I realize Fallon is just making a joke, but FYI, the damaged books were never in the desert in the first place. Because they aren't ancient books from Egypt; they are relatively modern books about Egypt.
No ancient artifacts were damaged, and the books that were damaged are going to be restored and will be OK.
A water leak at the Louvre museum in Paris has damaged hundreds of works, just weeks after thieves stole priceless French crown jewels from the museum in broad daylight. The museum's deputy administrator, Francis Steinbock, said between 300-400 works, mostly books, were affected by the leak - and that the count was ongoing.
Mr Steinbock told French media the damage occurred in the Egyptian department and that the volumes are "those consulted by Egyptologists", but that "no precious books" were affected.
The problem that caused the leak, which was discovered in late November, had been known for years, and repairs are scheduled for next year, Mr Steinbock added. The volumes will be dried, sent to a bookbinder and restored before being returned to the shelves.
Mr Steinbock described the books as "Egyptology journals" and "scientific documentation" from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. "No heritage artefacts have been affected by this damage," Mr Steinbock told the Agence France-Presse news agency. He added: "At this stage, we have no irreparable and definitive losses in these collections."
I hate when that happens. Like you know exactly what you're looking for, you take the time to look at the thing that's most likely to be wrong and your brain just does not do the work XD
They were artifacts from the ancient civilization known as Candyland. To ensure their preservation they were contained in a delicious caramel. Sadly the water washed it away.
Also people have been raiding, selling, recycling etc antiquities for thousands of years until Europeans started intentionally preserving things and putting them in museums. Like it's kind of a dick move to keep everything now that other cultures have become interested in preserving their histories but let's not pretend that people weren't bleaching and writing over manuscripts, painting over canvases, canibalizing monuments for stone, and melting down any metal work for thousands of years all over the world including in Europe (to say nothing about warfare and intentional iconoclastic destruction.
I mean there was that one time when Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin stole the Parthenon marble from the actual Parthenon building in Greece and sold it to the British Museum in 1816. Sure it sat there for literally thousands of years, but now it is finally safely preserved in the British Museum where it is protected and random guys can't just come and take it.
It sat there for thousands of years, only burning a few times, being looted, having the cult statue to athena shipped to constantinople and later destroyed, getting converted to a church which removed and destroyed a vast number of pagan scultptures and defaced surfaces, then as a mosque where the new christian inscriptions and paintings werr defaced and then the Venetians accidentally blew up half the Parthenon because the ottomans (who also dismantled a nearby temple to build fortifications) were using it for gunpowder storage and afterwards the ottomans used the rubble to build a mosque and much of the building's easily accessible materials were looted, in the Greek war of Independence the ottomans again targeted the acropolis with artillery fire.
The reason why the marbles even still existed in the form was because they were too high up for anyone to easily fuck with but 99% of what people could walk off with they did.
All that said I think the Elgin marbles should be returned to Greece now, but that doesnt mean taking them in the first place was some great historic crime of looting compared to how the site had been treated for hundreds of years, and it likely helped to preserve and rejuvenate interest in them.
The Alexandria library and it's fire. Also Baghdad had so many manuscripts thrown in the river after the Mongols destroyed the city the river an black with ink for weeks. Libraries and musuems have always existed, it's that European museums got a lot of loot.
There's differences between libraries and museums, and since you seem to be interested maybe you should read a book on the libraries of Alexandria and learn that their decline was a gradual one over centuries and not a singular cataclysmic fire.
As to the house of wisdom, the accounts of the river running first red with blood and then black with ink were written many years after the "destruction" by people who were not there and almost certainly using literary license to emphasize the barbarity of the Mongols.
There was a grand library in Baghdad, one that much of the contents of was most likely moved hundreds of years before the sack of the city when the capital changed, and what was left behind and destroyed was in no way the totality or even a primary collection of texts.
"mention of the library ends almost entirely after the death of al-Maʾmūn in 833. Tensions between the caliphate and the old establishment continued into the reign of al-Muʿtaṣim (833–842) and forced him to move the capital from Baghdad to nearby Sāmarrāʾ. Bayt al-Hikmah remained intact in Baghdad, but its association with al-Maʾmūn in 10th-century texts may indicate that its collection was not supplemented after the capital was moved to Sāmarrāʾ. Whatever may have remained of the collection in 1258 was destroyed in the Mongol sack of Baghdad."
It's easy to watch a YouTube video and be a pop historian making neat bold claims. Turns out history is actually a lot more complicated than you think and rarely paints the clean narratives that are satisfying and catchy for "educational" content creators.
While the libraries were in decline the destruction of any destroys so much of humanities collective knowledge that we'll never get back even if they were mostly shells of their former self. So many ancient knowledge and sources are lost to time.
While some aspect of that is true, let's also remember Europeans were buying massive quantities of paint that was made from ground up mummies (mummy brown).
Great preservers they are not. The things they preserved, they did because they viewed them as having VALUE. Value that likely could've been seen by the local population and would've mostly been kept by them. A large number of the people who were bleaching, painting over things, and destroying monuments were either doing so for the purpose of conquest (which Europeans also did) or they did so to sell to collectors (many European, not all) and later museums.
Nepal has had massive amounts of its cultural heritage pillaged and placed in collections, including in Museums. Religious 'artifacts' that in fact are part of a living religion used by people today, things that WERE BEING PRESERVED, VALUED, AND USED, stolen and sold for rich Western people to ogle at the Smithsonian.
and mummies were alreadu stolen and sold to the highest bidder 3 thousands of years ago, it's no coincidence that later pharao choose to be burried in an actual remote mountain instead of building the largest man made structure at the time, that served as the best beacon for pillager.
the pillaging and selling of invaluable artifact is part of our global human custom, no matter the continent or the period.
The "local people" who lived closest to the 3 great pyramids of egypt, had stripped them almost entirely of their polished white limestone covering to use on other buildings.
Europeans are not the only culture who destroyed history
The local population is the number one cause for the re-purposing of various 'antiquities' wherever you go, because the local population always had the means (lived there) and often the motive (needed stuff).
A dry riverbed might be nice flat ground, sheltered from the wind... but when it rains, it pours, and when it's gone hard the dry ground won't absorb that water.
It doesn’t even need to rain on you. Suddenly you can smell water, and then a 100 kph torrent that rained on the mountains beyond sight just washes you away.
The first time I traveled to Arizona to meet some extended family the biggest then they made clear to me is that when it rains in the dry desert the water moves FAST because it can't soak in. Coming from PA it takes a LOT of rain where I grew up before any flooding happens because most of the ground is already prepped to absorb water, so even a decent rain there is no risk of flooding.
Not true in the desert, you can get a flood with what feels like a small amount of rain.
nothing more fun than when it rains in the desert and you and the boys get to go play in all of the new rivers that flooded out golfers from their courses for the day
Sure but they didn't have the option to do a copy/paste in a new tab, not blaming the people on r/funny but a comedian with a massive audience and a full writing staff should be expected to fact check
Sure but they didn't have the option to do a copy/paste in a new tab
Surely the fact that this is still a problem despite the fact that we have that option proves that it's not an issue of a lack of access to information but of a lack of desire to acquire information. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
It seems more crazy that people who have been on the internet for decades still just accept whatever they read at face value as long as it somehow conforms with their worldview.
I was told in a documentary it was bound in human flesh and inked in blood. Also if you want to safely remove it, you have to say Klaatu, Barada... I forget the last one.. nickel? necktie?
One more and they're going to need to bring in a professor of symbology to unravel all the symbolisms left by the secret cult who like to leave symbols everywhere and little puzzles and so forth.
"Mr Steinbock described the books as "Egyptology journals" and "scientific documentation" from the late 19th and early 20th centuries."
Falsehood will fly, as it were, on the wings of the wind, and carry its tales to every corner of the earth; whilst truth lags behind; her steps, though sure, are slow and solemn
I'm more curious about the logistics of how this happened. They're books. Are they storing them under a sink in the visitors' restrooms?
I have to deal with fire safety stuff all the time and yes fires happen but sometimes it doesn't take a genius to point out that guy waving his cigarette around flammable stuff might be the reason. So, same here with the books; where are they putting them so that a water leak is all it takes?
It's an old building, and I bet the roof has issues sometimes (many, many old buildings have problems with leaky roofs). I also bet that at least some of the storage rooms are in the attic/directly beneath the roof. If it's not an area that they visit often, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that they didn't notice the water damage in the architecture until it had gotten particularly bad and also damaged the books.
I grew up in hurricane country. If the house didn't flood, the roof would be torn apart. Sometimes it was both. And I grew up with fire safety as one of the things I was constantly, constantly exposed to. I've lost more stuff to storms than I ever want to lose.
