I love how the scene became clearer and clearer while you explained the context. Has the report of this particular dig been published already? We would love to show a quick animation of this scene.
We are working on the preliminary publication now. The process of putting it all together, sending to an editor, then out to peer review, editing based on their comments, and finally into print will take about a year. One of the reasons I like making these videos is that I can talk about objects and interpretations as I am working through them for publication. A quick animated version of the scene would probably be fine if it fits in with one of your videos, and I can help with more evidence for it if you need.
@@artifactuallyspeaking further evidence would be amazing to have! If I'm not wrong youtube filter comments with emails, but we have one in our channel page. Thank you!
Cool video. It's amazing to think that thousands of years ago, someone was just doing their normal everyday thing in that spot. They never would have guessed that far into the future your team would be analyzing that same place. It makes me wonder if someday archeologists will be examining the remains of our civilization and be asking themselves the same questions you do when you make a cool find.
I also like thinking about future archaeologists and what they will think of our world. I've been posting a few comparatively recent objects (antiques/collectibles) on Instagram and asking the question of what archaeologists would think if they found them long in the future.
If you watch miniminuteman and even on the channel the book Motel of the Mysteries is mentioned and it's a work of fiction that takes place in the future and they are excavating a hotel from ancient US. I'm actually going to be ordering it myself even if it might not be a novel. It looked more like an adolescent boik
Estos dos videos son, como par, un excelente recurso para usar en el salón de clase. Los utilicé en mi curso historia del arte y mis estudiantes los disfrutaron mucho. Mil gracias.
The profile of that figurine with the broad cap looks just like the late Uruk cuneiform sign LÚ (sans hat)! It would be really interesting to compare the (pre-OB) sign inventory with objects like figurines.
i love these videos. i could watch everyone dig in the dirt for hours honestly. i at one point wanted to become an archeologist but decided in high school to just to keep it a interest. (less school and debt lol)
@@ruzi.the.spider ah there is. it was more of a shift in my priorities. i love history and archeology in general but it seemed like something that would make a better interest and hobby than a stable job.
Love this! I am a linguist (just a college teacher, but I pertain to be an academic on weekends) and context, for word origins, is very much essential there too. You will not find references to John - Paul - George and Ringo, in the same sentence in a medieval manuscript or somewhere on Mayan calendar.
but you might find 'John and Paul' on pages with the other two missing or rubbed out .... just putting it out there. Given that future archaeologists and historians might be working in a vacuum created by the 'dark ages' after world war three, any reference to John and Paul working together on "a narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader" (aka a story) can be secular or religious. And that, (while hilarious) is archaeology in a nutshell.
Oh yes, very true. Without more information (statistically just the names Paul and John is almost meaningless in a large corpus) things become impossible to determine. @@ValeriePallaoro Happy and comforted, we are all working by the same logic here!
Your analysis of these areas as work zones makes sense and hangs together well, but I also can't help thinking of the Jewish practice of keeping incidentally holy writings in a special storage room when they are no longer suitable for regular use, instead of simply throwing them away or using them as kindling. The deliberate flooring and the presence of the pot and bitumen pit obviously don't make sense for a genizah-type location, but I wonder if a place like that has ever been found? It's especially interesting given that Jewish texts claim a Mesopotamian origin for their earliest practices, despite the much closer relationship to Egypt that dominates ancient Canaanite/Hebrew history.
We do find broken objects in special pits in sacred spaces. These were religious items (like figures of deities) that broke but were still sacred and so they couldn't be disposed of in a typical trash pit (or at least that's how we interpret them). We tend to use the Latin word favissa for these sacred disposal areas. The figurines that we found in this possible work area were of important people, but not gods, so I think they didn't classify as sacred.
I think you've got a really compelling hypothesis for why that patch of pottery shards is laid out in that way- I'm convinced by the evidence shown in the video and your reasoning that you're correct. Sometimes though when I see certain archaeological sites, I wonder if the real explanation for some of the finds is a lot more mundane than what the scientists think. To use your patch of pottery shards as an illustration, I imagine the possibility that someone was just absentmindedly gathering up shards of pottery and laying them flat and lining them up just for something to do on a lazy afternoon- akin to idly doodling in class in lieu of paying attention to what the teacher is saying. Then someone thousands of years later digs up that person's handiwork, and assumes it means something significant, when in reality its true significance is humanizing people from the past- reminding us that we are not different from them. That isn't the case here, but I think you get my point.
