Funner fact: the Great Pyramids were built closer in time to the invention of mobile phones than to the construction of Göbekli Tepe. Human history is way deep.
Funnest fact: if we don't fuck it up, we're still only at the dawn of history, not at the end of it.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/ho...
As for the pay I am very difficult to motivate with money beyond what makes for housing and food security.
Better is the enemy of good enough -- just do something, and if that doesn't work, do something else.
There are so many issues facing the world: climate change, population growth (/collapse, depending on where you are), food security, energy security, biodiversity, civil society, socioeconomics in the face of automation, supervolcanos, etc. etc. etc.
There are diverse solutions to all these problems. If energy security is your thing, then everything from better residential insulation, to business process optimisation for solar panel installation, to R&D for fusion reactors is potentially part of the solution. Pick whichever one interests you the most. You don't need to be the Elon Musk of whatever it is that you've chosen: if someone else is already doing it, they'll need everything from web developers to janitors. Work for them, and you'll be part of the solution. And if in a few years you see something that'll make you even more hopeful, do that instead.
Personally, I chose "better urban design" as my personal route to saving the world. If we could make much better cities, this would seriously mitigate issues with energy consumption, climate change, land use, and civil society. But how best to do this?
First I tried being an architect. But the impact I could make was limited by the property developers I worked for, who were limited by the urban planners they worked around, who were limited by the urban infrastructure technologies they worked with. So I changed careers, taking aim at transport technology innovation. Went back to school, got an MBA, and joined a company developing a new class of transport technology (the Heathrow Pod, if you're curious). After a few years I realised that my influence was constrained by working for the technology vendor; I actually needed to work for governments instead. So I switched careers again and became a transport-planning consultant doing advisory work in 14 countries. After a few years I realised that my advisory services were producing cool feasibility studies but no actual results, because the actual implementations were too constrained by antiquated, innovation-inhibiting communications processes and planning/design tools. This was a software problem. So I switched careers again and started a company developing collaborative urban planning software (https://www.podaris.com), and now spend most of every week fighting with Javascript. This can be a tough slog, but it's Javascript that will hopefully change the way that cities are designed, thereby doing my bit to save the world. I feel good about it.
The above story isn't meant to be illustrative of what you or anyone else should do. WHAT you do will be different for everyone, and is very nearly irrelevant, provided you've put some thought into it. THAT you do is the important part -- and you are absolutely capable of doing it.
These look like neither... and that's damn weird! Almost like what a blind carver would make from listening to a description of a thing he never saw and carving it.
Probably the oldest cave paintings are like this, but those are like "simplest thing one can do" while these imply effort, but... somehow "skillfully retarted", like there was something "messed up" with the minds of the designers, or simply very different from our own.
(I expect there will be artefacts, and I expect their dates will coincide with what we already expect, but I’m always holding out for ”new science” that needs to be explained.)
So if this hypothetical chamber were found to be intact and unopened, and to contain artefacts made not of stone but of wood or fibre, then finally it would be possible to definitively date the structure and corroborate (or refute) the timeline currently taken for granted.
My point doesn't really go against this, just that it may be more practical to look at what we already have access to, but is largely not translated.
Also, since we have dated many other Egyptian artefacts, we can assume that the civilisation is that old (but of course, the pyramids could have pre-dated them). If they did find any artefacts with writing in the chamber and it is much older than when we believe the pyramids were built, I wouldn't be surprised if the artefacts contained Akkadian or Sumerian cuneiform anyway ;-)
My main point was simply that given that the oldest written texts we have are Sumerian cuneiform, it would seem likely that if there were written texts hidden in the pyramids which predates Ancient Egyptian civilisation, it would likely be cuneiform too, although it would be incredible if even older texts were found (and decipherable)! Early-human history is very interesting.
(I am aware that there is older proto-writing than cuneiform, but not complete written texts)
I did get in to cuneiform at one point in the past but the dictionary to translate was, IIRC, over £1k.
Any good links you can suggest for corpus of works that are likely to yield interesting output, and sources to aid in that?
What software is good for aiding such translation work?
Unfortunately I don’t have any answers to your question. I’m a rather casual observer with an interest but little experience. I only recently got interested enough to buy some books in the topic (and Sumerian history/mythology in general). It seems that the best source of untranslated cuneiform would be to physically visit the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum (not sure if anybody can make an appointment for the cuneiform study rooms or what though...)
If you or anybody else were to find a collection/library of digitized cuneiform tablets, I would be very much interested myself, more so if there are any notes or commentary.
It looks like they've got images of tablets from about 30 institutions, organized by time period. I've found a few with transliterations, but information seems fragmentary. There are also a fair number of entries without images.
Essentially, humans have always been garbage.
who were, by and large, slaves ...
> Essentially, humans have always been garbage.
I don't really consider them too garbage-y for trying to give even a little F.U. to their masters.
They weren't slaves
So there is still compulsion here, and the workers would often have had similar emotions and incentives as slaves. The fact that the workers had more freedom probably gave them more ability to act on that than if they had been proper slaves.
When you put it like that, it sounds an awful lot like slavery.
Monumental buildings almost always end up being wholesale building supply once they aren't revered and maintained.
Finding Tutenkhamen's tomb that hadn't been systematically cleared of all its contents was unprecedented but owed nothing to being protected by any elaborate superstructure that needed destroying, and everything to do with it being concealed by mudslides and workers' huts rather than the sort of superstructure graverobbers were used to partially dismantling to find a way in.
Personally I think some of the footage and pictures of them are more impressive than the pyramids. The size of the blocks compared to a human is just incredible.
Fun fact: there's a Neolithic site in Ireland, Newgrange, that's actually older than the pyramids. Fascinating and worth a visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange