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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26020 Posts |
 Posted - 06/26/2008 : 13:08:51 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Cuneiformist
This one [OIP 121, 389] says, more or less:
"One dead 2-year-old oxen to the 'kitchen' expended from the account of (mister) Intae'a on the 8th day of the 3rd month (May-June), 5th year of the king Amar-Su'en (ca. 2045 BCE)" |
And then in the table:047105 OIP 121 389 AS05 - 03 - 18 o. 2 ba-ug7 e2 muhaldim-ce3 |
I get "AS05" being "5th year of the king Amar-Su'en," and "03" being "3rd month," but "18" is the "8th day?"| Unfortunately, a conclusion one can draw from the above list is that if these texts were originally grouped together when they were found in the ground, they have since been scattered all over the planet. |
If the publication is an indication of a text's geographical location, yes. But papers you might write about stuff in Cornell's collection wouldn't only be published by Cornell, would they?| In checking the publication of these texts, I see that they were acquired by a Chicago professor from a dealer in Baghdad in 1919-20. |
Do you mean all 21, or just the 18 published by OIP?| My question before I pursue this further is to ask how likely this is to have happened by chance. That is, if the 'kitchen' tablets followed the general pattern noted above, we'd expect them to be scattered all over the place. And in general, that's what we see. But suddenly among this we find a bunch of texts which somehow didn't get separated. |
My first substantive question would involve you running a database search for some other building, as you did for 'kitchen'. Another keyword that results in 20 or so hits. Are there 'latrine' texts, for example?
Anyway, according to this list, there are 57,023 texts housed at 547 locations. The University of Illinois (home of the Chicago professor?) has 532 of them (and Cornell's only got 59 - I can see why you're jealous  ).
According to the catalog, there are 11,891 Drehem texts.
Actually, I just figured out more to the searches. None of those 21 is at the University of Illinois (mostly "SACT" publication of their collection). Ah, I see the problem: the database lists the owner as the Oriental Institute Museum, which is a part of the University of Chicago. The OIM owns some 1,737 texts (even more jealous, huh?), and 1,114 of those were from Drehem.
In other words, the OIM owns about 10% of all the known Drehem texts. It shouldn't be surprising that they've got a chunk of them, then.
Moving along, the catalog reports that there are 1,966 texts dating to AS05. There are 74 from AS05 - 01. Only two are 'kitchen' texts.
If 'kitchen' is "muhaldim," then the catalog reports 1,620 'kitchen' texts just from Drehem. And the OIM owns 159 (about 10%) of them.
Now, there are only 59 'kitchen' texts from Drehem in all of AS05. OIM owns thirty of them, or over 50% (far above the 10% we've been kicking about).
But wait. There are 997 texts from Drehem in AS05, more than half of all known texts from AS05, which is far more than 20% (the proportion of all Drehem texts to all texts).
OIM owns 246, or about 25%, of all Drehem texts from AS05. And because the OIM owns 1,114 texts from Drehem total, then Drehem texts from AS05 represent 22% of the OIM's whole collection!