I get your point, and it's a good one. I don't know for certain that my interpretation is correct. I think the worksurface is the most likely interpretation because of the other work area nearby, but someone could have just put the pieces there for no other reason than they were bored. That, too, is a very human thing to do and rather fun to think about. We tend to expect that people in the past were so busy just trying to survive that they didn't have time to get bored, but I'm sure they did and who knows what they did to pass the time then.
@@artifactuallyspeaking I have a tendency to look back on the past and wonder "how did they not get bored without "x," and surely no one can find peace without "y," and I surely wouldn't want to imagine living without "z." I think that's a trap though, because I need to remember that experience is relative. Someone in the early 1800s wouldn't even be able to conceive that Netflix is a thing they're missing out on. So then I think, perhaps those people at Ur had more fun than we can imagine, because from their perspective they're at the cutting edge of technological development, just like we are in the 21st century. Perhaps people would see the latest innovation from the local craftsman and exclaim "Wow, what a time to be alive!" This is pure speculation, but I imagine that the sorts of things they might have had to amuse themselves (balls, games) would likely be made out of materials that would deteriorate too quickly to show up in the archaeological record. I think it's also fun to imagine how those people at Ur might have thought about their ancient ancestors. Did they wonder how people hundreds or thousands of years ago didn't get bored without "xyz?"
@@choronos Consider Onfim! He was a child in 12th century Novgorod, and we have his writing practice work, complete with doodles of knights and dragons. In a more general sense, the stories of these times that come down to us are full of riddle games and storytelling, sometimes storytelling competitions. These to me seem like an obvious source of both participatory and audience entertainment - if your workday is light, you can wander down to the market square and see what the local storyteller has come up with since you last came by (or what crazy story the merchant is pushing to get you to buy some of his jars, when you've got a couple of perfectly good ones at home), and even if you're busy all day, you and your coworkers can entertain each other by trying to come up with outrageous stories or clever word-puzzles.
@@choronos they may not have wondered that about their ancestors because they probably didn’t have the same concept of history as we do today; history for most people would’ve been the myth and legends and general story telling being told rather than accurate records of history and those would probably have undergone a shift over time to keep some things contemporary, similar to how if you look at late medieval/Renaissance art of things like the Iliad, they depict the characters in full plate armour and wearing clothing contemporary to when the art was painted, not to when the stories were set. I’d imagine something similar would happen here, with the people living at Ur when these artefacts were freshly made thinking their ancestors to be pretty much like themselves.
however, what you're doing is assigning past humanity with different values than yours @@lordofuzkulak8308 We have done this with hunter-gatherer cultures in our recent past, with other nation's peoples that we see as 'the other', and with 'ancient cultures'. But we've been wrong. We do know that other cultures are full of peoples just like us, who wonder about their ancestors, rewrite their histories to make themselves seem more important, to tell stories that relive the narrative of the day, just like we do now. Myth and Legend can be comfort stories around the camp fire, they can be moralistic and justified to encourage cohesion, and they can tell the factual historical narrative. Our records of history, just because they are written down, are no more than this. Think, simply, of how the winners tell the tale of conquest versus the conquered. How your story of other nations compare with that history told in their schools. Only when we go into the very, very deep past can we say that cultures we dig up in archeology are different to ours.
i wonder if it was a pottery recycling spot about to be ground up and reused in some pottery but the layout is strange and would mean work was interrupted
The figurines may have come in a job lot of broken ceramics and were thrown to one side because they were too knobbly and uncomfortable to stand/kneel on? Fetched by an apprentice who did not understand the exact needs of the artesan, perhaps?
That's possible. Maybe they came in while the top layer was being laid down and that one needed to be as smooth as it could be. The two boats were found in the lower layer of sherds, where they could be a bit more knobbly. Another possibility I like to imagine is that the person gathering these things took a liking to the broken figurines and put them to the side as companions of a sort, watching over the work space.
@@artifactuallyspeaking Yes, I like the idea of just having decoration around without it necessarily being of deep ritualistic importance. The fruits-and-veggies wallpaper design that came with my kitchen doesn't have to mean the prior occupants were praying to fertility gods in that space, and the fact I painted it over doesn't mean there was a huge societal shift in religious orthodoxy. It seems like for a long time interpretations ignored simple human urges and now archaeology is more inclined to admit not everything in the past was all about the gods. Thanks for the in-depth view, I love your teaching style.
