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Thread: POTF 41 - Nominations

  1. #1

    Default POTF 41 - Nominations


    POTF is about recognising the very best posts, the best arguments and discourse in the D&D, and appropriately rewarding it.

    You shall progressively earn these medals once you achieve enough wins, but first you must be nominated in threads such as this one. And it works like this.

    Post of the Fortnight - Rules
    -Each user can nominate up to 2 posts per round, and the only valid form of nomination is by quoting with a link as shown below the chosen post in the PotF thread designated for it.

    Quote Originally Posted by Aexodus View Post
    Looking forward to getting this kicked off for real!
    -Each 15 days there will be a new Nomination thread put up, and all the posts written during this period are considered eligible, if properly nominated. Exception are posts who are somewhat breaking the ToS; upon being acted by Moderation, they are always considered uneligible.

    - Remember: It is possible to nominate up to 2 posts each round of the competition; it is also possible to change a nomination anytime before the actual round of nominations ends.

    - There will be two competitions held every month, with a period for nominations followed by a period of voting. The submitted posts can be discussed in a dedicated space.

    - Only posts that have not participated in a previous poll and that have been published in the current period of given time in any section of the D&D area may be nominated.

    - The authors of the nominated post will be informed so they can withdraw the candidacy if that is their wish.

    - The maximum number of participating posts in the final vote will be ten. If more than ten nominations are submitted, seconded nominations will take priority. After seconded nominations are considered, earliest nominations will take priority. If the number of posts submitted to the contest is less than ten, the organizing committee may nominate posts if it considers it appropriate.

    -The members of the committee will never nominate a post belonging to one of them, but the rest of the users can nominate their posts (organizers posts), and vice versa.

    -In the event of a tie, both posts will be awarded and both posters will receive rep and 1 competition point.


    - Public or private messages asking for a vote for a candidate post are forbidden. Violators (and their posts) may not participate in the running contest.

    - People are expected to consider the quality and structure of the post itself, more than the content of the same. While it's certainly impossible to completely split the two aspects when making our own opinion on a post, it remains intended, as also explained in the Competition Commentary Thread, that commenting and discussing on the content rather than on the form/structure of the post is considered off-topic for the purpose of this competition. You are free to nominate and vote for whatever reason you want, but what happens in public has to strictly follow up with the competition rules.


    A nominated post should:

    1. Be focused and relevant to the topic(s) being discussed.
    2. Demonstrate a well-developed, insightful and nuanced understanding of the topic(s) it is discussing.
    3. Be logically coherent, well organized and communicate its points effectively.
    4. Support its contentions with verifiable evidence, either in the form of links or references.
    5. Not be deliberately vexatious to other users.
    6. Not be composed of a copy/paste in its entirety.


    Good luck everyone!
    Of these facts there cannot be any shadow of doubt: for instance, that civil society was renovated in every part by Christian institutions; that in the strength of that renewal the human race was lifted up to better things-nay, that it was brought back from death to life, and to so excellent a life that nothing more perfect had been known before, or will come to be known in the ages that have yet to be. - Pope Leo XIII

  2. #2
    Flinn's Avatar His Dudeness of TWC
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    Default Re: POTF 41 - Nominations

    Quote Originally Posted by Dick Cheney. View Post
    The history of warfare proves that disaster usually falls upon the force that loses its cohesion. When formations are shattered, rout usually follows. And it is in unorganized retreat, as well as in panicked withdraws, where most casualties take place. If only for this one and single reason alone, it is generally imperative that armies and navies maintain formation during battle.

    This general principle however begs a fascinating question, was it imperative for the Roman fleet to maintain its formation at Cape Ecnomus? And if not, why wasn’t it?

    Obviously, the corvus will be central to this discussion, which had a deterministic effect on the course of the battle. But to truly appreciate this, and its negating effects on Carthaginian naval skill and strategy, one really needs to see and comprehend the military disaster that had just unfolded:



    The Battle of Cape Ecnomus (256 BC), depending on your reference point, was either one of the worse tactical blunders or incredible displays of maneuver planning in the history of naval warfare. On one hand, you have the total collapse of the Roman “wedge” formation, which arguably was flawed from the start, and destined to separate because of its transports. And on the other, you have a daring but well-conceived strategy of annihilation from the Carthaginians, which like the future Battle of Cannae, resulted in maneuvers designed to bring about the complete destruction of the opposing force. The appearance of a feigned retreat followed by swift and coordinated attacks from both flanks is instantly recognizable and goes without saying. But that the Roman fleet avoided being encircled or defeated in detail, without the clear benefits of a formation, while also being unduly separated into three unequal parts, and still managed to rally and win decisively, against an experienced naval power like the Carthaginians, demands immediate and stunning explanation. It also goes without saying that this battle was incredibly large, some 300 ships and 150,000 men on each side. Altogether, perhaps the largest naval battle in history.

