Pythagorean Theorem Found On Clay Tablet 1,000 Years Older Than Pythagoras

Study math for long enough and you will likely have cursed Pythagoras’s name, or said “praise be to Pythagoras” if you’re a bit of a fan of triangles.

But while Pythagoras was an important historical figure in the development of mathematics, he did not figure out the equation most associated with him (a2 + b2 = c2). In fact, there is an ancient Babylonian tablet (by the catchy name of IM 67118) which uses the Pythagorean theorem to solve the length of a diagonal inside a rectangle. The tablet, likely used for teaching, dates from 1770 BCE – centuries before Pythagoras was born in around 570 BCE.

PugJesus,
PugJesus avatar

Pythagoras CANCELLED for ACADEMIC PLAGIARISM

rebul,

You sir, win the internet today.

clearedtoland,

I can hear this headline in Buzzfeed, Fox, and HuffPost fonts.

JackbyDev,

Could’ve sworn there were already other instances of people discovering before Pythagoras even before this.

PugJesus,
PugJesus avatar

There are.

pH3ra,
@pH3ra@lemmy.ml avatar

“It was just parallel thinking, bro…”

Poggervania,
Poggervania avatar

3 hours later

“Pythagoras issues an apology video for stealing his crowning achievement from a piece of clay”

Touching_Grass,

Tablet man sues Pythagoras for IP infringement

Tronn4,

How do I pronounce 17 arrows pointed in different directions? click click clack?

teft,
@teft@startrek.website avatar

This is from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoiTPjL18Mg

Coasting0942,

Telephone router noises, the universal language

ChaoticEntropy,
@ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk avatar

Was he playing a ukulele?

dmonzel,
@dmonzel@lemmy.world avatar

“All aboard the clay tablet train”

InternetCitizen2,

Harpe

DragonTypeWyvern,

Three hours after that

“Justice Department launches investigation into accusations of missing persons in the Pythagorean Cult compound.”

Tygr,

I’m fat. I saw a rib roast at first.

HiddenLayer5,

Reminds me of the mediaeval nun who erased a manuscript by Archimedes who was laying out the basics of calculus long before it was formally “invented” by Newton and Leibnitz because she needed space to write prayers.

swnt,

This!

HawlSera,

How do you erase a manuscript

HiddenLayer5,

It was on parchment I believe, it was pretty common in the middle ages to scrape the ink off those and reuse them.

Skyhighatrist,

For anyone interested, that’s called a palimpsest.

a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.

valen,

“Let no one’s work evade your eyes, just plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize. But always please call it research.” – Tom Lehrer (Lobachevsky)

JokeDeity,

I’m an idiot, no doubt about that, but fellas I gotta’ say ancient Babylonian writing looks an awful lot like you just hit something with a weed whacker. Are we SURE?

Salamendacious,
@Salamendacious@lemmy.world avatar

check this out

JokeDeity,

Cool stuff but god damn I miss RedditIsFun showing me what links are before I opened them. I’m currently in bed next to my sleeping wife and that video was suddenly very loud.

redditReallySucks,

I recommend urlcheck from fdroid. Shows you the url and plenty of other features like removing tracking parameters

JokeDeity,

FUCK YES MY DUDE. I love you.

Salamendacious,
@Salamendacious@lemmy.world avatar

I set up a do not disturb schedule on my phone to avoid that. My apologies. I usually put what I’m linking to somewhere in the text (e.g. Wikipedia or YouTube).

JokeDeity,

Oddly enough my DND is supposed to be on schedule right now as well and it still played. 😂

Salamendacious,
@Salamendacious@lemmy.world avatar

I just posted a news article in the dungeons & dragons community (DND) and your comment was very confusing for a second. Check to see if your DND covers media. Android separates alarm, notification, and media volume levels again. (Assuming you’re an android user.)

JokeDeity,

Lol, that’s hilarious, D&D is dope.