@@artifactuallyspeaking could the figurines been from children’s toys? Maybe something like the child of the worker or one they were watching over while working could’ve been playing nearby and the toys got discarded when they got broken. Although if that was the case I expect you’d have found more parts of the same figurine and been able to reassemble a near complete one rather than just the single shards you did find.
They could have been toys used here at the work surface, but as you say, I would then expect to find the whole thing or at least the broken pieces of the complete figurine. It is likely that children helped their families and played games around them while they worked, so the image you've created is likely to have occurred relatively often I'd think.
So at the risk of provoking academic wrath, are there proper channels through which ordinary people can purchase less important artifacts or ones that there are many versions of? I feel like this must worth similar to the way fossils do: important and rare fossils are in museums, but then ones we have many instances of, such as fossilized shark teeth, will get sold to the public unless there's something significant about them.
I see the reasoning behind the suggestion (many people are truly interested in history and would love to own and care for ancient objects, and the money spent could go to continued scientific research) but there aren't really any such channels these days. If there were a legal market, it would provide higher incentive for illegal markets and therefore increased looting. Trade like this caused a lot of damage in the past and is the main reason that host countries no longer allow artifacts out of their borders, even to scientists and archaeologists. Of course there are some exceptions around the world, like Britain's Treasure Trove law, but not for Mesopotamian artifacts.
So many things like that on ebay and it makes me sad, they're either fake or came out of a grave, honestly don't know how the police in those countries can allow cultural heritidge to be sold off
They don't. They have a rigorous process to try and stop it. It's just much bigger than you assume. More secretive, more hard to track, more hidden with many layers of complexity. If they're fake, no problem, just simple buyer beware - not a police problem. But treasure hunting is a thing. And it's harder then. you think to stop it.
I love how the scene became clearer and clearer while you explained the context. Has the report of this particular dig been published already? We would love to show a quick animation of this scene.
We are working on the preliminary publication now. The process of putting it all together, sending to an editor, then out to peer review, editing based on their comments, and finally into print will take about a year.
One of the reasons I like making these videos is that I can talk about objects and interpretations as I am working through them for publication. A quick animated version of the scene would probably be fine if it fits in with one of your videos, and I can help with more evidence for it if you need.
@@artifactuallyspeaking further evidence would be amazing to have! If I'm not wrong youtube filter comments with emails, but we have one in our channel page. Thank you!
Hail King Context. Thanks for video.
Really fascinating. Thanks for continuing to post these videos.
Cool video. It's amazing to think that thousands of years ago, someone was just doing their normal everyday thing in that spot. They never would have guessed that far into the future your team would be analyzing that same place. It makes me wonder if someday archeologists will be examining the remains of our civilization and be asking themselves the same questions you do when you make a cool find.
I also like thinking about future archaeologists and what they will think of our world. I've been posting a few comparatively recent objects (antiques/collectibles) on Instagram and asking the question of what archaeologists would think if they found them long in the future.
If you watch miniminuteman and even on the channel the book Motel of the Mysteries is mentioned and it's a work of fiction that takes place in the future and they are excavating a hotel from ancient US. I'm actually going to be ordering it myself even if it might not be a novel. It looked more like an adolescent boik
As an Iraqi, I am excited that archaeologists are finally able to freely discover the ancient ruins
Estos dos videos son, como par, un excelente recurso para usar en el salón de clase. Los utilicé en mi curso historia del arte y mis estudiantes los disfrutaron mucho. Mil gracias.
Thank you again for another great video. A phrase I've long espoused is "context is everything".
Coming from your friend Milo's page! Can't wait to see your content sir😁
Reporting from PA as well
Found you from Milo! Glad to be a new subscriber!
That's really fascinating. I never would've guessed that was the context!
Very cool
The profile of that figurine with the broad cap looks just like the late Uruk cuneiform sign LÚ (sans hat)! It would be really interesting to compare the (pre-OB) sign inventory with objects like figurines.
just discovered your channel! i love it. thank you for explaining things so beautifully
Great video, super informative as always! Also enjoyed seeing you in your office instead of in front of a green screen
i love these videos. i could watch everyone dig in the dirt for hours honestly. i at one point wanted to become an archeologist but decided in high school to just to keep it a interest. (less school and debt lol)
Oh no that's kind of sad. Isn't there any financial support to study in your country? :(
@@ruzi.the.spider ah there is. it was more of a shift in my priorities. i love history and archeology in general but it seemed like something that would make a better interest and hobby than a stable job.
Love this! I am a linguist (just a college teacher, but I pertain to be an academic on weekends) and context, for word origins, is very much essential there too.