    But to return now to the truly difficult question at hand, was it imperative for the Roman fleet – if they wanted to win or survive the battle– to maintain its formation against the Carthaginians? Well then, the answer if not a partial yes, would seem to at least be a complicated no.

    In some sense, it’s not enough to argue no based on who won, or no strictly from the perspective of winning, because we really don’t know what the Roman battleplan actually was. For instance, did the Roman navy, with its transports, really mean to engage in a large-scale open sea battle with the Carthaginian fleet, or was it always part of the plan to try and sail through? The Roman fleet, after all, was primary an invasion force, intended to transport a Roman army from Sicily to Africa in one piece. And a fleet formation like the wedge seems extremely peculiar, not least of which because it had never been used in naval combat before (at the fleet level), but because its primary purpose, as a land tactic, had always been to initiate a breakthrough or create penetration. Its main advantages of course, were a narrower font and refused flanks that protected an army or a unit as a compact whole until it could make contact with the enemy. This argument thus assumes that the Roman navy, which was very much organized like a land force, did not really intend to lock itself in a decisive battle with the Carthaginian fleet, which by default carried enormous risk, but had intended instead to sail straight through to the coast of Africa. Of course, the idea of avoiding battle and avoiding casualties by adopting the wedge for the purposes of creating a naval convoy (arguably a first in naval warfare)- would only serve to benefit the Romans in the long run, and would go a long ways towards explaining what the Roman battleplan actually was.



    Mirroring the convoy argument, the next argument that should be considered before arguing no is that, in a way, a fleet formation was an obvious source of strength and protection for the Roman fleet. While in formation, its most vulnerable vessels and transports would be shielded from attack in all directions. Additionally, any attack made against the front of the Roman wedge would have to be made head on, where the bows and rams of the Roman ships protected the bows and rams of other Roman ships. It was of course hoped that a close order formation, like the wedge, would protect the Roman fleet from faster and more maneuverable Carthaginian vessels, where, so long as the Romans could keep their formation tight, their ships and vessels would be protected from flanking and ramming; the most primary methods of attack. Altogether then, a convincing argument can be made that the Roman formation, whether meant to be a convoy or not, acted as a real center of gravity for the Roman fleet. With it came obvious strength in numbers, mass, depth, cohesion, unity as well as the frontal power necessary to clear the way to Africa. And perhaps most importantly, so long as the Roman squadrons remained close together, the Roman fleet could not be defeated in detail.

    As convincing then as these arguments appear to be, those who believe them would almost certainly need to believe that the Romans nearly lost the Battle of Cape Ecnomus, which, based on a close reading of the available sources and battle results does not appear to be the case. Even with the collapse (or deliberate destruction) of the Roman formation -and arguably the Roman battleplan-, the Roman squadrons still appear to have fought on a nearly equal footing with the Carthaginian fleet. Moreover, there is also not much to suggest that the Romans had improvised a victory, either through maneuver or radical repositioning, when they were in fact locked in battle, and again probably couldn’t have. Improvising alone, without the benefits of luck or a colossal mistake by the other side, would also not have lead to such decisive results. And though fairly equal numbers at the beginning of the battle does have something to do with the outcome, and arguably helped the Romans endure any immediate losses, the fact that the collapse of the Roman formation was not at all a turning point or decisive, suggests that the Romans still had other important tactical advantages left that were not dependent on numbers or maintaining its fleet formation. What were these advantages then if not mass and cohesion? And why was the Battle of Cape Ecnomus not actually victory from defeat?

    Truth be told, a fleet formation, like the Roman wedge, was only one element of an extremely formidable series of systems, subordinate formations, and tactical countermeasures that the Romans used to negate close quarters ramming, which is why, in the final analysis, its importance as a survival tool -or center of gravity- for the Roman fleet must be downgraded. Most important to this argument of course is the Roman corvus. Often described as a gangplank with a large spike, any ship that drew too close to the bow of a Roman ship risked attaching itself to the beak of a corvus, where, as a disabled ship, it could then be boarded. It is here notably, in boarding actions, where the Roman navy truly excelled. Its naval officers and marines often being made up of experienced and heavily armed legionnaires, which, together with the corvus, had the unusual effect of turning a naval action into a land battle. Against this unique system, the very last thing a Carthaginian admiral ever wanted to do was fight a land battle at sea.

    But this decisive combination against ramming does not just end with the corvus. It also extends outwards as well, and combines with defenses employed throughout the Roman fleet.



