Ancient Manuscripts That Should Never Have Been Opened
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From the oldest manuscript ever found in the Americas to a document wrapping an Egyptian mummy - and printed in the wrong language - here are some of the most mind-blowing and unexplainable ancient manuscripts ever found.
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LINKS LINKS LINKS
www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/...
www.npr.org/2006/04/06/532769...
www.britannica.com/topic/Gosp...
www.gotquestions.org/gospel-o...
www.nationalgeographic.com/sc...
www.livescience.com/42398-ark...
www.st-andrews.ac.uk/divinity...
www.livescience.com/42398-ark...
www.biblicalarchaeology.org/d...
www.history.com/news/fate-of-...
news.yale.edu/2017/01/18/auth...
www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-...
www.brown.edu/news/2016-09-07...
www.britannica.com/topic/Grol...
www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna56477070
phys.org/news/2014-11-ancient...
www.livescience.com/56507-mys...
www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna56477070
www.livescience.com/48833-anc...
www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/...
www.historicmysteries.com/boo...
jasonrobertsonline.com/the-bo...
archive.org/details/jimreedss...
www.marianotomatis.it/blog.ph...
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Intro
1:42 - Linen Book of Zagreb
7:17 - Massekhet Kelim
9:09 - The Grolier Codex
11:30 - The Coptic Handbook of Ritual Power
13:55 - Book of Soyga
17:39 - Sponsor - Brilliant
Imagine future archaeologists finding a copy of my D&D 3.5 monster manual and being extremely confused.
Modern people are currently confused about 4th edition.
Someone wrote a short story in which Earth was destroyed. Survivors finally began rebuilding. The only written document that survived was one Star Trek novel. Believing it was history, they rebuilt their civilization and set out in a warp drive ship to locate the remaining Federation members and rejoin ...
I'm still confused about the 0.5 in general additions. Yeah, I chose my word.😂
"Wait, how did they know that zombies did 3d6 bludgeoning?"
Don’t be ridiculous. Those species existed once upon a time.
3:50 My wife has been doing research on historical textiles, and the answer to your question "who finds 300 year old linen and writes on it" the answer is pretty much everyone at the time. Textiles were very expensive and hard to make, so they got reused and repurposed over and over again. There's an altar cloth form a Catholic church in Spain that was once a Islamic battle standard, and had a couple other lives besides those two.
The comment I was looking for, thanks. In addition, "book" is a modern interpretation - it would not have been bound. The writing on it would have meant nothing to likely illiterate people, not to mention that Etruscan would have been unknown in Egypt, even if still a living language at the time. We place enormous value on it now, but then...it was scrap.
Was going to make this comment. We're spoiled by modern industry. We've forgotten just how hard it is to make good paper or other similarly used materials like linen or parchment. We've actually discovered a few old Greek math and philosophy texts preserved only in the form of reused manuscripts. As far as I understand it, it wasn't uncommon for Medieval monks or scholars to reuse ancient texts as new writing material. They would sometimes paint or bleach the surface of a piece of parchment to remove the old writing, and they would then write on top of it. (Not sure if it's actually bleaching, just some method to remove the writing.) However, these processes weren't perfect, and remnants of the old manuscripts remain deep within the parchment. Archaeologists can use x-ray or other imaging techniques to reveal the hidden writing. There are entire ancient manuscripts by notable authors who are only surviving copy of is a parchment book that some monk in the Middle Ages bleached and then wrote on top of. Though this sounds to us like an abominable act of historical desecration, it was standard practice. Writing material was precious. Those monks wrote over ancient texts, but they also reused and wrote over their own works when no longer needed. Some might have not believed that ancient "pagan" works of the Greeks were worth keeping, but many others probably thought there were plenty of copies somewhere of any text they might write over. Today scholars can look up how common a book is, if it's available in other libraries, etc., all online. But in the Middle Ages, even determining the rarity of a given work was difficult. If you find an ancient Greek text in your monastery's library, that could be a common work that can also be found in a hundred other libraries across Europe, or it could be an incredibly rare work of which you have the only surviving copy of. Unless it was a very familiar work, like say a famous and abundantly available work of a famous philosopher, how would you even know the rarity of a given work? Today, we throw away and recycle books all the time. Libraries continuously purge and maintain their collections. But today we can research and distinguish between rare one-of-a-kind works and mass produced paperbacks that were printed by the thousands. It wasn't so easy long ago.
This comment and the accompanying thread made me so happy! We look at everything in the past through our modern lens and it distorts EVERYTHING. We don't value our clothing at all and that leads us to make some crazy assumptions about life in the past. All the best to your wife! She's doing the work that I'm currently getting a degree for :D
That’s fascinating, thanks for sharing!
