https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopography

There is an interesting example of the mnemonic use of stone here in ancient Sumer. It serves as a boundary/border marker by its physical presence, but apart from any (other local) mnemonic uses, it also carries an inscription as a secondary form of long term written memory.

Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/rpPeOl4IEeyqH1-fAP0WQw

Rosetta Stone (RS)

Useful Links

1. Rosetta Stone_ Wikipedia
2. Explore the Rosetta Stone_ British Museum
3. Rosetta Stone_ Britannica
4. What is Rosetta Stone and why is it important?
5. Rosetta Stone- Smithsonian

On July 19, 1799, Pierre- Francois Bouchard's men discovered an ancient "basalt" slab in Rosetta (local name Rashid), Egypt. It was covered with 3 types of writing- Demotic, Hieroglyphics and ancient Greek. Scholars traced origin of the RS to 196 BCE in Egypt's Ptolemaic era

Click map of the Ptolemaic dynasty

<center>The Rosetta Stone decoded by AI</center> Click this YouTube Link

How the Hieroglyphics were decodified?

• Europeans were missing a key piece of the puzzle and had been for 2 000 years. They had been trying to figure out how to read hieroglyphics for centuries but the only instructions on how to do so came from ancient Greek and Roman writers who insisted that they were ideographies using pictures to indicate concepts. While that was true sometimes they could also be phonetic indicating sounds the same way as alphabetic languages do. This misunderstanding was inherited all the way to the 1800s.
• Medieval Muslim researchers tried to crack the code and failed though two did discover that some of the code lined up with Coptic, a descendant of ancient Egyptian. Later when Renaissance alchemists attempted to read the texts hoping to learn ancient spells, healing practices and other wonders, they had even less luck.
• It wasn't in until 1814 that an English polymath named Thomas Young made the first real progress. Young, a medical doctor, scientist and linguist at first just busied himself with translating the Demonic section of the Rosetta Stone. However, after a conversation with another researcher (who suggested that the ptolemies being Greek might have written their names phonetically in hieroglyphics) he decided to jump sections. He reasoned that finding the Royal name should be easy enough since it had been suggested that they were always in a circle that we now know as a Cartouche and sure enough he found the name Ptolemy. Upon further study, Young found 80 similarities between the hieroglyphic section of the stone and the Demonic one.
• Young's work stalled as he incorrectly assumed that hieroglyphics were logographic symbols with each symbol representing a word (like Chinese or Japanese) and that only the Greek names would have phonetic equivalents.

In comes Jean Francois Champollion!

• Champollion had been attempting to translate hieroglyphics from his knowlege of Copic and Demotic believing that they were in fact phonetic. However, being in France he had to work off print copies of the stone and probably never got to see the actual Rosetta Stone.
• champollion used his earlier work on demonic and knowledge of Coptic to reconstruct theoretical cartouches of common Egyptian royal names> His hope was that these cartouches, should he find them in inscriptions, would gradually unlock more hieroglyphic characters. This he did while also feuding with rivals and periodically going into exile for his continued support of Napoleon.
• Then when Banks (see below about Banks) sent him a print of the inscriptions on his Obelisk champollion stopped dead. There on the side was his reconstruction of Cleopatra! He went into a feverish blitz of work and began to realize that Egyptian hieroglyphics were a mix of ideographic and phonetic characters.
• It was i 1822 when it all clicked. He read the name Thutmose from an imported inscription, then checked it against the Rosetta Stone. He then bolted from his desk ran down the street to his brother's house and supposedly screamed "I've got it" before collapsing in a dramatic faint.
• In1829 he fulfilled his lifelong dream of traveling to Egypt. Once there, he found a vanished world beginning to speak to him. Using his dictionary and grammar system, he read the words of Gods and Priests off the temple walls. He uncovered Kings whose names had not been spoken in a millennia and in the Papyrus Scrolls preserved in the Arid deserts of Upper Egypt he found the words of the common people even though he'd never laid eyes on it.