    Any Carthaginian ship that thus wanted to ram another Roman ship would have had to have dealt with this whole series of effective countermeasures, which in combination, was a decisive tactical system. A fleet formation was important because Carthaginian ships could only engage one other ship at a time, which limited maneuver and generated obvious tactical risk when approaching Roman ships that were overlayed or stationed in between ships. Close order formations (and independent sub formations) adopted by the Romans at the squadron level were also decisive because they provided a backup formation – plus a source of cohesion- to Roman ships when the fleet formation failed. Roman squadrons that maintained their own lines, independently, denied spacing and gaps that could have been used for flanking and ramming by faster and more maneuverable Carthaginian ships. Once a tight squadron formation was broken, a Carthaginian ship still likely needed to make contact with a moving target (evasive maneuvers), where indeed, in the case of flanking or ramming, proper angles mattered. And of course, if a Carthaginian ship could even make contact with a Roman ship, especially in the crowded mess of naval battle, it then still needed to penetrate a likely reinforced hull, perhaps with copper belts or bronze plating, or against just plain old wood, which unsurprisingly was tough to sink. And even if this was possible there was still the immediate danger of making contact with the Roman corvuses and marines, along with the whole array of defensive arrows, towers, javelins, and grappling hooks from supporting ships that made approaching a single Roman ship extremely perilous and close to reckless. None of these countermeasures of course even begin to describe the obvious risks that ramming inevitably undertook; everything from becoming stuck in another ship’s hull, to having one’s oars ripped off, to the obvious naval skill, speed, and spacing requirements. Ships that rammed another vessel needed to withdraw immediately or risk being rammed themselves. Roman quinqueremes may have even have been built larger and heavier than their Carthaginian counterparts to accommodate more crew, which again, might have added to their durability. Yet, crucial to understanding the battle outcome, of course, are also the enclosed decks and row boxes that protected rowers from the sights and sounds of battle. Simply creating maneuver chaos and fleet separation was not going to instigate panic aboard a Roman ship, whose rowers, while below deck, were largely oblivious to the sights and sounds of battle until contact was made with another ship. Our traditional view of shock then, from land combat, formation collapse, and tactical surprise, only applies to the Roman captains that piloted a Roman ship from above deck, one of which was a battle-hardened centurion. Breaking apart a Roman formation at sea with trickery and maneuver would thus not have the same collapsing effects on order and unit cohesion as it would on land.

    As formidable as the ship, squadron, fleet system appears to be -and its family of subsystems like the corvus + marines- the one glaring weakness was that a fleet formation, like the wedge, was always going to prove totally inadequate for sailing. Fleet formations (that differed from a line) could be used to receive an attack, but not make one. This was true for all gallery age formations that involved sailing and cruising with hundreds of ships. An actual perimeter defense to guard against flanking and ramming, like the kyklos (circle), was too large and cumbersome to be used at the fleet level and certainly could not be done under sail. Any formation used for cruising naturally requires all ships to maintain pace and at least some appropriate distance, less they run into each other’s oars and hulls. This notable problem again, especially with signaling and spacing between ships, was partly the reason why sailing formations above the squadron level were almost never used. The Roman wedge of course, with its tremendous size and odd combination of towing vessels and escorting ships, would fair no better if it tried to sail. But instead of keeping an unbroken line to receive an attack, or the shoreline to avoid being flanked, the Romans would attack the Carthaginian line. A gap thus formed between the Roman vanguard and rear squadrons, who, with their transports, were unable to keep pace. That they were unable to do so, is entirely on the fault of the Consuls, who ordered the attack, Carthaginian trickery (depending on your reference point), and the notable ignorance that came with trying to adopt a land formation, and marching mentality, into a large naval creation at sea.

    Even with the blunder however, or feigned retreat, the collapse of the Roman formation never came close to dooming the Roman fleet. The evidence here is in the narrative. Both flanking attacks were met not by unorganized rout, or chaotic retreat, but by an organized opponent that came together to form effective resistance at the squadron level. When the transports and/or towing vessels came under threat by the Carthaginian left and right wings, the III and IV Roman squadrons moved to engage them. What thus resulted was three separate, but nearly equal engagements; between the Roman vanguard and Consuls against the Carthaginian center, and the Roman rear squadrons with the Carthaginian left and ring wings. Once the ships and battle lines became locked, and enemy ships were grappled by the corvuses, the battle instantly shifted from one of maneuver to one of “sheer strength.” For his part, Polybius also writes that the Roman vanguard had kept good order under the watchful eyes of the Consuls, yet the Roman rear squadrons too had also managed to maintain strong evidence of cohesion, which is evident in that both squadrons appear to have executed squadron maneuvers and adhere to squadron signals throughout the battle. That no transports appear to have been lost (with the possible exception of the horse transports), is a testament to squadron systems at work. That resistance was formed and sustained without any direction of the Consuls, in spite of formation collapse, is all together more impressive. Finally, when it appeared that the rear squadrons themselves were close to breaking, what still remained to be defeated were the Roman corvuses & marines. This unstoppable one-two combination, undefeated in earlier engagements, again proved decisive here. That the corvus in fact served as a deterrent, in the case of the Roman III squadron that was blockaded by Carthaginian ships, proves that the Carthaginians knew of no real effective counter.