See, my guess would have been "less-than-honest person trying to sell an old book by making it look older than it was".
I love the ancient map that shows Antarctica, I would love a full video on that.
yess
miniminuteman made a video on it
@@smoceany9478Piri Reis map, there are several better videos, such as World of Antiquity
@@whlewis9164 maybe i will watch it, never heard of them
I was never the same after I found out about the Piri Reis map 20 years ago, and I'd love to hear Joe's take on it!!
It's hard to imagine ancient people writing weird things and leaving them in random places to confuse archeologists, because they probably never thought there would be other civilizations after theirs.
The mummy wrapped in Etruscan texts reminds me of fish and chips wrapped in a random newspaper !
I wouldn't be surprised if it's just a discarded piece, either replaced because some new developments made its contents outdated or obsolete because the last person of the household with ties to their Etruscan family ancestry died a long time ago and nobody wanted to keep grandmother's old rag. And because fabric was still useful it got torn up and used for the mummy. Or whatever. I'm of the firm belief that way too much meaning is read into a lot of historical finds.
🤣 so true.
@@jojo-pkMaybe someone had a lifelong yearning for some Etruscan lost love or something like that. Maybe it was a favourite book that gave peace of mind so they wanted that next to them when they travelled to the afterlife.
I'd hate to be one who gets called for THAT order up
@@anandsharma7430 all of that is possible. Point is, we have no idea. There are a myriad possible reasons and it's silly to assume every single detail from the past has had some deeper meaning.
I vote for a part 2 where you go over the honorable mentions, please and thank you, Joe
I second this
I too support this idea.💡
Yes please!
Yes Please
Do not click on the link above its just bait
Um, actually. Etruscan wasn't an early kinda Roman language. It was it's own thing. A bit of a mystery, but linguists don't think it's related to Latin, or any other Indo-European language. However, the Romans did borrow a bunch of words, cultural practices, and second-hand Greek stuff from the Etruscans, before nicking a bunch of Greek stuff directly later on. By the way, is anyone else annoyed about the distinct lack of conveniently located caves where you can stash random stuff for people to find after thousands of years and wonder what it means?
It may be picayune of me, but this week I would like to award Joe extra points for knowing that the plural of "codex" is "codices."
Similar to "Kleenex", "Kleenices".
It may be… what?
Wtf is "picayune" ?!
Uh, yes to the honorable mentions, or at least that one with a detailed map of Antarctica???? Like, what?
Yeah, I feel that's kind of the most impressive one, if it's true. Also confusing, assuming it portrays no ice
I looked it up, unfortunately it’s not that big a mystery. It was a compilation of a few other maps, and with some massive mistakes. It’s fairly certain that they just thought S America continued East at its Southern end, and the area that is supposedly Antarctic isn’t at all accurate, and has no details besides the coastline (which, again, is not accurate at all).
@@thomaswalsh4552 Ah, usual story. Shame
@@thomaswalsh4552 ah that's a shame, sometimes these stories are blown out of proportion to grab attention.
thats been thoroughly debunked but still gets repeated because it sounds cool.
Joe, can I just say you're one of my favourite people on the Internet. There's so much negativity on the Internet, and you're just this endless beacon of wonder and positivity. Please never stop being you.
I second this
Positivity lmfao
That means a lot, thank you. 🥹
@@cp37373 Positivity for me isn’t about constant motivational poster nonsense, or even necessarily always looking on the bright side always: it’s just not allowing yourself to be dragged down by all the bad stuff in the world and only focussing on that. It’s still being able to look around and say “the world is a really interesting, cool place that I want to learn more about”.
As someone who's only known Joe's channel for 12 months, I whole heartedly agree. 2023 was better than it would have been otherwise had I not stumbled upon Joe's channel.
Piri Reis Map is definitely worthy of the Joe Scott treatment in it's own video.
Jamestown fascinates me! One of my ancestors arrived there in 1616, and by 1619 was considered an "olde settler", which means he survived some rough times.
I grew up in the area... And thought as a kid that that's how some people still lived... When I was little I told people that Dam Neck was named during the witch trials because they "Throwed the witches in the water, and broke their damn necks!"
My browsing history should’ve never been opened
A cursed text indeed
Classic.
Oh shit son
😮
Does it have alien tentacles?
There's a pen-and-ink artist on KZhead with a ton of subscribers called "Peter Draws" who has filled a vast number of notebooks with years worth of incredibly oddball and beautiful ink drawings, even including strange-looking scripts that mean absolutely nothing. Someday some archaeologist is going to find them, and people will get PhDs trying to decode them.
that would be hilarious and frightening
but also a very good television series
That reminds me there's an artist I follow on Instagram who uses pages from old books to draw and paint birds. The work is beautiful and having the text as a background adds to the work. It's a great example of reusing old books.
