How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
> sheds light on how the ancient Minoan and Mycenaean elite
Mycenaeans are considered Greek.
Minoans generally not considered Greek.
Their script, Linear A, has never been deciphered, so we don’t actually know what language they spoke, but most linguists think it wasn’t Greek, based on how poorly Linear A’s signs map onto Greek phonetics when tested as they do successfully with Mycenaean Linear B.
Culturally the Minoans also look distinct from later Greek civilization. Different religious iconography (bull-leaping, goddess-centric imagery), different art style, no clear warrior-elite hierarchy the way Mycenaean and later Greek society had.
Worth flagging the retconning point cuts both ways: some scholars think adamantine/adamas was always a somewhat vague "hardest thing we know" placeholder rather than one referent, meteoric iron included. Plausible, not settled.
Actually, maybe we should. Get him distracted and focused on solving that using all of Palantir's might, and then he'll leave the rest of the world alone.
Reminds me of every "let's give Google the impossible AI project so they stop shipping consumer garbage" joke from the 2010s. Never worked, they always ship both.
In ancient times with no light pollution they could probably see and track meteorites falling. And it could have been easier to access to get those metals than mining.
Perhaps sometimes they saw it hit and went to find it? But the night is long and people should be indoors asleep near the fire and meteorites fall all around the clock anyway?
So perhaps they mostly just picked weird rocks up off the ground, as the Inuit did? When you spend time outside with the herds you probably notice unusual wrongs.
They go completely dark at a very high altitude. I feel like a bright sunny day would give you a better chance of seeing a falling rock, at least once it gets closer to the ground
A couple of years ago, this 3000 year old arrow head was found in Switzerland, it comes from a meteorite up in Estonia. I read about this news right when I was visiting the island of Saaremaa and the site. It's an amazing place and as the arrow shows, material like this got traded far even quite far back.
If I get lucky in IPO land I'll have my eye on a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch with a meteorite dial, so I guess things have not changed all that much in the last 3500 years :P
My engagement ring contains meteorite, supposedly from the Gibeon Meteorite, although the fact that a single meteorite is a component advertised in so many rings makes me somewhat suspicious as to the quantity or authenticity. But it looks pretty, anyway.
It should read Egyptian rings forged from meteorites were fashionable within the regional trading area in ancient times.
But : cultural misapropriation
There are some places, like Cape York, where the meteorite was immense so fragments are in a long line and cold forging gets developed. That is, you keep bumping into bits in the same area so you start to think. Sometimes people are interested in the recurrent fragments but do not forge, as Canyon Diablo, which I think is tough to handle anyway. They know the bits are from the stars, which is quite enough to delight. In Egypt there seems anciently to have been an activity of hunting for where 'iron from the sky' landed, before there was hot forging. I don't know if there is a case of a spectacular strewn zone there, but the phenomenon had been taken on board, and continued much later. I dimly remember first reading about it when a bedoin's camel was found somehow outfitted with something beaten from a meteorite.
apparently several thousand small meteors strike earth per year. eventually they'd get buried but there would likely be a pretty huge number of them lying around after a few million years.
Iron smelting had not been invented yet. Meteorites were the only readily available source of iron. Upon the invention of smelting all iron rings appear to be smelted.
Fraud angle doesn't hold up much. Meteoric iron's rare and identifiable, smelted iron didn't exist yet to fake it with, and everyone at that status level would know what real sky-iron looked like. Faking it needed tech that didn't exist.
Provenance chain on 3000 year old metal, good luck with that. Somebody's gonna claim their ring is meteoric iron with zero spectrometry to back it, and museums will eat it up anyway.
Mycenaeans are considered Greek.
Minoans generally not considered Greek.
Their script, Linear A, has never been deciphered, so we don’t actually know what language they spoke, but most linguists think it wasn’t Greek, based on how poorly Linear A’s signs map onto Greek phonetics when tested as they do successfully with Mycenaean Linear B.
Culturally the Minoans also look distinct from later Greek civilization. Different religious iconography (bull-leaping, goddess-centric imagery), different art style, no clear warrior-elite hierarchy the way Mycenaean and later Greek society had.