    The presence of organized resistance, after a formation collapse and flanking maneuver, argues convincingly then that the Roman formation was in no way a center of gravity for the Roman fleet. It was only the first layer in a comprehensive fleet/squadron/ship system that protected the Roman ships from attack. What remained to still be defeated were the Roman squadrons themselves, followed by each and every Roman ship. While the first two layers, and its configurations of mutually supporting ships, could be negated through maneuver, the final input for sinking and striking a Roman ship was always the same. In order to sink a Roman vessel, it had to be rammed. And in order to ram a Roman ship, you had to risk attaching yourself to the corvus. In the final analysis, it was far easier to execute boarding tactics in tight and congested space with massive quinqueremes, then it was to try to ram and maneuver.

    The Battle of Cape Ecnomus thus ends with one of the more bizarre and compelling endings ever seen in the history of warfare. Maneuver, tactics, strategy, deception, tempo, top-down command & control, intelligence, execution, surprise, preparation, and attacking the enemy’s plan (formation) at the decisive point in time, all feel short of producing victory for the Carthaginians. In this truly bizarre ending, where the victor arguably blundered early, outcomes were deterministic. Simply creating effects through maneuver, tempo, and adjusting fleet positions on a map, were not going to generate overmatch capabilities against a system that negated close quarters ramming, the only known method of attack (other than boarding). In close quarter battles where only one ship could predictably engage one other ship at a time, the result against multiple ships armed with the corvus was always the same. Nothing was left to chance or uncertainty, any Carthaginian ship that came too close to a Roman vessel (which was all but certain) alone was going to get stuck. Carthage thus needed to copy the corvus system outright or find an asymmetric counter. The only other option of course, was to swarm a Roman ship with overwhelming numbers, which again was never a possibility against the Roman fleet. Ramming, so long as large numbers of heavy ships armed with the corvus dominated the battlespace, was effectively obsolete.

    What follows then is a truism. Capabilities are equal to military advantage. When military advantage exists, a nation or army must adopt their opponent’s way of fighting or develop an asymmetric counter. The Romans, inferior sailors as they were, were aware of their own inferiority at sea and sought domination early by developing new systems. Both fleet formations and convoy like escorts were new doctrines that had never before been used extensively at sea, and the corvus system, specifically designed to counter Carthaginian naval skill itself, was a new technology. Carthage only sought to preserve the status quo by doubling down on previously accepted naval philosophy and doctrine, thinking again everything would work out predictably before as it always had. In the end, it drowned in its own hubris.
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    Flinn's Avatar His Dudeness of TWC
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    Default Re: POTF 41 - Nominations

    Quote Originally Posted by CommodusV View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by basics View Post
    CommodusV,

    The changing of one's mind is as natural as breathing although probably not as essential but what then if our brain did not have the capacity even in the twinkling of an eye to change a decision, we'd be channel visioned. We wouldn't be able to weigh up things in an instant and so choose rightly or wrongly the way to go.
    The brain's ability to change and make decisions is a complicated subject. On one hand, we are capable of flips on a whim. On the other, memes aside, we all unto ourselves have founding logic and internal consistency. It may not be universal, it may well be narrow, it may even be channel visioned to the things you prioritize and consider correct at the omission of all else that contradicts it. Just as we are capable of making snap judgements, we are capable of forming nigh indomitable narratives that require a particularly open mind or special key from another party to break. When that foundation is made, even outright evidence to the contrary most people would accept may be considered suspect. It could be replied to with deflection, smoke and mirrors, skepticism that attempts to bungle it down to subjectivity and unprovability, even outright refusal, or falling back on statements and principles used as unquestionable blocks.

    In so many words and implying examples some here might appreciate, I must disagree with the openness of your statement. We are indeed able to change our minds, but through first impressions built upon especially, we are equally capable of refusing reality itself to follow them. Because that is how we know to live, and it wouldn't do to destroy that mental fabric of how the universe works. All must boil down to summary, and that summary becomes our working perception.

    I don't know if you were going anywhere with the comment, but in the spirit of the DD I feel obliged to make an argument of it anyways. Forgive me for delayed responses going forwards.
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  4. #4

    Default Re: POTF 41 - Nominations

    Quote Originally Posted by pacifism View Post
    In a couple of semi-recent political conversations, the person I was talking to or myself would start invoking the concept of “the West”. It could be western values, western culture, or just the West itself. When this happened, I would often realize that I would become way less certain whether we were on the same page or not. It was a very weird sensation because you would think that everyone knows what it is. At school, we have classes in western literature, western music, western architecture, western history, and so on. So why didn’t I know what other people meant by the West in the political circus? Here are a few things that people associate with the West:
    - Christendom
    - Enlightenment
    - Colonies and global empires
    - The free world

    Without getting bogged down in a history lesson – I would lose to quite a few people at TWC when it comes to nitpicking history – there is something unusual about this list. All of those associations are exclusives with foils: for the Christian West to exist as a polity, it requires a heathen non-West; an enlightened philosopher required an obscurant to rail against; an imperialist country requires the existence of natives being imperialized; and a free world is fighting for supremacy over the unfree world. Furthermore, not only are these ideas of the West rather exclusive, but they are also contradictory at times. Enlightenment thinkers were fighting against the Roman Catholic Church and Christian absolutist monarchies. Colonies are being ruled in an undemocratic way that is decidedly unfree.

