2,400-year-old baskets still filled with fruit found in submerged Egyptian city

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-uncover-2400-year-old-fruit-baskets-underwater-egyptian-city-180978350/

by diodorus • 5 years ago

200 44 5 years ago

smithsonianmag.com

bruce343434• 5 years ago

Would have liked to see the 2400 year old fruit...

sgt• 5 years ago

Me too. I saw a lot of other photos and images on that page, but few had anything to do with the basket.

Show us the basket!

lloydatkinson• 5 years ago

This is an unfortunate meme of modern journalism - not including direct link to sources, not showing the video, not showing the photos, being as obtuse as possible, and for what? No idea.

OJFord• 5 years ago

Weird, I only see two images, the first headline one is of the (strikingly vibrant orange I thought) basket in situ.

mattferderer• 5 years ago

Here's the basket - https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/02/fruit-basket...

It sounds that only grape seeds and doum nuts were what remained of the fruit.

whoomp12342• 5 years ago

a 2400 year old basket is neat too tho

flossmaster• 5 years ago

Dental floss has only been around for about 200 years. I wonder if the texture of fruit has changed such that 2400 years ago it was easier to extract from between your teeth than it is today.

scohesc• 5 years ago

I wonder if they alternatives like longer hairs from animals to get stuff out from between teeth.

asdff• 5 years ago

Before floss people used sticks. Some people still use sticks for dental health while hiking.

samatman• 5 years ago

A toothpick is very old technology indeed.

It is perhaps 90% as good as dental floss at liberating fibres from between teeth, perhaps 95%.

Not much selection pressure, in other words.

lmilcin• 5 years ago

Unlikely you would be even able to recognize it as fruit.

Probably there are some remnants of seeds and a bit of dark goo inside something that is a basket only after a lot of analysis.

Fruit just doesn't do well underwater for any length of time. Except for being frozen, encased in sap or in volcanic ash, there isn't many ways to preserve the shape of the fruit for thousands of years.

tedjdziuba• 5 years ago

What relics of my existence will be news in the year 4421? The pocket knife I lost? My car keys? Code I've written?

jraby3• 5 years ago

“ contain doum nuts and grape seeds”

fogihujy2• 5 years ago

I wonder if it would be possible to get them to germinate. Old seeds have been successfully germinated in the past, but I suspect the underwater-thing might have made it impossible.

hughrr• 5 years ago

Not sure how stable they are in that environment but we found some 80 year old tomato seeds in my grandfather’s shed when he died and they germinated. They didn’t produce fruit though which was weird.

noduerme• 5 years ago

https://thetakeout.com/ancient-rome-shipwreck-amphorae-wine-...

Can't find the article right now, but people have successfully drunk 2000 year old wine that was laying in amphorae at the bottom of the sea, preserved by a layer of olive oil which was placed on top to keep the wine from oxidizing. The Mediterranean is full of interesting stuff.

stuaxo• 5 years ago

I wonder if we will ever find the extinct Silphium in a shipwreck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium

konfusinomicon• 5 years ago

it's amazing that we haven't given that it was such a highly regarded plant.so many questions make me wonder if it ever existed to begin with! why did farmers stop planting it? what was the market like when it was in decline? could it have just evolved? what plants of current high regard will hold the same legendary status in a few thousand years that will have long been extinct and have historians scratching their heads?

datenhorst• 5 years ago

They never managed to cultivate it, and apparently it refused to grow anywhere else but that region in modern-day Tunisia.

PhasmaFelis3• 5 years ago

There's a theory that farmers over-cultivated it and ruined the nutrient balance of the only soil where it was known to grow reliably.

