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Jul 7, 2021 7 tweets 5 min read Read on X
Wooden tablets found on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the 19th century, thought to display writing or proto-writing. Never deciphered, since the native Rapa Nui said they couldn't read them when asked by the 19th century Europeans. ImageImageImageImage
The first European to notice them was Eugène Eyraud in 1864, a friar stationed on Rapa Nui to proselytize. He reported seeing hundreds of tablets, but 4 years later, a French priest tried to recover as many as possible, and could only find a few. In every hut one finds wood...
Their disappearance might be explained by reports of the native Rapa Nui's apparent disinterest in their survival. This is perhaps connected to European-introduced diseases to the island and the brutal Peruvian slave trade. These might have killed all the literate Rapa Nui. The Bishop questioned the R...Image of Rapa Nui slave tradeEaster Island mass-kidnappi...Historically inaccurate dra...
Rapa Nui also has tons of petroglyphs, the most in Polynesia. "Nearly every suitable surface has been carved." However, there seems to be limited connections between the petroglyphs and the tablets; the petroglyphs aren't "text-like." ImageImageImageImage
Only about 2 dozen of the tablets remain, none on the island, all scattered through museums and private collections. ImageImageImage
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Also, shoutout to this dude on Rapa Nui whose job is pretty much roasting Jared Diamond Image

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Dec 17, 2024
[Japanese viewers] "would experience the shock of coming suddenly across European perspective–the violent funnelling of space toward a single vanishing point, the panicky squeezing of a world that had reposed for all those centuries in the unhurried expanse of tranquil parallels" The reception of perspective in the non-West has been a contested body of evidence for this question. The conclusions of authors who have studied the reception of western perspectival art by non-European peoples is mixed.  An eighteenth-century Chinese artist and writer stated that: "The Westerners are skilled in geometry. . .When they paint houses on a wall people are tempted to walk into them. . .But these painters have no brush-manner whatsoever; although they possess skill, they are simply artisans."  Arnheim suggests reading of history of painting in Japan: "they would e...
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-Dong Qichang (1555-1636) The late-Ming master of literati Dong Qichang if;lt~ (1555-1636) commented on the relationship between nature and painting, as quoted and translated by James Cahill: 'From the standpoint of splendid scenery, painting cannot equal [real] landscape. But from the standpoint of the sheer marvels of brush and ink, [real] landscape is not at all the equal of painting.'1 This early-seventeenth-century remark about Chinese landscape painting demonstrates the mutually irreplaceable status of nature and painting as reflected in contemporary artistic discourse. However, in the European Renaissance, Le...
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Oct 28, 2024
Woah!

In Portugal's Côa Valley, a Paleolithic artist painted a deer-like figure on a rock wall. Several thousand years later, another artist engraved a rider atop the animal, "a horseman with typical Iron Age weapons". "Iron Age warrior image superimposed above a cervid figure of Paleolithic typology at the Coa Valley site of Vermelhosa"  https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Paleolithic-open-air-rock-art-sites-of-the-C-oa-Valley-1-Vale-da-Casa-2-Vale-de-Cabr_fig18_225545384
It's modern/global discovery occurred in the 1990s during a dam building project. But the most recent art was from just a century prior!

Humans had been making images here repeatedly for around 24,000 years Image
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Timeline: Image
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Oct 24, 2024
I love encountering "steelman" explanations for "unrealistic" nonmodern art. For eg, many cultures prefer "split-type" images over naturalistic ones. Instead of assuming lack of ability, Jan B. Deregowski points out split-type images give more information than perspective images Image
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(eg. we see the elephant's legs too).
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is this real

Two Tibetans who concluded WWII was the netherworld Image
Original here! Rt this one.

(Seems like the mystery isn’t solved yet)
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Apr 17, 2024
Mass literacy destroyed many complex systems of dactylonomy (finger counting/finger math) used in the ancient world.

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The Iñupiat of Alaska traditionally use a base-20 number system. In 1994, students at Kaktovik middle school worked with their teacher to invent a way to write this, since they found our base-10 unfamiliar. After the invention of Kaktovik numerals, test scores rose significantly

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The differences between the standard Arabic number system and theirs is more complicated than just a different base number - they also have a sub-base of 5
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