    This tension can also be seen in the peripheries of what is or isn’t the West. Why isn’t Latin America commonly seen as part of the West? A majority of them are Roman Catholic, despite a few authoritarian governments Latin America as a whole is still much more democratic than Africa or Asia, and they were a part of the Allies in WWII which was when the free world became a part of American lexicon. But there is the fact that these countries were colonies and a part of battlefield of the Cold War more than they were active participants.

    Does this mean that being imperialist and anti-Communist are now the biggest qualifiers of being a part of the West? The West decided that maintaining its colonies was politically as well as morally untenable. The truly Western thing to do is now is to not have colonies and not exert military control overseas against the locals’ wills. And Marxism? Karl Marx is a 19th-century stateless German Modernist philosopher whose ideas as we know them couldn’t’ve been made in anywhere but the West. The Reformation and the Enlightenment were probably seen by their detractors as an existential threat to the Christian West in their own days, and they were in some ways, but we do not think of them that way anymore. Now, they are just chapters and periods of needed change in a historical progression that is way more convoluted and less unique than we imagine them to be by calling it all “the West”.

    The idea of the West was made after the fact, but its dichotomies strikes me as an oversimplification no matter how you dice it. It’s a false binary. The different definitions of the West is also something of a house divided. Right now, I cannot synthesize the significantly disparate things I associate with the West in a way that is more meaningful than simply recognizing the nuances of the globe and everyone in it. A more cosmopolitan view of humanity strikes me as more useful, but perhaps I’m just missing something in these discussions invoking the West. What do you think?
    Quote Originally Posted by sumskilz View Post
    The talk about proto-Elamite pre-dating cuneiform is a silly distraction from Desset's accomplishment. As a system, it's linear Elamite (c. 2300 BCE) that is analogous to cuneiform (c. 3200 BCE). There is no evidence that proto-Elamite dates back as far as proto-cuneiform.

    Dash lines indicate possible influence:

    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
    I would also add a dash line between cuneiform and proto-Canaanite.

    Unfortunately, there aren't much more than twenty short linear Elamite inscriptions, but more could be found.

    Quote Originally Posted by Abdülmecid I View Post
    What I found most intriguing is Desset's claim that linear Elamite were purely phonetic, which is revolutionary for the standards of the era.
    It looks like the same system as cuneiform when cuneiform is fully written out. These are from Desset's previous publication:

    E/Ia-ba-ra-at = Ebarat
    Na-pi-ri-ša = Napiriša

    It wasn't necessary to use logograms in cuneiform, they were just faster to write. Knowing them all would have required more training, but I don't think the scribal class were particularly worried about that since it granted them job security and preserved their status.

    Canaanite was functionally the same as well, at least initially, because every consonant carries a vowel, and every West Semitic syllable consists of a consonant and a vowel. They just didn't bother to specify the vowel because it doesn't matter that much to the meaning, so much fewer characters were required. Although two of the consonants (y and w) are semivowels so in pronunciation they had a tendency to morph into vowels. Which is how they would have been when the Greeks first encountered the system, as is evidenced by the fact that the Greeks interpreted them as vowels. The Greeks also interpreted the aleph and the ayin as the vowels they most often carried rather than as the consonants Semitic speakers think of them as. Indo-European speakers tend not to even hear closing the throat as a consonant. In that sense, the fully phonetic alphabet appears to have been invented somewhat by accident. Which is convenient for the fact that vowels are much more important to the meaning of Indo-European words.

  5. #5
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    Default Re: POTF 41 - Nominations

    Quote Originally Posted by Ludicus View Post
    Un Français déchiffre une écriture de plus de 4000 ans ...

    In English.

    François Desset has succeeded in deciphering Linear Elamite, a writing system used in Iran 4,400 years ago. In its archaic proto-Elamite version (from 3300 BC), it joins the two oldest writing systems known in the world, the proto-cuneiform of the Mesopotamians and the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Enough to modify the knowledge that we had until then on the origin of writing!



    The announcement - very rare - must have delighted the spirits of Father Barthélémy, Sylvestre de Sacy or Champollion. French archaeologist François Desset, from the Archéorient Laboratory in Lyon, announced on November 27, 2020 that he had succeeded in deciphering inscriptions that are 4,400 years old! All were written in linear Elamite, a script used by the Elamites who then populated Iran. The scholars gathered online to learn about this discovery from the cultural property department of the Universita degli Studi di Padova in Padua (Italy) were enthusiastic. Here is indeed more than a century this writing system, used on the Iranian plateau in the ancient kingdom of Elam (now Iran) between the end of the 3 rd millennium and the beginning of 2th millennium before our era, escaped decryption, as is still the case for the Cretan linear A or the writing of the Indus valley. Between marks of admiration and congratulations from colleagues, the Frenchman, fresh from the University of Tehran (Iran) where he has been teaching since 2014, explained in English that: " This writing had been discovered for the first time on the ancient site of Susa (Iran) in 1901 and that for 120 years we had not been able to read what had been inscribed 4,400 years ago for lack of having found the key " . Something now done this year (thanks to the opportunity offered by quarantine in his apartment in Tehran and the collaboration of three other colleagues, Kambiz Tabibzadeh, Matthieu Kervran and Gian-Pietro Basello).


