13 ms·

Archaeologists discover 4k-year-old ancient city in Iraqi desert

148 points by andyxor 5y ago

pythonlion 5y ago
maybe its the lost city of Akkad. capital of the first empire
- andyxor 5y ago
  this is just 30km from Ur, I thought Akkad capital was more to the north , in the traditionally Akkadian territory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_Empire#/media/File:Empire_akkad.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_Empire#/media/File:Em... btw this is great series on that time (and what preceded it) "The Sumerians - Fall of the First Cities" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    Thank you. I’m always on the hunt for good archeology TV. The Netflix show ‘ Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb’ was great and good for kids too. Much of Time Team was as well. I also enjoyed one on Must Farm - I believe it was this one. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sX3bqmxD298 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sX3bqmxD298 Far too many searches for shows end up with crackpot ‘Aliens did it’ type scenarios, which irritates. Have you any other recommendations?
    - wswope 5y ago
      Not the person you replied to, but as someone with very similar tastes, there’s a Time Team spinoff called “Extreme Archaeology” that’s pretty good, and some BBC specials with “Lost Kingdoms of [Region]” titles that I found scratched the same itch.
    - andyxor 5y ago
      not really, just falling into wikipedia & youtube rabbit hole, just found out that the biblical 'Cain & Abel' story could be an echo of earlier Sumerian myth of the Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzid, or even earlier one of the god Enlil "choosing the Farmer", and generally goes back to the pre-historic agriculture revolution which divided the settled farmer and the wandering hunter-gatherer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain_and_Abel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain_and_Abel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inanna#Courtship_of_Inanna_and_Dumuzid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inanna#Courtship_of_Inanna_and... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlil#Enlil_Chooses_the_Farmer-God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlil#Enlil_Chooses_the_Farmer... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_between_Winter_and_Summer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_between_Winter_and_Summ...
      - Mikeb85 5y ago
        Nice rabbit hole. To add to this, pretty much all pre-exodus biblical stories and myths have parallels in Mesopotamian myths, likely having originated there.
      - pythonlion 5y ago
        most famous is flood story and creation myth which have big similarity with the bible. also Habiru/afiru people have been theorized to be ancient Hebrew. also big parallax between Baal and the bible god and many traditions that were common all over the ancient near east, as well as myths.
        mwaitjmp 5y ago
        Yes indeed! This is really fascinating. This comes to us via the epic of Gilgamesh[0], perhaps written around 2100 BCE. Small extract: “ Ea commanded Utnapishtim to demolish his house and build a boat, regardless of the cost, to keep living beings alive. The boat must have equal dimensions with corresponding width and length and be covered over like Apsu boats.” There is an excellent in our time episode which covers this epic, the Sumerian language and translation which I found one of the most interesting episodes they have made [1]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b080wbrq https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b080wbrq
    - hiddencache 5y ago
      Not TV, but something I used to look at every time I was at the British Museum. There's a virtual tour here: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/galleries/assyrian-sculpture-and-balawat-gates https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/galleries/assyrian-...
    - pythonlion 5y ago
      on YouTube 3 channels I really recommend : history with CY - very easy to follow animated videos and great narration , Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages - have everything and good quality, also talk about mythology. World of Antiquity - most scientific vibe
    - christkv 5y ago
      Tides of history podcast is great and talks a lot about ancient civilizations from all over the world.
    - zetazzed 5y ago
      Wondrium (formerly the Great Courses) has many excellent related series. Academic but very watchable. Like a 20 lecture series on the history of Jerusalem. I particularly liked their series on the Etruscans: https://www.wondrium.com/the-mysterious-etruscans https://www.wondrium.com/the-mysterious-etruscans
      - lostlogin 5y ago
        Thanks. I really enjoyed Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem, the Biography.
    - amitport 5y ago
      In Hebrew (with subtitles in English and Arab), worth a mention I think (free to watch) "VeHaaretz Hayta Tohu vaVohu": History of the Land of Israel from prehistoric times to the Ottoman period. https://www.kan.org.il/program/?catid=64&subcatid=427 https://www.kan.org.il/program/?catid=64&subcatid=427 Really recommended, and does not have much of the epic/religious vibe documentaries on the history of Israel often have. Also note that it stops at the Ottoman empire so does not get into the history of the state of Israel. (The title is from Genesis 1:2. It roughly translates to 'and then the earth was chaos')
    - WoodenChair 5y ago
      Recently I've been really enjoying "Unearthed" on Discovery Plus (I think originally Science channel). It's hit or miss depending on the episode, but the good episodes are really good.
hiddencache 5y ago
I remember learning that cuneiform isn't an alphabet and doesn't have characters, but rather characters to write syllables so it could be used to spell English or Chinese.
- pythonlion 5y ago
  Its more complicated then that. for example Akkadian is a language that used the Sumerian cuneiform. the way they used it was divided into two. Sumerian was written in a simple way that in which every word have unique symbol. the first advancement in written happened with the second written language Akkadian as so: first, because of many words in Sumerian had only 1 consonant the Akkadians used the symbol of that word to represent 1 consonant. let say the world Ki in Sumerian meant a star and had a symbol * you can use that symbol in you language to write *d and read it "kid" (but you also need a sign for d, I don't have real example). second the used complete Sumerian symbols but read them in Akkadian like Korean used Chinese symbols until 1500. this got evolved until the Assyrian which used old Akkadian system and the new (normal) alphabet system that was invented by the Phoenician long time after.
