The Torch Podcast with Bob Brier | The Great Courses
Posted on 08/22/2018 7:52:29 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The University of Copenhagen in Denmark is home to a unique collection of Ancient Egyptian papyrus manuscripts. A large part of the collection has not yet been translated, leaving researchers in the dark about what they might contain. "A large part of the texts are still unpublished. Texts about medicine, botany, astronomy, astrology, and other sciences practiced in Ancient Egypt," says Egyptologist Kim Ryholt, Head of the Carlsberg Papyrus Collection at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark... "It's totally unique for me to be able to work with unpublished material. It doesn't happen in many places around the world," says PhD student Amber Jacob from the Institute for the Study of The Ancient World at New York University... one of four PhD students working on the unpublished manuscripts... focusses on the medical texts from the Tebtunis temple library, which existed long before the famous Library of Alexandria, up until 200 BCE. In one of the texts, she has found evidence that Ancient Egyptians knew about the existence of kidneys... The papyri also reveal insights into the Egyptian view on astrology... "Today, astrology is seen as a pseudoscience, but in antiquity it was different. It was an important tool for predicting the future and it was considered a very central science," says Ryholt... Astrology was their way of avoiding going to war on a bad day, such as when the celestial bodies were aligned in a particular configuration... The unpublished manuscripts provide a unique insight to the history of science, says Ryholt. "When you hear about the history of science, the focus is often on the Greek and Roman material. But we have Egyptian material that goes much further back. One of our medical texts was written 3,500 years ago when there was no written material on the European continent," he says.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenordic.com ...
You can get pregnancy test kits in the Dollar Tree these days.
Only her version has a crack down the middle...
It looks a bit like ‘they carry’ in Devanagari
I disagree it’s so ‘specialized’ that translation is limited to the knowledge and available time of 4 PhD candidates. Surely we could count at least 400. Or 4000 worldwide. Discovery shouldn’t rely on time between spring breaks, sabatticals, summer breaks, fall breaks, seminars, lectures and vacations.
Crowd-source it out on the Gutenberg Project model. How much faster could complete translation occur if hundreds of people were working, assigned page by assigned page, and tossing trick ponys off to ‘the experts’ to fill in. We’re not talking War and Peace here. I did notice page fragments, large and small captured between two sheets of lucite. Translation of the large being the key to smaller fragments. What if all that remained in 6 months was the translation of the smallest, the last fragments? With as many work-study grants that the government hands out to students, universities have no lack of free labor to photograph and digitize. The volunteers won’t mind if the 4 PhD candidates want to take the final accolades.
Wow, thanks!
https://www.omniglot.com/writing/devanagari.htm
http://www.ancientscripts.com/devanagari.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari
So, according to you it's also not up the owners of the documents? And that the four PhD candidates, who contrary to what you implied, haven't been spending their entire third decades of their lives on spring, summer, and fall breaks, sabbaticals, and vacations, should not have any voice in the matter? Then I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
I doubt the professors and grad students would like the idea of putting themselves out of jobs. In the "publish or perish" world of academia, having exclusive access to material that would result in a publishable paper, is like having your own gold mine. Look at the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls
This thread has real meaningful heiroglyphics that tell a real story
They’re actually making some breakthroughs by reviewing the old manuscripts. While some remedies were junk, others did work to a degree.
1,000-year-old onion and garlic eye remedy kills MRSA
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-32117815
Sure. Just a precursor to the NYT and fake news. LOL!
One manuscript was translated as follows: "Do not take if you have high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney disease, or while taking medication for heart disease. Side effects may include insomnia, diarrhea, dizziness, double vision, or loss of appetite. If symptoms persist for more than 21 days, check with your doctor or pharmacist before continuing ton take this medication."
There's no grant money in that, and there's nothing that academic types love more than grant money, so it ain't gonna happen.
The ancients probably didn’t have to worry about filling out forms on human subject testing safety!
I can see it now.
Oh Thutmose bring me another slave, the crocodile ate this one!
Note in research diary: “Does not work if dung still in crocodile! Next will try dung left behind by crocodile!”
LOL
The inside joke is that rktman posts heiroglyphics not understood by most FReepers.
He knows my bugging is because he is a FRiend
Hiero, hiero, he’s off with glyphs to post...
What if your blood pressure is diverted for more than 4 hours?
Sure Bert. :-). You got that one right?
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