About Banks mentioned above

John Banks was touring Egypt when he fell in love with a 22 foot tall six-ton Obelisk and decided that it would look great in front of his yard as it also had inscriptions in hieroglyphics and Greek. He hoped it would be a second Rosetta Stone. So he did what anyone would do: hired an Italian circus strongman to coordinate hauling it back to his estate in England.

How the Rosetta Stone was discovered

<div style="background-color: silver; color: black; font-weight: bold;"> Nearly 2 000 years after the Rosetta stone decree was written, the French military engineer Pierre Francois Bouchard was repairing the defenses of an Arab Fort strengthening it against the ottoman Fleet that's expected to arrive within a short time. Only a year ago the French army had invaded Egypt and attempted to set up a colony but that increasingly looked doomed to failure as both the Ottomans and British were mustering to attack the French and the Army has to consistently battle internal revolts. </div>

Discovery of the Rosetta Stone

<div style="background-color: DarkCyan; color: white; font-weight: bold;"> During the repair work the engineers find the stone seemingly used as scrap construction material in an old wall. They immediately brought it to Bouchard's attention as they're supposed to do with any artifact. Seeing the script on the broken Stone Bouchard immediately realized the implications of this find as this inscription was in three different languages and it could be the key to finally deciphering Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics. so he sends out a message saying he's found a curious artifact near Rosetta the French name for Rasheed. </div>

How Rosetta Stone was deciphered

<div style="background-color: LightCyan; color: black; font-weight: bold;"> Bouchard sent out a message saying he's found a curious artifact near Rosetta, the French name for Rasheed. He then passed the stone to General Mano transferring it to his tent to be cleaned and the Greek to be translated while they dug in hopes of finding its missing pieces but then as the French army fought off an Ottoman landing at Abu kirbei Bouchard accompanied the 1700 pound Stone to the savants headquarters at Cairo. It arrived just in time for Napoleon to see it before he ditched the Expedition and sailed back to France. In doing so he left the savants with a deteriorating military situation alongside a Priceless but extremely heavy artifact that they had no way of getting back to France. </div>

Note:The French Expedition also had an academic component of over 150 so-called savants - scientists, writers, linguists and other academics who had come along setting up a research institute in Cairo where they studied everything from local Wildlife to ancient artifacts.

The deciphering of the Rosetta Stone

Rosetta Stone changes hands from French to the British:

It became soon obvious that the mysterious third language was not Syriac as originally thought but the Demotic mentioned in classical sources. At first they tried copying it by hand but it proved too intricate. Then they just smeared ink on the front and then pressed it with paper like it was a printing press. It worked ! All the while the French army hauled the stone around even to battlefields unwilling to leave it unguarded. Prints of the inscription had already reached Paris which was good because the Rosetta Stone could not be transported there.

in 1801 General Menou, now in charge of the Expedition, signed a surrender agreement with the British and the Ottomans and one of the provisions was that all of the artifacts retrieved during the French expedition to Egypt were now Spoils of War and the personal property of King George III, especially the Rosetta Stone. In fact, the British were so pleased with its acquisition that they actually painted on the side "captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801".

Click Captured-by-British-Rosetta-Stone

A year later when King George donated it to the British museum

Why does Ptolemy figure on the inscription?

<div style="background-color: bisque; color: black; font-weight: bold; padding: 12px;"> Ptolemy V really needed something to court the priests because the ptolemaic dynasty were not Egyptians at all. They're actually Greeks and for generations these foreign Kings had kept power over Egypt by engaging with the priests. This inscription is the Memphis decree exempting the Priestly Class from taxes and from having to pay homage to him, a gesture the teenage King hoped will steady his throne and prevent another uprising. </div>

History of discovery of Rosetta Stone

(...on July 15, 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, a French soldier Pierre Bouchard discovered a black basalt slab inscribed with ancient writing near the town of Rosetta, about 35 miles east of Alexandria. The irregularly shaped stone contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Egyptian demotic. The ancient Greek on the Rosetta Stone told archaeologists that it was inscribed by priests honoring the king of Egypt, Ptolemy V, in the second century B.C. More startlingly, the Greek passage announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning. The artifact thus held the key to solving the riddle of hieroglyphics, a written language that had been “dead” for nearly 2,000 years.) For rest of the article click Rosetta Stone Found