You will not find references to John - Paul - George and Ringo, in the same sentence in a medieval manuscript or somewhere on Mayan calendar.
but you might find 'John and Paul' on pages with the other two missing or rubbed out .... just putting it out there. Given that future archaeologists and historians might be working in a vacuum created by the 'dark ages' after world war three, any reference to John and Paul working together on "a narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader" (aka a story) can be secular or religious. And that, (while hilarious) is archaeology in a nutshell.
Oh yes, very true. Without more information (statistically just the names Paul and John is almost meaningless in a large corpus) things become impossible to determine. @@ValeriePallaoro Happy and comforted, we are all working by the same logic here!
Your analysis of these areas as work zones makes sense and hangs together well, but I also can't help thinking of the Jewish practice of keeping incidentally holy writings in a special storage room when they are no longer suitable for regular use, instead of simply throwing them away or using them as kindling. The deliberate flooring and the presence of the pot and bitumen pit obviously don't make sense for a genizah-type location, but I wonder if a place like that has ever been found? It's especially interesting given that Jewish texts claim a Mesopotamian origin for their earliest practices, despite the much closer relationship to Egypt that dominates ancient Canaanite/Hebrew history.
We do find broken objects in special pits in sacred spaces. These were religious items (like figures of deities) that broke but were still sacred and so they couldn't be disposed of in a typical trash pit (or at least that's how we interpret them). We tend to use the Latin word favissa for these sacred disposal areas. The figurines that we found in this possible work area were of important people, but not gods, so I think they didn't classify as sacred.
very cool :O
I love this! Thank you for making these types of videos!
"Context is what?" Yells Hatshepsut from across the way (and time)
I think you've got a really compelling hypothesis for why that patch of pottery shards is laid out in that way- I'm convinced by the evidence shown in the video and your reasoning that you're correct. Sometimes though when I see certain archaeological sites, I wonder if the real explanation for some of the finds is a lot more mundane than what the scientists think. To use your patch of pottery shards as an illustration, I imagine the possibility that someone was just absentmindedly gathering up shards of pottery and laying them flat and lining them up just for something to do on a lazy afternoon- akin to idly doodling in class in lieu of paying attention to what the teacher is saying. Then someone thousands of years later digs up that person's handiwork, and assumes it means something significant, when in reality its true significance is humanizing people from the past- reminding us that we are not different from them. That isn't the case here, but I think you get my point.
I get your point, and it's a good one. I don't know for certain that my interpretation is correct. I think the worksurface is the most likely interpretation because of the other work area nearby, but someone could have just put the pieces there for no other reason than they were bored. That, too, is a very human thing to do and rather fun to think about. We tend to expect that people in the past were so busy just trying to survive that they didn't have time to get bored, but I'm sure they did and who knows what they did to pass the time then.
@@artifactuallyspeaking I have a tendency to look back on the past and wonder "how did they not get bored without "x," and surely no one can find peace without "y," and I surely wouldn't want to imagine living without "z." I think that's a trap though, because I need to remember that experience is relative. Someone in the early 1800s wouldn't even be able to conceive that Netflix is a thing they're missing out on. So then I think, perhaps those people at Ur had more fun than we can imagine, because from their perspective they're at the cutting edge of technological development, just like we are in the 21st century. Perhaps people would see the latest innovation from the local craftsman and exclaim "Wow, what a time to be alive!"
This is pure speculation, but I imagine that the sorts of things they might have had to amuse themselves (balls, games) would likely be made out of materials that would deteriorate too quickly to show up in the archaeological record. I think it's also fun to imagine how those people at Ur might have thought about their ancient ancestors. Did they wonder how people hundreds or thousands of years ago didn't get bored without "xyz?"
@@choronos Consider Onfim! He was a child in 12th century Novgorod, and we have his writing practice work, complete with doodles of knights and dragons.
In a more general sense, the stories of these times that come down to us are full of riddle games and storytelling, sometimes storytelling competitions. These to me seem like an obvious source of both participatory and audience entertainment - if your workday is light, you can wander down to the market square and see what the local storyteller has come up with since you last came by (or what crazy story the merchant is pushing to get you to buy some of his jars, when you've got a couple of perfectly good ones at home), and even if you're busy all day, you and your coworkers can entertain each other by trying to come up with outrageous stories or clever word-puzzles.
