It would be interesting to know who and when exactly created this temple, if it's really a Zeus temple.
Were that expat / refugees from Greece? Greek wife of some Pharaoh? Greek soldiers of Roman legion? Or Phoenicians deciding to troll future archaeologists?
Egypt was Hellenised after its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 BC. The article suggests the temple was renovated in the reign of Hadrian, in the first half of the first century AD.
This is not aimed at the commenter, but rather a generalized statement:
yntries like this make me love and at the same time hate HN. Great articles with mostly uninformed comments, whereas the two or three guys with knowledge on the topic are buried deep underneath.
Egypt was ptolemaic, thus hellenised. Cleopatra is famously Greek, not Egyptian.
Bring uninformed and asking questions should be appreciated, not condescended. It's an attitude that I see too much of in our society but hope to see less of here on HN.
This is a topic I'm also ignorant of, and I'm glad to see a discussion spark up.
> Bring uninformed and asking questions should be appreciated
I disagree. There's too much noise already. This isn't StackOverflow. Wikipedia exists. People should take a moment to read up on whatever subject before they ask questions rather than wasting other people's time coming up to speed on fundamental knowledge. (It's not like ancient Egyptians and Greeks are particularly obscure, eh?)
We can have much deeper discussions if people ask informed questions.
Sometimes the experts have a really deep discussion, and that's cool. Sometimes people just want to spitball because a post sparked their imagination.
The great thing is, we can do both. If you don't like the question that was asked, find another or ask one yourself. I fundamentally disagree with feeling people should be silenced because they are not asking the right questions.
How much research should be necessary? How much baseline knowledge is "enough" to participate? Who gets to draw that line? Thank Zeus it's not you, and instead people get to draw their own lines by engaging, or not, with other commenters on this social network.
> Who gets to draw that line? Thank Zeus it's not you...
I'm not the Spanish Inquisition. The worst I can do is downvote stupid or ignorant questions that could be easily answered by a web search and ten minutes of reading.
> I fundamentally disagree with feeling people should be silenced because they are not asking the right questions.
That's not how I feel. In fact, I would say that "feeling people should be silenced because they are not asking the right questions" is a symptom of mental or emotional illness.
What I feel is that it's disrespectful at best to lean on other people for basic knowledge rather than doing one's own homework. Even if you don't agree that "lazyweb" is disrespectful, I would still argue that it wastes a lot of time and energy. If someone asks a question that could be answered by ten minutes of googling, they are just using the forum as a interface to google, eh?
There are plenty of other places on the Internet where people can go to get basic information, Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Google, etc... Places where it's perfectly appropriate to be one of the "lucky 10,000" ( https://xkcd.com/1053/ ).
I don't think being "uninformed and asking questions should be appreciated" here. FWIW I do think it should be tolerated, because A) that's how some people learn (however disrespectfully and lazily) and B) occasionally ignorant questions lead to very interesting and informative discussions (which is the whole point of HN as far as I'm concerned) and we cannot reliably predict which ignorant questions will lead to such discussions.
> The worst I can do is downvote stupid or ignorant questions that could be easily answered by a web search and ten minutes of reading.
You can also state your point eloquently, as you did. All I'm doing is expressing my counterpoint to yours in this public forum.
I think where we really disagree is that I don't think there is a clearly defined baseline for "common knowledge". You say it's something like "10 minutes of googling", but I think there are other valid definitions, like the information you have on hand at the moment. i.e. is this a research library or a cocktail party (or something in between)?
There's certainly a point where it turns to trolling, but questions asked in good intent are fair game as far as I'm concerned.
> I think where we really disagree is that I don't think there is a clearly defined baseline for "common knowledge". You say it's something like "10 minutes of googling", but I think there are other valid definitions, like the information you have on hand at the moment. i.e. is this a research library or a cocktail party (or something in between)?
Well, part of my crankiness on this point comes from the fact that if you're on HN you're on the Internet, so the "information you have on hand at the moment" is more-or-less the information you can find in "10 minutes of googling", eh?
(I'm old enough to remember the day I realized that the 'net was as fast as my hard drive. It was like an expanding horizon, a kind of vision of cyberspace, all that information only milliseconds away... It still blows my mind if I think about it for more than a few moments. Effectively infinite information in a hyper-fractal sea.)
FWIW I do agree with you that condescending to people in re: ignorant questions is unproductive (not to same lame. It's emotional junk food.)
It's a subject you probably heard about at least three times in secondary school. If you forgot, look it up. It's like these people who were in the same state-required economics class I had to take in high school who pass around memes about how kids should have to learn about interest and credit cards and checking accounts and taxes and saving for retirement in high school, because they had to learn on their own.
And your point is? Most people will learn about Alexander at some point in their education; you might notice he wasn’t American either. Same for the Roman Empire.