PraiseTheSoup,

I used RiF for 9 years. I miss it too. But I’m using Sync for lemmy and it shows me the full link and that it’s from YouTube. Maybe check it out.

JokeDeity,

Is there a paid version of it? I’m only using free apps because I’m literally so poor dirt is offering to help me, and when there’s two versions of an app they usually make the free one pretty bad on purpose to get you to buy the full version.

Airazz,

The only difference is that the paid one doesn’t have ads. I don’t know what’s going on, but my free version doesn’t have ads either.

OfficerBribe, (edited )

Last I checked, if you deny GDPR / ad personalization thingy under Settings -> Privacy, ads are not shown (There is a box, but it is blank with text “Sponsored content”).

Certain views did not show ads as well.

JokeDeity,

I’m using Voyager and have never seen a single ad. Out of curiosity do you have AdGuard on your device or something else that would catch ads before you see them?

Airazz,

I use Small Cards layout and it looks like there’s a bug (it’s not a bug, it’s a feature) where it won’t show ads in this layout. It will in other layouts.

JokeDeity,

That’s a bit of a bummer, I don’t use card view, I always use the most condensed option I can.

MightEnlightenYou,

Same, let’s not ever talk about this again so that it doesn’t get fixed

GbyBE,

Sync for Lemmy also shows a preview of the YT video.

intelati,

RiF transplant (I used sync for reddit early on in my redditing)

It’s been nicehttps://programming.dev/pictrs/image/72b59b7e-2adf-437e-a3c8-6e79646da1ef.jpeg

Tikiporch,

Rookie move. Always, always, always check phone volume before clicking any link.

olympicyes,

For iPhone users, you can press a long click to preview. I’m using Voyager as a PWA and so far it’s better than all the native apps I’ve tried. I don’t really use Lemmy on the desktop because the url isn’t muscle memory yet.

JokeDeity,

Weird I’m using Voyager on Android and don’t think it does that, but I’m loving URLcheck as recommended by another guy.

Brahm1nmam,

It’s an iOS feature, I’m pretty sure. Works on just about any hyperlink I think, I just sell the things though. I don’t actually use them.

Trubble,
@Trubble@startrek.website avatar

I’m on Jerboa on Android, I seem to get that option too. Thanks for the tip!

FordBeeblebrox,

Same here, Voyager is the best so far and they’re updating it constantly plus it’s the most like Apollo which was my favorite. Don’t know about the preview button, thanks for the tip

PoolloverNathan,

Why use muscle memory when you can use autofill?

Sigh_Bafanada,

Connect for Lemmy does that, and it also has a UI rather similar to RIF. As another RIF refugee, this is by far my favourite Lemmy frontend

Churbleyimyam,

Did she wake up? Mine always wakes up.

JokeDeity,

No, she slept through it just fine. 😂

bighatchester,

I use sync and it shows me the video thumbnail.

Desistance,
@Desistance@lemmy.world avatar

It’s legend that Babylon was destroyed most likely taking all of that knowledge with it. I’m surprised that this tablet survived.

Tucumano88,
@Tucumano88@lemmy.zip avatar

Sorry but no…Babylon came to crisis quite quickly having two major times, when society and culture developed. Even the there are cultural and religious references to Babylon as far from 1st century BC. So, Babylon wasn’t destroyed at all, came towards the end for the exact reason of all civilizations of middle east and orient at the time: internal struggles and bad actions from kings

Rodeo,

Those are the same reasons that nearly every civilization in history ended because of. It is much more common for great civilizations to collapse from internal pressures than it is for them to be conquered.

DogMuffins,

Nah. There’s heaps of Babylon tablets in existence. Most of them very mundane - how much beer was fed to your slaves last month, how many goats were born, that sort of thing.

Scribes usually kept tablets damp so the clay was still supple enough to take an imprint from a reed (cuneiform) but often the stuff we find archeologically is the burned remains of buildings which have been built over later - but in the burning the tablets have been “fired”.