In other words, Drehem texts from AS05 are over-represented in OIM's collection, compared to all texts. Here (with some other years tossed in for comparison):
Criteria | All texts | OIM's | %
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All texts | 57,023 | 1,737 | 3.0%
AS03 texts | 1,272 | 76 | 6.0%
AS04 texts | 1,414 | 70 | 5.0%
AS05 texts | 1,966 | 264 | 13.4%
AS06 texts | 1,628 | 59 | 3.6%
AS07 texts | 2,181 | 60 | 2.8%
Drehem texts | 11,891 | 1,114 | 9.4%
AS03 texts from Drehem | 483 | 52 | 10.8%
AS04 texts from Drehem | 802 | 58 | 7.2%
AS05 texts from Drehem | 997 | 246 | 24.7%
AS06 texts from Drehem | 660 | 37 | 5.6%
AS07 texts from Drehem | 573 | 44 | 7.7%
Kitchen texts | 2,186 | 177 | 8.1%
AS03 kitchen texts | 55 | 3 | 5.5%
AS04 kitchen texts | 72 | 7 | 9.7%
AS05 kitchen texts | 66 | 30 | 45.5%
AS06 kitchen texts | 51 | 3 | 5.9%
AS07 kitchen texts | 95 | 8 | 8.4%
Kitchen texts from Drehem (KTD) | 1,622 | 159 | 9.8%
AS03 KTD | 47 | 3 | 6.4%
AS04 KTD | 65 | 7 | 10.8%
AS05 KTD | 59 | 30 | 50.8%
AS06 KTD | 42 | 3 | 7.1%
AS07 KTD | 60 | 8 | 13.3%
AS05 - 01 KTD | 2 | 1 | 50.0%
AS05 - 02 KTD | 7 | 7 | 100.0%
AS05 - 03 KTD | 6 | 6 | 100.0%
AS05 - 04 KTD | 2 | 1 | 50.0%
AS05 - 05 KTD | 1 | 1 | 100.0%
AS05 - 06 KTD | 4 | 2 | 50.0%
AS05 - 07 KTD | 11 | 1 | 9.1%
AS05 - 08 KTD | 0 | 0 | 0.0%
AS05 - 09 KTD | 7 | 3 | 42.9%
AS05 - 10 KTD | 2 | 0 | 0.0%
AS05 - 11 KTD | 8 | 6 | 75.0%
AS05 - 12 KTD | 7 | 1 | 14.3% |
Clearly, if OIM owns almost 25% of all AS - 05 texts from Drehem, then you'll find a relatively high number of 'kitchen' texts from Drehem that same year in OIM's collection. I bet if you tried the same thing with a different word, the results would be much the same.
Something to notice: out of the 339 kitchen texts from AS03 to AS07, only 66 come from outside Drehem, and the OIM owns none of them. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26020 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 13:35:18 [Permalink]
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Here's the thing: while OIM may have all 7 of the kitchen texts from (say) AS05 - 02, there were 81 total texts from Drehem that same month, and OIM has 21 of them.
How many other "keywords" from that month does OIM have 100% of the texts for? What's on the other 60 texts? A random pick offers one with "hur-sag" on it (dunno what that means). There are 8 texts that month from Drehem with "hur-sag" on them, only one of which is owned by OIM. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 14:01:09 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Cuneiformist
Originally posted by Simon
Total Drehem in the World: 11978 (busy buggers)
Total Drehem in University of Chicago: probably ca. 1200 (the book in question was just Drehem texts from the reign of one king; when you add up those that date to other kings, the total is a bit higher)
'kitchen tablets': Ca. 1,2000 in the world. In Chicago? Not sure. A quick glance through the two publications gives ma ca. 150. But there's one more due out, but it won't have as much material as the first two, so let's add 50 more and make it ca. 200.
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How can there be more Kitchen tablets than the total Drehem?
I thought it was a sub-section of the Drehem?
What am I missing? |
Total DREHEM tablets, 12,000. Total kithcen tablets (a sub-set of Drehem tablets): 1,200
Total Chicago Drehem Tablets: 1115. Total Chicago kitchen tablets (a sub-set of their Drehem tablets): ca. 200.
Does that make sense?
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One of your posts had a zero too much then :p
Ok... I'll think about that tonight and let you know tomorrow.
Should be doable. |
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26020 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 15:06:37 [Permalink]
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| All my 'kitchen' numbers are wrong. That database returns multiple results for tablets upon which "muhaldim" appears multiple times. Dammit. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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Cuneiformist
The Imperfectionist
USA
4955 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 16:45:57 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dave W.
Here's the thing: while OIM may have all 7 of the kitchen texts from (say) AS05 - 02, there were 81 total texts from Drehem that same month, and OIM has 21 of them.
How many other "keywords" from that month does OIM have 100% of the texts for? What's on the other 60 texts? A random pick offers one with "hur-sag" on it (dunno what that means). There are 8 texts that month from Drehem with "hur-sag" on them, only one of which is owned by OIM.
