
Seikilos epitaph - benbreen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph
======
mirimir
> ... in about 1893, as it "was broken at the bottom, its base was sawn off
> straight so that it could stand and serve as a pedestal for Mrs Purser's
> flowerpots"; this caused the loss of one line of text, i.e., while the stele
> would now stand upright, the grinding had obliterated the last line of the
> inscription.

Sigh.

~~~
vanderZwan
Sadly, history is full of stories like that:

> _Mummy brown was a rich brown bituminous pigment, intermediate in tint
> between burnt umber and raw umber, which was one of the favorite colors of
> the Pre-Raphaelites. [It] was originally made in the 16th and 17th centuries
> from white pitch, myrrh, and the ground-up remains of Egyptian mummies, both
> human and feline._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown)

~~~
dogma1138
The Egyptian's mummified everyone not just pharaohs and other people of note.

Mummies have been used for resources by the local populous heck much more
important things were used for local resources many monuments were turned into
essentially quarries by the locals.

Exporting "mummies" and their byproduct was going in Egypt since for ever
during roman times mummified remains were used in medicine, alchemy, pigments
and much more. Mummia which is the "medical" use of mummified remains is
documented in Materia Medica which is essentially the oldest surviving medical
encyclopedia and the documented use of it dates back to at least Imhotep which
was an Egyptian physician (before he was made a god).

While some of these artifacts may have had historical value in hindsight you
are essentially arguing against recycling.

~~~
paviva
De materia medica refers to "mūmiyā", a kind of asphalt, and not to human
mummies. The use of human remains began during the Middle Ages.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummia)

------
Apocryphon
How serendipitous that the most everlasting song would be about the
evanescence of existence!

------
CalRobert
Civ V turned me on to this song, and it's been intermittently stuck in my head
ever since. I hum it to my infant daughter often (along with Ocarina tunes
from Zelda..)

The lyrics are bittersweet, but I find them fitting for a parent to sing to
their child.

``` While you live, shine

have no grief at all

life exists only for a short while

and Time demands his due ```

~~~
24gttghh
Ah so that's the "Peace" song that plays when Alexander comes grovelling. Very
cool.

------
tuomosipola
One of those unexpected things that has been preserved from the ancient times.
I actually learned to sing this, I think it's quite sad.

The 1951 film Quo Vadis features Peter Ustinov as emperor Nero singing a
version of this in English with changed lyrics, Oh lambent flame:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBIswXv28GI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBIswXv28GI)

------
maxs
How it may have sounded:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xERitvFYpAk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xERitvFYpAk)

~~~
tuomosipola
I think the pronunciation is quite good. Not your classical Attic Greek
pronunciation but it shouldn't be since the stele is from a later time and
from Anatolia where people would have spoken a Ionic dialect originally.

~~~
fifnir
Hi, are you saying this with a some linguistic expertise ?

As a Greek without much background in linguistics etc I noticed a some pretty
strong mistakes (to my ear) and since the original is pretty understandable to
me I assume (potentially mistakenly) that the pronunciation can't have changed
THAT much.

She pronounces ai as 'aee' but ai definitely an 'ɛ' sound (as in head: /hɛd/)
in modern greek

She then pronounces 'meden' as mɛdɛn when it should be midɛn (η is an ee
sound, at least in modern geek)

and she puts a strongish h in holos (ὅλως) which again seems like a person
without any greek knowledge reading the latin alphabet version of the word and
assuming how it's pronounced...

she says zɛn instead of zeen/zin

So again, as a modern greek with no particular knowledge of how ancient
pronunciation worked, this was pretty bad to my ears..

If you know more than me please correct me, it would be great to know

~~~
hcayless
It's a pretty good rendition. Greek pronunciation has shifted _a lot_ from
ancient to modern. See, e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iotacism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iotacism).
Among other things, the accentuation has gone from pitch, which comes out
nicely in this version (though we don't know precisely what it sounded like),
to stress. So while it may look quite familiar to you reading it, it would
have sounded very different. There was a Modern Greek speaker in the intro to
Ancient Greek class I took in college, and I remember him remarking how
disorienting it was.

~~~
adia
According to Wikipedia, "first century AD is the most probable guess" for the
stele's age. By that time, pronunciation was probably nearer to the modern
language than to Ancient Greek, although, of course, not exactly the same:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology#Popular_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology#Popular_pronunciation,_1st_century_BC_%E2%80%93_2nd_century_AD)

Even Modern Greek, despite the homogenization effect of modern communications,
still has local dialects which sound very different from one another and
aren't easily intelligible to speakers of the standard dialect.

~~~
hcayless
The shift in pronunciation wasn’t a simple and straightforward process. If
you’re trying to argue that the reconstruction is faulty on the basis that the
shift was >50% complete, I’d respond that nothing like that level of precision
is possible. Moreover, I’d expect funerary songs to be a bit conservative in
their pronunciation.

