Ancient Manuscripts That Should Never Have Been Opened

[@Beldizar]

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.

[@lorassorkin]

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.

[@TanyaLairdCivil]

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.

[@astreaward6651]

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

[@joescott]

That’s fascinating, thanks for sharing!

[@ComradePhoenix]

See, my guess would have been "less-than-honest person trying to sell an old book by making it look older than it was".

[@RagingGoldenEagle]

Imagine future archaeologists finding a copy of my D&D 3.5 monster manual and being extremely confused.

[@timnoble1385]

Modern people are currently confused about 4th edition.

[@veramae4098]

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 ...

[@gregprice5524]

I'm still confused about the 0.5 in general additions. Yeah, I chose my word.😂

[@TomatoFettuccini]

"Wait, how did they know that zombies did 3d6 bludgeoning?"

[@cp37373]

Don’t be ridiculous. Those species existed once upon a time.

[@rustyfox81]

The mummy wrapped in Etruscan texts reminds me of fish and chips wrapped in a random newspaper !

[@jojo-pk]

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.

[@rjswas]

🤣 so true.

[@anandsharma7430]

@@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.

[@Nefylym]

I'd hate to be one who gets called for THAT order up

[@jojo-pk]

@@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.

[@ToolsAreToys]

My name is David but my 1 year old son is currently eating one of his own socks. I doubt he is the messiah, but i'll keep y'all updated.

[@declanrenault6720]

Any update? It’s been a few weeks

[@badbill6492]

at least its light and fluffy lol

[@davidfinch7407]

All hail Davidson! All hail Davidson, the doom of socks!

[@dwdillydally]

Vigilance!!

[@chadada8866]

All the great ones started that way!! He is our messiah! All hail the son of David.. and his socks 🧦

[@Gzeebo]

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?

[@JennySimon206]

Take up pottery. Archeologists spend 90% of their time piecing together pottery shards. Or if u have no talent for throwing pottery, make clay tablets. Write stuff on them u want someone u find later. Much later perhaps.

[@JennySimon206]

I don't actually think we are gonna make it that long endless we get flooded again or something, in that case, it would all be erased but maybe we will almost extinct ourselves somehow or something natural happens & doesn't grind everything up and lay a huge layer of mud over it.

[@davidva8694]

To answer your question, I do find it annoying but I know why I can’t find any. Caves only form in certain places and I don’t live there.

[@michaelstone5298]

I couldn't have put it better myself!

[@michaelstone5298]

Is this evidence of direct contact between the Etruscans and Egyptians or was it later from Roman times that the mummy was wrapped.

[@cannibalbananas]

I vote for a part 2 where you go over the honorable mentions, please and thank you, Joe

[@SapphicKnits]

I second this

[@westzed23]

I too support this idea.💡

[@fromtheblonx]

Yes please!

[@tbella5186]

Yes Please

[@austinadams3400]

Do not click on the link above its just bait

[@ShaunSommer]

I love the ancient map that shows Antarctica, I would love a full video on that.

[@dawsonbalcaen8553]

yess

[@smoceany9478]

miniminuteman made a video on it

[@whlewis9164]

@@smoceany9478Piri Reis map, there are several better videos, such as World of Antiquity

[@smoceany9478]

@@whlewis9164 maybe i will watch it, never heard of them

[@margaretandersen9914]

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!!

[@CLaw-tb5gg]

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.

[@cassandra2445]

I second this

[@cp37373]

Positivity lmfao

[@joescott]

That means a lot, thank you. 🥹

[@CLaw-tb5gg]

@@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”.

[@User31129]

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.

[@christopherhall5361]

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.

[@waynehendrix4806]

They had a lot of sorcery to avoid. Pagan Pride parades were still a long way off.

[@QHalvorson]

@@waynehendrix4806 what is Pagan Pride….? Is it like normal pride stuff, but for Pagans…?

[@N8Dulcimer]

We only currently recognize 7000 years or so of history, yet many cultures claim to have oral traditions spanning 3x that long. Humans have been anatomically modern for 20x that long. Perhaps people 5000 years ago were aware of the cultures from 15,000 years ago, who fell and whose history was lost long before our time. Point being, with how long humans have been around, I suspect that people have always known that civilizations rise and fall since the beginning.

[@hatsukotaro]

@@QHalvorsonI’m imagining a bunch of people praying to a pan enby cthulhu

[@DavidOliveriMcGovern]

1000 years from now they’ll believe we worshipped Star Wars as our mythology

[@aceloco817]

The Marvel Multiverse is really gonna confuse em. 😂

[@GaganSingh-nx2yv]

​@@aceloco817 they will be exorcising people possessed by Thanos.

[@MisbehavedLiberty]

No they won’t. We don’t believe they worshipped Ajax, Helen, or Paris and that was written four thousand years ago when books were much rarer. Logic, it solves problems and keeps you from looking like an idiot.

[@GaganSingh-nx2yv]

@@MisbehavedLiberty one quick Google search shows Helen was worshipped and she has her own temple. So you're just wrong.

[@chadada8866]

Wait, we are not supposed to worship Star Wars? F#€k, I just wasted most of my life…

[@jcortese3300]

There's a pen-and-ink artist on KZbin 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.

[@bexiexz]

that would be hilarious and frightening

[@bexiexz]

but also a very good television series

[@XSemperIdem5]

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.

[@cameronsmith8775]

Peter Draws mentioned!

[@zimtastic1171]

Lol, yes! I love that channel!

[@thisguy7616]

Uh, yes to the honorable mentions, or at least that one with a detailed map of Antarctica???? Like, what?

[@TitaniusAnglesmith]

Yeah, I feel that's kind of the most impressive one, if it's true. Also confusing, assuming it portrays no ice

[@thomaswalsh4552]

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).

[@TitaniusAnglesmith]

@@thomaswalsh4552 Ah, usual story. Shame

[@davidjennings2179]

​@@thomaswalsh4552 ah that's a shame, sometimes these stories are blown out of proportion to grab attention.

[@adrianwebster6923]

thats been thoroughly debunked but still gets repeated because it sounds cool.

[@owenpancoast1163]

My browsing history should’ve never been opened

[@Avroxyy-jo2be]

A cursed text indeed

[@veenoir1991]

Classic.

[@golf_is_hard_tv]

Oh shit son

[@rayb4faybrown975]

😮

[@Hendika]

Does it have alien tentacles?

[@feelincrispy7053]

So let me get this straight. A group of Mexicans who were born and live in mexico go to look for their ancestors historical pieces on their native lands, find said pieces and are called looters BUT an englishman born in england goes to Egypt to find historical pieces they have zero linage to, armed soley with a peice of paper certifing they read books and wrote essays for 4 years is an called archaeologis and not a looter? Riiiiight. Makes total sense

[@MarcColten73]

John Oliver recently had an episode on the wholesale looting of antiquities that fill the British Museum. He didn't pull any punches or make any excuses.

[@popcornfueralle8263]

I love how he sometimes delivers the most mindblowing stuff while talking in the most nonchalant manner ever heard by humankind

[@23daughters]

It's called arrogance.

[@xuedi]

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

[@yin-sin]

At least she has something to read in the after life

[@sealyoness]

@@yin-sin If she was still in the coffin. What a boring way to spend eternity, stuck in the ground with nothing to do.

[@chubbydinosaur9148]

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?

[@lennsisson]

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.

[@quiestinliteris]

It's so goooood!

[@cherylcampbell9369]

A video on the Phaistos disc!! That is one of my all-time favorites! ❤

[@bobinthewest8559]

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. 😏😏😏😂😂

[@scloftin8861]

Someone else may have noted this ... early SNL skit which I loved. Now, did the graphic novel come before the skit or after?

[@lennsisson]

@@scloftin8861I don’t know when the skit was, but the book is copyrighted 1979.

[@joshk.6246]

Joe's right about the Ark of the Covenant. I think a lot of us saw that old documentary Han Solo did about it.

[@scloftin8861]

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[@Nefylym]

I love how he teamed up with James Bond in the next installment to claim the related limited edition collectible.

[@zimriel]

it's a question frequently asked of Conservative / Orthodox rabbis by gentiles that's their most-frequent answer

[@romangeneral23]

Noooooooooooooooo. You must not read from the book!

[@BrentWalker999]

It's called the book of the dead for a reason!

[@lordzeiss2368]

Instructions unclear. Resurrected a mummy bent on domination and the resurrection of his lover.