But, since we still don't know what it was, it's quite possible that's it's still growing wild to this day and we just can't recognize it. A few candidate species have been proposed, apparently.

jihadjihad• 5 years ago

Every July I watch eagerly a certain country graveyard that I pass in driving to and from my farm. It is time for a prairie birthday, and in one corner of this graveyard lives a surviving celebrant of that once important event. It is an ordinary graveyard, bordered by the usual spruces, and studded with the usual pink granite or white marble headstones, each with the usual Sunday bouquet of red or pink geraniums. It is extraordinary only in being triangular instead of square, and in harboring, within the sharp angle of its fence, a pin-point remnant of the native prairie on which the graveyard was established in the 1840's. Heretofore unreachable by scythe or mower, this yard-square relic of original Wisconsin gives birth, each July, to a man-high stalk of compass plant or cutleaf Silphium, spangled with saucer-sized yellow blooms resembling sunflowers. It is the sole remnant of this plant along this highway, and perhaps the sole remnant in the western half of our county. What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.

This year I found the Silphium in first bloom on 24 July, a week later than usual; during the last six years the average date was 15 July.

When I passed the graveyard again on 3 August, the fence had been removed by a road crew, and the Silphium cut. It is easy now to predict the future; for a few years my Silphium will try in vain to rise above the mowing machine, and then it will die. With it will die the prairie epoch.

The Highway Department says that 100,000 cars pass yearly over this route during the three summer months when the Silphium is in bloom. In them must ride at least 100,000 people who have 'taken' what is called history, and perhaps 25,000 who have 'taken' what is called botany. Yet I doubt whether a dozen have seen the Silphium, and of these hardly one will notice its demise. If I were to tell a preacher of the adjoining church that the road crew has been burning history books in his cemetery, under the guise of mowing weeds, he would be amazed and uncomprehending. How could a weed be a book?

This is one little episode in the funeral of the native flora, which in turn is one episode in the funeral of the floras of the world. Mechanized man, oblivious of floras, is proud of his progress in cleaning up the landscape on which, willy-nilly, he must live out his days. It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life."

--Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

PhasmaFelis3• 5 years ago

Nice! I hadn't realized there were two unrelated plant groupings called Silphium.

The original was a valuable, multi-functional plant grown in ancient Libya and traded all across the Mediterranean; its exact species is lost to history. It may have gone extinct around the second century BCE, or it may be a surviving plant that we can't identify.

Leopold seems to be referring to a sunflower-like genus of North American plants which were named after the ancient crop, and are also known as rosinweeds. These, fortunately, appear to have survived to this day--or at least many individual species have.

Interesting stuff.

NL807• 5 years ago

My first instinct would be collecting seeds.

GravitasFailure• 5 years ago

Max Miller with Tasting History[0] did a whole episode on silphium and what it might have been, and possibly why it went extinct. Some actual silphium to analyze would be really helpful though.

[0]https://youtube.com/watch?v=D-QHd4_1geE

PhasmaFelis3• 5 years ago

I've also wished for Silphium to somehow be revived.

...Okay, that's mostly because it was also known as "laser", and I want to plant it with some rocket (arugula) and tell people I have a rocket laser garden. Maybe serve them some rocket laser salad.

jerbearito• 5 years ago

Your reasons are just as valid as anyone else's. I hope one day you achieve your rocket laser garden.

SJetKaran• 5 years ago

Interesting, has some similarities similarities to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botanical_identity_of_soma%E2%...

omega3• 5 years ago

I'm hoping they'll find pineapple there: https://eyesofrome.com/blog/eyes-on-storytelling/mystery-in-...

rm999• 5 years ago

I couldn't find a picture of the fruit, but this article at least has a photo of the basket.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/02/fruit-basket...

10x-dev• 5 years ago

I think it would be really cool if we had a time slider on a product like Google Earth, where we could go back in time and see how cities and roads changed and what we think they might have looked like based on all the archeological knowledge we possess.

For example, the city in this article is currently submerged under water. What was the world like right before? How about right after?

Think of it like a visual reconstruction of all of human history. It would be fascinating.

shiftpgdn• 5 years ago

Google earth does have a time slider. My area has some 90+ year old aerial imagery. :)

SavantIdiot• 5 years ago

Just the bottom of that basket is gorgeous. I want to see everything else.

2,400-year-old baskets still filled with fruit found in submerged Egyptian city

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