Colorcodedresistor,

literally 90% of human history has gone unrecorded, and what has been recorded usually gets destroyed, ransacked or deliberately destroyed, Caligula’s pleasure barges, Tower of Babel, Library of Alexander. Humans have tried to keep knowledge retained. and some people take that personally.

remember when ISIS was at its peak they were just destroying artifacts like it was a kid in a candy store. And that’s just been in the 35 years I’ve been alive.

when Rome fell it took another century for civilization to rediscover the technology and applied lessons used then.

and im a dumb idiot, I’m just making a broad skim, if you could ask a historian they’d likely tell you all the things humans have lost, purposefully destroyed or forgotten along the way.

sailingbythelee,

It’s even more amazing than that in the case of Rome. To cite just one example, by the time of Constantine I in the mid-300s CE, Rome could support armies totaling 650,000 men. The logistics and organization required to do that are staggering. After the fall of Rome, it would take until the time of Napoleon’s Grand Armee in the early 1800s before numbers like that were fielded again. Even today, there are relatively few countries with an active military force of that size. They weren’t just sitting around either. Rome was always fighting someone. It speaks to the ability of ancient peoples to organize and support truly massive endeavors and sustain them over literal centuries. I mentioned Napoleon’s Grand Armee earlier. It was large, but it only lasted for about 5 years.

So, yes, a ton of technology was lost for a long time, both physical and social/organizational.

Buddahriffic,

And during the second Punic war, when Rome mostly just controlled the Italian boot, Hannibal ravaged the peninsula for a decade but Rome just kept raising more armies to fight them. You could say that war wasn’t very well understood at that time (like Hannibal was very good at battles, but couldn’t turn that dominance into its own advantage), but it’s still crazy to me that Rome just had an enemy army just roaming around, surviving on plunder and foraging, destroying the armies Rome sent to oppose it, but otherwise Rome was still able to function as a state to the point where they could raise, organise, equip (actually, they might have had to equip themselves at this point, I think the Empire providing that was one of the innovations they later started), train, move, and feed armies despite it.

creditCrazy,
@creditCrazy@lemmy.world avatar

Romes navy during the punic wars was basically a boss that always had another stage you would have to beat

Buddahriffic,

And the final stage came years after the previous one had already beaten Carthage because they had the audacity of continuing to be more successful than Rome (in richness of the city), so they had to go back and completely destroy it and enslave the population that was left after the siege. And by destroy it, I mean they literally burned down the wooden parts and carried off the stones that couldn’t be burnt and forbade anyone to make a new city in that location.

creditCrazy,
@creditCrazy@lemmy.world avatar

Honestly it’s stuff like that that makes me wonder if I’d rather live in a warlord country like Rome back in the day or live in the boring dystopia that is becoming amarica today

caseyweederman,

We’re discovering this fungus that breaks down plastics and I’m wondering… How many times have we independently invented plastic?

emptiestplace,

oh, hundreds

aniki,

deleted_by_author

    •
    emptiestplace,

    I wasn’t being serious.

    JiggityWeenis,

    That’s very hard to tell, and that’s on you.

    emptiestplace,

    I’m comfortable with that.

    Natanael,

    With the required manufacturing tools and source materials, probably not a lot of times.

    caseyweederman,

    Manufacturing? Like this? [Antikythera Mechanism on Wikipedia] (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism)
    Or this? Metalworking in pre-Columbian America (Do scroll down to the South America section)
    Or just like… waves broadly The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC,…

    Small amounts of natural gold have been found in Spanish caves used during the late Paleolithic period, c. 40,000 BC

    If that fungus (or the wax worm for that matter) was more widespread at any point in the last 40,000 years, we just wouldn’t know about any use of plastics.