    This first step of the decryption, published in 2018, culminated this year in the complete decryption, which will be published scientifically in 2021. Thus, as an example, the decryption of a magnificent silver vase discovered in the region of Marv Dasht in the 1960s and now kept at the National Museum in Tehran (Iran), where we can now read: " To the lady of Marapsha [toponym], Shumar-asu [her name], I did this silver vase. In the temple which will be famous by my name, Humshat, I have placed it as an offering for you with kindness " . The result of years of hard work. " I have been working on these writing systems since 2006," explains the researcher at Sciences et Avenir .I did not wake up one morning telling myself that I had deciphered linear elamite. It took me over 10 years and I was never sure I would get there. "


    Linear Elamite writing notes a particular language, Elamite. It is a linguistic isolate which cannot be attached at present to any other known linguistic family, such as Basque. " Until this decipherment, everything concerning the populations occupying the Iranian Plateau came from Mesopotamian writings . These new discoveries will finally allow us to access the own point of view of the men and women occupying a territory they designated by Hatamti, while the term Elam by which we have known it until then, in fact corresponds only to an external geographical concept, formulated by their Mesopotamian neighbors ".

    "Contemporary writing systems"

    The oldest examples of writing known to date come from Mesopotamia (current Iraq) and date back to the Bronze Age, around 3300 years BC: these are proto-cuneiform tablets. But the decipherment of the linear Elamite calls into question this supremacy! " We find in fact that around 2300 BC, a parallel writing system existed in Iran, and that its oldest version - called Proto-Elamite writing , (3300 BC - 2900 BC). . -C) - dating back as far in time as the first Mesopotamian cuneiform texts says François Desset!. also, I can now say that writing did not first appear in Mesopotamia and then later in Iran: these two systems, the Mesopotamian proto-cuneiform and the Iranian proto-Elamite, were in fact contemporary! There was not a mother script of which the proto-Elamite would be the daughter, there were two sister scriptures. On the other hand, in Iran, there were not two independent writing systems either as specialists thought until then, with the proto-Elamite on one side and the linear Elamite on the other. , but the same writing which has been subjected to historical evolution and has been transcribed with variations in two distinct periods. "

    This completely changes the perspective on the appearance of the writing system in the Middle East since it is now more accurate to say that Iran has developed its own writing system "at the same time" as in Mesopotamia and that the Iranian plateau should no longer be ignored in historical reconstructions dealing with the origins of writing ...


    Green, the spread of writing Linear Elamite area in the 4th / 3rd e millennium BC © François Desset

    It is this most recent form of Iranian writing (linear Elamite) that has been deciphered. At the present time, these are forty inscriptions from southern Iran, from the ancient city of Susa, via Fars (with the region of Kam Firouz and the plain of Marv Dasht, just next to the famous Achaemenid site of Persepolis) then the Iranian southeast with Shahdad and the famous site of Konar Sandal / Jiroft. Unlike the Mesopotamian cuneiform, which is a mixed writing system combining phonograms (signs transcribing a sound) with logograms (signs transcribing a thing, an idea, a word), the linear Elamite presents its unique characteristic. the world's 3 rdmillennium BC, to be a purely phonetic writing (with signs noting syllables, consonants and vowels). Used from around 3300 to 1900 BC, Iranian writing has evolved considerably between its oldest texts (the Proto-Elamite tablets) and the most recent (the linear Elamite texts), notably with a process "skimming". Of the 300 initial signs making it possible to note proper names in the proto-Elamite tablets (the vast majority of which is currently kept at the Louvre Museum), only 80 to 100 will remain in linear Elamite afterwards. , its most recent version. About a hundred signs used continuously for some 1400 years and generally written from right to left and top to bottom. "To work, we divided the forty or so texts available to us into 8 corpuses, depending on the origins and the periods. Because linear elamite was used from 2300 to 1900 BC under the reign of different rulers and dynasties and in different regions ", continues the archaeologist . Most of the texts are fairly repetitive royal inscriptions, dedicated to ancient gods, like : " I am [name], great king of [name] , son of [name of father] , I made this item for [name of god or person] " .

    The click of the "gunagi vases"

    For François Desset, the decryption "click" occurred in 2017 during the analysis of a corpus of 8 texts written on silver vases, qualified as "gunagi vases", dated around 2000-1900 BC. BC and from graves in the Kam-Firouz region (currently in a private collection in London). As these vases presented very repetitive sign sequences, standardized indeed, the archaeologist was able to identify the signs used to note the names of two rulers, Shilhaha and Ebarti II (both having reigned around 1950 BC). C.) and the main deity then worshiped in southwestern Iran, Napirisha.



