3,200-Year-Old Stone Inscription Tells of Trojan Prince, Sea People

[Judi Lynn]

By Owen Jarus, Live Science Contributor | October 7, 2017 08:53am ET

- click for image -

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According to the inscription, a kingdom called Mira controlled Troy 3,200 years ago and a prince from Troy, named Muksus, led Mira's forces in a series of military campaigns.
Credit: Alex Khripunov/Shutterstock

A 3,200-year-old stone slab with an inscription that tells of a Trojan prince and may refer to the mysterious Sea People has been deciphered, archaeologists announced today (Oct. 7).

The stone inscription, which was 95 feet (29 meters) long, describes the rise of a powerful kingdom called Mira, which launched a military campaign led by a prince named Muksus from Troy.

The inscription is written in an ancient language called Luwian that just a few scholars, no more than 20 by some estimates, can read today. Those scholars include Fred Woudhuizen, an independent scholar, who has now deciphered a copy of the inscription. [Cracking Codices: 10 of the Most Mysterious Ancient Manuscripts]

Woudhuizen and Eberhard Zangger, a geoarchaeologist who is president of the Luwian Studies foundation, will publish findings on the inscription in the December issue of the journal Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/60629-ancient-inscription-trojan-prince-sea-people.html?utm_source=notification

[shenmue]

1. Wow! I love Troy

[Raastan]

2. Plus

Knowing more about the sea people would be awesome.

[Irish_Dem]

3. Looks like humans have not evolved much in the past 3000 years.

Still jockeying for power and destroying civilizations.

[Boomer]

4. Evolution does not lead to ethical behavior

Power struggles are part of the inevitable dynamics of group living, no matter which species you belong to. We aren't going to "evolve" out of that toward some idealistic moral high ground. Evolution is driven by what works best for survival in the long-term, no matter how much we may rue that result. We should be thankful that we also have a significant altruistic component to our nasty, brutish primate mind.

[Irish_Dem]

5. Surely we have made some progress fighting human's dark side.

It could be argued that altruism loads on survival in some ways. But yes, violence, greed, corruption certainly seems to lead the list of long term human survival skills.

As a species, it appears that we have raised the rates of literacy, health, rights of minorities. A big change in my lifetime are civil rights for women, non-whites, and LGBTQ. When I was young, women could only become wives, nurses, teachers, or secretaries. Professional schools were closed to females. Now that has all changed.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether any of this progress will hold for the long term. Takes so long to achieve basic human rights, but they can be swept away over night.

[Boomer]

6. This is ethics not evolution

Social progress is, unfortunately, relative and ephemeral. It is learned behavior and yes, disappears all too quickly. Even if we managed to construct a culture that suppresses what we call "bad" human qualities, it's not in any sense an evolution of species. We're just managing our symptoms. DNA doesn't give a fig about ethical behavior.

[Irish_Dem]

7. If you read the Biological Altruism literature, you can see that altruism is Darwinian.

Monkeys who put their own lives in danger to sound an alarm to the group about an impending danger, increase the group's survival rate, loading on survival of the species. This is not learned, but hard wired biology.

I think however any biological altruism is over whelmed by dark side traits.