Why is Rosetta Stone important? Click Importance of Rosetta Stone

Sly Stone, Sly and the Family Stone frontman, dies at 82 by [[Kiki Intarasuwan]]

Hill, Rosemary. Review of Use your theodolite, by Colin Richards and Vicki Cummings. London Review of Books, December 26, 2024. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n24/rosemary-hill/use-your-theodolite.

A theodolite is a precision instrument used for measuring angles both horizontally and vertically.

https://www.rilko.org/

ᔥ Alan Jacobs

https://www.facebook.com/dartmoor.archaeology1

https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/gateway/Results_Single.aspx?uid=MDV110432&resourceID=104

Archaeologist Discovers Two Neolithic Stone Circles in England, Supporting a 'Sacred Arc' Theory by [[Margherita Bassi]]

for - sustainable building - engineered stone - health ban - sustainable construction - engineered stone - health ban

for - stone age 2.0 - stone and lime - new stone age - stone and lime - sustainable building - stone and lime - post-modern construction - sustainable construction - stone and lime - post-modern construction

for - sustainable building - stone age 2.0 - quote - stone age 2.0 - post-modern stone building

quote - stone age 2.0 - post modern stone building - What is required in the first half of the 21st century is a new form of post-modern construction, - relevant to contemporary needs but as - sustainable and as - environmentally benign - as pre-industrial traditional building used to be.

for - post-modern sustainable building - RIBA President Alex Gordon - 1970s proposal for stone system - ignored

for - sustainable building - stone age 2.0 - stone for compression - post-tensioned steel rods for tension

for - corn - thousands of years to breed from 1 cm cob to present size - transition - stone age to agriculture - importance of women

for - progress - transition from stone age hunter gatherers to agriculture - role of women and children

Muhanna, Elias. “A New History of Arabia, Written in Stone.” The New Yorker, May 23, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-new-history-of-arabia-written-in-stone.

‘Romancing the Stone’ and Its Screenwriter’s Tragic Tale by [[Bob Mehr]]

for - sustainable architecture - new stone age

story details - Title: Back to the stone age: the sustainable building material we’ve all been waiting for… - Author: Rowan Moore - Date: 2023, Aug 6 - Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/aug/06/back-to-the-stone-age-the-sustainable-building-material-weve-all-been-waiting-for-amin-taha-groupwork-webb-yates-the-stonemasonry-company

for - stats - carbon footprint of stone, steel, concrete

stats - carbon footprint - stone, steel , concrete - ( see below)

• The Inventory of Embodied Carbon and Energy 2019 says carbon footprint of the following building materials are:
  • ‘General stone’ - 0.079kg carbon per kg .
  • Concrete - 0.15kg carbon per kg and
  • Steel - 2.8kg carbon per kg.

for - stone availability - stats - stone availability

stone stats - rough calculation below

• Question: Is there enough stone?
• According to the Global Cement and Concrete Association,
  • annual worldwide concrete production is roughly 1.6 km3.
• Due to its higher strength its equivalent in stone would be about one quarter of that volume.
• To put this into context,
  • the volume of a small, Ben Nevis-ish mountain is about 30km3;
  • all the world’s buildings* would only make a 56km3 or two Nevis,
  • the Earth’s crust (rock) has a volume of 10 billion km3.
• Assumptions for above calculations:
  • 7bn people living in threes in
  • 120m2 live work units made of
  • 200mm slabs.

for - new stone age - stone age renaissance - stone architecture - practitioners - Amin Taha - Steve Webb - Pierre Bidaud

for - sustainable architecture - a new stone age - the return of stone - meme - a new stone age

story details - Title: Why the time is ripe for a return to stone as a structural material - Author: Steve Webb - Date: 2023, May 29 - source: https://www.ribaj.com/intelligence/stone-as-a-structural-material-embodied-carbon-sustainability

meme - new stone age

summary - Stone buildings have lasted millenia. Compared to steel, concrete and CLT, post-tensioned stone has the least embodied energy of all. - Could we also modernize ancient animal and human powered labor to create a low carbon stone building industry? -

A second remove perhaps, but nominative determinism at play here?

