Ancient Hangover Cure Discovered In Greek Texts 105
An anonymous reader writes with good news for people looking for an old cure for an old problem. Trying to ease a bad hangover? Wearing a necklace made from the leaves of a shrub called Alexandrian laurel would do the job, according to a newly translated Egyptian papyrus. The "drunken headache cure" appears in a 1,900-year-old text written in Greek and was discovered during the ongoing effort to translate more than half a million scraps of papyrus known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Housed at Oxford University's Sackler Library, the enormous collection of texts contains lost gospels, works by Sophocles and other Greek authors, public and personal records and medical treatises dating from the first century AD to the sixth century A.D.
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Re:damn (Score:5, Funny)
Why they all went outside to collect leaves of the Alexandrian laurel bush of course.
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Another text in the collected wisdom (Score:5, Funny)
Another text in this collected wisdom authoritatively cites Aristotle as saying that Pythagorus invented the Scroll Lock key. Literally. It's a little key you lock the scroll with.
Re:Another text in the collected wisdom (Score:5, Funny)
Another text in this collected wisdom authoritatively cites Aristotle as saying that Pythagorus invented the Scroll Lock key. Literally. It's a little key you lock the scroll with.
No, that was Steven Chu, and I have a citation [xkcd.com].
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Well, you really should look up the literal meaning of "Symposium"
But were those laurel wreaths not for greek olympionikes and roman ceasars?
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Does it WORK as a hangover cure???
"... medical treatises" (Score:4, Funny)
Any baldness cures in there?
Ancient, Greek, Hangover cure? Go Takahashi! (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Before anyone asks, Trichloromethylene does not exist. It is the 555 phone number of chemical compounds.
The obvious next step (Score:5, Funny)
Re: The obvious next step (Score:5, Funny)
The fact that the cure has been lost for two thousand years suggest that it is already been tried and found wanting.
Who would forget a cure for a hang over for Pete sake? Especially after writing it down!
Re: The obvious next step (Score:5, Funny)
Who would forget a cure for a hang over for Pete sake?
Someone who's been drinking a lot?
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Someone who converted to a religion that forbids drinking. Alexandria became Islamic territory.
Islam didn't always forbid alcohol. Only drunkenness.
http://www.economist.com/node/... [economist.com]
Lost Gospels, Sophocles? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lost Gospels, Sophocles, and 1,800 other pages and someone posts about the hangover cure.
I guess we are living a new dark ages.
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Considering that hangovers is probably the most researched subject in all universities, I believe that it is indeed the most important part.
Re:Lost Gospels, Sophocles? (Score:4, Funny)
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Rivers, Streams, Mountains, Lakes.....and legal weed, Washington is great!
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The medical is still a better deal, but the retail is frequently $8 a gm. At least here on the eastern side of the state.
And the quality of the retail is approaching that of the medical. Only thing is it has to be pre-packaged on retail so you don't get to handle and smell it like you do the bulk jars in the medical side.
Medical still has the best oils though.
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The tree is willow, but I understood that Hippocrates used its bark rather than its leaves.
Still being translated? (Score:2)
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All the folks who know ancient Greek have better things to do? Like what?
Wanking off to the plays of Aristophanes probably. I for one collect jokes. Here's one:
If Euripides his trousers, then Eumenides his trousers
Ha, Ha Ha, HAHAHAHAHAHA
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All the folks who know ancient Greek have better things to do? Like what?
Wanking off to the plays of Aristophanes probably. I for one collect jokes. Here's one:
If Euripides his trousers, then Eumenides his trousers
Ha, Ha Ha, HAHAHAHAHAHA
No, it's if Euripides trousers, then Eumenides trousers.
The "des" ending is pronounced "dese" as in "these".
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Perhaps the people who are seriously interested in these texts prefer to read them in the original so translating them is not very useful.
Of course, the option of putting translations on the Internet makes some things worth translating nowadays that weren't worth translating in the past when you'd have to have made a print edition.
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Recently they uncovered the following fragment:
Poté Tha sas dósei méchri...
Ancient Hangover Cure Discovered In Greek Texts (Score:2)
Excuse me, but... (Score:2)
...how is this news?
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The best cure for hangovers is to drink a glass of water between each "drink". Prevention is the best cure known.
Treatment? Yes. Cure? Unknown (Score:3)
Whether stringing its leaves and wearing the strand around the neck had any effect to relieve headaches in alcohol victims isnâ(TM)t known.
This doesn't seem like it would have been that difficult to test, but there is no indication that anyone who read it has done so yet.
Folk treatment (Score:1)
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Sounds like a possible anti-inflammatory or astringent to me. Not just that Cambodian entry as the Fiji eye inflammation treatment.
