Friday five: this old thing?

[redbird]

via various people, details of phrasing via kazzanos

1) What is the oldest thing you own?

Probably something from cattitude's family, like the ceremonial sword, if we don't count a potsherd someone gave me.

1a) I was interpreting this as "artifact." If I interpret it to include things of any sort, there's a polished gray stone containing a fossil, on the shelf above me. And some undated and probably undateable small gemstones in jewelry: amethysts, and little cut diamonds in some earrings from my grandmother that I haven't been wearing, other bits but not worth waking cattitude to look at the rest of my jewelry.

2) What is the oldest home you've lived in?

Probably Vanderbilt Hall, on Yale's Old Campus, which was built in 1893. The house I grew up in, and the one I live in now, were built in the 1920s, and I think our apartment building in New York is about as old. (It's what NYC real estate calls a "pre-war" building, referring to World War II, meaning high ceilings, thick walls, and out-of-date wiring.)

[Not included in this, but the newest building I've lived in was our apartment building in Bellevue, which was built around 2010.]

3) What is the oldest book you've read?

The oldest content? I'm not sure, are the Iliad and Odyssey older than the Bible? (The oldest book I've read in the original language is Plato's Apology, though I did manage part of the Iliad in Greek.)

Oldest physical book? Probably one of the Anti-Masonic almanacs kept at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Library, which were from the late 1820s. Those are the oldest books I've needed or wanted to consult that hadn't been reprinted in the 20th or 21st century.

4) What is the oldest electronic device that you still use?

Nothing very old, since I gave up on the old Palm Pilots. I haven't used my digital camera in years, since my last couple of phones had significantly better cameras. I recently plugged in an iPod mini (and saw that the "current" playlist was dated 2011), but that was to check that it still worked before giving it to carbonel.

5) What is the oldest work of art/architecture that you've seen?

Oh, this is fun. I keep typing things and then thinking "but wait..." The oldest art I can remember seeing is the Varna Gold Treasure. Before that I thought of
Cleopatra's Needle in Central Park, which dates to the Egyptian 18th Dynasty, and then Stonehenge and Avebury. For architecture specifically, maybe the walls of the City of York, which are intact enough that I walked along part of the circuit.

The oldest human artifacts I've seen in person were probably at either the French National Museum of Archeology in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which I visited in 1999, or something at the American Museum of Natural History.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

IIRC (which I may well not) the Iliad and the Odyssey were (probably) composed at the end of the second millennium BCE while the oldest of the Old Testament was written down in the first couple centuries of the first millennium BCE, making the two Greek epics a bit older. But I could be wrong.

Also I am loving this meme! aNd obviously I think potsherds count. :D

[mrissa]

Ah thank you, I had not remembered the potsherd I also have and was about to reply to another poster somewhat inaccurately.

[kareina]

The gemstones might be undatable. But, they might be date-able. If they happen to have inclusions of zircon or monazite or any of the other tiny accessory minerals that are routinely used for determining the date of formation of rocks (usually, but not always, from the radioactive decay of Uranium in the mineral to Thorium and then Lead). However, if those inclusions aren't on the surface of the gemstone you couldn't do it without destroying the gem, and it costs a fair bit of money to do that sort of analysis. So even if they do, there isn't much point. But you can safely assume that they are really old as humans count time. :-)

[redbird]

Absolutely; that's more a vague wondering whether they, or the nice hunk of amethys on my desk, are older than the fossil that's next to the amethyst.

[kareina]

No guarantee, of course, but if I were going to guess, I would guess that the gemstones are older. Why? Because many (but not all) gemstones are metamorphic minerals, which require high heat and pressure to form, which means that the rock in which it formed had to be at a pretty deep depth, and to bring it back up close enough to the surface to be mined takes some pretty serious amount of time. Fossils, on the other hand, form in sedimentary rocks at much lower temperatures and pressures, so, often, take less time to come back to the surface to be found. However, that doesn't mean that the fossil can't be older...