Ancient Manuscripts That Should Never Have Been Opened 

Modern people are currently confused about 4th edition.

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 ...

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

That’s fascinating, thanks for sharing!

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

yess

miniminuteman made a video on it

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

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

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!!

I second this

I too support this idea.💡

Yes please!

Yes Please

Do not click on the link above its just bait

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.

🤣 so true.

@@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.

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

@@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.

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!"

I second this

Positivity lmfao

That means a lot, thank you. 🥹

@@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”.

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.

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

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).

@@thomaswalsh4552 Ah, usual story. Shame

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

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

Similar to "Kleenex", "Kleenices".

It may be… what?

Wtf is "picayune" ?!

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.

@@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

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.

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.

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.

I couldn't have put it better myself!

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

that would be hilarious and frightening

but also a very good television series

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.

Peter Draws mentioned!

Lol, yes! I love that channel!

A cursed text indeed

Classic.

Oh shit son

😮

Does it have alien tentacles?

🤣

Yeah I like this angle

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

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.

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

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

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

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

It's so goooood!

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

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. 😏😏😏😂😂

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

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

At least she has something to read in the after life

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

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?

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

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

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).

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

@@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

I started collecting old books about 20 years ago when people didn't know the value of them, some of my oldest are from 1700 and a few very few from 1600. Started as a casual hobby became a life journey.

In like 1997, as an 11 year old, I was gifted an old World Book Encyclopedia that my grandparents had at their place, published around 1967. It was so cool to read as a young man why was curious about the world both what things had changed over 30 years, and learning more about stuff that hadn't changed. Like the books were written at the height of the space race, and the Cold War, and much of Africa was still colonised and Apartheid was still in place. I wish I still had those books. But they got lost around the time I turned 18 and left my Mom's place.

Had a full copy plus the greatest ....

@@TheSilmarillian that's great, I'd love to have some truly old books like that I'm pretty sure my oldest is from the 19th century. mainly I just don't think I'd have the ability to store them properly.

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.

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

😂

@@zimrielPlus India & Africa...

@@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.

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

I thought I saw a video with the voynich manuscript has been shown to be some form of Turkish language.

It does feel like old times

​@davehilling3944 I saw that video too.

@@davehilling3944 I was just going to write the same thing

@@hauntedmilk8540 turns out it was a notebook on herbalism back when those were a no no to have, who knew

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

@@Bdynysus fair point, well made.

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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

It really IS fascinating how awesome he is. :)

Agreed.

The emerald tablet was supposedly held in Alexandria too

@@adamhaney1048 What's the emerald tablet?

@@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.

@@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

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.

@@achristiananarchist2509 Interesting, thank you.

@@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.

World of Antiquity and Miniminuteman

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

Love that XKCD!

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

@@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.

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

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?

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

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

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?

_"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?

@@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.

​​@@patavinity1262 Then what does related mean?

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.

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

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

Gigas? Do you mean Soyga?

@@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.

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

Following for more info!

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

@@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

@@dewiz9596Await your discoveries.

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

My mistake to not read farther down on the Wikpedia page, the citation for the debunking is: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piri_Reis_map#CITEREFMcIntosh2000b

Lol, there's a whole section titled "Antarctica claims". The originator of the claim has no supporting evidence himself and even disregarded Piri Reis' own markings to fit the map to his Antarctica theory. No part of the supposed Antarctica coastline has ever been accurately matched to either the actual coastline or a postulated unglaciated coastline. It's far more likely to be Terra Australis, a theoretical southern landmass on most maps of the period that was initially posited by Ptolemy.

Wikipedia is not a trusted source for anything "esoteric", mystical or otherwise outside of current scientific standards. Look up the "Guerilla Skeptics" and what they do.

@@jacobmarchlinski852 Considering the belt current that traps you around the island from leaving unless you have a powered engine vessel, I am not surprised no ancient navigators ever got that coast line quite right.

​@@johnpezaris6982speaking of unsolved mysteries, how were you able to include a non-RU-vid link and have your comment still visible hours later? Is Wikipedia also allowed by YT?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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