    Natanael,

    The process is significantly more complex for plastic, not comparable to metalworking

    The closest comparable material is variants of wax

    kadu,
    @kadu@lemmy.world avatar

    We have phylogenetic techniques to interpolate when certain genes might’ve appeared in evolutionary history. Not surprisingly, the ability to breakdown plastics is quite new.

    Not only that, but the very few microorganisms that can degrade some plastics only express those enzymes under extreme pressure, when no other sources of carbon are available. Literally every sugar is a better alternative than plastic, as the process of degrading it is massively inefficient.

    Making a usable polymer out of the absolute insane mixture that is crude oil is also way beyond what any human civilization could ever achieve without industrialization.

    I get your point of “but we did amazing things in the past! look at the complexity of steel!” but artificial plastic polymers is in another league.

    caseyweederman,

    crude oil
    tree oil and formalin

    caseyweederman,

    Also my point is not “we were so awesome”, it’s “why do we think every generation before us was a drooling caveman”

    kadu,
    @kadu@lemmy.world avatar

    why do we think every generation before us was a drooling caveman

    We do not. But there’s a massive jump in logic from the idea that we could handle bronze versus we could make plastic.

    And once again, the biological portion of your statement makes no sense.

    Hadriscus,

    if you’re an idiot, you’re one of the best I’ve seen yet

    DAMunzy,

    We’ve supposedly just rediscovered how to make Roman concrete in the last few years!

    kameecoding,

    try this year

    news.mit.edu/…/roman-concrete-durability-lime-cas…

    DAMunzy,

    Time flies so I thought it was longer. Thanks for the reminder!

    Phegan,

    We are haven’t figured out how to make Damascus Steel

    BigDanishGuy,

    Study math for long enough and you will likely have cursed Pythagoras’s name, or said “praise be to Pythagoras” if you’re a bit of a fan of triangles.

    What? Why? @Salamendacious would you care to elaborate? Who curses Pythagoras? Fourier? Sure! Laplace? Fuck that guy AND the goat he rode in on! And don’t get me started on Fermat and his silly margin note joke. But Pythagoras?

    SturgiesYrFase,
    @SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml avatar

    Unless OP actually wrote this article, they aren’t saying that. The post text body is literally just the first two paragraphs of the article.

    BigDanishGuy,

    If OP actively copied it, and doesn’t give any indication that it’s plagiarized from the article, then OP can damn well defend it.

    SturgiesYrFase,
    @SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml avatar

    I mean…do you not click on the comments sections of articles here? Standard practice is to copy some or all of the article to the text body of the post. I feel like maybe you either need more or less coffee/tea today. Take a deep breath my dude.

    BigDanishGuy,

    do you not click on the comments sections of articles here

    Clearly I do.

    Standard practice is to copy some or all of the article to the text body of the post

    In that case I don’t follow the standard of stealing content when I post something.

    I feel like maybe you either need more or less coffee/tea today. Take a deep breath my dude.

    Why is everyone telling me to relax? I WILL NOT RELAX!!1!one! /s

    SturgiesYrFase,
    @SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml avatar

    I don’t follow the standard of stealing content when I post something.

    It’s not stealing, it’s putting some of the info in the post. Most people aren’t going to actually read the article, so for those people, posting some/all of the body of the article gets them to actually read what was posted.

    Why is everyone telling me to relax? I WILL NOT RELAX!!1!one! /s

    I know you put the sarcasm tag on there, but this is a weird fucking hill to die on, pal.

    BigDanishGuy,

    I do choose weird hills to fight on, don’t I?

    Let me try this another way, this time with less sarcasm.

    1. The websites we link to generate revenue by displaying ads. If we copy the important parts of the articles, and put them on lemmy with the link, then, as you also brought up, people won’t want to read the original article as well. That results in fewer views and less revenue for the author. Is it the same as holding a gun to the author’s face and robbing them? Of course not. But I also don’t think it’s fair to the author either.
    2. It’s copyright infringement. Plain and simple infringement. If you copy all the relevant parts and don’t offer additional content, like commentary, then the fair use clause is really hard to argue. How copyright attorneys are going to handle getting content taken off the feddiverse is a different thing, but it is still copyright infringement.