Peter Draws mentioned!
Lol, yes! I love that channel!
Imagine future archaeologists finding fish wrapped in newspaper and trying to figure that shit out.
🤣
I love how he sometimes delivers the most mindblowing stuff while talking in the most nonchalant manner ever heard by humankind
The amount of times I think of burying weird stuff to confuse future people does make me think that past people would have thought to troll us as well.
Yeah I like this angle
I like to think that at least *one* person did this
Certain ecological conditions allows for things to preserve generally almost everything is lost to history. Ink dries and eventually evaporates and paper and metal denigrates very rapidly in a few decades. That’s why time capsules from 20 years ago (if you can even find it) look like they were buried 2000 years ago.
I buy weird crap to confuse people in our time. Stay weird, friends.
woman strolling through a flea market in from of the library of Alexandria buying some randoms books that are thrown out by the library for clean up, thought the fancy characters looked "cool" so she bought it and decorated here bedroom for years, then she died the family thought, hey, she loved that strange book so much, lets wrap her into that ... that how imagine it happend
At least she has something to read in the after life
@@yin-sin If she was still in the coffin. What a boring way to spend eternity, stuck in the ground with nothing to do.
I imagined that she might've been an intellectual and that the stuff she was wrapped in was her job which she was very passionate about and good at. I'm sick rn and can barely remember what the video was about but didn't the writings turn out to be a calendar? She might've been a shaman/priestess or an agricultural manager?
I love your content. I think with all ancient manuscripts one needs an understanding of what was happening historically and linguistically. I highly recommend the lectures of Richard Carrier.
I find these types of things HELLA fascinating, weird, strange and HECKA detailed books are so cool, I actually bought myself a copy of both the Voynich Manuscript and the Codex Seraphinianus (they were EXPENSIVE) but they're a true beaut on my bookcase~
Joe's right about the Ark of the Covenant. I think a lot of us saw that old documentary Han Solo did about it.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I love how he teamed up with James Bond in the next installment to claim the related limited edition collectible.
it's a question frequently asked of Conservative / Orthodox rabbis by gentiles that's their most-frequent answer
Regarding what you said about future people applying the same criteria we apply to the past to our present, I’d suggest reading “The Motel of the Mysteries,” a graphic novel about future archaeologists discovering a motel. Note: the scene with the archaeologist walking about the dig site with a toilet seat around her neck and tooth brushes for ear rings, to show how these sacred artifacts were worn is beyond funny.
It's so goooood!
A video on the Phaistos disc!! That is one of my all-time favorites! ❤
I’ve known a few people to wear “the sacred seat” around their neck, while performing an exorcism/purging “ritual”, after heavily imbibing of the “holy nectar” of the gods. 😏😏😏😂😂
Someone else may have noted this ... early SNL skit which I loved. Now, did the graphic novel come before the skit or after?
@@scloftin8861I don’t know when the skit was, but the book is copyrighted 1979.
Make a video on all of them, love this kind of stuff
Videos like this make me want to write some weird book, and hide it away to be discovered centuries later. In my opinion, the Voynich Manuscript was something like that.
The Piri Reis map is a world map compiled in 1513 by the Ottoman admiral and cartographer Piri Reis.From ancient times it was believed that a southern continent must logically exist to counterbalance the weight of the known northern hemisphere. In a world map first published in 1570, Abraham Ortelius perpetuated this belief with a southern landmass depicted prominently, but drawn entirely from conjecture. he took the Australian northern coast and the land near south America and filled in the rest with his best guess. You can find maps of the two points mentioned and those are period accurate. The rest is apparently his best guess. There is no mystery to cartographers.
More recent analysis finds that the land to the south matches the eastern coast of South America pretty closely, but rotated 90 degrees. Add that to the notes above and it's not hard to believe that Reis reinterpreted that southern land as being the "balancing mass." On the other hand, he supposedly said that he used "much older maps" to make his map, so it's possible that's what someone before him thought about the eastern coast of South America.
oddly, I think australia + antarctica WERE the same landmass once. the map was just out of date by 60 million years
😂
@@zimrielPlus India & Africa...
@@ScottEsser You are correct that its the Eastern coast of SA, not Antartica as the myth that people keep ignorantly perpetuating. You can tell that Piri Reis ran out of room on his map while drawing the coastline and continued along the bottom edge of the map instead of getting a second page or adding onto it.