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On thing, Dave-- I'll get to more in a little bit-- is that raw searches for something like "e2-muhaldim" will turn up more than what really exists, since sometimes a text will have that phrase in it multiple times. And some people have the professional designation "muhaldim" (we'll call them "cooks") and so those references should be thrown out, too.
But again, more in just a bit.
And thanks for everyone for looking into this! |
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Cuneiformist
The Imperfectionist
USA
4955 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 18:05:51 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dave W.
Originally posted by Cuneiformist
This one [OIP 121, 389] says, more or less:
"One dead 2-year-old oxen to the 'kitchen' expended from the account of (mister) Intae'a on the 8th day of the 3rd month (May-June), 5th year of the king Amar-Su'en (ca. 2045 BCE)" |
And then in the table:047105 OIP 121 389 AS05 - 03 - 18 o. 2 ba-ug7 e2 muhaldim-ce3 |
I get "AS05" being "5th year of the king Amar-Su'en," and "03" being "3rd month," but "18" is the "8th day?" |
No, that's a typo on my part. I should have said 18, and not 8. You are correct.
| Unfortunately, a conclusion one can draw from the above list is that if these texts were originally grouped together when they were found in the ground, they have since been scattered all over the planet. |
If the publication is an indication of a text's geographical location, yes. But papers you might write about stuff in Cornell's collection wouldn't only be published by Cornell, would they? |
You're correct again. I was commenting on some obvious connections, but Cornell's stuff is published in an Italian series. In general, I know what's been published where-- or I can find it easily (I own most publications of these texts and they are on a shelf in my office on campus), but that's because this is what I do. So you're right that a simple check won't always do.
| In checking the publication of these texts, I see that they were acquired by a Chicago professor from a dealer in Baghdad in 1919-20. |
Do you mean all 21, or just the 18 published by OIP? |
Actually, it's probably much more. More information is in the publication in my office, so I'll look at that and provide the data tomorrow.
| My question before I pursue this further is to ask how likely this is to have happened by chance. That is, if the 'kitchen' tablets followed the general pattern noted above, we'd expect them to be scattered all over the place. And in general, that's what we see. But suddenly among this we find a bunch of texts which somehow didn't get separated. |
My first substantive question would involve you running a database search for some other building, as you did for 'kitchen'. Another keyword that results in 20 or so hits. Are there 'latrine' texts, for example? |
You're right, and this is something that struck me today, too. I'll run some checks with other administrative organizations, and also with particular individuals. It may have been that some archives were grouped by person, in which case they might be localized in one particular place.
Anyway, according to this list, there are 57,023 texts housed at 547 locations. The University of Illinois (home of the Chicago professor?) has 532 of them (and Cornell's only got 59 - I can see why you're jealous ).
According to the catalog, there are 11,891 Drehem texts.
Actually, I just figured out more to the searches. None of those 21 is at the University of Illinois (mostly "SACT" publication of their collection). Ah, I see the problem: the database lists the owner as the Oriental Institute Museum, which is a part of the University of Chicago. The OIM owns some 1,737 texts (even more jealous, huh?), and 1,114 of those were from Drehem.
In other words, the OIM owns about 10% of all the known Drehem texts. It shouldn't be surprising that they've got a chunk of them, then. |
Right, and I should have been more clear, before. The OI is part of U Chicago, and the tablets I'm talking about are in the OI.
Moving along, the catalog reports that there are 1,966 texts dating to AS05. There are 74 from AS05 - 01. Only two are 'kitchen' texts.
If 'kitchen' is "muhaldim," then the catalog reports 1,620 'kitchen' texts just from Drehem. And the OIM owns 159 (about 10%) of them. |
As I noted in another post, muhaldim is actually 'cook' and 'kitchen' is e2-muhaldim ('house of the cook'). The number is probably lower due to a) the fact that some texts contain multiple references to the e2-muhaldim, and because some people called muhaldim appear even when there's no reference to the kitchen itself.
| Now, there are only 59 'kitchen' texts from Drehem in all of AS05. OIM owns thirty of them, or over 50% (far above the 10% we've been kicking about). |
Right! And these were only published in the last few years. If I'd done my dissertation only 5 years earlier than I did, I'd be left with a nice gap.
