Ancient manuscripts - the methods of writing them down

[renaldo]

@renaldo

It’s amazing to think that stone-carved inscriptions can endure, legible and unyielding, for more than ten thousand years—a testament to their timelessness. Another amazing example from antiquity (this one non-Buddhist) is the Narmer Palette, discovered in Nekhen, Egypt (which was also known as Hierakonpolis; Greek: Ἱεράκων πόλις, meaning City of Hawks or City of Falcons), which is over 5,200 years old:

The Narmer Palette, also known as the Great Hierakonpolis Palette or the Palette of Narmer, is a significant archaeological find, dating from about the 31st century BC, belonging, at least nominally, to the category of cosmetic palettes. It contains some of the earliest hieroglyphic inscriptions ever found. The tablet is thought by some to depict the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the king Narmer.

Narmer Palette - Wikipedia

Cuneiform tablets can last for an extremely long time as well, though not exactly as long as stone tablets (in best-case scenarios, stone tablets last 10,000+ years, while fired-clay tablets last up to 5,000+ years)…

On Contingency:

@renaldo

“To argue that history is contingent is to claim that every historical outcome depends upon a number of prior conditions; that each of these prior conditions depends, in turn, upon still other conditions; and so on. The core insight of contingency is that the world is a magnificently interconnected place. Change a single prior condition, and any historical outcome could have turned out differently…

…Contingency demands that students think deeply about past, present, and future. It offers a powerful corrective to teleology, the fallacy that events pursue a straight-arrow course to a pre-determined outcome, since people in the past had no way of anticipating our present world. Contingency also reminds us that individuals shape the course of human events. What if Karl Marx had decided to elude Prussian censors by emigrating to the United States instead of France, where he met Frederick Engels? To assert that the past is contingent is to impress upon students the notion that the future is up for grabs, and that they bear some responsibility for shaping the course of future history.”

—Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke

“What Does It Mean to Think Historically?” (2007)

R