Joe: Joe:
@@TeodoraTacderen Doamne... avortează.... avortează! AAAAAaaaaa
@@Nefylym Joe: Joe: So here is where all the lost socks go!
Must be radioactive (when you open it, the "demon core" gets completed from the triggering of an internal mechanism); then the SAME process still happens, just it takes 1 million times longer (~1 month).
@@TeodoraTacderenHello you wizard. I don't know how you are doing this, but when I post a link in KZhead, it gets deleted automatically.
@@thingsiplay same happens to me a lot, but that's more chrome not refreshing your comment properly, if you hit refresh on your browser and scroll through the comment section, usually the missing comments appear, commenters and publishers have no ability to delete comments, thats something only google moderators can do as an admin, used to work as a cloud admin for them hunting rogue admins, man i used to have the power to shut down an entire website bro lol but office politics be cray over there so i left to work for the gov
I love watching you video every monday. Its my day off routine. No music thou pleasee it hard to focus on what your saying. And i love to have a part two as well. Thanks and keep on kepping on.
13:07 - I LOVE this kind of thing, so I'm a huge yes vote for a separate video on each of these "honorable mentions"! Thank you for yet another entertaining and elucidating video. 👍👍
The Judas Manuscript (and others) came out when I was in seminary. The Dead Sea Scrolls were starting to be released to non-scholars when my father was in seminary. Always fun to study, translate, and see how they fit with canonical texts.
I vote specifically for the Easter Island writing to get it's own video, and for the Honorable Mentions as a group in general. As for the nature of past writtings, it seems to me like the most creative people would have also been the most likely to learn how to read & write.
Just you know, EVERYTHING about Easter Island I vote for being it's own video.
I appreciate that you mentioned how difficult it is to learn to write and create the tools to do so. Also, how much effort must go into the preservation of a text. I definitely agree that some texts without references found elsewhere yet could be fictional. Ones with multiple sources I'd be skeptical of being fully fictional, but definitely skewed with biases.
Thank you so much for all your lessons and yes, I would love to see your take on the Rongo Rongo, Phiskus Disk and I already misspelled those so, ... you know. Can't wait for your next video.
not quite ancient manuscripts but I still remember going into my great Aunt's basement as a child and finding a bunch of old schoolbooks for Latin & other subjects most people would not recognize today. basically I'm saying that I'd open all of these, couldn't help myself. old books are awesome.
I started collecting old books about 20 years ago when people didn't know the value of them, some of my oldest are from 1700 and a few very few from 1600. Started as a casual hobby became a life journey.
In like 1997, as an 11 year old, I was gifted an old World Book Encyclopedia that my grandparents had at their place, published around 1967. It was so cool to read as a young man why was curious about the world both what things had changed over 30 years, and learning more about stuff that hadn't changed. Like the books were written at the height of the space race, and the Cold War, and much of Africa was still colonised and Apartheid was still in place. I wish I still had those books. But they got lost around the time I turned 18 and left my Mom's place.
Had a full copy plus the greatest ....
@@TheSilmarillian that's great, I'd love to have some truly old books like that I'm pretty sure my oldest is from the 19th century. mainly I just don't think I'd have the ability to store them properly.
I would love to see a video on the Mayan manuscript (The Grolier Codex). Those drawings look amazing and pre-columbian history is so fascinating!
The 3 step rule for determining veracity. 1. Are the materials authentic? 2. Does it appear to be contemporary for the time? 3. Does it confirm what I already believe?
Your page was suggested to me by KZhead. The title caught me so I watched. Then immediately watched another. So second video in I subscribed. Love your videos. 😊
I like to think that Etruscan linen book came from a bargain bin at the library of Alexandria. Like when the local library has way too many of those garbage romance novels so they sell them off at $1 each to make space.
Speaking of undeciphered writing, the Harappa / Indus Valley civilization had seals with an undeciphered writing system. We've only found seals (for stamping on clay) with this writing, no paper or manuscripts. These were most likely used as a credit system for trading goods. The Harappans were pretty advanced for a Bronze Age civilization, but we know a lot less about them than other civilizations of the time due to the lack of discovered writing.
17:39 one more option. Sometimes you get a group of people with a narrative they wish to promote, like today’s gorilla, skeptics, editing, pages in Wikipedia. The Gnostics were such a group.
I love the variety of your content so many interesting ideas. I think the Piri Reis map would be an interesting video on it's own since it in itself says it's baed on other maps and would raise questions about who made it and how?
The Voynich manuscript was one of Joe's first videos I found and I guess that means that I've been subbed a LONG time. This kind of feels like a bit of a throwback vid, and I'm all for it.
I thought I saw a video with the voynich manuscript has been shown to be some form of Turkish language.