But wait. There are 997 texts from Drehem in AS05, more than half of all known texts from AS05, which is far more than 20% (the proportion of all Drehem texts to all texts).
OIM owns 246, or about 25%, of all Drehem texts from AS05. And because the OIM owns 1,114 texts from Drehem total, then Drehem texts from AS05 represent 22% of the OIM's whole collection! |
I'm not sure I follow-- in the whole Ur III corpus, there are 997 texts dating to AS05, and more than half come from Drehem? That's quite interesting, if so.
In other words, Drehem texts from AS05 are over-represented in OIM's collection, compared to all texts. Here (with some other years tossed in for comparison):
Criteria | All texts | OIM's | %
-------------------------------------------------------------
All texts | 57,023 | 1,737 | 3.0%
AS03 texts | 1,272 | 76 | 6.0%
AS04 texts | 1,414 | 70 | 5.0%
AS05 texts | 1,966 | 264 | 13.4%
AS06 texts | 1,628 | 59 | 3.6%
AS07 texts | 2,181 | 60 | 2.8%
Drehem texts | 11,891 | 1,114 | 9.4%
AS03 texts from Drehem | 483 | 52 | 10.8%
AS04 texts from Drehem | 802 | 58 | 7.2%
AS05 texts from Drehem | 997 | 246 | 24.7%
AS06 texts from Drehem | 660 | 37 | 5.6%
AS07 texts from Drehem | 573 | 44 | 7.7%
Kitchen texts | 2,186 | 177 | 8.1%
AS03 kitchen texts | 55 | 3 | 5.5%
AS04 kitchen texts | 72 | 7 | 9.7%
AS05 kitchen texts | 66 | 30 | 45.5%
AS06 kitchen texts | 51 | 3 | 5.9%
AS07 kitchen texts | 95 | 8 | 8.4%
Kitchen texts from Drehem (KTD) | 1,622 | 159 | 9.8%
AS03 KTD | 47 | 3 | 6.4%
AS04 KTD | 65 | 7 | 10.8%
AS05 KTD | 59 | 30 | 50.8%
AS06 KTD | 42 | 3 | 7.1%
AS07 KTD | 60 | 8 | 13.3%
AS05 - 01 KTD | 2 | 1 | 50.0%
AS05 - 02 KTD | 7 | 7 | 100.0%
AS05 - 03 KTD | 6 | 6 | 100.0%
AS05 - 04 KTD | 2 | 1 | 50.0%
AS05 - 05 KTD | 1 | 1 | 100.0%
AS05 - 06 KTD | 4 | 2 | 50.0%
AS05 - 07 KTD | 11 | 1 | 9.1%
AS05 - 08 KTD | 0 | 0 | 0.0%
AS05 - 09 KTD | 7 | 3 | 42.9%
AS05 - 10 KTD | 2 | 0 | 0.0%
AS05 - 11 KTD | 8 | 6 | 75.0%
AS05 - 12 KTD | 7 | 1 | 14.3% |
Clearly, if OIM owns almost 25% of all AS - 05 texts from Drehem, then you'll find a relatively high number of 'kitchen' texts from Drehem that same year in OIM's collection. I bet if you tried the same thing with a different word, the results would be much the same. |
OK, I'll run this with another word. If you're interested, see if "e2-uz-ga" comes up. Another is "e2-kicib-ba".
| Something to notice: out of the 339 kitchen texts from AS03 to AS07, only 66 come from outside Drehem, and the OIM owns none of them. |
This, I'm aware of. Well, sort of. Outside of Drehem, references to the e2-muhaldim are far fewer.
Anyhow, thanks for looking into this, Dave. I'll follow up on some of the above and try to understand better what's happening! |
| Edited by - Cuneiformist on 06/26/2008 18:11:43 |
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Cuneiformist
The Imperfectionist
USA
4955 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 18:06:47 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dave W.
All my 'kitchen' numbers are wrong. That database returns multiple results for tablets upon which "muhaldim" appears multiple times. Dammit. |
Right! And there isn't a way to filter that out. Though I should mention this to the people who run the site when I seem them next. |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26020 Posts |
Posted - 06/26/2008 : 21:08:46 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Cuneiformist
You're correct again. I was commenting on some obvious connections, but Cornell's stuff is published in an Italian series. In general, I know what's been published where-- or I can find it easily (I own most publications of these texts and they are on a shelf in my office on campus), but that's because this is what I do. So you're right that a simple check won't always do. |
Well, I did find the button that pops up all the data about a text, including "owner," which can be very different from publisher.| Actually, it's probably much more. More information is in the publication in my office, so I'll look at that and provide the data tomorrow. |
With any number of search results less than 100 from that one database, porting the results to a spreadsheet and filtering them shouldn't be difficult. I just hadn't thought of it until I ran out of time. It'd be nice if there were some "backdoor" way to get it to show more than 100 results on a page. Actually, it'd be really nice to just be able to download the whole dataset in a standard format. Then we could do all sorts of custom queries.| You're right, and this is something that struck me today, too. I'll run some checks with other administrative organizations, and also with particular individuals. It may have been that some archives were grouped by person, in which case they might be localized in one particular place. |
I'm was interested in more keywords to look for, as you supplied below.| As I noted in another post, muhaldim is actually 'cook' and 'kitchen' is e2-muhaldim ('house of the cook'). The number is probably lower due to a) the fact that some texts contain multiple references to the e2-muhaldim, and because some people called muhaldim appear even when there's no reference to the kitchen itself. |
Well, we can search on "e2-muhaldim" too (if we ignore what it says about "inverted commas" - use double-quotes instead).
There are 58 results, 8 of which are obvious duplicates so there are only 50 texts from AS05 with "e2-muhaldim" in them (on the same line, too). Limiting the search to just Drehem eliminates two results, so there are 48 "kitchen texts" from Drehem from AS05. Limiting it further to only texts owned by OIM drops it down to 29 results (one of which wasn't published by OIP!).
So Chicago owns 29 of the Drehem kitchen texts from AS05, and there are 19 others floating around in the world.
(It would appear that only one of those "muhaldim" texts I found at OIM earlier was really a cook and not a kitchen, unless I'm not getting something else about the notation.)But wait. There are 997 texts from Drehem in AS05, more than half of all known texts from AS05, which is far more than 20% (the proportion of all Drehem texts to all texts).
OIM owns 246, or about 25%, of all Drehem texts from AS05. And because the OIM owns 1,114 texts from Drehem total, then Drehem texts from AS05 represent 22% of the OIM's whole collection! |
I'm not sure I follow-- in the whole Ur III corpus, there are 997 texts dating to AS05... |
Say what? Run a search where the only criteria you put in is "AS05" (without quotes) for "Date of the Text." You will get 1,966 results, none of which appear to be duplicates. Then go up to the top of the page, and click "Statistics," and you'll get a breakdown of the search results by provenance. You'll see that of the 1,966 results, 996 of them are from Drehem, and one more is from "Drehem ?" for a total of 997.| ...and more than half come from Drehem? That's quite interesting, if so. |
That's 50.7% of all the 1,966 texts from AS05 come from Drehem.| OK, I'll run this with another word. If you're interested, see if "e2-uz-ga" comes up. Another is "e2-kicib-ba". |
Well, that one chart of mine was a lot of work.| Something to notice: out of the 339 kitchen texts from AS03 to AS07, only 66 come from outside Drehem, and the OIM owns none of them. |
This, I'm aware of. Well, sort of. Outside of Drehem, references to the e2-muhaldim are far fewer. |
That should be easy to check... roughly. There are 1,523 results for "e2-muhaldim" (but that includes duplicates, I said "roughly" 'cause I'm not going to de-duplicate 16 pages of listings). If you restrict the search to just Drehem, there are 1,392 results, so there are only 131 instances of "e2-muhaldim" outside of Drehem over all years. Wow.| Anyhow, thanks for looking into this, Dave. I'll follow up on some of the above and try to understand better what's happening! |
From the previous numbers, it looked to me like OIM simply owned an inordinate amount of AS05 texts (compared to other years).
