Nothing new under the sun1

A favourite image of mine, the Ancient Greek Laptop, has been doing the rounds for many years now. I thought it was about time I found out which of endless thousands of Greek pots it came from. An informative post by Vagabond at allempires.net directed me to the slow but stunningly comprehensive Perseus site. The famous image turns out to be from a cup painted by Douris in the early fifth century BC, Berlin F2285 .

The laptop scene comes from side B of the Douris cup - teacher and student with stylus. According to the description,

The teacher in the center, who is seated on a cushioned stool facing right, holds a writing tablet on his lap, his stylus held in his raised right hand. His student also stands facing him, wrapped in his mantle.

For another example, in close-up, refer to Philadelphia MS4842.

Though the classicists claim these are writing tablets, I have word from Mount Olympus that the gods hid fully formed laptop computers in the caves for the Ancient Greeks to discover. Historians who claim that technology evolves over hundreds of years are wrong, because Zeus can create a laptop in an instant - and these pots prove it. But the gods became angry with the ancient Greeks for spending too much time on Facebook, so they caused mankind to forget where the original laptops were hidden and made the successors of the Greeks discover them the hard way, which took two and a half thousand years. The point is, if it weren't for intelligent design by the gods, laptops could never had existed at all.