    Linear Elamite inscription in the upper part of this silver vase from Marv Dasht (Iran), dated 3rd millennium BC © François Desset

    This first step of the decryption, published in 2018, culminated this year in the complete decryption, which will be published scientifically in 2021. Thus, as an example, the decryption of a magnificent silver vase discovered in the region of Marv Dasht in the 1960s and now kept at the National Museum in Tehran (Iran), where we can now read: " To the lady of Marapsha [toponym], Shumar-asu [her name], I did this silver vase. In the temple which will be famous by my name, Humshat, I have placed it as an offering for you with kindness " . The result of years of hard work. " I have been working on these writing systems since 2006," explains the researcher at Sciences et Avenir .I did not wake up one morning telling myself that I had deciphered linear elamite. It took me over 10 years and I was never sure I would get there. "
    Linear Elamite writing notes a particular language, Elamite. It is a linguistic isolate which cannot be attached at present to any other known linguistic family, such as Basque. " Until this decipherment, everything concerning the populations occupying the Iranian Plateau came from Mesopotamian writings . These new discoveries will finally allow us to access the own point of view of the men and women occupying a territory they designated by Hatamti, while the term Elam by which we have known it until then, in fact corresponds only to an external geographical concept, formulated by their Mesopotamian neighbors ".



    Terracotta cone with linear Elamite inscriptions dating from around 2500-2300 BC © François Desset

    This breakthrough in decryption has important implications in three areas, continued François Desset: " on Iranian history; on the development of writing in Iran in particular, and in the Middle East in general, with considerations on continuity. between the Proto-Elamite and linear Elamite writing systems; and on the Hatamtite (Elamite) language itself, now better documented in its earliest form and now made accessible for the first time by a writing system other than the Mesopotamian cuneiform (see box).

    For Massimo Vidale, the Italian protohistorian organizer of the Padua conference, (whose Sciences et Avenir has just published the work on the site of " Hatra, the city of God-Solei " (Iraq), in his magazine dated December 2020 currently on newsstands), "France, by this new decryption, maintains its primacy in the" cracking "of old lost writing systems!" . As for François Desset, he has already embarked on the decryption of the oldest state of Iranian writing, the proto-Elamite tablets, for which he considers to have now opened a "highway".

    Regarding the decryption of ancient scriptures

    We must not confuse language (spoken sounds) and writing (visual signs). Thus, the same writing system can be used to note different languages. For example, the Latin alphabet currently makes it possible to transcribe French, English, Italian and Turkish for example. Likewise, the cuneiform writing of the Mesopotamians made it possible to transcribe several languages ​​such as Akkadian (Semitic language), Old Persian (Indo-European language) or even Elamite and Sumerian (linguistic isolates). Conversely, a language can also be transcribed by different writing systems such as Persian (an Indo-European language) which is currently written as well with the Arabic alphabet in Iran (and sometimes the Latin alphabet with the surprising phenomenon of fingilish ), that the Cyrillic alphabet in Tajikistan whereas it was noted in the past with a cuneiform system in the Achaemenid period (ca. 520-330 BC, for Old Persia ) or the Aramaic alphabet in the Sassanid period (3 rd -7 thcentury of our era for Middle Persia). In the case of the Elamite language, it was known until now only through the cuneiform writing. With the decryption of linear Elamite writing carried out by François Desset, we now have access to this language through a writing system probably developed specifically for it and therefore better reflecting the phonological subtleties of this language than cuneiform writing.

    Some great "decipherers":

    Father Barthélémy (1716-1795) deciphered the Palmyrean alphabet in 1753, then in 1754 the Phoenician alphabet.
    Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics.
    Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810-1895) one of the four co-decipherers of cuneiform writing noting the Akkadian language.
    Michael Ventris (1922-1956) deciphered in 1952 the "linear B", one of the three writings discovered in Knossos (Crete) used in the 2 nd millennium BC to note an archaic form of Greek.
    -------

    Now, I would like to hear our resident archaeologist.
    Quote Originally Posted by antaeus View Post
    Ever since last week's riots at the Capitol, the global debate on freedom of speech online has been dragged back out of it's closet for another going over.

    As a TLDR summary to provide context to this thread, as of this week, President Trump has been banned or blocked from a wide range of the largest social media platforms - for the most part the bans and suspensions are for terms of use breaches in response to the claim that he used his pulpit to prompt the Capitol riots. As an aside to this, social media platforms which have more liberal free speech policies and that have been seen as alternative pathways for the President to communicate have been dropped by app hosts such as Google, Apple and Amazon.

    For me this conversation leads to a level of dissonance that I struggle to reconcile.