Better cure has been known for quite some time (Score:2)
For a moment you would feel as if somebody had touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down your throat with a lighted torch, and then everything would suddenly seem to get all right. The sun would shine in through the window; birds would twitter in the tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope would dawn once more.
It is time tested and well recorded. Really, there is an actual historical record of this recipe working its magic
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Seems a bit like chopping off your foot to fix an ingrown toenail.
Let's stop this right here (Score:1)
Re: Let's stop this right here (Score:1)
Don't get a hangover in the first place (Score:2)
I am not going to say that people shouldn't drink, but if you drink responsibly then you shouldn't get a hangover in the first place.
I can imagine that hangovers were more common in earlier times because alcoholic drinks could have been of lower quality - with more of the chemicals that would worsen hangover. Production and quality control these days are done using scientific methods.
One of those chemicals is methanol, which I would expect there to be more of in moonshine than in store-bought vodka.
Another
Scholars. (Score:1)
The Mexicans Beat The Greeks (Score:2)
They also thought wearing amethyst stops durnkness (Score:2)
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haha, is it Christian Era, or Anno Domini? But, people didn't start systematically talking about the years Before the Christian Era until they had already stopped using Latin everywhere, so it's BC for Before Christ.
Well anyway, I'm sure we can call it Common Era, or Current Era, to pretend we're not using an estimate from hundreds of years later of when Christ was born to date things.
Why don't you start in the year 2000? That way you won't be basing your calendar on Christ.
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That's the Unix Epoch.
Re: Please, BCE/CE, not BC/AD (Score:1)
In Latin aCn (ante Christum natum) is written for BC; anno Domini is one Latin way of expressing what we mean by AD, but often I've seen it written as anno Salutis (in the year of Salvation), and there are countless variations. Sometimes, especially in texts referring to Greek and Hebrew affairs, you find a different system, aM or anno Mundi, but in general the aD system is so prevalent that variation is desirable (Latin loves variety), hence anno Salutis and its friends.
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In Latin aCn (ante Christum natum) is written for BC; anno Domini is one Latin way of expressing what we mean by AD, but often I've seen it written as anno Salutis (in the year of Salvation), and there are countless variations. Sometimes, especially in texts referring to Greek and Hebrew affairs, you find a different system, aM or anno Mundi, but in general the aD system is so prevalent that variation is desirable (Latin loves variety), hence anno Salutis and its friends.
anno Mundi (year of the world) is used in the Jewish calendar. anno Domini translates to "year of the Lord". Much of the ancient world used a system of "the Xth year of the reign of Y"
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You'd have to pick some other human event to set the start date. You could go with the moon landing or the first atomic bomb test or any other number of historic dates that are well established.
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You'd have to pick some other human event to set the start date. You could go with the moon landing or the first atomic bomb test or any other number of historic dates that are well established... more mundane like the founding of Slashdot.
It should be based on the first time the ball dropped in Times Square.
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It's an atheist thing.
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What I don't like about BC/AD is that one is English and one is Latin. Pick one, not some ugly mixture! The mixture also means that the placement of the abbreviation is either inconsistent (traditional usage) or grammatically incorrect (getting more common). The grammatically correct placement is to put BC after the date, but AD before the date:
330 BC vs. AD 1983
You could write "1983 AD", but then you are not even being correctly traditional, at which point you might as well just give up and use the newer E
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Why stop there? The days of the week are named after the gods associated with the seven celestial bodies (only Saturday wasn't converted from a Roman deity to a German one, as there was no equivalent of Saturn in the Norse pantheon). And the first 6 months of the calendar are all named after Roman gods or religious festivals, so we should rename those as well. Even how we divide time into hours, minutes, and seconds is associated with Babylonian numerology and astrology, which has deep religious signific
Re:Please, BCE/CE, not BC/AD (Score:5, Funny)
FUCK you and your god damned bullshit.
Fuck you culture warrior identity politics fuckface asshole prick.
BC/AD is part of the fucking culture ass grabbing fuck puke.
FUCK YOU, history changer Goebbels re-writer.
I vote for renaming them BFC ("Before Fucking Christ") and AFD ("Anno Fucking Domini").
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Now you've got me wondering just what one would do (have done?) before fucking christ.
Genuflect? Give the kiss of peace? (Oh, baby....) Take your clothes off, at least. A glass of wine, a couple of figs dipped in honey to set the mood.
What would mary magdalene have done BFC?
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Re:Please, BCE/CE, not BC/AD (Score:4, Funny)
Please get the terms right, the name of the religion is not militant atheism but evangelical atheism.
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