• for: stone age code, similar to - Ronald Wright - computer metaphor, evolutionary psychology - examples, evolutionary paradox of modernity, evolution - last mile link, major evolutionary transition - full spectrum in modern humans, example - MET - full spectrum embedded in modern humans

• comment

• insights

  • evolutionary paradox of modernity
    • modern humans , like all the living species we share the world with, are the last mile link of the evolution of life we've made it to the present, so all species of the present are, in an evolutionary sense, winners of their respective evolutionary game
    • this means that all our present behaviors contain the full spectrum of the evolutionary history of 4 billion years of life
    • the modern human embodies all major evolutionary transitions of the past
    • so our behavior, at all levels of our being is a complex and heterogenous mixture of evolutionary adaptations from different time periods of the 4 billion years that life has taken to evolve.
    • Some behaviors may have originated billions of years ago, and others hundred thousand years ago.

• Examples: humans embody full spectrum of METs in our evolutionary past

  • fight and flight response
    • early hominids on African Savannah hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago when hominids were predated upon by wild predators
  • cancer
    • normative intercell communication breaks down and reverts to individual cell behavior from billions of years ago
      • see Michael Levin's research on how to make metastatic cancer cells return to normative collective, cooperative behavior
  • children afraid to sleep in the dark
    • evolutionary adaptation against dangerous animals that might have hid in the dark - dangerous insiects, snakes, etc, which in the past may have resulted in human fatalities
  • obesity
    • hunter gatherer hominid attraction to rich sources of fruit. Eating as much of it as we can and maybe harvesting as much as we can and carrying that with us.
      • like squirrels storing away for the winter.

Use of massebah for remembrance of a name...

Potentially used for other factors? translation? context?

See also: https://hypothes.is/a/oqgH4mx9Ee68_dMgihgD0A (Rachel's massebah in Genesis 35:19-20)

Use of a standing stone or massebah (pillar) to mark a grave in Genesis 35:19-20.

Certainly could have been other than to simply mark a location and may have been used to mark and remember the knowledge of Rachel as well as the family's experiences with Rachel, a practice which is still commonplace when visiting burial locations.

Description of the arrangement? Circle? Further or suggested usage?

Link to Genesis 28:18: https://hypothes.is/a/NF5p8Gx6Ee65Rg_J4tfaMQ

Conversely, in Western jurisprudence the emergence of the concept of environmental personhood can be traced to Christopher Stone’s seminal 1972 essay “Should Trees Have Standing?” in which the American professor argued that the natural environment as a whole should be granted rights15 and be empowered to institute legal proceedings in its own right through a guardian entity.16 This would enable courts to take injury to the environment into account and to award relief that would directly benefit the environment.17 Stone emphasized that environmental personhood was not as radical as it initially appeared, noting that the legal world is populated by inanimate rights-holders: “trusts, corporations, joint ventures . . . to mention just a few.”18 Stone further drew a parallel between granting rights to nature and the history of the conferral of rights on oppressed or minority groups in ways “theretofore, a bit unthinkable.”19

David Berman on a fave book.

Some of David Berman's book tips.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/109r830/who_else_is_pretty_much_avoiding_the_digital_zk/

movie tickets as stores of memory

what a great review...

Sounds like this shares many of the potential features of Stonehenge, stone and timber circles, and menhirs that fit into Lynne Kelly's thesis on mnemonic devices.

!- homo erectus : was a seafarer

Siltstone is a potentially valuable by-product material from de-silting of riverbeds as means of flood aid.