    Why not reduce the posting rate, and take the time to just write a short enticing description instead?

    SturgiesYrFase,
    @SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml avatar

    Why not reduce the posting rate, and take the time to just write a short enticing description instead?

    Laziness

    BigDanishGuy,

    ooooh that’s a bingo!

    I’m sorry, I promised no more sarcasm.

    Now I don’t have a problem with laziness, but when someone’s laziness becomes disrespectful and rips people off, then I believe that we should try to do better. Or at least not expose our instance of choice to IPR liabilities.

    Maybe I’m being a pedant. That we can argue, and I’ll give you a head start by agreeing with you. But I refuse to believe that I’m also wrong.

    SturgiesYrFase,
    @SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml avatar

    Eh, most of the entities that get fucked by posting the article in the text body, I couldn’t give two shits about. Also no one is getting ad revenue off me, ads can be an attack vector for malicious code, they’re also annoying. I agree you’re being a pedant, that’s what I like about you. I do think you’re wrong though. That said, I feel like we can agree to disagree, and leave it at that.

    angrystego,

    Pythagoras was a brutal cult leader, wasn’t he?

    BigDanishGuy,

    Considering that we’re somewhere on a scale going from “We’re not really sure Pythagoras was even an actual person” to “Pythagoras was a brutal cult leader”. My stance will be that the theorem is useful, and that Fermat, Fourier, and Laplace, apart from being French (which is bad enough to begin with), also made math hard on me in university, at least the last two. Fermat was just a dick with that margin note. Curses on all three of them!

    tdawg,

    Middle schoolers certainly curse him

    BigDanishGuy,

    Being an ancient Greek man I bet the boys would curse him even more if they met him.

    snota,

    It’s all relative, someone who never touched on Fourier or Laplace might see Pythagoras or trigonometry as the peak of mathematics and something very difficult. There will be some hardcore mathematicians that dream in Laplace…(shudders)

    BigDanishGuy,

    I have had dreams about Laplace transform, they were nightmares, but not as bad ones as the classes.

    Smokeydope,
    @Smokeydope@lemmy.world avatar

    who curses pythagoras?

    At the very least that one guy who got drowned for blasphemy by the pythagoras cult, because he proved that the hypotenuse of a triangle with a base of 1 is an irrational number.

    Also to be fair I imagine more people are cursing Euler for having his name stapled to half of every theorem and proof it seems.

    BigDanishGuy,

    If you start talking about irrationality to a cult you’re kinda asking for it. sqrt(2) is a beautifully irrational number!

    raspberriesareyummy,

    and the proof is very elegant - you could explain it to a (smart) elementary school kid

    havokdj,

    Not gonna lie, that’s extremely comical and on par for pre-early modern humanity

    creditCrazy,
    @creditCrazy@lemmy.world avatar

    From what I recall from learning about who Pythagoras was as a person he really liked talking things out while sailing

    FlyingSquid,
    @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

    Who curses Pythagoras?

    Pythagoras said you shouldn’t eat beans. Fuck him, I need my burritos.

    macracanthorhynchus,

    Yes, but that led to my absolute favorite joke in Moby-Dick: the fart joke in chapter 1. (It’s important to remember that the “Pythagorean Theorem” is A²+B²=C², but the “Pythagorean maxim” is ‘Don’t eat beans.’)

    “For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle.”

