> Researchers currently poring over the papyri in the Carlsberg Collection are finding that medical information discovered in ancient Egypt didn't disappear when the Library of Alexandria burned
That's because almost nothing was lost when the library at Alexandria burned. Because there was almost nothing there to burn at the time. The library had long been in decline by this time period, and there were many other great centers of learning in the world which had extensive libraries. Why does this myth still persist?
>> Researchers currently poring over the papyri in the Carlsberg Collection are finding that medical information discovered in ancient Egypt didn't disappear when the Library of Alexandria burned
> That's because almost nothing was lost when the library at Alexandria burned. Because there was almost nothing there to burn at the time. The library had long been in decline by this time period, and there were many other great centers of learning in the world which had extensive libraries. Why does this myth still persist?
The actual source howstuffworks.com cites for that section doesn't mention the myth (https://sciencenordic.com/denmark-videnskabdk/unpublished-eg...). My guess is the "freelance science writer" who wrote this piece interpolated it for color from a memory of a pop-science source like the one in the critique above.
The short of it is that Alexandria, including its libraries, declined as a center of scholarship after Ptolemy VIII exiled or killed all the intellectuals who worked there in 145 BCE. While the library survived, subsequent administration didn't maintain the institution. Whatever insults the physical institution suffered or when the buildings were finally destroyed, the institution of legend died from neglect long before then.
> subsequent administration didn't maintain the institution
Also papyrus has a limited shelf life, so even the books need to be maintained (copied) to maintain them in the long run, so if the institution is failing, the books will be lost in the medium/long term, even without direct destruction of the library
To contextualize why "history for atheists by an atheist historian" is a thing...
> After over ten years of seeing supposed “rationalists”, most of them with no background in or even knowledge of history, using patent pseudo history as the basis for arguments against and attacks on religion, I felt someone needed to start correcting the popular misconceptions about history which are rife among many vocal atheist activists. I also felt there needed to be some push-back by a fellow unbeliever against several fringe theories and hopelessly outdated ideas which have no credibility among professional scholars and specialists, but which seem to be accepted almost without question by many or even most anti-theistic atheists.
It’s surprising to me that the author finds it improbable that we don’t know many ancient writers. It’s always been my default assumption that the vast majority of all works and writers of antiquity were lost. I would expect that, like today, there is a relatively small number of hugely popular works, which had a decent chance of surviving, and a massive long tail of less popular works that were relatively obscure, especially over the time scale, didn’t get copied, and so therefore were lost. Of course we might get a few random selections from the long tail, but not many compared to the number of total works. I would have supposed there was easily a ratio of 100:1, at least.
> If you have some reliable references, I'd be happy to learn from them!
The problem is that we have no reliable references on the destruction of this library. Written sources contradict each other, and archaeology has nothing.
- According to 3 Roman authors, Julius Caesar burned it. But other Roman authors vigorously deny it.
- Even if no book did burn at this time, centuries of decline followed. The town's activity went down, and other libraries had greater fame.
- When Aurelian took the city (anno 272, thanks Wikipedia), the building was certainly destroyed (among many others) if it still existed.
- There were very late claims that the library was destroyed be the Arab invasion, but this is extremely unlikely since the written sources on the library's activity stopped just before the probable destruction by Aurelian.
In France most people believe in an Arab destruction. For instance, this well known newspaper had to write an justification[^1] after many readers denied the destruction by the Romans mentioned in a previous article. I suppose it is not a mere coincidence that the prejudice against Arabs is very common in this country.
[^1]: https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1990/02/10/qui-a-bru...
That's not great. A quick skim says that the number of books were probably (edit typo: overestimated) by a fair bit:
"The actual numbers were probably lower, perhaps by as much as one order of magnitude"
Reference to this says "a library that was a tenth of this size [sc. the 500,000 in Ps.-Aristeas] would still have been very large in antiquity") so it was a large library. I have to say, claims of hundreds of thousand weren't really plausible anyway.
Second it doesn't say it was dwarfed elsewhere at the time. It does say "The Library of Alexandria, however comprehensive for its time, was not on a scale comparable with the great research libraries of the twentieth century[0]". Which is fair, but doesn't support what you say.
finally it doesn't say (that I can see) that it was empty when destroyed. The guy does say there's now way it would have survived a long time due to the humidity and climate it was in, but doesn't suggest (AFAIKS) that it was nearly empty when it was destroyed.
[0] well duh
So I'm going to go with the more common view for now. Thanks anyway.
Incoming ships got searched for books because there was a law in place made by one of the Ptolemies that any ships coming in would be required by law to lend any books on board to the library to make copies. Sometimes, the scribes would keep the original and give the copy back because they would be hard to distinguish.