  - philipov 5y ago
    Japanese is a better example than Korean. Hanzi/Kanji are Chinese ideographic characters adopted by Japan and still used today. But Chinese is an 'analytic' language that uses grammatical words instead of conjugation (much like most of English). Japanese words have significant and complex morphology depending on the grammatical context, and Chinese characters aren't well suited for writing that. Ideographs aren't great for languages where the same word is written differently depending on the tense, case, person, etc (like English '-ed' for past tense; 'is' vs 'was'). They're good when you have a distinct word for expressing those things (like English 'will' for future tense). The Hiragana syllabus was developed to write the grammatical parts of words. It was developed by taking existing Chinese characters, just like you described with Akkadian, and simplifying them to make them easier to write. Many Japanese words will contain a mix of writing systems, with the root of the word written in ideographic Kanji and the grammatical conjugation written in syllabaric Hiragana. And there's also Katakana which is a syllabus of even further simplified characters derived from Hiragana, which is used for writing loan words not derived from either Chinese or Japanese. It's of course a bit more complicated and messy than just what I described, but that's the gist of it.
dane-pgp 5y ago
Iraqi researchers get to do their work on a 4k year-old tablet, while I'm stuck with a 1080p flat screen from 2016? I should change career!
- asadlionpk 5y ago
  Atleast the refresh-rate is better.
ncmncm 5y ago
4kya is 1500 years after the first Mesopotamian cities we know about arose. Before the Persian Gulf filled in, ~8kya or another 2500 years back, there could have been cities there, now underwater, downstream from the known ruins. If made of un-fired mud brick, they would have since dissolved.
- andyxor 5y ago
  this could've been the source of the biblical flood story inherited from ancient Mesopotamian legends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth Sumerian is a language isolate unlike any other neighbor languages and their civilization might have developed in "The Gulf Oasis" (the size of Great Britain) for tens of thousands of years before being flooded around ~8k BC https://www.livescience.com/10340-lost-civilization-existed-beneath-persian-gulf.html https://www.livescience.com/10340-lost-civilization-existed-... The hardships of that migration escaping the flood, and the fact multiple tribes had to suddenly co-exist in a crowded area with limited resources probably accelerated development of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, and by extension, civilization.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    We don't have any evidence for a sudden ("sodden"?) Noah-style flood. The Persian Gulf filled in over centuries as the oceans rose and swallowed up Doggerland, Sundaland, and Sahul. But it would be hard to keep oral histories consistent with actual drawn-out timelines. There are suspicions about a Black Sea deluge as the Bosphorus opened and closed, but nothing conclusive. Similarly, there are hints at a big meteor strike in the Gulf a few thousand years later that could have generated a huge tsunami. Floods are pretty common on coastlines and near rivers, and easy to confuse with other events as time goes by.
    - tharkun__ 5y ago
      Disclaimer: Not saying this is how any of this happened (people that actually looked into sources and did research have probably considered this). I always wonder how much exeggaration might be involved. Whether oral or at some point written down. Exeggarating and making things more dramatic seems like something that could easily happen over a timespan of a few hundred/thousand years, couldn't it? Basically a story of how 'our ancestors' slowly moved from one place to another to another to another as 'the sea kept swallowing up settlements' (as in over 500 years every 30 years or so they had to move a bit) could slowly morph into a catastrophic event, especially if the timeframes are such that these become children's stories. "Your grandma used to live over there. See where the fisher boats are now. That's where your grandma was born. And one day the sea swallowed it.". The fact that it took 10 years of minor floods until there finally was one bad enough to make them actually move gets lost and converted onto a catastrophic event.
8bitsrule 5y ago
I wasn't much interested in 'windblown old sites' until I found a hardcover picture-book in a nearby library: The Past from Above by pilot/photographer George Gerster. My attitude completely changed after I experienced this collection of 240+ aerial photos from around the world. It put the magnitude and impermanence of human history right in my face. Strong recommend if you've any interest in world history! Wikipedia nearby libraries: [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources?isbn=0892368179 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources?isbn=08923... ] Can be borrowed from Internet Library. [ https://archive.org/details/pastfromaboveaer0000gers/page/n423/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/pastfromaboveaer0000gers/page/n4... ] 2005 (expensive) hardcover, 2007 paperback. Goodreads reviews [ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/576680.The_Past_from_Above https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/576680.The_Past_from_Abo... ]
- mncharity 5y ago
  There's a Preview on google books: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Past_from_Above/7cdfUfxDcTsC https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Past_from_Above/7cd... .
- rkuykendall-com 5y ago
  > It put the magnitude and impermanence of human history right in my face https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias#Text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias#Text > on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies

148 points by andyxor 5y ago

pythonlion 5y ago

maybe its the lost city of Akkad. capital of the first empire

andyxor 5y ago
this is just 30km from Ur, I thought Akkad capital was more to the north , in the traditionally Akkadian territory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_Empire#/media/File:Empire_akkad.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_Empire#/media/File:Em... btw this is great series on that time (and what preceded it) "The Sumerians - Fall of the First Cities" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA
- lostlogin 5y ago
  Thank you. I’m always on the hunt for good archeology TV. The Netflix show ‘ Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb’ was great and good for kids too. Much of Time Team was as well. I also enjoyed one on Must Farm - I believe it was this one. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sX3bqmxD298 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sX3bqmxD298 Far too many searches for shows end up with crackpot ‘Aliens did it’ type scenarios, which irritates. Have you any other recommendations?
  - wswope 5y ago
    Not the person you replied to, but as someone with very similar tastes, there’s a Time Team spinoff called “Extreme Archaeology” that’s pretty good, and some BBC specials with “Lost Kingdoms of [Region]” titles that I found scratched the same itch.
  - andyxor 5y ago
    not really, just falling into wikipedia & youtube rabbit hole, just found out that the biblical 'Cain & Abel' story could be an echo of earlier Sumerian myth of the Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzid, or even earlier one of the god Enlil "choosing the Farmer", and generally goes back to the pre-historic agriculture revolution which divided the settled farmer and the wandering hunter-gatherer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain_and_Abel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain_and_Abel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inanna#Courtship_of_Inanna_and_Dumuzid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inanna#Courtship_of_Inanna_and... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlil#Enlil_Chooses_the_Farmer-God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlil#Enlil_Chooses_the_Farmer... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_between_Winter_and_Summer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_between_Winter_and_Summ...
    - Mikeb85 5y ago
      Nice rabbit hole. To add to this, pretty much all pre-exodus biblical stories and myths have parallels in Mesopotamian myths, likely having originated there.
    - pythonlion 5y ago
      most famous is flood story and creation myth which have big similarity with the bible. also Habiru/afiru people have been theorized to be ancient Hebrew. also big parallax between Baal and the bible god and many traditions that were common all over the ancient near east, as well as myths.
      - mwaitjmp 5y ago
        Yes indeed! This is really fascinating. This comes to us via the epic of Gilgamesh[0], perhaps written around 2100 BCE. Small extract: “ Ea commanded Utnapishtim to demolish his house and build a boat, regardless of the cost, to keep living beings alive. The boat must have equal dimensions with corresponding width and length and be covered over like Apsu boats.” There is an excellent in our time episode which covers this epic, the Sumerian language and translation which I found one of the most interesting episodes they have made [1]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b080wbrq https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b080wbrq
  - hiddencache 5y ago
    Not TV, but something I used to look at every time I was at the British Museum. There's a virtual tour here: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/galleries/assyrian-sculpture-and-balawat-gates https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/galleries/assyrian-...
  - pythonlion 5y ago