    JohnDClay,

    I completely missed that, that’s great!

    whoisearth,
    @whoisearth@lemmy.ca avatar

    “Fuck Mexicans” - Pythagoras

    wolfpack86,

    His whole theorem was for the sole purpose of building a wall.

    creditCrazy,
    @creditCrazy@lemmy.world avatar

    Oh so now I get why he yelled “I’ll make amarica great again” no one understood until a orange man ran for president

    Ser_Salty,

    The dude hated beans so much, he got killed by pursuers in front of a bean field because he refused to touch them

    Stupid deaths, stupid deaths, they’re funny cause they’re true!

    raspberriesareyummy,

    And don’t get me started on Fermat and his silly margin note joke.

    One of the rare moments on teh intarwebz where it comes in handy I read Fermat’s Last Theorem :D

    dylanTheDeveloper,
    @dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world avatar

    Time travel

    tal,
    @tal@lemmy.today avatar

    Maybe. It could also be that this proves that the Babylonians were a hoax.

    Salamendacious,
    @Salamendacious@lemmy.world avatar

    I don’t think that’s accurate

    hperrin,

    Next to it: “First!”

    Salamendacious,
    @Salamendacious@lemmy.world avatar

    I haven’t seen a comment like that in years. I bet there’s a whole slew of users (lemmies? What exactly are we called here?) Who have no clue what you’re talking about.

    Hadriscus,

    we’re lemmings. I’ll be the one with the pickaxe, you can be the one with the parachute

    Salamendacious,
    @Salamendacious@lemmy.world avatar

    Hey as long as we’re all part of the same team.

    ColeSloth,

    Nice. A repost from two days ago from a repost from 5 years ago. This us old news.

    Salamendacious,
    @Salamendacious@lemmy.world avatar

    I searched in my app for Pythagoras and I didn’t see it posted. I wouldn’t have posted it if I had known it had been posted two days ago. In the grand scheme of things it isn’t that horrible a transgression.

    logicbomb,

    I don’t blame you. Here’s the one from 2 days ago. (New to lemmy. I’m guessing there’s a better way to link posts, but I don’t know it.)

    As you can see, the only way you’d be likely to find it is if you searched for “trigonometry” or “babylonian”. That’s why it’s so important to have the most specific keywords in the post, for searching. “Babylonian” and “trigonometry” are really good for this, but it feels like “Pythagoras” or “Pythagorean” is essential.

    Salamendacious,
    @Salamendacious@lemmy.world avatar

    I actually remember seeing that article but I didn’t click on it. Oh well. I really want lemmy to survive. I used to love Google+ and it was sad to see it die a slow death. For a while it was, in my opinion, the best photography community on the web. I figure if people see the same content over as over again they’ll just leave. So I’m trying to post frequently but not just pure crap.

    ram,

    The paper this article is based on is from 2009. I’d argue that’s against rule 5.

    s1ndr0m3,

    It is almost 4000 years old, but this is the first time I have seen it.

    jarfil,

    One of today’s lucky 10,000! 🎉

    GBU_28,

    Please list all news facts now, so there will be no reposts.

    If you miss one, delete your account for misinformation.

    It’s the only way

    NerdyPopRocks,

    Omg! I didn’t know Pythagoras taught at Harvard

    Salamendacious,
    @Salamendacious@lemmy.world avatar

    He was Francesca Gino’s research assistant

    TrenchcoatFullofBats,

    Babylon: Based 60

    RattlerSix,

    Sorry didn’t read the article, but time travel has been proven?

    RickyRigatoni,
    @RickyRigatoni@lemmy.ml avatar

    Yes.

    SheeEttin,

    I don’t know about you, but I regularly perform time travel at a rate of one second per second.

    jasory,

    So you are accelerating?

    tdawg,

    That’s relative

    KISSmyOS,

    Don’t mess with relatives while time travelling.

    Kirkkh,

    I think the consensus at this point was Pythagorus probably didn’t even exist, given no writings of his were ever found. It’s more likely he a was a mythic/ideological figure.

    Churbleyimyam,

    “Non-existent man publicly called out for misappropriating clay tablet.”