I'm thinking that someone was interested in Drehem AS05 in particular, and someone (perhaps not the same someone) boxed a whole bunch of texts in rough chronological order long before OIM got around to documenting, transliterating and publishing them. OIM owns over 13% of all of the AS05 texts, whereas they don't own more than 6% of the texts from any other year (that I checked). OIM numbered them not quite in chronological order, and if I were handed a box of these things, I'd number them right as I pulled 'em out of the box, for fear of getting them mixed up if I tried to do anything else with them first. Even assuming that Drehem itself had them in perfect chronological order, I don't imagine that the looters would have cared if they stole them in order or reverse order, so either OIM was given a clue as to which end to start with, or the looters got lucky (on a 50/50 shot) and nobody in the chain of ownership changed the order prior to publication. Strains credibility. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26020 Posts |
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Cuneiformist
The Imperfectionist
USA
4955 Posts |
Posted - 06/27/2008 : 14:17:22 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dave W.
Well, I can see why we're not using this database (even though it says it won't return duplicates): I can't get it to return even a single result on any search I've tried.
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Yes, the CDLI has its problems. For one, they don't allow searches by date (e.g. AS05), and, if I recall correctly, they have a quirkier system of abbreviations so that whereas on the other site, you'd do OIP 121 389, on CDLI it is OIP 121, 389.
I've gently brought up some of these critiques with them, but thus far with little success.
Though, to their credit, they finally fixed the bug that made their system only work on Safari! As a PC guy using Firefox and trying to write a dissertation, you can guess how often I went to their database! |
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13476 Posts |
 Posted - 06/28/2008 : 10:58:14 [Permalink]
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I hope I have been some help so far in this discussion...
You know. By staying out of it.
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Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
Posted - 06/28/2008 : 13:02:28 [Permalink]
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Ok; first of all sorry for the delay.
My lab got a new grad. student a couple of weeks ago and yesterday, I was recruited to show him a technique
I had to fight my urge to make up increasingly unbelievable steps to see how long it takes him to figure out I am yanking his chain:
-'Now you spit in your samples on jump three times on one foot while saying "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" '.
Anyhow; I had a look and here is how I'd do it:
There is 200 kitchen tablets in Chicago, so 200 chances to get a tablet from the sequence of 20 you are interested in.
There is 20 out of 1200 chance to get the first tablet; then 19 out of 1199 chance to get a second tablet from the sequence, followed by 18 out of 1198 and so on.
All these is repeated 200 times for the 200 total kitchen tablets at the university.
So, the probability is p= 200 X[ (200!)/(1200 X 1199 X 1198 X...X1180)]
p= 1,26120736877805* 10^44 >> 0.05
That's, really exceedingly tiny. Elton John's genitals order of smallness. Much below the 5% level of significance.
So, to me, there is something more going on than pure randomness.
I would agree with your opinions that these tablets were stocked together when the looter found them and that he sold his find in bulk to a reseller who also sold them in bulk to the Chicago professor.
That would also fit with what little I know from the artefact black market of this period (mostly from reading stuff about Egypt).
Basically locals were stumbling onto a find. Mostly, they did not have the knowledge to evaluate the value of their find, and sold them in bulk to re-seller. They did not volunteer details about their find to this persons, as they were afraid he would recruit his own team and loot the site for himself.
At the same time, Westerners were travelling to these countries and, bought artefacts as quickly as possible and in bulks. They were large volumes of such antiquities flooding the market at the time and they did not take the time to translate or analyse most of what they found. The priority was to secure these artefacts before representents of competing institutions got them first.
The slow efforts to exploit these artefacts arrived later.
That's how I see it, and it would certainly fit with what we see here. |
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
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Statistics help