[@Zengotim]

Imagine future archaeologists finding fish wrapped in newspaper and trying to figure that shit out.

[@rebeccaerb9935]

🤣

[@Numbabu]

"mummified fish"

[@danpettersen5862]

Piri Reis Map is definitely worthy of the Joe Scott treatment in it's own video.

[@MarylandFarmer.]

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.

[@lizardking5210]

Yeah I like this angle

[@Echo_the_half_glitch]

I like to think that at least *one* person did this

[@chickenmaster66]

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.

[@Just1Nora]

I buy weird crap to confuse people in our time. Stay weird, friends.

[@chrisdobry1305]

What else did they have to do I sometimes think that like cave drawings were a frustrated mom just giving her kid a rock and saying good girl on that wall over there cuz you're getting on my nerves

[@revgurley]

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.

[@merinsan]

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.

[@Ken_Brooks]

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.

[@PocketBrain]

Joe: Joe:

[@Nefylym]

@TeodoraTacderen Doamne... avortează.... avortează! AAAAAaaaaa

[@KaiHenningsen]

@@Nefylym Joe: Joe: So here is where all the lost socks go!

[@adolfodef]

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).

[@thingsiplay]

@TeodoraTacderenHello you wizard. I don't know how you are doing this, but when I post a link in KZbin, it gets deleted automatically.

[@Nefylym]

@@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

[@pjsisseck915]

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.

[@RealBradMiller]

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!"

[@waynehendrix4806]

@@RealBradMiller I hope that wasn't next to Peterzin Mybeut.

[@_Nanigashi]

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."

[@johng4093]

Similar to "Kleenex", "Kleenices".

[@Deltacarygirl]

It may be… what?

[@paulchristie3306]

Wtf is "picayune" ?!

[@jakevendrotti1496]

Picayune! Jesus you guys don't know about Merriam-Webster? It's called the information super highway. Most people don't deserve Wi-Fi, ugh.

[@Deltacarygirl]

@@jakevendrotti1496 i think we all know what a dictionary is but sometimes it’s just more fun to swap information with other people than it is to look something up. If the original commenter doesn’t feel that way they’re under no obligation to answer. No one is hurting anyone by asking what a word means, and I really don’t see the cause for offense here

[@laurenpatzer]

The one with the magic words and tables? That seems worth a future visit if there’s more to it.

[@SaintPhoenixx]

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.

[@patavinity1262]

"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.

[@HOOSlERDADDY]

Ah thank you, you’re right and I’m glad you mentioned the life cycle at the end.

[@michaelborror4399]

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?

[@renedekker9806]

_"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?

[@patavinity1262]

@@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.

[@PimpessRockstar]

​​@@patavinity1262 Then what does related mean?

[@paperburn]

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.

[@ScottEsser]

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.

[@zimriel]

oddly, I think australia + antarctica WERE the same landmass once. the map was just out of date by 60 million years

[@ScottEsser]

😂

[@thhseeking]

@@zimrielPlus India & Africa...

[@DKforever24]

@@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.

[@stevessann3516]

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!

[@xdeejayjones]

Make a video on all of them, love this kind of stuff

[@franciscodanconia4324]

My father’s name is David. But I have not had any messages from God yet. It’s been 50 years so maybe it’ll be soon. I’ll make sure to let you know.

[@christophercrowder872]

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.

[@User31129]

Just you know, EVERYTHING about Easter Island I vote for being it's own video.

[@dustinking2965]

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.

[@iangregory3719]

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.

[@Bdynysus]

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

[@iangregory3719]

@@Bdynysus fair point, well made.

[@GemCandy]

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~

[@phoenixdavida8987]

Cool! ❤

[@Tinyflypie]

This was really enjoyable. Also by putting your commercial at the end, I am far more likely to listen to it. I just feel resentful if it's at the start or the middle

[@tyronefowler]

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

[@hannahbrown2728]

Theres plenty of videos out there of people talking about that map. The one from Miniminuteman might be a good start.

[@jessc5112]

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!

[@ClarkyClark]

​@@hannahbrown2728 came here to suggest that exact video. You beat me to it! Cheers

[@astreaward6651]

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.

[@the_real_glabnurb]

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.

[@BADDEC101]

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.

