Daily Archives: August 16, 2021
More Pompeii . . .
I mentioned in last night’s blog that I had put in for a refund of the $99 deposit I had made when I signed up for a Starlink system. I was told it would be 7-10 days until I got my refund, but it showed up in my PayPal account this evening. Nice!
Getting back to our trip to the Houston Museum of Natural Science this past Tuesday, (you can click above to read about it again) this is a facsimile of the famed Rosetta Stone. For some reason I always pictured it smaller.
Dating from 196 BC, and discovered by one of Napoleon’s officers in 1799, it contains the same document, written in three different scrips and two languages, Ancient Egyptian in both Demotic and hieroglyphic text, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek.
Since Ancient Greek was well-known and easily read, it allowed linguists to translate and read the hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt for the first time, though it took more than 25 years before this was accomplished.
As I mentioned in last Tuesday’s blog about our visit to the Museum, it’s amazing how much some of these almost 2000 year old objects would look perfectly at home today.
Like this shovel and a pitchfork,
and these carpentry tools, a set of dividers, a chisel, a plum-bob, and a right angle framing square.
Even this glassware used for cooking looks like stuff found in a high-end shop.
And this solid gold jewelry could be found in a Cartier’s store window.
But the thing that stands out more in these Pompeii exhibit are the ‘bodies’. But of course they’re not really bodies.
When the excavations of Pompeii started in the mid-1700’s workers were finding these mysterious voids inside the solidified volcanic ash. It was only when they noticed jewelry and bits of cloth in the voids that they realized that these were left after the bodies inside them decayed away over the intervening 1700 years or so.
So they started pouring plaster of Paris into each one as they were discovered.
And the posture of some of the bodies showed how fast that some of the victims were engulfed in the ash. In fact I’ve seen some that were found standing up, or even running.
Even the pets were caught, like this dog.
And this just goes to show that, as I titled the first episode in this visit, Nothing New Under The Sun, this the recently-excavated version of a Pompeii Fast Food Joint.
With no place to sit, you just strolled through, picking your food from the dishes, and then dropping a few denari on the counter as you left. Sounds familiar.
Finishing up at the Pompeii exhibit, we headed down to the main level to everyone’s favorite . . .Dinosaurs!
This Dimetrodon is not really a dinosaur, but a prehistoric reptile and lived about 50 million years before the dinosaurs ever showed up.
Another T-Rex.
A Stegosaurus, the guy with the big spiked tail.
A Triceratops.
And of course, this isn’t a dinosaur either but a Wooly Mammoth, who lived 10,000 to 20,000 years ago.
A real youngster.
And wrapping up, this just goes to show that, as I titled the first episode in this visit, Nothing New Under The Sun, this is the recently-excavated version of a Pompeii Fast Food Joint.
With no place to sit, you just strolled through, picking your food from the dishes, and then dropping a few denari on the counter as you left. Sounds familiar.
Thought For The Day:
Will whoever keeps asking if this country can get any more insane, please stop?