It does feel like old times
@davehilling3944 I saw that video too.
@@davehilling3944 I was just going to write the same thing
@@hauntedmilk8540 turns out it was a notebook on herbalism back when those were a no no to have, who knew
The reference to dead and dying languages brought to mind the story of Linea A, and Linea B, and the work of Michael Ventris in the translatin of Linea B, which Ventris determined was a very ancient form of Greek. Sadly Ventris was killed in a car crash before he could start work on Linea A, which today still remains undecyphered.
True but even he probably wouldn't be able to decipher A, as it was an educated guess that B was an early form of Greek. We have very little historical examples left of A, meaning our sample size is too small to decode it.We have no idea what linear A is similar too, so unless we find more of it, it's lost to time
@@Bdynysus fair point, well made.
Thanks so much for creating and sharing this educational and entertaining video.
Joe, I’m a new subscriber but I’ve been binging all of your videos. I have an idea for one after watching a video you made where you mentioned parallel thinking. Maybe you could do a video just about parallel thinking/inventions that were made by people without contact or knowledge about each others work.
Supposedly, the Greek dynasty of Egyptian pharos, the Ptolemies, stocked their famous Library of Alexandria by requiring all ships entering port to surrender any scrolls or books on board, and accept copies before departing. This may be apocryphal, and perhaps they simply purchased volumes like normal people. If so, it's still probable that Alexandria, as the busiest port on the Mediterranean, ended up with lots of foreign texts on material like Chinese paper, Japanese silk, clay, hide and papyrus. The embalmers perhaps bought stuff for wrapping mummies at flea markets, and in the desert, old linen would do very well for cheaper burials.
The emerald tablet was supposedly held in Alexandria too
@@adamhaney1048 What's the emerald tablet?
@@jeffcampbell1555 A supposed work of alchemy revered by medieval European alchemists, probably introduced to the West by early medieval Arab alchemists via Moorish Iberia. But the library was destroyed long before that, by various Roman sieges of the city up to the reign of Diocletian and several earthquakes, anything left was possibly destroyed at the order of Caliph Omar when the Muslim army conquered Alexandria in 642.
@@Nulli_Di Thank you. Yes, Alexandria was thriving in the medieval era, but the Ptolemaic city was already under a layer of archeological rubble. Alexander chose a great place for a port, but alluvial soils and sand don't keep buildings standing tall forever.
@@jeffcampbell1555 it’s an ancient scripture that was supposedly a literal giant tablet with writing on it. People say it was written by Egyptian god Thoth/ Hermès Trismegistus and it’s one of the texts that astrology,alchemy,magic ect stems from. The quote “as above, so below” comes from it
I can't remember where I heard (or possibly read) this idea but it's possible that many ancient books were written backwards so that they could only be read in the reflection of a pool. Like a security feature.
That's a pretty badass detail for my short stories, thank you!
I wonder how many valuable books have been completely ruined because some clumsy oaf dropped them in the water.
I love stuff like this. Absolutely make a video on the Honorable Mentions!!! ❤
I agree with your point at the end, I think we've been storytelling creatures as far back as history can go. It's how we, historically, made sense of the world. Greek mythology is entirely based around "A thing happened, I don't know why, so a God did it". Lightning, earthquakes, mountains, the sea, love, happiness, death, they didn't understand the science behind it like we do now so they came up with stories to tell their children around the fire. Going off topic slightly, I think this is where most cryptids came from, they were stories handed down like Chinese Whispers, every generation adding more details until it becomes a legend of its own. You hear stories of tribes in Africa seeing *giant* snakes or human-like gorillas or other monsters and we take them so seriously. "Why would they lie? They must have seen it, they've been telling this story for hundreds of years!" And so often it's that they created the myth around an evil of the time. It was a storytelling device. It could have represented a plague or an enemy or a mysterious phenomenon of their time. The Boogeyman isn't a real animal, he's an invention you tell your children to scare them into (not) doing something. But in 1000 years, they might find the story of it and assume we thought it was a real animal.
The Piri Reis map has fascinated me since I came across it in Fingerprints of the God's when I was a teenager. From what I can tell there is a lot of reason to doubt large parts of Fingerprints of the Gods, and its still a cool idea... But that map has always bothered me. I would love to see a deep dive
Theres plenty of videos out there of people talking about that map. The one from Miniminuteman might be a good start.
world of antiquity also has a great video on the piri reis map, hes a historian w a focus on antiquity and a great source for that kind of thing!