I'm one of those people that would use a plastic tote and pack the thing like it's going through USPS before storing something, knowing if anything went wrong everything will go wrong. My wife worries sometimes because of how redundant I can be but I'm like "I'd rather spend another $50 on storage than hundreds replacing things (assuming they can be replaced). And this is personal stuff that isn't worth thousands of dollars (at least I don't think I have anything worth a thousand). Give me something worth a thousand and I'll spend at least a hundred storing it in a way that makes minor problems like a water leak a nonissue. It's not like storage containers need to be custom built or can only be used once.
Also also also, this is one of the oldest buildings in Paris and a major tourist attraction. I'm shocked they aren't spending a little bit renovating parts of it so this doesn't happen (though the Notre Dame renovation was quite the scare, I don't foresee the Louvre having such problems especially after Notre Dame).
These weren't actually old books but for real artifact texts from Egypt the only examples we have are from random desert sites because everything in the major cities, that is, cities near rivers and farming, was destroyed over the millennia by humidity. And then I'd still say that an academic museum is safer than leaving artifacts in the open to be stolen or eventually damaged in a desert flash flood.
Ah corrupt dictatorial regimes in Tourism economic countries, yeah not exactly the usual mix for academic preservation gold standard.
I haven't been there since the Arab Spring but back when Zawi Hawass ran all the digs/museums it was like dealing with an Egyptian Trump. He had a legal monopoly on all the Indiana Jones hats being sold in Egypt. Like him personally.
It seemed like to him it was about the money being generated from the artifacts, not the actual cultural heritage. Like they dont give good Egyptology degrees in Egypt, even he has his degree from UPenn and apparently was a shit student that only got accepted and given a degree because his family was in the Mubarak inner circle.
context is important, but it isn't everything. I'd say ending up at the Louvre is one of the best case scenarios for an artifact bought at antiquities market. Most such items are probably destroyed relatively quickly
They wouldn't have been left in the desert, some low life would have stolen them and sold them to private collectors where they would disappear. Source: All the other Egyptian stuff that was destroyed over time.
Also the people who live in Egypt now are not the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians they are the descendants of the people who displaced them.
What on Earth are you talking about? The Egyptians were never displaced. Conquered, yes, not displaced. That would be a rather huge population to completely remove.
Oh yeah, better to leave them in the desert so a local guy can take it to sell, so it eventually ends up in some rich dudes basement. Or maybe not, and it just gets destroyed because some religious freaks believe it makes their imaginary friend sad.
While I am not opposed to the idea of returning artifacts, maybe we should wait for the region to modernize and stabilize. Looting, destruction of artifacts and cities is not uncommon with the regional players.
Yeah, Syria and Afghanistan are the best/worst examples of that. Priceless artifacts lost to religious zealots, forever.
Paris and London are not big enough to serve as a backup for the whole world tho. And some situations are properly absurd (like. I believe Greece deserves to get some loot back now).
The front page on reddit is absolutely cooked. Tons of repetition, tons of suspicous upvote to comment ratios. People love to joke about the dead internet theory here, but the site is entirely affected by it too
People get big mad at the idea of being identifiable on the internet, but I don't see another fix to the bot issue. I would love to know all accounts are real humans not from Russia/China/Iran,
to be fair, a lot of that stuff in the louvre and the british royal wouldn't have survived to today if it stayed where it was. kinda like the the stuff isis blew up and sold for weapons and trucks
I still love the story about how they removed the high tech security in one of the rooms and replaced it with basic glass cases because it was some attempt to make the museum look less pretentious and shortly thereafter, the stuff was stolen.
Whatever is going on there, I hope this is a wake up call. My son's been there this summer - according to him, for such a major museum, it was super dingy and rundown.
Where I am 100% sure islamists won't destroy them? considering how easy was for them to Kidnap Native Egyptians (Copts, who are closest descendants of pyramid-building ancient Egyptians, but are persecuted for not being muslim)
I think the point of the joke regardless of what the book actually is or how Egypt’s weather is like, is that relics and cultural pieces should really be at their respective country’s own museums.
Overwhelming lesson here is maybe the 18th century palace that has seen ridiculous levels of foot-traffic and continuous use is in need of some more serious renovations to ensure its artifacts are properly protected and cared for.
It's a beautiful building that is a work of art itself, but it perhaps isn't the most secure location for priceless works of national importance. The British Crown Jewels are kept in a very modern and secure building for this reason.
Speaking on the British. 'Funny thing, long time ago. We went around the world. And robbed, everyone. We put all their stuff in a museum. After many years the owners asked for their things back.... we said, no! We're not done.. lookin' at em yet!'.
When I was in Egypt in 2020, the day I went to The Egyptian Museum in Cairo, there were severe thunderstorms. The museum had a very very leaky roof. King Tuts mummy was on my left, a bucket catching drips from the ceiling on my right, glad they got the new museum built to better preserve those artifacts.
Can’t risk some religious nut wanting to zero millenarian treasures, like those fucks who wanted to bomb Petra. Things stay here until Arabic countries get their shit together
People dig holes 500km deep and find stuff that's been there perfectly safe for thousands of years, then say "yes, dig it up, it needs to be in museum".
Dry and stolen perhaps. Egypt is an politically and socially unstable region. Just look up what happened near ancient sites like the pyramids during recent turmoil.
I'd love to now hear from the crowd that yaps "they're being preserved. they would have been destroyed by the Egyptians if they weren't stolen by the French"
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I realize Fallon is just making a joke, but FYI, the damaged books were never in the desert in the first place. Because they aren't ancient books from Egypt; they are relatively modern books about Egypt.
No ancient artifacts were damaged, and the books that were damaged are going to be restored and will be OK.
From a BBC article, "Water leak in Louvre damages hundreds of books":
They would have been very sticky if they were
Hah, I just fixed that typo right before I saw your reply.
When originally writing the comment, I paused to double check that I did not get the wrong spelling, and then I got the wrong spelling anyway.
I hate when that happens. Like you know exactly what you're looking for, you take the time to look at the thing that's most likely to be wrong and your brain just does not do the work XD
Happened to me constantly. Not only am I a bad speller, I'm also a bad reader too. 😐
Me two
Except with this one there's plausible deniability.
They were artifacts from the ancient civilization known as Candyland. To ensure their preservation they were contained in a delicious caramel. Sadly the water washed it away.
This is the kind of "Umm, actually," that I love. Thanks for the information!
But damn, that place is really lacking in care taken, considering the value of its contents.
what, the French Republic? absolutely
Also people have been raiding, selling, recycling etc antiquities for thousands of years until Europeans started intentionally preserving things and putting them in museums. Like it's kind of a dick move to keep everything now that other cultures have become interested in preserving their histories but let's not pretend that people weren't bleaching and writing over manuscripts, painting over canvases, canibalizing monuments for stone, and melting down any metal work for thousands of years all over the world including in Europe (to say nothing about warfare and intentional iconoclastic destruction.
I mean there was that one time when Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin stole the Parthenon marble from the actual Parthenon building in Greece and sold it to the British Museum in 1816. Sure it sat there for literally thousands of years, but now it is finally safely preserved in the British Museum where it is protected and random guys can't just come and take it.
It sat there for thousands of years, only burning a few times, being looted, having the cult statue to athena shipped to constantinople and later destroyed, getting converted to a church which removed and destroyed a vast number of pagan scultptures and defaced surfaces, then as a mosque where the new christian inscriptions and paintings werr defaced and then the Venetians accidentally blew up half the Parthenon because the ottomans (who also dismantled a nearby temple to build fortifications) were using it for gunpowder storage and afterwards the ottomans used the rubble to build a mosque and much of the building's easily accessible materials were looted, in the Greek war of Independence the ottomans again targeted the acropolis with artillery fire.
The reason why the marbles even still existed in the form was because they were too high up for anyone to easily fuck with but 99% of what people could walk off with they did.
All that said I think the Elgin marbles should be returned to Greece now, but that doesnt mean taking them in the first place was some great historic crime of looting compared to how the site had been treated for hundreds of years, and it likely helped to preserve and rejuvenate interest in them.
The Alexandria library and it's fire. Also Baghdad had so many manuscripts thrown in the river after the Mongols destroyed the city the river an black with ink for weeks. Libraries and musuems have always existed, it's that European museums got a lot of loot.
There's differences between libraries and museums, and since you seem to be interested maybe you should read a book on the libraries of Alexandria and learn that their decline was a gradual one over centuries and not a singular cataclysmic fire.
As to the house of wisdom, the accounts of the river running first red with blood and then black with ink were written many years after the "destruction" by people who were not there and almost certainly using literary license to emphasize the barbarity of the Mongols.
There was a grand library in Baghdad, one that much of the contents of was most likely moved hundreds of years before the sack of the city when the capital changed, and what was left behind and destroyed was in no way the totality or even a primary collection of texts.
"mention of the library ends almost entirely after the death of al-Maʾmūn in 833. Tensions between the caliphate and the old establishment continued into the reign of al-Muʿtaṣim (833–842) and forced him to move the capital from Baghdad to nearby Sāmarrāʾ. Bayt al-Hikmah remained intact in Baghdad, but its association with al-Maʾmūn in 10th-century texts may indicate that its collection was not supplemented after the capital was moved to Sāmarrāʾ. Whatever may have remained of the collection in 1258 was destroyed in the Mongol sack of Baghdad."
It's easy to watch a YouTube video and be a pop historian making neat bold claims. Turns out history is actually a lot more complicated than you think and rarely paints the clean narratives that are satisfying and catchy for "educational" content creators.
While the libraries were in decline the destruction of any destroys so much of humanities collective knowledge that we'll never get back even if they were mostly shells of their former self. So many ancient knowledge and sources are lost to time.
Sorry I need to critique this view.
While some aspect of that is true, let's also remember Europeans were buying massive quantities of paint that was made from ground up mummies (mummy brown).
Great preservers they are not. The things they preserved, they did because they viewed them as having VALUE. Value that likely could've been seen by the local population and would've mostly been kept by them. A large number of the people who were bleaching, painting over things, and destroying monuments were either doing so for the purpose of conquest (which Europeans also did) or they did so to sell to collectors (many European, not all) and later museums.
Nepal has had massive amounts of its cultural heritage pillaged and placed in collections, including in Museums. Religious 'artifacts' that in fact are part of a living religion used by people today, things that WERE BEING PRESERVED, VALUED, AND USED, stolen and sold for rich Western people to ogle at the Smithsonian.
That is highly debatable. See: ISIS in Syria or the Taliban in Afghanistan.
and mummies were alreadu stolen and sold to the highest bidder 3 thousands of years ago, it's no coincidence that later pharao choose to be burried in an actual remote mountain instead of building the largest man made structure at the time, that served as the best beacon for pillager.
the pillaging and selling of invaluable artifact is part of our global human custom, no matter the continent or the period.
The "local people" who lived closest to the 3 great pyramids of egypt, had stripped them almost entirely of their polished white limestone covering to use on other buildings.
Europeans are not the only culture who destroyed history
The local population is the number one cause for the re-purposing of various 'antiquities' wherever you go, because the local population always had the means (lived there) and often the motive (needed stuff).
Jimmy might want to read up on that whole Library of Alexandria thing...
Looks like they have a lot of issues that are known but aren't being fixed in a timely fashion.
Superficial, poorly thought out "joke", trying to capitalise on an ageing once-popular internet trope?
Yep, that's Fallon.
Idk, scientific journals and expedition logs from the 1800s sound like the kind of thing that might have a lot of forgotten rediscoveries.
To be fair in some deserts in the region, the deadliest danger is .. drowning. It doesn't rain often, but when it does, all bets are off.
A dry riverbed might be nice flat ground, sheltered from the wind... but when it rains, it pours, and when it's gone hard the dry ground won't absorb that water.
It doesn’t even need to rain on you. Suddenly you can smell water, and then a 100 kph torrent that rained on the mountains beyond sight just washes you away.
as someone who lives in a desert, when it rains it usually sprinkles. pouring is very very rare
But when it pours, it rains.
Egyptian history is noted for its regular floods
Regular, mild and predictable
Just like sex with me.
oooOOOOOOOooooo 🎵
I like it that way.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/1hwjph7/its_so_over/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
The fact that the Nile flooded is the whole reason Egypt is where it is!
40 days?!?
[deleted]
Fucking hell that’s like 80 days equivalent altogether
What is this, a cruise?
They were able to predict and calculate the floodings of the Nile to maximise the crop.
The first time I traveled to Arizona to meet some extended family the biggest then they made clear to me is that when it rains in the dry desert the water moves FAST because it can't soak in. Coming from PA it takes a LOT of rain where I grew up before any flooding happens because most of the ground is already prepped to absorb water, so even a decent rain there is no risk of flooding.
Not true in the desert, you can get a flood with what feels like a small amount of rain.
nothing more fun than when it rains in the desert and you and the boys get to go play in all of the new rivers that flooded out golfers from their courses for the day
Lately it has been civil war. Even Egypt had one no so long ago.
Books written by the French about Egypt but hey facts amirite.
It's crazy how nobody seems to fact check anything anymore.
"Mr Steinbock described the books as "Egyptology journals" and "scientific documentation" from the late 19th and early 20th centuries."
The joke does not even work because the Egyptian civilization, much like basically every other, flourished around a HUGE body of water.
Yeah, and sometimes the Nile flooded!
Every year even.
I get what you're saying, but let's not pretend like people of the past were any better at fact checking.
Sure but they didn't have the option to do a copy/paste in a new tab, not blaming the people on r/funny but a comedian with a massive audience and a full writing staff should be expected to fact check
Surely the fact that this is still a problem despite the fact that we have that option proves that it's not an issue of a lack of access to information but of a lack of desire to acquire information. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
It seems more crazy that people who have been on the internet for decades still just accept whatever they read at face value as long as it somehow conforms with their worldview.
Next you're going to tell me the Book of the Dead wasn't actually a leather-bound Bible written in hieroglyphics the pharaoh kept on his bookshelf! /s
(For the record, pretty much every part of the above statement is inaccurate)
I was told in a documentary it was bound in human flesh and inked in blood. Also if you want to safely remove it, you have to say Klaatu, Barada... I forget the last one.. nickel? necktie?
Also using Fallon for the meme is craaaazy.
is this the standard of r/funny? shittily captioned jimmy fallon pics with even shittier jokes?
what a fucking cesspool.
This is Philomena Cunk level unfunny.
The louvre "loses" 2 sets of priceless artifacts in the same year?!?!
Damn, those coincidences sure are coinciding
One more and they're going to need to bring in a professor of symbology to unravel all the symbolisms left by the secret cult who like to leave symbols everywhere and little puzzles and so forth.
They weren’t actually Egyptian artifacts, they were old books about Egypt. But nothing that was unique or irreplaceable.
"Mr Steinbock described the books as "Egyptology journals" and "scientific documentation" from the late 19th and early 20th centuries."
Falsehood will fly, as it were, on the wings of the wind, and carry its tales to every corner of the earth; whilst truth lags behind; her steps, though sure, are slow and solemn
Also, Egyptians aren't the best at protecting their antiques anyway. That country peaked a few thousand years ago and has been a mess for centuries.
I'm more curious about the logistics of how this happened. They're books. Are they storing them under a sink in the visitors' restrooms?
I have to deal with fire safety stuff all the time and yes fires happen but sometimes it doesn't take a genius to point out that guy waving his cigarette around flammable stuff might be the reason. So, same here with the books; where are they putting them so that a water leak is all it takes?
It's an old building, and I bet the roof has issues sometimes (many, many old buildings have problems with leaky roofs). I also bet that at least some of the storage rooms are in the attic/directly beneath the roof. If it's not an area that they visit often, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that they didn't notice the water damage in the architecture until it had gotten particularly bad and also damaged the books.
I grew up in hurricane country. If the house didn't flood, the roof would be torn apart. Sometimes it was both. And I grew up with fire safety as one of the things I was constantly, constantly exposed to. I've lost more stuff to storms than I ever want to lose.
I'm one of those people that would use a plastic tote and pack the thing like it's going through USPS before storing something, knowing if anything went wrong everything will go wrong. My wife worries sometimes because of how redundant I can be but I'm like "I'd rather spend another $50 on storage than hundreds replacing things (assuming they can be replaced). And this is personal stuff that isn't worth thousands of dollars (at least I don't think I have anything worth a thousand). Give me something worth a thousand and I'll spend at least a hundred storing it in a way that makes minor problems like a water leak a nonissue. It's not like storage containers need to be custom built or can only be used once.
Also also also, this is one of the oldest buildings in Paris and a major tourist attraction. I'm shocked they aren't spending a little bit renovating parts of it so this doesn't happen (though the Notre Dame renovation was quite the scare, I don't foresee the Louvre having such problems especially after Notre Dame).
Pattern Recognition. Not even once.
Nah, I heard on NPR that it leaks all the fucking time there. So can't be that surprising.
Egypt was famous for flooding yearly for thousands of years.
The world's largest river goes right through it
These weren't actually old books but for real artifact texts from Egypt the only examples we have are from random desert sites because everything in the major cities, that is, cities near rivers and farming, was destroyed over the millennia by humidity. And then I'd still say that an academic museum is safer than leaving artifacts in the open to be stolen or eventually damaged in a desert flash flood.
This some Facebook shit
They're french books about Egypt
They would have been stolen by someone else.
Egypt just has had a tomb raider problem for over 6,000 years.
The French are still salty the British got them first.
Egyptian libraries are famous for keeping their contents intact.
Yes, famously bad.
That's the joke.jpg
To be fair, that library was built by occupying Greeks.
Ah corrupt dictatorial regimes in Tourism economic countries, yeah not exactly the usual mix for academic preservation gold standard.
I haven't been there since the Arab Spring but back when Zawi Hawass ran all the digs/museums it was like dealing with an Egyptian Trump. He had a legal monopoly on all the Indiana Jones hats being sold in Egypt. Like him personally.
It seemed like to him it was about the money being generated from the artifacts, not the actual cultural heritage. Like they dont give good Egyptology degrees in Egypt, even he has his degree from UPenn and apparently was a shit student that only got accepted and given a degree because his family was in the Mubarak inner circle.
More likely they would have been burned or lost if a museum didn't have them.
This is such a Reddit meme I can’t even lmao. So many self righteous morons on this website lol.
the Nile does flood yearly though
If it stayed in egypt it would have been sold in the antiquities market.
and years later end up in France at the Louvre
Without documentation of where it was excavated from it's useless
context is important, but it isn't everything. I'd say ending up at the Louvre is one of the best case scenarios for an artifact bought at antiquities market. Most such items are probably destroyed relatively quickly
“Google Aswan dam”
“Holy hell”
Kid named Aswan dam:
He probably laughed through the entire joke
A significant portion of the city of Alexandria is lost due to water… just saying.
No they would've been burned by fanatics
Or looted by opportunists.
They wouldn't have been left in the desert, some low life would have stolen them and sold them to private collectors where they would disappear. Source: All the other Egyptian stuff that was destroyed over time.
Also the people who live in Egypt now are not the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians they are the descendants of the people who displaced them.
What on Earth are you talking about? The Egyptians were never displaced. Conquered, yes, not displaced. That would be a rather huge population to completely remove.
Oh yeah, better to leave them in the desert so a local guy can take it to sell, so it eventually ends up in some rich dudes basement. Or maybe not, and it just gets destroyed because some religious freaks believe it makes their imaginary friend sad.
Or maybe the Egyptians have their own museums to pit it in? Do you think it's still ancient Egypt over there?
Oh ye, Iraq had museums too, so where did all the old shit go?
They probably would not exist of they stayed in Egypt
Just get some rice.
Put the Egyptian artifacts in the Asiatic grain so the French can once more look upon them from a distance.
While I am not opposed to the idea of returning artifacts, maybe we should wait for the region to modernize and stabilize. Looting, destruction of artifacts and cities is not uncommon with the regional players.
Yeah, Syria and Afghanistan are the best/worst examples of that. Priceless artifacts lost to religious zealots, forever.
Paris and London are not big enough to serve as a backup for the whole world tho. And some situations are properly absurd (like. I believe Greece deserves to get some loot back now).
I agree and even Egypt. People had to form a human chain around the Cairo museum to prevent looting and arson during the Arab Spring.
What artifacts? Ancient Egyptian books?
they're neither ancient nor Egyptian. 1/3, good job
Egypt is very vulnerable to severe flash floods and coastal flooding.
over 8000 upvotes and just 80 comments is also suspicious as hell
Very suspicious, but less than in news subs. If you see a news sub that has such posts, you can be certain it's bots. Here it might be bots too.
The front page on reddit is absolutely cooked. Tons of repetition, tons of suspicous upvote to comment ratios. People love to joke about the dead internet theory here, but the site is entirely affected by it too
People get big mad at the idea of being identifiable on the internet, but I don't see another fix to the bot issue. I would love to know all accounts are real humans not from Russia/China/Iran,
Deserts have floods. And they aren't that rare.
Fuck off, Fallon
False but funny
Sheesh do they even do any maintenance there?
to be fair, a lot of that stuff in the louvre and the british royal wouldn't have survived to today if it stayed where it was. kinda like the the stuff isis blew up and sold for weapons and trucks
They would be already destroyed
Yep it's gonna be far safer in the Middle East.
Must be the water
Or they would have been destroyed by whatever piece of shit regime has that authority.
Conspiracy theory: the heist that happened didn't just steal jewels and this is a coverup to hide how much was really stolen.
Man, the louvre just wont stop fucking up huh?
That's an episode of Scrubs
The Louvre can't catch a break, huh?
I still love the story about how they removed the high tech security in one of the rooms and replaced it with basic glass cases because it was some attempt to make the museum look less pretentious and shortly thereafter, the stuff was stolen.
Whatever is going on there, I hope this is a wake up call. My son's been there this summer - according to him, for such a major museum, it was super dingy and rundown.