@@choronos they may not have wondered that about their ancestors because they probably didn’t have the same concept of history as we do today; history for most people would’ve been the myth and legends and general story telling being told rather than accurate records of history and those would probably have undergone a shift over time to keep some things contemporary, similar to how if you look at late medieval/Renaissance art of things like the Iliad, they depict the characters in full plate armour and wearing clothing contemporary to when the art was painted, not to when the stories were set. I’d imagine something similar would happen here, with the people living at Ur when these artefacts were freshly made thinking their ancestors to be pretty much like themselves.
however, what you're doing is assigning past humanity with different values than yours @@lordofuzkulak8308 We have done this with hunter-gatherer cultures in our recent past, with other nation's peoples that we see as 'the other', and with 'ancient cultures'. But we've been wrong. We do know that other cultures are full of peoples just like us, who wonder about their ancestors, rewrite their histories to make themselves seem more important, to tell stories that relive the narrative of the day, just like we do now. Myth and Legend can be comfort stories around the camp fire, they can be moralistic and justified to encourage cohesion, and they can tell the factual historical narrative. Our records of history, just because they are written down, are no more than this. Think, simply, of how the winners tell the tale of conquest versus the conquered. How your story of other nations compare with that history told in their schools. Only when we go into the very, very deep past can we say that cultures we dig up in archeology are different to ours.
i wonder if it was a pottery recycling spot about to be ground up and reused in some pottery but the layout is strange and would mean work was interrupted
The figurines may have come in a job lot of broken ceramics and were thrown to one side because they were too knobbly and uncomfortable to stand/kneel on? Fetched by an apprentice who did not understand the exact needs of the artesan, perhaps?
That's possible. Maybe they came in while the top layer was being laid down and that one needed to be as smooth as it could be. The two boats were found in the lower layer of sherds, where they could be a bit more knobbly.
Another possibility I like to imagine is that the person gathering these things took a liking to the broken figurines and put them to the side as companions of a sort, watching over the work space.
@@artifactuallyspeaking Yes, I like the idea of just having decoration around without it necessarily being of deep ritualistic importance. The fruits-and-veggies wallpaper design that came with my kitchen doesn't have to mean the prior occupants were praying to fertility gods in that space, and the fact I painted it over doesn't mean there was a huge societal shift in religious orthodoxy. It seems like for a long time interpretations ignored simple human urges and now archaeology is more inclined to admit not everything in the past was all about the gods. Thanks for the in-depth view, I love your teaching style.
@@artifactuallyspeaking could the figurines been from children’s toys? Maybe something like the child of the worker or one they were watching over while working could’ve been playing nearby and the toys got discarded when they got broken. Although if that was the case I expect you’d have found more parts of the same figurine and been able to reassemble a near complete one rather than just the single shards you did find.
They could have been toys used here at the work surface, but as you say, I would then expect to find the whole thing or at least the broken pieces of the complete figurine. It is likely that children helped their families and played games around them while they worked, so the image you've created is likely to have occurred relatively often I'd think.
So at the risk of provoking academic wrath, are there proper channels through which ordinary people can purchase less important artifacts or ones that there are many versions of? I feel like this must worth similar to the way fossils do: important and rare fossils are in museums, but then ones we have many instances of, such as fossilized shark teeth, will get sold to the public unless there's something significant about them.
I see the reasoning behind the suggestion (many people are truly interested in history and would love to own and care for ancient objects, and the money spent could go to continued scientific research) but there aren't really any such channels these days. If there were a legal market, it would provide higher incentive for illegal markets and therefore increased looting. Trade like this caused a lot of damage in the past and is the main reason that host countries no longer allow artifacts out of their borders, even to scientists and archaeologists.
Of course there are some exceptions around the world, like Britain's Treasure Trove law, but not for Mesopotamian artifacts.
You can get really good copies though (not withstanding all that @artefactuallyspeaking has said)
Positive Algorithm Comment
Nicely done (also a positive algorithm comment, just working with in the established parameters)
hi 🇭🇺🇪🇺
So many things like that on ebay and it makes me sad, they're either fake or came out of a grave, honestly don't know how the police in those countries can allow cultural heritidge to be sold off
They don't. They have a rigorous process to try and stop it. It's just much bigger than you assume. More secretive, more hard to track, more hidden with many layers of complexity. If they're fake, no problem, just simple buyer beware - not a police problem. But treasure hunting is a thing. And it's harder then. you think to stop it.
@@ValeriePallaoro no it isn't, don't be stupid, or are you purposefully trying to spread misinformation