@@hannahbrown2728 came here to suggest that exact video. You beat me to it! Cheers
Anything written by Graham Hancock, Erich von Daniken, and the rest of the pseudo-archaeological crowd should be discarded out of hand. They're just keeping the Nazis' ideology alive, whether or not they agree with it. I'll name-check Miniminuteman and World of Antiquity, too, along with Stephen Milo, Atun-Shei Films, and The Cynical Historian if you want REAL information.
If you are too lazy to google it: None of the real geographical features on the Piri reis map were unknown at the time of its creation. It's just a compilation of different well known maps of that time - the other stuff is made up.
An interesting footnote to the Gospel of Judas: the famous Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges predicted (before it was rediscovered) much of its theology in his short story 'Three Versions of Judas', published in 1944.
Part of that is due to the fact that we had actually had a halfway decent general idea of what was likely to be in the Gospel of Judas for centuries before it was discovered. Iraneus mentioned it in his "Against Heresies" in about 180 CE. "Others again declare that Cain derived his being from the Power above, and acknowledge that Esau, Korah, the Sodomites, and all such persons, are related to themselves. On this account, they add, they have been assailed by the Creator, yet no one of them has suffered injury. For Sophia was in the habit of carrying off that which belonged to her from them to herself. They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas." From this short description we can tell that the Gospel of Judas was probably written by a gnostic sect active at the time of Iraneus that believed that Judas' betrayal was a divine mystery motivated by access to a higher truth than was available to the other disciples. The discovery filled in a ton of gaps and allowed us to read this long mysterious text for the first time, but it was already known that it had existed and that it would have the broad general shape that it did.
@@achristiananarchist2509 Interesting, thank you.
@@achristiananarchist2509 Yeah the contents of the Gospel of Judas is very, _very_ much what one would expect from a Gnostic author of that time. The more contrarian the claim, the deeper (or higher, in a sense) the mystery it must be, and they loved mysteries.
Everyone of these needs its own video, super interesting.
Dear Joe, I would love entire episodes on any of the books, codices and other finds you mention here. Your show is great, and I love your “magic” 😂 Thank you so much!
Furry Harry Potter fanfics in 2524
"Etruscan was an early kind of Roman language" No, not at all. Etruscan was totally unrelated to Latin and other Italian languages, and in fact it wasn't even an Indo-European language. Its origin is an interesting mystery in itself. Also it's a bit silly to suggest that there's a 'crisis' happening because languages are going extinct. That's just part of the life cycle of languages - they either evolve into something different or they die out. As long as we make sure to keep a good record of dying languages and not to lose the ability to translate them (which we do) then it's fine. The alternative - to force people to keep speaking a language when it's already doomed - is not an alternative.
Ah thank you, you’re right and I’m glad you mentioned the life cycle at the end.
Maybe it's like an early play, fairy tale, or soothecy, as I wouldnt expect or trust setians for having a very good spell to turn mike johnson into a toad or gaurd llama rather than a communist agent robot?
_"Etruscan was totally unrelated to Latin and other Italian languages, and in fact it wasn't even an Indo-European language"_ - Wikipedia says that: "Etruscan influenced Latin" and "The consensus among linguists and Etruscologists is that Etruscan was a Pre-Indo-European and Paleo-European language". Do you have other knowledge?
@@renedekker9806 I don't really know what you mean, since those statements merely corroborate my point. Etruscan was a Pre-Indo-European or Paleo-European language, and hence not Indo-European. Etruscan did indeed influence Latin, but this is not what is meant by 'relation' in linguistic terminology.
@@patavinity1262 Then what does related mean?
Fantastic video, and yes those things do sound like they need their own video!
Piri Reis, please. Thank you for your decade of work. I'm always excited to see what drops on Monday.
When Ben Bova was editor of Analog Magazine, he mentioned in the editorial that he could write in a fantasy language. (I'm not sure what to call it, don't remember what he called it.) He could just disconnect his mind and words, sentences, paragraphs would flow, but he had no idea what they meant. Strange symbols. There was such an appeal, that in the next issue he included several pages of his writing. I've tried googling, but my search didn't show anything; as I said I'm unsure what he called it.
When I get back home, i’ll try to find it. I have ALL the Analogs of the Ben Bova and Stanley Schmidt eras.
Following for more info!
@@dewiz9596i have them too! been a loooong time since i browsed any of those. now preparing to offer them all on ebay.
@@quiestinliteris ditto, Ben Bova's Grand Tour was one of my favorite series of all time, would love to know more about this fantasy language
@@dewiz9596Await your discoveries.
What a pleasant change of choice of music for mystery content. No atmospheric, ethereal soundscape with creepy noises, but jazzy Foodtuber cooking show close-up shot music. I like. :D
Right? I was noticing that. No weird wavery background wail, whatever that noise is. Made with a saw and a violin bow, I think? Great in certain circumstances, iffy in something that's supposed to be informational.
