It’s a Hollyland, M2 I believe. It’s a nice little mic!

@ thanks 🙏

@@jasonchester9109 thanks! Episode 2 out now

@@RyanKry my experience was because it was a backpack, gate agents don’t give you a second thought. Flew on a lot of budget airlines too. The bag was 100% over weight limit but I guess they figure “well it’s on your back”

lol ya, I think I called it Dial of Destiny for like 3 hours. Circle, dial, why do they have to keep choosing round objects

Episode 2 coming out on Friday. Make sure you’re subscribed!

@@Lameibra awesome! Anecdotally evidence that TikTok posts work 😂 Ep 2 coming on Friday

@@joselynrijna462 ya you’re totally right - camera was way too high! I’d like to make another with just a top down for next travel. But thanks for watching this one!

Please,make another vídeo showing the backpack features...🙏🙏🙏

@@Nefertsukia thanks! Ya you’re 100% right. I did one version first and it was EVEN higher, guess should have gone lower! I should make another in the future that’s more top down on a table. Thanks for watching though!

Awesome, thanks for the comment. Got Ep 2 recorded!

Funnily enough, that's exactly what's been happening with AI. It's made figuring out if random partial fragments connect to the text!

What point are you making?

@ well when you cut someone off to where they aren’t finishing their point and then agree to the point they made in the original video but don’t serve the context to what you’re agreeing to only to be understood by your point of view it leads to a confusing video. Like saying “this is what happens when you don’t- “ “And I completely agree to this” I’m not sure what the heck he was agreeing to. Maybe we aren’t watching the same video.

@@tomroethke Do you not believe this man can teach you about historian's practices without the additional input of a layperson?

@@chaoticdriver Wow what a wonderfully nice comment, thank you!

@@iamdigory Lots of Assyriologists feel there’s a moral hazard - if you use stolen/looted/problematically acquired it will encourage other to do more looting.

@@marshallschurtz Just seems like a way they feel good about themselves. Most of history is an exchange of culture, consensual or otherwise. Seems counter-productive to the very concept of preserving an ancient culture.

Honestly because most are like a fragment with a few words. Or they’re just receipts/ledgers, which are interesting as a corpus, but an individual one is like “10 sheep”

When you find an inventory some shop keeper made you only need to look at the first couple lines to realize you didn't find the next Rosetta stone. The process of reconstructing missing parts and doing a full translation isn't a good use of time and people move on to something else.

​@marshallschurtz that doesn't answer the question. If you know it's a scrap that says 10 sheep, then that scrap HAS been translated.

@@marshallschurtzhow would you know that without translating them tho, maybe you can say of the 10 percent that have been translated most were receipts or lists. But you can’t honestly say anything about the 90 percent that haven’t been translated because they haven’t been translated.

​@@antzpantz8778context is a big part of this. When you have a huge pile of them from one place and you've translated the first few you can then deduce what the rest are based on the context of what the first few were if they seem to follow a similar format. So if I get a hundred tablets from one place that all have very similar formatting and layout, and I translate ten of them and find that they are lists then I can reasonably assume the other 90 are lists too. But that's still only 10%. Each word is hours of labour. As we translate more documents, however, we will become progressively faster at translating to newer ones, meaning that these probable lists can be revisited later for this to be confirmed, and virtually every time we do so it turns out that we were right. The other thing is formatting. A lot of these are actually formatted in surprisingly standardized ways. Partly because humans like doing that. Ledgers and lists historically were used for record-keeping by bureaucratic bodies. We know this. In fact, the first historical name we know about is one we only know because somebody signed their work on a ledger for beer IIRC. A lot of these ledgers stayed together and so from where they are found and how they look we are fairly good at recognizing them without needing to read them. Though many of them will have a few keywords translated. Not only that, but you as a person can probably tell a list is a list without actually reading it. If I hand you a document in any language where you see minimal words, we are talking one to five words at most, at a time on each row followed by a number,you start to quickly notice that what you are looking at is a list of items. Humans are so good at recognizing what a list looks like due to pattern recognition in fact that many video games and cartoons can just put squiggles with numbers beside them on a page without actually writing any words down and you will recognize what you are looking at as a list. This holds true for ancient texts as well. This gives us a very big hint on what it is. Especially if it was found in a place with a lot of other lists. Being able to sort these out without actually translating them fully or at all is important as each single word will, to repeat myself, potentially take hours to translate it if it isn't already known to figure out what it says. So if something meets the general criteria of what a list looks like it is put aside until being able to translate it can be done more quickly. If it doesn't superficially look like a list, then you can translate tiny pieces of them fairly quickly if you come across any known words and use that to gain context of what it is. If the context doesn't point towards something interesting, then you simply stop. It isn't that only 10% of them have been translated, it is that only 10% of them have been translated fully. The rest had been quickly skimmed for just enough known words to know if it is worth the time or set aside based on formatting and context. I should also point out that interesting simply means not a typical ledger or list in this context. An atypical list is still interesting. Something like a record of names for leaders. The other thing that could be interesting is just a list not formatted like a list. If it's formatted funny then there's a reason for that. And translating it can help us understand that reason. Understanding that reason gives us insight into these ancients societies. This process has been used for countless historical languages. It just isn't worth the time if we don't stand to learn something interesting enough to justify that time. It's the reason why we relearned Latin from reading the dirty letters that people sent to Julius Caesar instead of by reading the absurd amount of bureaucratic papers we have from tax collectors. Once you reverse engineer the language sufficiently and you can start having people who can simply just pick up a document and read it like somebody who has learned a second language might do, then we start getting around to these lists. It's also important to know what the word translated here refers to. Usually with historical documents translated doesn't just mean somebody picked it up and read it and determined its context, this is a specific term with specific meaning in this context. It means that somebody picked it up and read the document and then wrote it down in a modern language. So even if every single one of these documents had been fully read, it won't count as translated until it's written down in a modern language.

Yes a lot about how empires set up fortresses for visibility and control in conquered areas. Incan, Wari, Urartu, and more. Often mountainous expansionary empires

@@આર્ય thanks! Generally that they were looted or bought from people who probably looted them

The vast majority of Mesopotamian tablets that can be bought on the market were looted from Iraqi and Syrian national museums during the Iraq war and the Syrian civil war. Those tablets rightfully belong to those countries’ public because they were not willingly lent or sold out. Buying one is being active in the illegal market of looted artefacts and helps fund an industry of cultural theft and destruction of world heritages. In the past few years the major American retailer Hobby Lobby got in trouble because its parent company (a private Christian fundamentalist organization) was found to have purchased smuggled stolen artefacts confirmed to have been looted from the Iraqi national museum in 2003. They did so to place them in a for profit Christian biblical literalist history museum as supposed evidence for Noah’s Deluge (I’m 100% serious this actually happened irl lol)

​@@marshallschurtz who cares how they were gotten if they could be historically valuable. If ethics were really a concern, those researchers wouldn't use iPhones.

​@@marshallschurtzwhy loot/change a tablet that you dont understand? Ethically compromized would imply to me to be a forgery, or? What else might be going on?

Great, 100% reply - this is one huge part of it. There are lots of tablets that were acquired longer in the past and looted from sites, but looted is looted, which is why we wouldn't want to set that precedent!

@@millky3634 much appreciated! Got many more in the pipeline