    JoshRW,

    You encouraged me to go look him up on Wikipedia. The history and legend of Pythagoras is some crazy shit apparently

    KreekyBonez,

    damn. why did schools only teach the super boring part about the triangles. dude had the golden thigh of apollo and the super-speed of hermes.

    also, it really sounds like he was a cult leader.

    neuracnu,
    @neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    No shit… these are like old Chuck Norris facts:

    en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras

    the priest of Apollo gave Pythagoras a magic arrow, which he used to fly over long distances and perform ritual purifications

    A fragment from Aristotle records that, when a deadly snake bit Pythagoras, he bit it back and killed it.

    he once convinced a notoriously destructive bear to swear that it would never harm a living thing again, and that the bear kept its word

    Bread,

    Kinda makes you wonder if future archeologists would know the difference between the jokes being jokes about chuck Norris vs us believing he was a god that we worshipped. Maybe that’s all mythology is, some running gags that everyone took seriously.

    Elohim,

    a god that we worshipped

    Would they be wrong? What’s the line between idolization and worship?

    Bread,

    I would argue praying to them and doing acts in their name. Although that last part could be twisted.

    DeanFogg,

    👏 Dear Harambe…

    Amuck7157,

    Source? Seems like Wikipedia thinks he existed.

    jarfil,

    Will any of our writings be found in 2500 years? Are we a myth…?

    It seems to be a case similar to Socrates, or Jesus. Nice how Pythagoras was supposed to perform miracles, and stay a month “dead” just to later come back to life.

    angrystego,

    I thought Jesus was a proven historical figure, because we have some independent Roman info about him.

    DragonTypeWyvern,

    Sort of. Tacitus, for example, mentions his execution a hundred years later but his cult was relatively popular, spreading throughout the Jewish diaspora, having a notable presence in Rome itself, and presumably played a part in a massive rebellion in Judaea. Of course, a lot of the Roman sources could also be fabricated references, but Tacitus’s is considered reliable.

    There isn’t a document saying “Pilate had this dude executed today” but there are sources saying “That dude Pilate executed back in the day has a cult and they’re being annoying.”

    So yes, there almost certainty was a cult leader that was executed and his followers believed he was divine, or at least started saying he was within a couple decades of his death, but we, for example, don’t even have a primary source that his name was Yeshua. We mostly know for certain that people worshipped a guy named Yeshua a century after his probable death.

    But history is funny, and cults are weird.

    It’s not impossible, for example, a man with a cult named something too “ethnic” for Greeks and Romans to pronounce was stabbed by a Roman by the side of the road. They scatter and start telling everyone about how a soldier of Pilate martyred their God, it becomes a crucifixion over time where a soldier stabs him in the side, and everyone gives up on correcting people that his name wasn’t “Josh” and just rolls with it because at least they’re getting the “Christ” title right.

    But we don’t have a source for that version, so you can broadly assume a dude named Jesus was baptized by John, crucified by Pilate, and these were reliable events even if everything else isn’t.

    angrystego,

    That’s a beautiful answer, thanks!

    PilferJynx,

    Unless you’re a contemporary, you’ll just be a story.

    ChickenLadyLovesLife,

    Will any of our writings be found in 2500 years?

    The media on which our electronic data is stored have lifespans measured in just years. Everything that the Internet consists of right now, unless it’s endlessly copied forward, will be lost.

    MonkderZweite,

    There’s a copy of Wikipedia on the moon and the orbiting Tesla. With a shelf live of a few billion years.

    Elohim,

    Luckily the moon is a quick day-trip away in case we return to sticks and stones.

    DragonTypeWyvern,

    The point being it’s for a humanity that recovered scientific progress in a place techno-barbarians cant ruin or, failing that, others 👽

    stardreamer,
    @stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    The year is 5123. We have meticulously deciphered texts from the early 21st century, providing us with a wealth of knowledge. Yet one question still eludes us to this day:

    Who the heck is Magic 8. Ball?

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