lived in the last 2000 years.
I recall a story where a historian visited ireland and heard a song with what the people singing called gibberish, but the historian recognized as an ancient language.
Im unfortunately too lazy to look it up and link it
There is a native american (i forget the exact group but located in near colorado) who’s oral tradition accurately recounts glacial floods from many thousands of years ago. I wish I remembered how many but I read this in a textbook last year and only half recall it. Either way it isn’t all lost, just 99.999% lost
Lost and waiting to be found. Instead we spend money on wars 🤷
I often wonder how much was lost just in the Library of Alexandria. Start combining that one place, with countless wars, fires and natural disasters throughout time and it boggles my mind thinking about it.
Just wait until all the information that was born digital disappears without a physical copy in existence
Someone’s probably out there right now transferring PragerU videos to glass plates along with instructions for decoding them. We’ll all be remembered as far-right nutjobs.
We’ll all be remembered as far-right nutjobs.
I certainly hope so.
I really hope that future society is leftist enough to view even today’s “left” as being very conservative.
Who’s the laughing guy with Ryan Reynolds?
Gosling
Sorry, who’s the laughing guy with Chris Gosling?
Ryan
The man or the small duck?
Baby goose
Better than the current practice in journalism where everything in every article is devoid of context
Good thing we sold all our media outlets to billionaires who either use them explicitly to promote fascism or just use the modern first to eyes slop written for profit fear porn and trash entertainment “reporting” you used to find exclusively in tabloids. Defunding public service journalistic outlets sure did fix things, huh?
This has always irked me, especially when I was young and tried to read articles on politics or the economy. NO context whatsoever.
…and that wraps up the complete, and anotated discussion of the solution to the Foxworthy Conundrum.
I knew a guy who would start lecture recordings this way. It was hilarious at the time.
Help me out? Google foxworthy conundrum, only seeing the modern comedian. I’m assuming this isn’t that lol
I think it’s a made up problem for exampling purposes.
This is precisely why all of my school essays painfully recounted every detail of any persons vaguely attached to the subjects entire life story. Including tangentially related anecdotes about what may or may not have been there favorite meals.
Not just to pad the word count, but to make sure that future generations would know about how Charles Dickens is experiences a child influenced his writing. On the off chance that every other reference was destroyed in the apocalypse and for some reason a paper copy of my essay magically survives said apocalypse.
Bruh, the paper copy of your essay didn’t even survive a day past when the teacher finished grading it.
I was fully expecting ≥2 people in the comments to share some relevant and interesting info about diotrophes of miletus…
Where are ü now that I need ya? 🥺
I think the OOP made them up, because there’s a Diotrephes mentioned in the bible and nowhere else, and there’s a Dionysius of Miletus, whose works are known. I think it’s just a placeholder name for memetic value.
Were they roommates?
On a long enough timeline every modern historian becomes a ancient one.
Something something “Ancient Egypt had archeologists who studied ancient(er) Egypt.”
Egyptians had scholars of ancient history and archeologists who studied ancient Egypt.
They still do, but they used to, too.
If this was a known text throughout history (not lost and rediscovered), does that mean there was at least one generation of educated people faking that they knew what these texts were before someone realized they were lost? 🤔