    Freedom of speech
    I am an advocate of the concept of freedom of speech in it's classic, and internationally recognised sense: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. On the other hand I also feel that freedom of speech shouldn't shield people from the consequences of what they say where it infringes on other rights of other individuals - there is a delicate balance to be found where the expression of a right of one individual can potentially infringe on a right of another.

    Scope
    Confusing the discussion further are two other factors. The first factor is that our communications are now global. Participants in conversation sit under different legal interpretations of what freedom of speech and accountability are. The second is that much of our communication online occurs in a confused collection of environments that function as a public realm, but are administered as private and corporate owned space. One could easily envisage a situation where an opinion is stated by a Russian person speaking on a platform that is hosted in multiple locations including India and Turkey, moderated in Bangladesh, owned by a company that is incorporated in Ireland and where the majority of development staff are based in the United States: Would US legal or cultural ideas on free speech apply to this situation where an American reader comes across the original Russian opinion?

    Question one: How do we manage freedom of speech when it crosses borders? I.e. What obligations to private corporations who own our communication space have to respect freedom of speech across borders? What obligations do these corporations have, when they are headquartered in another legal jurisdiction from their primary user base?

    Social media - a facilitated community
    Corporations that facilitate conversation within their privately owned and moderated communities should in essence be able to moderate free speech however they see fit within their legal framework. We can choose to join and leave their communities and we accept their terms upon joining. Much like I can kick ol' uncle racist Bob out of my house when he starts screaming about "PC gone mad", a facilitated community should be able to define who can join a conversation, and what the limits of that conversation are. But the nature and scope of the way these facilitated communities function as a semi-public space does lead to a grey area: whether they are providing public utility - or for that matter, whether they are broadcast media. The latter two situations would imply different and perhaps conflicting sets of standards and different obligations regarding the free expression of their users.

    Question two: Are social media companies providing public space? and as such should the use of that public space be governed by a nation's legal framework around freedom of speech?

    Systemic bias
    Because of the size and scale of the interactions in these facilitated communities, algorithms are used to manage what users within the community see. The role of the algorithm is two fold. Firstly it serves to improve a user experience: it filters what a user sees by judging what is most relevant to that user's interactive engagement. Secondly it serves to monetise the facilitated community: again it filters what a user sees in a way that maximises the future potential interactions with services that have a paid component. The algorithm's goals: to increase engagement and monetise that engagement - don't specifically include human judgement on what type of content is engaged with, just that it increases that engagement - at the same time it is topic neutral, but pro-topic.

    The "basket of deplorables"
    Thanks to the two stated roles of a facilitated community algorithm - interaction and monetisation at all costs - these communities have witnessed a 'race to the bottom' whereby communication that is more likely to be interacted with, is more likely to be propagated. In effect, algorithms punish mundane communication in favour of opinionated discourse. This leads to a hollowing out of the middle ground in debates as the loudest voices are rewarded with the most engagement. Make no mistake: this situation isn't exclusive to one political party or narrative - no matter how much you feel it is - Every political perspective becomes amplified at once to a specific audience in order to maximise the algorithm's goal of engagement and monetisation. This means community feelings of anger, victimhood, success, struggle, victory etc etc are amplified to the most engageable users for each of those feelings.

    Arbitrary solutions to the most obscene of voices
    In a situation where freedom of speech has been sidelined in favour of algorithmically targeted and monetisable communications, and where mundane conversations are sidelined in favour of louder discourse, we find ourselves facing up to the results of the increased volume of opinionated content. The major facilitated community providers have been forced through public pressure to tackle the net result of the effect of their algorithms: punishing people who do exactly what their algorithms prefer (create loud opinionated conversations). Because of the internal conflict within these organisations between their desire to increase and monetise opinionated conversation, and the public relations problems created by the amplified opinions, the owners of facilitated communities have operated a minimum possible interference model. They they are slow to act even in response to those who fail to behave in accordance with their own terms of use. They are reactive rather than proactive and appear arbitrary in action. For example, Donald Trump has likely been banned from his facilitated communities because of the results of his speech, not because of the speech itself or any speech he has given previously - He was banned only when his speech led to an action.

    On the other hand, facilitated communities that take a lighter touch on moderation tend to end up as a "basket of deplorables" where under the guise of free speech, users utilise the open mic that is provided to advertise extreme perspectives that are too distasteful for the majority of facilitated communities. Whether these services like it or not, their services become active facilitators for extremism - and again in effect, suppress free speech by algorithmically disincentivising mundane opinion.

    Question three: How can social media companies moderate their communities when their financial survival depends in part on the results of unmoderated engagement?

    Question four: Should we be depending on private corporations to moderate free speech, and if not, would this necessitate further guidance from governments on exactly what free speech is in the age of amplified opinion?

    Question five: Can free speech even exist at all when our entire discourse is being channelled by algorithm?

    That should be enough to get some opinions going...
    Patronised by Pontifex Maximus
    Quote Originally Posted by Himster View Post
    The trick is to never be honest. That's what this social phenomenon is engineering: publicly conform, or else.

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