Friday five: this old thing?

Fri, 09 Oct 2020 21:07:14 GMT

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what NYC real estate calls a "pre-war" building, referring to World War II, meaning high ceilings, thick walls, and out-of-date wiring.)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.

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Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Friday five: this old thing?