[@Nefylym]

That's a pretty badass detail for my short stories, thank you!

[@davidanderson_surrey_bc]

I wonder how many valuable books have been completely ruined because some clumsy oaf dropped them in the water.

[@tedarcher9120]

Furry Harry Potter fanfics in 2524

[@DragonHeart-cm1tx]

One of my favorites is "The Genetic Disk" from Columbia carved 6,000 years ago. The stone itself is Lydite, one of the hardest stones on Earth. However, due to it's hardness and the fact that it is structured in very thin layers (leaves) Lydite is incredibly brittle, so how the hell was it carved? The carvings themselves are nothing short of a complete mystery considering that one set of carvings are of a sperm and ova and their progression from cells to a human baby outlining the various growth stages in between. Other carvings are of various animal fetuses, other cells, DNA, very general cellular anatomy, and very general human anatomy. Another stone is from Ecuador that is 13,000 to 17,000 years old. This small boulder is a map of the entire planet. It includes all 7 continents plus 3 additional landmasses. The most intriguing part is the fact that it extremely accurately depicts Earth during the Ice Age including the additional landmasses exposure due to water levels being 400 feet lower than today.

[@ktrimbach5771]

More info,please!! ❤

[@DragonHeart-cm1tx]

@@ktrimbach5771 kzbin.info/aero/PLEA02E6E78D8AAAFA This video is a presentation containing the 2 artifacts I mentioned and a whole lot more. It also contains THE oldest written language on Earth. It is, at minimum, over 2 times older than Cuneiform and could be as much as slightly more than 4 times older. Cuneiform being at most 6,000 years old and this oldest language is from 13,000 to 25,000 years old. I myself have found a carving in Colorado of this very ancient language. It was only a few numbers, but undoubtedly it was, in fact, a carving from this very ancient language. The skulls shown in these videos are something that I have been working on for just over 10 years myself. I have even gone to Peru and Bolivia to do Paleopathological examinations on some skeletal/mummified remains. The results were ZERO pathologies.

[@domkalli6878]

You know what's fun? Realizing that people from history did dumb shit like make up secret languages and wrote fictional stories and now we dive into a rabbit hole of why, without ever answering "just because" or "it was funny"

[@therockbottom5256]

Massekhet Kelim is totally a fanfic

[@LutarezHH]

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

[@quiestinliteris]

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.

[@simplethings3730]

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?

[@kathleen88863]

Nah. 3. AssUmes you are all knowing.

[@shantishanti1949]

Number 3 for some, seems ALWAYS over rides 1 and 2 !!

[@jeffcampbell1555]

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.

[@adamhaney1048]

The emerald tablet was supposedly held in Alexandria too

[@jeffcampbell1555]

@@adamhaney1048 What's the emerald tablet?

[@jeffcampbell1555]

@@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.

[@adamhaney1048]

@@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

[@AcidGlow]

Fascinating. i like this stuff

[@grantfraser5430]

Love the Shackleton Endurance story. Absolutely unbelievable that they survived so long shipwrecked with no ability for outside communication without anybody losing their life. People should check out the movie Shackleton if they don't know this story.

[@TheSteveBoyd]

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. 👍👍

[@SakuraAsranArt]

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.

[@patavinity1262]

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.

[@achristiananarchist2509]

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.

[@patavinity1262]

@@achristiananarchist2509 Interesting, thank you.

[@JonMartinYXD]

@@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.

[@goomba7456]

Thanks!

[@darrenfrazier8560]

Piri Reis map sounds super interesting for a segment!

[@diceyDealer]

you know what I find fascinating Joe? Your awesomeness.

[@Nefylym]

It really IS fascinating how awesome he is. :)

[@snicksabea]

Agreed.

[@veramae4098]

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.

[@dewiz9596]

When I get back home, i’ll try to find it. I have ALL the Analogs of the Ben Bova and Stanley Schmidt eras.

[@quiestinliteris]

Following for more info!

[@imaginethat9757]

@@dewiz9596i have them too! been a loooong time since i browsed any of those. now preparing to offer them all on ebay.

[@Nefylym]

@@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

[@UmbraHand]

@@dewiz9596Await your discoveries.

[@deborahm6036]

Thank you for this. All the manuscripts sound interesting and worthy of further explanation.

[@roosjen]

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!

