
Unearthing a masterpiece: a rare Minoan sealstone (2017) - diodorus
https://magazine.uc.edu/editors_picks/recent_features/unearthingamasterpiece.html
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HillaryBriss
> _“Some of the details on this are only a half-millimeter big,” said Davis.
> “They’re incomprehensibly small.”_

pretty impressive given they didn't have magnifying glasses in 1500 BCE. i
guess the artisan had excellent vision.

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coldtea
> _i guess the artisan had excellent vision._

Not being in front of a computer or mobile screen all day helped!

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thaumasiotes
Back in the mid-20th-century, they used to blame nearsightedness on reading in
bed.

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stan_rogers
Nearsightedness would actually help quite a bit with fine work like this.
Before presbyopia took hold with me, I could easily focus on my own nose,
while things started getting pretty blurry about three feet/one metre out.
(These days, I have about a 10cm clear vision range uncorrected at an utterly
useless distance, just at the limits of an arm's reach.)

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dmix
It's only 3.6cm in height, the detail is incredible.

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dr_dshiv
Wow. Nothing ever before or for a thousand years after with that level of
aesthetic beauty -- realism and style.

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thaumasiotes
> Nothing ever before or for a thousand years after

There's quite a history in premodern-to-modern times of something being
attributed as "first appearing" in the classical period, and then everyone
being surprised to discover a much, much earlier example.

Heck, an instance of this which was falsifiable _all along_ was the idea that
Archimedes invented the Archimedes screw. Why else would it be named after
him? Well, he visited Egypt and wrote about the water screws he saw in use
there. They'd been there, as far as he knew, forever.

We know a good amount of what was going on in the classical period because
there was only a moderate amount of disruption between then and now. But the
fact of something's existence is entirely unrelated to whether we've noticed
it. The odds are overwhelming that there was a lot of material comparable to
this ring before and after 1500 BC. We just don't know about it.

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gred
> The odds are overwhelming that there was a lot of material comparable to
> this ring before and after 1500 BC.

"A lot" is a fairly vague quantifier, but I'd wager you're wrong regardless of
how you define it.

We've now collectively spent about a century excavating all of the most
interesting sites that we can find, and still this artifact is unique enough
that the archeologist in charge of this excavation is quoted as saying:

> This seal should be included in all forthcoming art history texts, and will
> change the way that prehistoric art is viewed.

Are there other artifacts like this one from the same time period? Almost
certainly. But apparently they're rare enough that we're finding them at the
rate of about one per century.

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olliej
We just need two more to get into Atlantis

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networkimprov
For those who didn't know, its widely believed by scholars that Minoan
civilization is the source of the story of Atlantis as recorded by Plato.

The Minoans' trading hub on Thera (present day Santorini) largely disappeared
into the Aegean after a massive volcanic eruption in the 1600s BCE.

Bettany Hughes has the full story
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VJqnTlbCS0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VJqnTlbCS0)

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olliej
I was making an apparently super obscure reference to the LucasArts game
“Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis”