    on YouTube 3 channels I really recommend : history with CY - very easy to follow animated videos and great narration , Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages - have everything and good quality, also talk about mythology. World of Antiquity - most scientific vibe
  - christkv 5y ago
    Tides of history podcast is great and talks a lot about ancient civilizations from all over the world.
  - zetazzed 5y ago
    Wondrium (formerly the Great Courses) has many excellent related series. Academic but very watchable. Like a 20 lecture series on the history of Jerusalem. I particularly liked their series on the Etruscans: https://www.wondrium.com/the-mysterious-etruscans https://www.wondrium.com/the-mysterious-etruscans
    - lostlogin 5y ago
      Thanks. I really enjoyed Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem, the Biography.
  - amitport 5y ago
    In Hebrew (with subtitles in English and Arab), worth a mention I think (free to watch) "VeHaaretz Hayta Tohu vaVohu": History of the Land of Israel from prehistoric times to the Ottoman period. https://www.kan.org.il/program/?catid=64&subcatid=427 https://www.kan.org.il/program/?catid=64&subcatid=427 Really recommended, and does not have much of the epic/religious vibe documentaries on the history of Israel often have. Also note that it stops at the Ottoman empire so does not get into the history of the state of Israel. (The title is from Genesis 1:2. It roughly translates to 'and then the earth was chaos')
  - WoodenChair 5y ago
    Recently I've been really enjoying "Unearthed" on Discovery Plus (I think originally Science channel). It's hit or miss depending on the episode, but the good episodes are really good.

hiddencache 5y ago

I remember learning that cuneiform isn't an alphabet and doesn't have characters, but rather characters to write syllables so it could be used to spell English or Chinese.

pythonlion 5y ago
Its more complicated then that. for example Akkadian is a language that used the Sumerian cuneiform. the way they used it was divided into two. Sumerian was written in a simple way that in which every word have unique symbol. the first advancement in written happened with the second written language Akkadian as so: first, because of many words in Sumerian had only 1 consonant the Akkadians used the symbol of that word to represent 1 consonant. let say the world Ki in Sumerian meant a star and had a symbol * you can use that symbol in you language to write *d and read it "kid" (but you also need a sign for d, I don't have real example). second the used complete Sumerian symbols but read them in Akkadian like Korean used Chinese symbols until 1500. this got evolved until the Assyrian which used old Akkadian system and the new (normal) alphabet system that was invented by the Phoenician long time after.
- philipov 5y ago
  Japanese is a better example than Korean. Hanzi/Kanji are Chinese ideographic characters adopted by Japan and still used today. But Chinese is an 'analytic' language that uses grammatical words instead of conjugation (much like most of English). Japanese words have significant and complex morphology depending on the grammatical context, and Chinese characters aren't well suited for writing that. Ideographs aren't great for languages where the same word is written differently depending on the tense, case, person, etc (like English '-ed' for past tense; 'is' vs 'was'). They're good when you have a distinct word for expressing those things (like English 'will' for future tense). The Hiragana syllabus was developed to write the grammatical parts of words. It was developed by taking existing Chinese characters, just like you described with Akkadian, and simplifying them to make them easier to write. Many Japanese words will contain a mix of writing systems, with the root of the word written in ideographic Kanji and the grammatical conjugation written in syllabaric Hiragana. And there's also Katakana which is a syllabus of even further simplified characters derived from Hiragana, which is used for writing loan words not derived from either Chinese or Japanese. It's of course a bit more complicated and messy than just what I described, but that's the gist of it.