[@johncliffalvarez6513]

I love stuff like this. Absolutely make a video on the Honorable Mentions!!! ❤

[@guayaquilindependiente8763]

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.

[@TaliesinMyrddin]

My favourite way of putting it was XKCD, I believe, implying the Voynich Manuscript is an ancient DND campaign book

[@JohnBainbridge0]

The Piri Reis map is fascinating. I'd love a video about that.

[@thhseeking]

World of Antiquity and Miniminuteman

[@TaliesinMyrddin]

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

[@ravinthered]

It interesting descovering ancient art. It's wild what people did to explain the world around them that they didn't understand.

[@Nefylym]

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?

[@davidanderson_surrey_bc]

Unlike today, when each and every one of us is educated, rational, and sane. 🤨

[@xennojeremy]

The only text that should really be on there is the Emerald Tablets (both hermetic and thothian). Newton, his basis for gravity, partially came from translating the hermetic texts. This is probably the only text that possibly came from aliens or something supernatural; since the tablet is indestructible. It's one thing for the tablet to exist, but the lore and fascination of the tablet through the years, amongst many notable scholars, makes this document more weirder than anything else you presented.

[@alidaweber1023]

Just because something is genuinely old, doesn't mean that it wasn't completely bogus from the get go back then. Liars have been around as long as there were people.

[@Average-J-O-E-]

Hey Joe you were the first KZbinr I subscribed to, and I still look forward to your post every Monday....... Keep up the good work.

[@adreiiaii510]

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.

[@davidanderson_surrey_bc]

Gigas? Do you mean Soyga?

[@adreiiaii510]

@@davidanderson_surrey_bc 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.

[@mousqy]

imagine some dungeon master guide book found and people trying to make sense of it

[@ContinuumSpanner]

Love that XKCD!

[@butHomeisNowhere___]

"I see here that there once existed a creature by the name of... the Tarrasque 🤔🤔"

[@Nefylym]

@@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.

[@zimriel]

"it looks like English... but it's not... where was this GYGAX even from?"

[@aellalee4767]

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.

[@TheSleepSteward]

We're human beings. And we're the exact same humans as we were hundreds and thousands of years ago. We make art, we create, we discover, we push the boundaries, we always have. And at the time when all these religious texts were written, we had a lot of unanswered questions about the world. Those texts provided answers and if you were able to read, you were incredibly smart and more trustworthy as a result. Anything you said was taken as such because it would take another who could read to say otherwise but that's if they even wanted to say otherwise. We've always made stories to make sense of the world. How do wells form, where did this oasis come from, how come the stars aligned exactly a month after this child was born, how did the opposing army stop their advancement maybe it was because of this or that, etc etc. And we can find that all over the world throughout the ages. We just tell stories to understand what we couldn't understand back then but we can understand now with science. And not only did those stories provide people with comfort and a sort of safety net with their lives, it also provided a sense of salvation and purpose. Which is why is was popular, why people held on to it and swore by it; we do the exact same nowadays but with different things and some of the same things as well. Just as we did back then, we use these stories for political gain, we use it for social power, we use it to hold moral high ground over another. It's how it's been for thousands of years until the age of information that we live in today. We're rapidly pacing towards understanding more and more, year by year, month by month, week by week, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second after second.

[@unknowntexan4570]

Love these types of videos. Herculeum scrolls?

[@robfisher3790]

Have you done a full video on the dead sea scrolls?

[@edibleapeman2]

00:23 statues crumble for me

[@_angelarose]

Who knows how long I’ve loved you 🤌🏼

[@TheShadow0515]

That’s what happens when you speak softly and carry a big sledgehammer.

[@mosthvaathe547]

Imagine some future archaeologists uncovering someone’s D&D notebook.

[@GrimmDelightsDice]

The random bullshit that I have in my ttrpg and general worldbuilding notebooks would make an archeoligist cry. VtM makes it even worse because it's modern and I'm running it set in my current city.

[@Atrivion]

Fantastic video, and yes those things do sound like they need their own video!

[@JMSouchak]

17:22 I'm pretty sure all religions are based on fictional writing with Fandoms that jumped the shark.

[@LEDewey_MD]

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.)

[@thhseeking]

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.

[@mangalores-x_x]

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

[@jpope2657]

The video title says that these 'never should have been opened' but you totally failed to explain WHY they never should have been opened.

