Trismegistos: Database of Ancient Papyri | Hacker News Reader

Trismegistos: Database of Ancient Papyri

trismegistos.org

21 pointsdr_dshiv10 comments

I think crowdsourcing+Tech might allow for a new era of discovery. We only have about 1% of classical material remaining, but every year, hundreds of papyri are discovered -- mostly by looters. Why is ancient knowledge relevant?

I like to think about how "Ancient Intelligence" might intersect with artificial intelligence. Cute, I know, but bear with me. Ancient intelligence created human civilization. Artificial intelligence will transition us to what comes next. Perhaps the Ancient Intelligence can help retain our humanity as we transition?

Here is the reference where I learned about Trismegistos -- and the rate at which new papyri are discovered.

It's an amazing podcast, btw: https://shwep.net/podcast/korshi-dosoo-on-the-papyri-graeci-...

Pretty silly suggestion if you knew a bit about ancient history, or not so ancient.

Slavery, oppression by any means (taxation or force), fights to the death as entertainment, hideous punishments, genocide, immense inequity, tyrants killing at whim, women usually treated like crap, forced prostitution, rape with little or no recourse for the victim, minimal to no education for most... which part of that do you consider civilised.

This is taking what the poster above you said, hammering it into your own world view and then accusing him of a misunderstanding of civilization.

> A civilization or civilisation is any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification imposed by a cultural elite, symbolic systems of communication, and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment.

I tend to agree with this definition and as you can see, there is no asterisk (*) regarding ```Slavery, oppression by any means (taxation or force), fights to the death as entertainment, hideous punishments, genocide, immense inequity, tyrants killing at whim, women usually treated like crap, forced prostitution, rape with little or no recourse for the victim, minimal to no education for most```.

Now, going back to the poster's argument, it is possible that an artificial intelligence will start developing society in its own understanding of it and it might emulate some aspects of early civilizations (yes, even the ones containing rape, minimal education, genocide, immense inequity), and perhaps it is important to study those in order to understand a possible new one.

So try to retaliate his argument with another one in the context set by him rather than trying to hammer in your civilization not compatible with things you don't like world view...

I'd actually agree with you, that I misrepresented him (and didn't check the meaning of civilisation - good catch there!) except for his last line, to wit "Perhaps the Ancient Intelligence can help retain our humanity as we transition?"

I take 'humanity' here to mean not doing the evils I was talking about - but which ancient cultures did in fact do in horrible abundance.

When talking history, civilization describes a form of human society. It is not some kind of moral value judgement.

That's like refusing bread because of all the holes in it. Yes, there are gaps within the goodness of human civilization, but outside it, things were typically much worse!

Surely you don't think the society we live in would be possible without having gone through the very real process of developing a civilization? It's hard to judge their actions by today's morality.

The important point is that the transmission of humanistic writing formed the basis for the enlightenment -- and the moral values of modern society.

>Trismegistos [TM], called after the famous epithet of Hermes - Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom and writing who also played a major role in Greek religion and philosophy, is a platform aiming to surmount barriers of language and discipline in the study of texts from the ancient world... (roughly BC 800 - 800 AD).

>The core component of TM is Trismegistos Texts, currently counting 804,940 entries.

>... Trismegistos increasingly wants to be a platform where information can be found about all texts from antiquity, thus facilitating cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research.

>...our aim is to lead people to the partner websites, where more information, often including also photographs, transliterations and translations of the texts, can be found.

At Papyri.info

>Papyrological Editor (PE) enables multi-author, version controlled, peer reviewed scholarly curation of papyrological texts, translations, commentary, scholarly metadata, institutional catalog records, bibliography, and images.

All papyri with English translations are here: http://papyri.info/search?DATE_MODE=LOOSE&DOCS_PER_PAGE=15&T...

It is said that there are enough unread and uncategorized papyri in museums around the worlds to keep historians occupied for a century.

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