
Egypt's newly discovered tombs hold mummies, animal statues - dnetesn
https://phys.org/news/2018-11-egypt-newly-tombs-mummies-animal.html
======
gersh
I can imagine the Egyptians like cat pictures like people today. However, the
statutes don't look like the most beautiful of cats. Have the aesthetics of
cat pictures changed over time?

~~~
gwern
Egyptian art had very different conventions and esthetics. But also the cats
themselves seem to be different (larger, IIRC, and different colored than the
European cats you're probably more familiar with). If you want to take a look
at all the kinds of cat-related artwork (including cartoons which I can only
call cat memes, like artwork of rats laying siege to a cat fortress or cats
whipping a human for unknown offenses), take a look at all the illustrations
in Malek's _The Cat in Ancient Egypt_. You can get a high-quality scan from,
ahem, the usual place.

One interesting thing about the cat mummies here is that they'll provide
additional datapoints on how well fed temple-sacrificial cats were and how
they were killed. And perhaps at some point some ancient DNA can be sequenced?
Which will give interesting data about how domesticated they were. Bradshaw in
_Cat Sense_ argues that the core work of domesticating cats was accomplished
by the Ancient Egyptians as a byproduct of their large-scale breeding,
necessary for the raising the vast volumes of cats to be sacrificed as
offerings.

~~~
dmix
Is putting underscores around titles a convention for some format? I see it
around once in a while.

~~~
scrollaway
Probably trying to make it italic, which is indeed a convention. Asterisks
will work better on hn.

~~~
gwern
I'm too lazy to remember how HN's pseudo-Markdown does (not) work.

------
thaumasiotes
Why does the article say nothing about dates except "Pharaonic Age"? That
title was in use for about 1400 years.

------
Alex3917
If they want more tourism dollars they should just let YouTubers decide where
to dig. As long as it’s not damaging anything, it doesn’t cost anything to
look at things people are curious about.

~~~
craftyguy
> As long as it’s not damaging anything

And who decides that? The people receiving ad money for producing entertaining
content that people want to watch? The armchair archaeologists watching the
videos? The platform on which the video is hosted, who is heavily incentivized
to host entertaining content that people want to watch?

~~~
Alex3917
The Egyptian antiquities authority would obviously need to do the excavations
themselves or oversee them, I’m just saying the process could be democratized
a little.

There are hundreds of square miles of sites, letting armchair archeologists
vote on what should be looked at isn’t going to break anything.

~~~
beaconstudios
why would you want to democratise a process that benefits highly from expert
knowledge? The last thing the world needs is Jake Paul directing
archaeologists to dig in the middle of a desert that was never inhabited.

~~~
Alex3917
> why would you want to democratise a process that benefits highly from expert
> knowledge?

To get more tourist dollars. Think of it as a loss leader. You allocate 0.1%
of your archeology budget to humor the amateur Egyptologist YouTubers with the
most subscribers, and then engages a whole new generation who then want to
visit for themselves.

If the guy who runs the Ancient Architects YouTube channel thinks there might
be a secret entrance to the pyramid behind a specific stone, fly him out and
let him go up there and check it out. It's not like the whole thing is going
to fall over if he runs some tests on it or tries to see if one of the stones
is movable, people have been climbing it for thousands of years.