dane-pgp 5y ago

Iraqi researchers get to do their work on a 4k year-old tablet, while I'm stuck with a 1080p flat screen from 2016? I should change career!

asadlionpk 5y ago
Atleast the refresh-rate is better.

ncmncm 5y ago

4kya is 1500 years after the first Mesopotamian cities we know about arose. Before the Persian Gulf filled in, ~8kya or another 2500 years back, there could have been cities there, now underwater, downstream from the known ruins. If made of un-fired mud brick, they would have since dissolved.

andyxor 5y ago
this could've been the source of the biblical flood story inherited from ancient Mesopotamian legends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth Sumerian is a language isolate unlike any other neighbor languages and their civilization might have developed in "The Gulf Oasis" (the size of Great Britain) for tens of thousands of years before being flooded around ~8k BC https://www.livescience.com/10340-lost-civilization-existed-beneath-persian-gulf.html https://www.livescience.com/10340-lost-civilization-existed-... The hardships of that migration escaping the flood, and the fact multiple tribes had to suddenly co-exist in a crowded area with limited resources probably accelerated development of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, and by extension, civilization.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  We don't have any evidence for a sudden ("sodden"?) Noah-style flood. The Persian Gulf filled in over centuries as the oceans rose and swallowed up Doggerland, Sundaland, and Sahul. But it would be hard to keep oral histories consistent with actual drawn-out timelines. There are suspicions about a Black Sea deluge as the Bosphorus opened and closed, but nothing conclusive. Similarly, there are hints at a big meteor strike in the Gulf a few thousand years later that could have generated a huge tsunami. Floods are pretty common on coastlines and near rivers, and easy to confuse with other events as time goes by.
  - tharkun__ 5y ago
    Disclaimer: Not saying this is how any of this happened (people that actually looked into sources and did research have probably considered this). I always wonder how much exeggaration might be involved. Whether oral or at some point written down. Exeggarating and making things more dramatic seems like something that could easily happen over a timespan of a few hundred/thousand years, couldn't it? Basically a story of how 'our ancestors' slowly moved from one place to another to another to another as 'the sea kept swallowing up settlements' (as in over 500 years every 30 years or so they had to move a bit) could slowly morph into a catastrophic event, especially if the timeframes are such that these become children's stories. "Your grandma used to live over there. See where the fisher boats are now. That's where your grandma was born. And one day the sea swallowed it.". The fact that it took 10 years of minor floods until there finally was one bad enough to make them actually move gets lost and converted onto a catastrophic event.

8bitsrule 5y ago

I wasn't much interested in 'windblown old sites' until I found a hardcover picture-book in a nearby library: The Past from Above by pilot/photographer George Gerster. My attitude completely changed after I experienced this collection of 240+ aerial photos from around the world. It put the magnitude and impermanence of human history right in my face. Strong recommend if you've any interest in world history! Wikipedia nearby libraries: [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources?isbn=0892368179 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources?isbn=08923... ] Can be borrowed from Internet Library. [ https://archive.org/details/pastfromaboveaer0000gers/page/n423/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/pastfromaboveaer0000gers/page/n4... ] 2005 (expensive) hardcover, 2007 paperback. Goodreads reviews [ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/576680.The_Past_from_Above https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/576680.The_Past_from_Abo... ]

mncharity 5y ago
There's a Preview on google books: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Past_from_Above/7cdfUfxDcTsC https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Past_from_Above/7cd... .
rkuykendall-com 5y ago
> It put the magnitude and impermanence of human history right in my face https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias#Text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias#Text > on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies