Oldest Submerged City Visualized With CGI 84
Stirling Newberry writes "Nottingham University's Pavlopetri project spent months measuring a city that sank beneath the waves 3,000 years ago, perhaps in a tsunami. The result is a BBC documentary that features a detailed CGI reconstruction. 'The entire city – covering 20 acres – has been surveyed in ultra-high definition, with error margins of less than three centimeters. ... [T]he survey team has so far located scores of buildings, half a dozen major streets and even religious shrines and tombs.' eScience News chimes in about the oldest known submerged city, first inhabited 5,000 years ago and rediscovered in 1967. Of course, Slashdot readers will probably want to dig into the details of how stereo-vision mapping was used (PDF) to create the map in the first place."
Re:In Before... (Score:5, Interesting)
I forget the exact details, but I know he trashed damn near 90% of the place; even by the looser standards of the 1800's he was a reckless, arrogant fuck. His own partner castigated him for his methods. It must have been inspirational for archeologists I suppose, to know that great things were still out there, but it quickly became one of the bigger archeological tragedies man has ever witnessed.
Re:In Before... (Score:4, Interesting)
You're trying to inject realism into a story where there was little, and exaggeration was normal. This isn't confined to the Greeks, just look at any Hollywood movie; there's no realism there. The "true stories" of Troy are probably rather dull: there was some stupid diplomatic gaffe (nothing as romantic as a stolen love), some sociopathic king got pissed and declared war, took a couple dozen ships and crossed the Aegean, and invaded some small town. The town's defenses helped for a short time, but were fairly quickly overcome with a battering ram or similar. King sacks city, survivors flee, end of story. Who wants to read a story about that, when they can read about a beautiful woman being taken by a foolish prince to his grandiose city, the other King angrily assembling a fleet of thousands of ships and traveling a great distance, then a great war being fought between tens of thousands of soldiers, and finally the King conquering the city through clever subterfuge, plus some stuff about various gods and super-warriors being thrown in for good measure?