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Topic: What's Going on in Antiquity? (Read 12247 times)

Re: What's Going on in Antiquity?

Reply #50
Beer was first in antiquity, as old as agriculture and bread. Some even say that agriculture became a thing because people wanted beer. Also the first writings are about beer, such as salary payment documents where salary includes beer, and beer recipes. All according to this article https://yle.fi/aihe/a/20-10002499

I think this implicitly means that beer is also earlier than wine.



According to the map of current wine-vs-beer preference in Europe, North Europe favours beer (except Swedes and Danes) and Southern Europe favours wine (except Spaniards). This year April was colder than March and ruined grape fields in France so this year they'll have to do with beer.

Re: What's Going on in Antiquity?

Reply #51
I think this implicitly means that beer is also earlier than wine.
On the flip side, I'm sure we've all encountered accidental wine-like. A grape or kiwi that's started fermenting in the good way rather than getting moldy, that kind of thing. It seems harder to imagine how that would happen with beer.

Re: What's Going on in Antiquity?

Reply #52
Very very good point. Wine seems to kinda just happen, whereas beer is more processed and should have arised first as a byproduct in the process of trying to obtain something else and, after the byproduct was found to be good, the procedure would have been repeated for beer's sake.

However, this is how Wikipedia currently stands:

The earliest archeological evidence for a dominant position of wine-making in human culture dates from 8,000 years ago in Georgia.

The oldest known winery was found in Armenia, dating to around 4000 BC.

Beer is one of the world's oldest prepared alcoholic drinks. The earliest archaeological evidence of fermentation consists of 13,000-year-old residues of a beer with the consistency of gruel, used by the semi-nomadic Natufians for ritual feasting, at the Raqefet Cave in the Carmel Mountains near Haifa in Israel. There is evidence that beer was produced at Göbekli Tepe during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (around 8500 BC to 5500 BC).

Re: What's Going on in Antiquity?

Reply #53
New Indo-European Language Discovered
Yearly archaeological campaigns led by current site director Professor Andreas Schachner of the Istanbul Department of the German Archaeological Institute continue to add to the cuneiform finds. Most of the texts are written in Hittite, the oldest attested Indo-European language and the dominant language at the site. Yet the excavations of this year yielded a surprise. Hidden in a cultic ritual text written in Hittite is a recitation in a hitherto unknown language.

The discovery of another language in the Boğazköy-Hattusha archives is not entirely unexpected, as Daniel Schwemer explains: "The Hittites were uniquely interested in recording rituals in foreign languages."

Such ritual texts, written by scribes of the Hittite king reflect various Anatolian, Syrian, and Mesopotamian traditions and linguistic milieus. The rituals provide valuable glimpses into the little known linguistic landscapes of Late Bronze Age Anatolia, where not just Hittite was spoken. Thus cuneiform texts from Boğazköy-Hattusha include passages in Luwian and Palaic, two other Anatolian-Indo-European languages closely related to Hittite, as well as Hattic, a non-Indo-European language. Now the language of Kalasma can be added to these.

Re: What's Going on in Antiquity?

Reply #54
Excellent, even if the text itself is probably fairly boring. Books of hours are the most commonly preserved medieval books.

Re: What's Going on in Antiquity?

Reply #55
If rituals and spells (and presumably also epics) are boring, then what would be an interesting clay tablet text? Accounting records?

Re: What's Going on in Antiquity?

Reply #56
Not overly boring if unique, but I'm not hedging my bets on that (other than the language variety). :)

 

Re: What's Going on in Antiquity?

Reply #57
Ancient DNA challenges prevailing interpretations of the Pompeii plaster casts

We show that the individuals’ sexes and family relationships do not match traditional interpretations, exemplifying how modern assumptions about gendered behaviors may not be reliable lenses through which to view data from the past. For example, an adult wearing a golden bracelet with a child on their lap—often interpreted as mother and child—is genetically an adult male biologically unrelated to the child. Similarly, a pair of individuals who were thought to have died in an embrace—often interpreted as sisters—included at least one genetic male.
Those tour guides may have to update their stories.