I absolutely love learning about these manuscripts, and about dead languages in general. I wonder if the text for the Book of Soyga is online somewhere.
This one was AWESOME!!! I loved it! Thanks!!
Thank you for this. All the manuscripts sound interesting and worthy of further explanation.
The Piri Reis map is fascinating. I'd love a video about that.
World of Antiquity and Miniminuteman
It's not quite as fascinating once you know the truth - it's just a warped map of South America (the bottom part is called "the land with all the snakes") that pseudoarcheologists try to argue is Antartia
Excellent approach.❤
You say it would be unlikely for someone to do that just for a goof, but have you seen sculptures? Amazing levels of effort for artistic expression.
you know what I find fascinating Joe? Your awesomeness.
It really IS fascinating how awesome he is. :)
Agreed.
I’d love to see a video on any or all of those things. I find this stuff really interesting.
Your take on monastic traditions & illuminated manuscripts would be of welcome interest, Joe --- Book of Kells, Lindisfarne Gospel, etc. Happy St Paddy's Day, Mr Scott!
That is a legitimately interesting hypothesis… one I hadn’t considered, but it is entirely possible that some people were just creative and made things that meant nothing, people after all are smart and ingenious, it’s a misconception that people were stupid centuries or millennia ago, they just didn’t have the information we had, but they had the same thinking capacity as a modern person.
My favourite way of putting it was XKCD, I believe, implying the Voynich Manuscript is an ancient DND campaign book
I vote for a deep dive into the Lands of the Piri Reis Map! (Also, have you ever looked into the Origins of the Great Sphinx of Egypt? Heard that some archeologists and geologists think that it could be thousands of years older than any Egyptian Pharaohs' reign.)
Piri Reis - See World of Antiquity & Miniminuteman. As for the Sphinx, I think WoA has a video on that. There's so much 🐂💩 about it being multiples of tens of thousands of years old. These people either fabricate "evidence", ignore evidence or distort it to suit their weird concepts. Same as the pyramids. The Great Pyramid isn't perfectly aligned, for example, and people have even tried shaving pieces off to make it fit their calculations.
No, they have not. Any peculiarities of the map have been thoroughly debunked and shon to be simply an iterative improvement of contemporary maps. The claim about Antarctica were themselves unscientific and proven to be wrong aka what the map shows us unlike an ice free Antarctica would look like and it is simply a continuation of the belief that there is a terra australis and those lines fictional and made up placeholder
Yes to doing more of these!
Your intro still-shot this with the title etc. is HILARIOUS! I keep waiting for Harrison to sneak up behind you.
The Wikipedia entry on the Peri Reis map states: "A disproven 20th-century hypothesis identified the southern landmass with an ice-free Antarctic coast," but offers no reference to support the assertion.
My mistake to not read farther down on the Wikpedia page, the citation for the debunking is: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piri_Reis_map#CITEREFMcIntosh2000b
Lol, there's a whole section titled "Antarctica claims". The originator of the claim has no supporting evidence himself and even disregarded Piri Reis' own markings to fit the map to his Antarctica theory. No part of the supposed Antarctica coastline has ever been accurately matched to either the actual coastline or a postulated unglaciated coastline. It's far more likely to be Terra Australis, a theoretical southern landmass on most maps of the period that was initially posited by Ptolemy.
Wikipedia is not a trusted source for anything "esoteric", mystical or otherwise outside of current scientific standards. Look up the "Guerilla Skeptics" and what they do.
@@jacobmarchlinski852 Considering the belt current that traps you around the island from leaving unless you have a powered engine vessel, I am not surprised no ancient navigators ever got that coast line quite right.
@@johnpezaris6982speaking of unsolved mysteries, how were you able to include a non-KZhead link and have your comment still visible hours later? Is Wikipedia also allowed by YT?
It interesting descovering ancient art. It's wild what people did to explain the world around them that they didn't understand.
I'm ok with most of it but really wish they hadn't made blood sacrifice such a thing. I mean, what god would feel honored by the murder of one of his creations anyway?
Unlike today, when each and every one of us is educated, rational, and sane. 🤨
Your comparison between magical texts and self-help literature is surprisingly apt. Most of it concerns how to understand and overcome gatekeeping if it's written well. Otherwise, it was probably written by gatekeepers as part of their gatekeeping.
Thank you for another fun video joe ❤️
Codex Gigas would make a great segment. I don't believe in all the supernatural lore surrounding the Codex, but it is definitely a bizarre book with a long history.
Gigas? Do you mean Soyga?