[@TootiFruuti]

I second this

[@walkingtalkingstevenhawkin6831]

It's labeled click bait champ, would you have clicked the video if it was titled "slightly interesting texts that I will twist as ancient texts you should not open because I like views"?

[@RustedZeus]

id be really interested to hear more about the Peiris map have scientists checked its accuracy etc.

[@MrCovi2955]

"These linen curtains have been in the family for generations! You can't just write on them!" "YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO ANYMORE MOM!!!" hundreds of years later "This linen manuscript has been in the family for generations! You can't just rip it up to wrap a dead body in it!" "YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO ANYMORE MOM!!!"

[@GBart]

How does the gospel of Judas challenge established lore? It fits in perfectly Unless God wasn't planning on Jesus being crucified? Or he didn't expect Judas to betray Jesus, like that wasn't part of the plan? How was it supposed to work, then? Why did he send Jesus if not to sacrifice him in order to satisfy his own rule that he made up? This is what we call a plot hole

[@ktrimbach5771]

I agree. From Joe’s description, it’s not particularly heretical. I may have to read it.

[@robertharold2503]

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

[@mr.obvious4810]

Good theory, except religious texts where also writen with an audience in mind who often could not read.

[@thirdwaveemo]

? people have been creating made up stories for fun since the beginning of time

[@robertharold2503]

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

[@sharongillesp]

The Bible is filled with “incantations.” We call them Proverbs.

[@IanM-id8or]

Apparently, the Coptic Christian Pope has the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia. No-one else is allowed to look at it so it's a bit hard to tell for sure

[@TK8866275]

That Etruscan book was quite likely written as a scroll format instead of codex format, which means pages bind from the one side like current books. That explains who it could be ripped for strips and used for wrapping a mummy, while strips of separate pages have to be attached each others until they could be used for wrapping a corpse.

[@sketchchomsky]

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

[@sketchchomsky]

OK, it stopped at around 5 minutes but man, it was loud.

[@deckwolf3442]

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.

[@chadatchison145]

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.

[@NefariousKoel]

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.

[@oskarskalski2982]

Etruscan wasn't a Roman language, it was ... etruscan language:). Romans and Etruscans are two distinct civilisations.

[@MikeP2055]

I, for one, would definitely love another video of the honorable mention mysterious manuscripts.

[@Uzkodas]

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.

[@skullcrusher9445]

Its been disproven... the guy who made it literally took SA and Australia, drew parts of them, then free-handed the rest.

[@THambrough]

Man, even back then they was writing fan fiction on ya holy boy, Jesus, and his holy homie, Judas. r/fanfiction presents "The adventures of J & J"

[@NatalieNirian]

The KZbin comment section should never have been opened.

[@augustwhorff3314]

Your page was suggested to me by KZbin. The title caught me so I watched. Then immediately watched another. So second video in I subscribed. Love your videos. 😊

[@lennsisson]

@tamrymer4153 ​​⁠just so you know, I noted in a subsequent comment that this is more like a proto-graphic novel, as the text is separate from the images, though there are a lot of images. Hope you enjoy it.

[@nyanpasu5919]

What if these books are just written by people on acid wantin to document what they saw after eating smth

[@05Matz]

While it's an example that was more or less solved, I find the Copiales (spelling?) Cipher interesting: From what I remember, apparently an encrypted book of initiation rites and philosophical declarations by some German secret society (gone all secretive when people first started cracking down on the Freemasons IIRC?), now long defunct, turned up a while back, and some interesting cryptography was eventually employed to figure out what it said. Some proper nouns (ranks within the organization, etc.) were shorthanded with a single special symbol, so the translation has 'variables' in it still, but it's apparently pretty much readable now if you speak German. Might be worth covering if you do another video with odd documents like these!

[@Nat101413]

Please do a video on the Jamestown tablets!

[@1shawzam]

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?

[@skullcrusher9445]

Ill give you a hint, the name is the cartographer. And its proven that its the southern part of SA.

[@grinningidiot]

For centuries we have been stumped trying to decipher the ancient worlds equivalent of the National Enquirer.

[@scarlet_scepter]

My theory about the Voynich Manuscript is that it's someone's conlang and worldbuilding.