So what? Do you pass on memes about how there ought to be a required class, as if there weren't one, that you actually were required to take in school?
> Cunningham is credited with the idea: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."[15]
Just to add what others are saying. Phoenicians (and anyone else in antiquity) would never have "trolled" archaeologists, because the concept of archaeology, or preserving the long-forgotten past, was simply not a concept until relatively recently (like, the late 1700's and even then, not picking up steam for a couple of decades).
Imagine if we could travel back in time and show those Babylonians an iPad. They'd think it was magic. It's incredible to think how far we've come technologically but how similar we are mentally emotionally psychologically spiritually.
Someone 100 years ago would think it's borderline magic, 200 years ago they would have absolutely considered it magic (electricity wouldn't come into its own for 70 more years). 3000 years ago a pocket knife would have been unbelievable.
Yes, Egypt was a Hellenic / Greek colony for a while, but seeing “ancient” I was under the impression it was much older. Hellenic / Greek period is something I associate with “antic” and not “ancient”.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 32.2 ms ] threadWere that expat / refugees from Greece? Greek wife of some Pharaoh? Greek soldiers of Roman legion? Or Phoenicians deciding to troll future archaeologists?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemaic_Kingdom
Egypt was ptolemaic, thus hellenised. Cleopatra is famously Greek, not Egyptian.
This is a topic I'm also ignorant of, and I'm glad to see a discussion spark up.
I disagree. There's too much noise already. This isn't StackOverflow. Wikipedia exists. People should take a moment to read up on whatever subject before they ask questions rather than wasting other people's time coming up to speed on fundamental knowledge. (It's not like ancient Egyptians and Greeks are particularly obscure, eh?)
We can have much deeper discussions if people ask informed questions.
The great thing is, we can do both. If you don't like the question that was asked, find another or ask one yourself. I fundamentally disagree with feeling people should be silenced because they are not asking the right questions.
How much research should be necessary? How much baseline knowledge is "enough" to participate? Who gets to draw that line? Thank Zeus it's not you, and instead people get to draw their own lines by engaging, or not, with other commenters on this social network.
I'm not the Spanish Inquisition. The worst I can do is downvote stupid or ignorant questions that could be easily answered by a web search and ten minutes of reading.
> I fundamentally disagree with feeling people should be silenced because they are not asking the right questions.
That's not how I feel. In fact, I would say that "feeling people should be silenced because they are not asking the right questions" is a symptom of mental or emotional illness.
What I feel is that it's disrespectful at best to lean on other people for basic knowledge rather than doing one's own homework. Even if you don't agree that "lazyweb" is disrespectful, I would still argue that it wastes a lot of time and energy. If someone asks a question that could be answered by ten minutes of googling, they are just using the forum as a interface to google, eh?
There are plenty of other places on the Internet where people can go to get basic information, Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Google, etc... Places where it's perfectly appropriate to be one of the "lucky 10,000" ( https://xkcd.com/1053/ ).
I don't think being "uninformed and asking questions should be appreciated" here. FWIW I do think it should be tolerated, because A) that's how some people learn (however disrespectfully and lazily) and B) occasionally ignorant questions lead to very interesting and informative discussions (which is the whole point of HN as far as I'm concerned) and we cannot reliably predict which ignorant questions will lead to such discussions.
You can also state your point eloquently, as you did. All I'm doing is expressing my counterpoint to yours in this public forum.
I think where we really disagree is that I don't think there is a clearly defined baseline for "common knowledge". You say it's something like "10 minutes of googling", but I think there are other valid definitions, like the information you have on hand at the moment. i.e. is this a research library or a cocktail party (or something in between)?
There's certainly a point where it turns to trolling, but questions asked in good intent are fair game as far as I'm concerned.
Well, part of my crankiness on this point comes from the fact that if you're on HN you're on the Internet, so the "information you have on hand at the moment" is more-or-less the information you can find in "10 minutes of googling", eh?
(I'm old enough to remember the day I realized that the 'net was as fast as my hard drive. It was like an expanding horizon, a kind of vision of cyberspace, all that information only milliseconds away... It still blows my mind if I think about it for more than a few moments. Effectively infinite information in a hyper-fractal sea.)
FWIW I do agree with you that condescending to people in re: ignorant questions is unproductive (not to same lame. It's emotional junk food.)
> Cunningham is credited with the idea: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."[15]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Law
The Babylonians were extremely active in that practice and Nabonidus was famous for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabonidus
From the conquest of Alexander onwards, Egypt was hellenized so calling the temple 'ancient' in the context of Egypt is misleading.
Yes, Egypt was a Hellenic / Greek colony for a while, but seeing “ancient” I was under the impression it was much older. Hellenic / Greek period is something I associate with “antic” and not “ancient”.