Anthropology and Archelogy findings support the idea that humans began laying progress traps as early as two million years ago. Our great success at socialization and communication that harnessed the power of collaboration resulted in wiping out entire species upon which we depended. Short term success leading to long term failure is a central pattern of progress traps.

Anthropology and Archelogy findings support the idea that humans began laying progress traps as early as two million years ago. Our great success at socialization and communication that harnessed the power of collaboration resulted in wiping out entire species upon which we depended. Short term success leading to long term failure is a central pattern of progress traps.

A remarkable paper from Tel Aviv researchers studying early hunters in the Southern Levant as early as 1.5 million years ago revealed that our ancestors in this part of the world were poor resource managers and over many generations, continually hunted large game to extinction, forcing descendants to hunt progressively smaller game.

Annotation of the 2021 source paper is here: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2Fscience%2Farticle%2Fabs%2Fpii%2FS0277379121005230&group=world Annotation of a science news interview with the researchers here: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedaily.com%2Freleases%2F2021%2F12%2F211221102708.htm&group=world

The researchers even surmise that the extinction of game animals by around 10,000 B.C. is what gave rise to agriculture itself!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/roger-stone-documentary-capitol-riot-trump-election/

https://www.landesmuseum.ch/en/exhibitions/temporary/2021/humans.-carved-in-stone/humans.-carved-in-stone

Worth delving into more deeply for additional sources and archaeological evidence.

This is a good example of the default "ancestor worship" and "rituals" label on archeological finds of ancient peoples

What is the actual basis for assigning these labels? Is there any real evidence or is it just become the default in the literature.

Personally I'm building evidence towards a more comprehensive thesis for what these practices may have been used for.

I wonder how much of our genetic programming is based on centuries of evolution with humans moving around their landscapes and attaching their memories to them?

Within Lynne Kelly's thesis about stone circles, henges, etc. most of the locations have roads and entryways into them which require movement much less the idea of dancing and singing attached to memory performance as well.

https://phys.org/news/2021-08-archaeologists-reveal-famous-stone-age.html

table

lower case of stone in here. Why is that?

The original Stonehenge? A dismantled stone circle in the Preseli Hills of west Wales - Antiquity - Cambridge Core

Antiquity2021 Vol. 95 (379): 85–103 https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2020.239

Interesting to think that some of these stones may have stayed behind to represent the knowledge of the group that stayed behind. If the stones can be thought of as "books", some of the extra empty ones were relocated with the knowledge of other books moved into them in new contexts.

Sort of curious that so many of these circles were around 105m in diameter on average. What might have caused this sort of regularity? What sub-measurement may have this resulted from?

Synopsis with dating of Waun Mawn stone circle.

OST: La La Land [ooo]

VÖ: 13.1.2017

Charts: 16 Wochen

AppleMusic / iTunes

The clairvoyante’s cards seem to be Tarot cards in this stanza.

Most obviously, “The Hanged Man” is the name of one of the major arcana/trumps, representing a traitorous person, or a crossroads. “The Wheel [of Fortune]” is also a trump, and represents change and movement, and the cycle of life.

The other cards all appear to be minor arcana. “The drowned Phoenician Sailor” seems to refer to the Ten of Swords, representing anguish and defeat, but with a chance of hope. (It is considered one of the most negative cards.) “Belladonna / Lady of the Rocks / Lady of Situations” is the Queen of Cups, representing a difficult road with a large reward at the end. “The man with three staves” is the Three of Wands, representing a journey, or hope for renewal. (Interestingly, this card often depicts a man looking out on a wasteland.) Finally, “the one-eyed merchant” would likely be the Six of Pentacles/Coins, representing equality and generosity.

This could be read into much more deeply than the general meanings of each card, but overall, the message appears to be “bleak, but with hope of salvation or reparation.”

It is weird that something burnished can glow. It feels much like opposites. Also it sits on top of marble which is another kind of rock or stone.

Connects to our class discussions about garbage/trash as a theme. “Stony rubbish” underlines the theme of uselessness, as things can grow out of most trash, but things cannot grow out of stone itself.