Sunday, March 25, 2012

Cracked.com on antiquities and a fake

CRACKED.COM: 6 Nobodies Who Stumbled Into World Changing Discoveries. Five major archaeological discoveries and one bogosity. On the Dead Sea Scrolls:
To this day, the goat herders who found the things probably still think the guy who bought them was a sucker for forking over 30 bucks.
Actually, they figured thirty bucks was thirty bucks, so they went back to the site and found more caves with more scrolls and then cashed in bigtime.

On the fake metal codices:
Oh, and then there are some scholars who think that the real reason we can't translate them is because they are bulls**t forgeries written by someone who didn't understand much about the language they were trying to imitate. But as usual, we are reserving hope that there's a little bit of Indiana Jones magic in this world. In the meantime, we're heading to the Middle East, and we're bringing our cave-diving equipment.
Yeah, good luck with that.

Very amusing piece that also covers Pompeii, the Venus de Milo, Otzi, and the recovery of Aeschylus's Achilles stuffed in a mummy. But, as usual with Cracked, if you are easily offended by crudities, you may wish to skip it.

(HT The Jordan Lead Codices are fake FB page.)