Yeah, if they would have stayed in Egypt they would only have been blown with a sledgehammer, like during the 2011 revolution!
Where I am 100% sure islamists won't destroy them? considering how easy was for them to Kidnap Native Egyptians (Copts, who are closest descendants of pyramid-building ancient Egyptians, but are persecuted for not being muslim)
They would have been looted and burned, but OK funny man.
Did he laugh at his own joke after he said it? Johnny Carson is probably rolling over in his grave.
Maybe they should ask for those stuff back
They have a brand ew museum in the desert…. 🐪
But they said they'd be able to take care of them better than the Egyptians could.
Ah this old rage bait again, nice OP
A few years ago, workers at the Egyptian Museum broke the beard off of Tutankhamun's death mask and tried gluing it back together with epoxy, so...
I'm not defending the British Museum's history of theft, but on the other hand...
I think the point of the joke regardless of what the book actually is or how Egypt’s weather is like, is that relics and cultural pieces should really be at their respective country’s own museums.
jimmy Fallon has no place in /r/funny
Are you a bot? That's not Jimmy Kimmel.
I'm not, just a dummy who put Kimmel and not Fallon!
They haven't updated their script yet, don't teach the bots!
Those famous ancient Egyptian books. Morons.
Jimmy Fallon is the trash bag of comedy.
I fucking hate Jimmy Fallon.
Keeping books in a very dry place is just as bad for them.
Why are the Pyramids in Giza?
Egypt making the news again for damaged books in a library. What century are we in?
Overwhelming lesson here is maybe the 18th century palace that has seen ridiculous levels of foot-traffic and continuous use is in need of some more serious renovations to ensure its artifacts are properly protected and cared for.
It's a beautiful building that is a work of art itself, but it perhaps isn't the most secure location for priceless works of national importance. The British Crown Jewels are kept in a very modern and secure building for this reason.
Speaking on the British. 'Funny thing, long time ago. We went around the world. And robbed, everyone. We put all their stuff in a museum. After many years the owners asked for their things back.... we said, no! We're not done.. lookin' at em yet!'.
-James Acaster
The Koh-i-Noor was a gift
What's the most welcoming tourist attraction in the world?
The British Museum - because no matter where you're from, it reminds you of home...
Great way to move sensitive material under the guise of an accident
Once again proving Jimmy Kimmel is the funniest man in late night.
Flooding in a lou was reported.
Repairs scheduled to be bidet after tomorrow.
Maybe those guys were plumbers and just trying to save the antiques?
When I was in Egypt in 2020, the day I went to The Egyptian Museum in Cairo, there were severe thunderstorms. The museum had a very very leaky roof. King Tuts mummy was on my left, a bucket catching drips from the ceiling on my right, glad they got the new museum built to better preserve those artifacts.
Imagine the king who enslaved a lot of people just to create a fortified tomb, only to have it robbed several years later.
God he needs a wedgie so hard.
Hell yeah they would
Ur was predisposed to have an instable personality
I think we need to reopen the reparations debate.
To be precise, they are not Egyptians but Arabs
Next, the locusts.
Oh the old 'give it back to the third world' canard.
Can’t risk some religious nut wanting to zero millenarian treasures, like those fucks who wanted to bomb Petra. Things stay here until Arabic countries get their shit together
Fallon is an unfunny twit, if anyone should be cancelled it's him, but he's suckled on the teet.
People dig holes 500km deep and find stuff that's been there perfectly safe for thousands of years, then say "yes, dig it up, it needs to be in museum".
Should’ve let the British steal them
Fuck you Fallon. You were never funny.
Dry and stolen perhaps. Egypt is an politically and socially unstable region. Just look up what happened near ancient sites like the pyramids during recent turmoil.
But we can’t give them back, they wouldn’t be cared for properly
Why are the pyramids in Egypt? They were too big to move to London.
Jimmy Fallon played wingman for his friend Horatio Sanz to molest a teenage super fan.
With the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum it's time for nations to begin returning Egypt's artifacts.
I can't believe that this happened to this museum. 🧐
It would be a funnier meme if it didn’t have a picture of Jimmy Fallon on it.
I'd love to now hear from the crowd that yaps "they're being preserved. they would have been destroyed by the Egyptians if they weren't stolen by the French"
Does Egypt have a strong history of preservation outside of the pyramids? (It generates a fuck-ton of tourism money)
Yeah. These are French journals written in the 19th century on Egyptology. So. Kinda hard to steal your own stuff.
You should really read the article before spouting off
Those were french books