@@davidanderson2357 Two separate grimoires. Codex Gigas is also called the "Grand Grimoire" or the "Devil's Bible". It's a colossal book allegedly written by Herman the Recluse, a Benedictine monk. Aldaraia was one of John Dee's collection.
imagine some dungeon master guide book found and people trying to make sense of it
Love that XKCD!
"I see here that there once existed a creature by the name of... the Tarrasque 🤔🤔"
@@butHomeisNowhere___ Funny thing is... there actually IS a Tarrasque in classical French mythology and it was every bit as monstrous as the D&D version, here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarasque#:~:text=The%20Tarasque%20is%20a%20creature,could%20expel%20a%20poisonous%20breath.
"it looks like English... but it's not... where was this GYGAX even from?"
I love all Ask Joe videos!!
So love your pod cast. I learn so much
This has to be the best thumbnail picture you have even done for a video
A little perplexed about why the piri rais map is in the honorable mention. I thought I was just the coast of south america warped, but people think it’s antarctica? The area people claim is antarctica clearly shows the valdes peninsula and ends around the city of puerta deseado.
I'm really surprised Joe let that one slip by him, or did he do it on purpose to cause more engagement, I suspect the later lol.
Yeah, that was what jumped out at me when I saw it. We also need to remember that navigation in the far southern hemisphere was difficult at that time as their location methods had been created in the northern hemisphere. It was already a bit imprecise and the further south they went, the more funky it could get.
I, for one, would definitely love another video of the honorable mention mysterious manuscripts.
Thank you for saying *on* Long Island! I love to hear it ❤, this small thing has made my day! I am literally going to tell people about this.
Have you done a full video on the dead sea scrolls?
Love these types of videos. Herculeum scrolls?
Hey Joe, Great show. I'd like to hear more about that Seth thing.
I've been wondering the same thing for a long time, how do we know that some of these old manuscripts aren't just stories they made up for fun? Grrat video as always, thanks 😊
Hey Joe you were the first KZheadr I subscribed to, and I still look forward to your post every Monday....... Keep up the good work.
Considering the possibility that few people knew how to read in ancient times it would seem to be unlikely that someone would take the time to create fiction without an audience
Good theory, except religious texts where also writen with an audience in mind who often could not read.
? people have been creating made up stories for fun since the beginning of time
Regarding religious texts, I believe that was in order to control religion, considering that for the most part only priests could read Latin and therefore dictate the belief system
Piri Reis map deserves its own video. Its various quirks and its details are.... fascinating. I'm a map nerd so to me its the height of intrigue but I tell you now that there is at least a 20 minute video to be made on that map. If not far longer...
Brilliant episode 🎉
Dude. I'm gonna say this once and then I will never criticise your outstanding work again. Sometimes, the incidental music (in this case some jazz muzac) is so loud in the mix I can barely concentrate on what you're saying. Sorry. Love your work otherwise. X
OK, it stopped at around 5 minutes but man, it was loud.
Etruscan wasn't a Roman language, it was ... etruscan language:). Romans and Etruscans are two distinct civilisations.
I am very interested in seeing you do something on EVERY single one of these.
I've always thought that The Voynich Manuscript was the world's first comic book. Love the channel by the way.
Noooooooooooooooo. You must not read from the book!
What if these books are just written by people on acid wantin to document what they saw after eating smth
I've always been interested in linguistics and history, and the fact that we could lose more languages in the future is scary. Hope we can preserve these languages before that happens.
The Piri Reis map is wildly fascinating. If it is true that he made his map based off of older source maps which showed Antarctica hundreds of years before it was discovered, and how it shows the Bimini Road in the Bahamas above water and a bunch of other things that has some incredible implications of prehistory. I mean if everything is true then there’s a map from the 1500s based off of older maps depicting a world as it likely would have been during the ice age. If it’s true, it would mean that somehow there was a culture circumnavigating the world during the ice age! That is insane to me. In fact everything from the ice age is wildly fascinating. You got these maps allegedly from the time period, placed like gobekli tepe dating to the time period, mass extinctions of animals, significant geological evidence from around the world suggesting a comet impact around the time, ice core samples corroborating the impact theory, massive flood plains, the flood myth across practically all culture. I mean there is so much varied evidence, that it makes complete sense that an advance culture was out and about during the ice age, when the miles thick ice sheets was hit with a meteor, resulting in massive flooding on an unimaginable scale raising sea levels hundreds of feet effectively resetting civilization. Ice age impacts, Piri Reis maps, ancient sites now being discovered are wildly fascinating and demands more study because the implications are literally world changing.
The KZhead comment section should never have been opened.