Since we can probably assume the copies of these books were made without the consent of the original author or publisher, would that make these pirate ships?
> Sometimes, the scribes would keep the original and give the copy back because they would be hard to distinguish.
Copying books back when you had to do everything by hand and doing so fast enough that you could return the book in time? I would expect less "hard to distinguish" and more "barely legible".
Considering how few people could read and how expensive books would have been, I would expect that those books would have been valuable cargo (as opposed to personal items) and not willingly released anyway.
With only 6 (8?) cases, the naive bound of the false positives is ~15% and if there is some statistician nearby the bound will be much higher. (I guess close to ~25%, but I'm too lazy to look up the correct calculation.)
And if it doesn’t grow you can repeat the test in a week or two - even modern tests have this issue since early in the pregnancy hormone levels might not be high enough yet.
Regarding false positives - since you’re detecting hormones that are not produced outside of pregnancy time, then the only possible reason for false positive could be some genetic condition, or maybe some serious endocrinologic disease, maybe ovarian cancer.
> It has long been observed that men who work in professions that expose them to heat in the nether regions: bakers, cooks, steamworkers; have had a hard time fathering children. Interestingly, men in these professions were observed to start having children after retiring or finding a new job. Based on these observations, Dr. Martha Vogeli [sic, her name ends with 'e': Marthe] ran a long set of experiments starting in the 1940’s in India. After trying all possible combinations, Dr. Vogeli found a consistent method for inducing temporary infertility in men by a series of hot baths. In short, men who sat in hot water for 45 minutes a day for 3 weeks were protected for at least 6 months.
The ‘baker’s method’ post above suggests is reversible. As for libido, if you’re roasting your ‘nads enough that they stop producing gametes then it seems reasonable that they might temporarily do producing other things too, so maybe?
But it is obvious that the temperature of the balls matter. This is why we put it outside the body, have a special device (the ball sack) to keep it at the right temperature, and then load the whole structure with sufficient pain signals that the man will be very protective of it. Given that the temperature matters that much, it isn't surprising that making it too warm anyways is likely to create infertility.
a. Forty-five minutes is a long time to sit in a bath, and a long time to keep water hot.
b. Long ago, I read that wearing jockey shorts rather than boxers put one at a slightly higher risk for testicular cancer, presumably because the jockeys keep the freight warmer. Now, the risk of testicular cancer is pretty slight to start with, but I whether the hot-bath method raises it.
It's not that long if you have a spa. I have a family friend who were having trouble getting pregnant with their second child. They tried everything and took over a year, but finally the dr suggested that the husband stoped using the spa... it worked
Maybe originally, but not anymore. Demographers regularly survey women in various countries about how many children they want to have, and in Japan women want to have on average 1 child, which means they’re having that many children by choice and not accident.
Japanese women are having on average one child. They want two.
> Japan is one such country that discrepancy between
intended and observed levels of fertility is relatively large. For example, calculated from a
nationally representative survey in 2010 (IPSS 2011), the average number of intended children
among women aged 40-44 is 1.84, while their observed cohort total fertility is estimated to be 1.48 . These discrepancies between intended and observed fertility suggest social constraints on
meeting intentions.
If you stay in an onsen for 45 minutes, you’d probably have bigger issues than infertility — such as passing out and drowning. They of course come at different temperatures, whether they are artificial or natural, but onsen are HOT. After 10 or so minutes it becomes pretty unbearable. Most people take small breaks in between soaks, but even then a cumulative 45 minutes is a bit much.
I’d be more interested in how this affects sauna cultures. In particular Korea where it’s quite common to sleep in a sauna (jimjilbang) for a couple hours. Although people don’t do it daily.
I've hung out in onsen for about an hour at a time. Sometimes I raise my upper body out if I start feeling dizzy, but it's not completely unbearable. I also took sizzling hot baths all the time as a kid and don't feel the heat, although I'm sure I'm probably being cooked.
>I’d be more interested in how this affects sauna cultures.
Sauna works differently than hot bath. In sauna you sweat profusely in order to maintain your body temperature, and your blood vessels expand, and the heart works hard actively pumping the blood thus avoiding local overheat of any specific body part. Plus you take a cold shower or jump into cold water right out of sauna :)
>to sleep in a sauna (jimjilbang) for a couple hours
nobody can sleep in sauna for a couple of hours :) The best i saw some few guys did in the local Korean sauna is about 30-40 minutes at 180F. In Korean jimjilbang there is also usually something like a room with warmed floor where you do go for a nice relaxed sleep after/between sauna room visits. Damn that coronavirus lockdown, i haven't been for the sauna for like 6 weeks already...
> nobody can sleep in sauna for a couple of hours :)
You're right, I should have been more clear. I was referring to the warmed floor area you mentioned. I've spent quite a lot of time in jimjilbangs back in Seoul.
Currently in Tokyo...Once the travel restrictions are lifted, I'm on the first thing with an engine headed back to Seoul!
I always like to think about the first person who thought of this. "Hmm let's pee on some wheat and barley, I wonder if this will prove if the woman is pregnant".
It's probably something more like the wheat and barley was waste and they peed in the same area they dumped their waste.
One family noticed their barley was sprouting, while another's didn't. Shortly after, the family with the sprouts had a baby. It could have taken generations for this to be actually used as a pregnancy test.
It's still a remarkable observation. Presumably urination was a private thing then as it is now. It seems like a coin toss between some 'shaman' suggesting it and it turned out to be true vs the many observations that had to happen.
Women generally have a good idea, perhaps some women started to observe it as they maybe didn't want more children and didn't want men to know about it and we worried about each and every possible indication that could reveal it.
Urine was (and is) considered to be strong magically tied to the person, so it was on focus for shamans and priests since ages. And used in combination with many other materials, to heal, to foresee, to curse ..
And given, that urine does contain many personal informations, there is truth to it ..
Some woman peed on wheat/barley while working outside, it sprouted. She noticed and later found out she is pregnant. Theory formed, gossip did rest to let others know too.
Is there a link to the study where they got the 70%? If they used a group with a 50% of pregnant women then 70% is not too much. Also it would be nice to know the number of women to estimate the error in the 70%. *If they had 10 women in total and they get the right result in 7, it is not impressive at all.)
Also, the weeks of pregnancy are important. This test is useful proably in before the week 6, but I think the homones level change with time.
I'm trying to picture a bunch of archaeologists deciphering some Egyptian papyri, and then going to some hospital (or maybe university) to enlist women who would be willing to pee in some bags with wheat and barley. In order to assess the accuracy of an ancient wives' tale.
> One of the oldest descriptions of a pregnancy test comes from ancient Egypt, where women who suspected they were pregnant would urinate on wheat and barley seeds: If the wheat grew, they believed, it meant the woman was having a girl; the barley, a boy; if neither plant sprouted, she wasn’t pregnant at all. Avicenna, a 10th-century Persian philosopher, would pour sulfur over women’s urine, believing that the telltale sign was worms springing from the resulting mixture. In 16th-century Europe, specialists known as “piss prophets” would read urine like tea leaves, claiming to know by its appearance alone whether the woman who supplied it was pregnant.
Would need to know how the sample was chosen for that test. If you sample women of reproductive age at random, there's decidedly not a 50/50 chance that she's actually pregnant: by rough estimation it should be about (1.75 [fertility rate] * 9 months [duration of pregnancy] / 30 years [reproductive lifespan] = 4-5%). If you give all of those woman a wheat/barley test and 70% of the positive tests were truly pregnant (implying about 6.25% test positives) that's actually pretty good, roughly 8x better than a coin flip. If you take a sample that's known to be half pregnant and half not pregnant and only 70% of the pregnant women are identified, it's decidedly less good.
Sure it's better than flipping a coin, but how does it compare with just making an educated guess?
For some demographics you might get a 70% success rate with something as stupid as "Have you been trying to get pregnant for a few months? If so assume you are."
We should back up Wikipedia in stone tablets and bury them in various places on earth and on the dark side of the moon, just in case our Library of Alexandria gets burned by an EMP during a nuclear war.
If I order a bag of whole grain to use for food, is there a way to determine that it has not suffered such indignities? (besides reliance on the plastics industry)
From plant to combine/harvester, to wagon, to bin, to truck, to elevator, to railcar/barge, to mill, to bag should be an approximate path. I'd say that someone peeing on the bag is most likely to be a problem and you'd notice that. In all other cases, a single person peeing on a couple tons of grain isn't very likely to matter. The ground up dead rats probably affect it more.
Ambient temperature is important. Seeds are more likely to sprout at certain temps, and women are more likely to conceive in certain seasons (spring, for instance... not due to biology, but rather due to cultural/farming/religious cycles.)
Lol, go out and take a walk, we live in pretty good times compared to the rest of history (and civilizations btw). Is it wrong now wrongthink to think that we have it better or at least we've had some material and slight social progress since that era?
That's because almost nothing was lost when the library at Alexandria burned. Because there was almost nothing there to burn at the time. The library had long been in decline by this time period, and there were many other great centers of learning in the world which had extensive libraries. Why does this myth still persist?