M.J. Rose

Some thing are better left in the sky where they belong…

From Ancient Origins,

The Comet that Changed Civilization – And May Do Again

“On 30 September this year the first human spacecraft ever to orbit a comet was deliberately crashed onto its surface in order to get the closest possible pictures of the enigmatic celestial body. This will end its mission that began when the vessel was launched over twelve years ago. During the past two years the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe has been circling the comet millions of miles from Earth, making unprecedented close-range observations of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (named after the two astronomers who discovered it).

One of the spacecraft’s most significant accomplishments is to have taken readings of the comet’s makeup, determining that it contains some of the basic building blocks of life. Cometary impacts, it seems, may have helped start life on Earth. But comets, such as the focus of the Rosetta mission, have also posed threats to earthly life. 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko is around two and a half miles across; if it hit the Earth— which thankfully it won’t— it could put an end to civilization as we know it. A comet just 500 feet in diameter is believed to have caused the Tunguska event of 1908, when it exploded over a remote area of Siberia with the force of a fifteen megaton bomb, flattening 1000 square miles of forest. But the Tunguska comet was miniscule compared to one, estimated to have been around ten miles wide, which almost collided with our planet three and a half thousand years ago…”

For the rest, click here.

P.S. Our friends over at the Long Now Foundation created something amazing called the Rosetta Disk – and here’s something that not very many people know: The Rosetta Disk hitched a ride on the Rosetta probe. Learn more about this adventure here.

“But it was not the very first disk. That one is in space. In 2004 the Rosetta Space Probe was launched by the European Space Agency. This small craft was created to land on a comet in 2014. Before it blasted off, the ESA contacted us because we share names. They asked if we’d like to mount a version of the disk on their probe. Of course we would! We had manufactured a pure nickel disc with a subset of 6,000 pages of language translations, which was mounted on the payload section of the probe…“

In celebration of our most recent post on the Ancient stories that are being published in English for the first time, here’s a wonderful little piece all about what our beloved Ancient Egyptians were eating and drinking while they came up with all those glorious stories…

Bread, Beer, and All Good Things

The staple food was bread and beer, supplemented by onions or other vegetables and dried fish.

They eat loaves of bread of coarse grain which they call cyllestis. They make their beverage from barley, for they have no vines in their country.They eat fish raw, sun-dried or preserved in salt brine. —Herodotus, Histories 2,77

Meat was not eaten often by the fellahin ^[4]. Even the workers at Deir el Medina, certainly better off than the ordinary peasant, received meat supplies mostly on special festive occsaions only.^[10] Growing domesticated animals for the sole purpose of meat production was (and still is) expensive. People sometimes supplemented their diet by hunting and fowling and by gathering wild fruit and roots. In the Tale of Sinuhe the protagonist, who had become a tribal chief, recounts:

Loaves were made for me daily, and wine as daily fare, cooked meat, roast fowl, as well as desert game. For they snared for me and laid it before me, in addition to the catch of my hounds. Many sweets were made for me, and milk dishes of all kinds.

 

Read (and see) the rest here.

Pretty much the best news ever…

From Smithsonian.com,

Ancient Egyptian Stories Will Be Published in English for the First Time

Translated from hieroglyphics on monuments, tombs and papyri, the book will present tales few outside of academia have read

By Jason Daley

“While people may view inscriptions in Greek or Latin as pretty, they still recognize their merit as text. Indeed, writings from ancient Greece and Rome are revered and considered classics of Western literature. Egyptian hieroglyphics, however, are often seen as mere decoration. Sometimes, the characters are literally used as wallpaper.

One reason is that schoolchildren and classicists alike have read Greek and Latin widely for centuries. But hieroglyphics and the stories they tell have remained accessible only to a handful of trained scholars. That’s one reason Penguin Classics has published Writings from Ancient Egypt in Great Britain (it will be available in the US in January), the first literary English translation of some of the texts that cover thousands of square feet of monuments and tomb walls.

Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson, a fellow of Clare College at Cambridge University, tells Dalya Alberge at The Guardian that the ancient Egyptian writing is just as compelling and layered as those written by the Romans. “What will surprise people are the insights behind the well-known facade of ancient Egypt, behind the image that everyone has of the pharaohs, Tutankhamun’s mask and the pyramids,” Wilkinson says…”

Read more here.