4 ms·

I was like, pretty sure all those people didn't live 900 years. I like a lot of the stories and subjective meaning, but you kind of have to look past the odd fa

I was like, pretty sure all those people didn't live 900 years. I like a lot of the stories and subjective meaning, but you kind of have to look past the odd factoids.

mch82 5y ago
As a thought experiment, could it be a units translation issue? A person who lived 175 seasons (each 3 months long) would be 44 years old. A person who lived 900 moons would be 74. It’s happened to spacecraft, http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/ http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/
- jcranmer 5y ago
  People have suggested that it's miscounting months as years, but that now means you get 10 year-olds (and sometimes even younger!) popping out babies, which doesn't make that much sense either.
- soneil 5y ago
  I find it interesting that the Sumerian King List exhibits the same behaviour. The earliest kings rule for tens of thousands of years (each), the second wave rule for hundreds of years, and the third wave rule for tens of years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_King_List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_King_List ). So I'm left with three thoughts that don't necessarily agree with each other. One, is that it seems fairly obvious that there's some transition from oral histories to written histories; and the closer the event was to the written record, the more realistic it gets (which we also see in the OT). Two, is that there's a lot of crossover between Sumerian kings and Gods, so it doesn't seem inappropriate for the oral tradition to imbue kings with god-like properties. (As an aside - I can easily imagine that in tens of thousands of years from now, with fragments of records remaining, someone could argue with a straight face that the early space-agers actually believed Queen Elizabeth was immortal and semi-lizard. This is obviously comical, but does illustrate the risks of an oral tradition.) And three - the possibility that there's intermingling between these two traditions? Or that there's some cultural factors here where we're seeing the effects without the causes (ie we're not seeing why it was popular to assign these characteristics to ancestors, only that they did so). But to come back a little more on-topic - Sumer is also where we get the sexagesimal (base-60) numbering that we still see in time & angles. So when comparing units, there could be some mistranslation between different number bases at some point.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    > space-agers actually believed Queen Elizabeth was immortal and semi-lizard Oh my god I'm picturing bojack horsemen as the last surviving digital media; not so different from ancient hieroglyphs of animal heads and human bodies...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- timbit42 5y ago
  The likely solution is that it is a unit translation issue. Apparently Sumerian had three numbering systems, depending on what you were counting, and they each reused the same symbols, some of them to mean different things. Robert Best wrote "Noah's Ark and the Ziusudra Epic: Sumerian Origins of the Flood Myth" ( https://www.amazon.com/Noahs-Ark-Ziusudra-Epic-Sumerian/dp/0966784014 https://www.amazon.com/Noahs-Ark-Ziusudra-Epic-Sumerian/dp/0... ) in which he translates the numbers back into Sumerian using the incorrect numbering system and then retranslates them using the correct numbering system. He ends up with not only ages that make sense, but it also fixes the unevenness of the Biblical ages. It also sorts out the Kings List numbers.

I was like, pretty sure all those people didn't live 900 years. I like a lot of the stories and subjective meaning, but you kind of have to look past the odd factoids.

mch82 5y ago

As a thought experiment, could it be a units translation issue? A person who lived 175 seasons (each 3 months long) would be 44 years old. A person who lived 900 moons would be 74. It’s happened to spacecraft, http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/ http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/

jcranmer 5y ago
People have suggested that it's miscounting months as years, but that now means you get 10 year-olds (and sometimes even younger!) popping out babies, which doesn't make that much sense either.
soneil 5y ago
I find it interesting that the Sumerian King List exhibits the same behaviour. The earliest kings rule for tens of thousands of years (each), the second wave rule for hundreds of years, and the third wave rule for tens of years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_King_List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_King_List ). So I'm left with three thoughts that don't necessarily agree with each other. One, is that it seems fairly obvious that there's some transition from oral histories to written histories; and the closer the event was to the written record, the more realistic it gets (which we also see in the OT). Two, is that there's a lot of crossover between Sumerian kings and Gods, so it doesn't seem inappropriate for the oral tradition to imbue kings with god-like properties. (As an aside - I can easily imagine that in tens of thousands of years from now, with fragments of records remaining, someone could argue with a straight face that the early space-agers actually believed Queen Elizabeth was immortal and semi-lizard. This is obviously comical, but does illustrate the risks of an oral tradition.) And three - the possibility that there's intermingling between these two traditions? Or that there's some cultural factors here where we're seeing the effects without the causes (ie we're not seeing why it was popular to assign these characteristics to ancestors, only that they did so). But to come back a little more on-topic - Sumer is also where we get the sexagesimal (base-60) numbering that we still see in time & angles. So when comparing units, there could be some mistranslation between different number bases at some point.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  > space-agers actually believed Queen Elizabeth was immortal and semi-lizard Oh my god I'm picturing bojack horsemen as the last surviving digital media; not so different from ancient hieroglyphs of animal heads and human bodies...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
timbit42 5y ago
The likely solution is that it is a unit translation issue. Apparently Sumerian had three numbering systems, depending on what you were counting, and they each reused the same symbols, some of them to mean different things. Robert Best wrote "Noah's Ark and the Ziusudra Epic: Sumerian Origins of the Flood Myth" ( https://www.amazon.com/Noahs-Ark-Ziusudra-Epic-Sumerian/dp/0966784014 https://www.amazon.com/Noahs-Ark-Ziusudra-Epic-Sumerian/dp/0... ) in which he translates the numbers back into Sumerian using the incorrect numbering system and then retranslates them using the correct numbering system. He ends up with not only ages that make sense, but it also fixes the unevenness of the Biblical ages. It also sorts out the Kings List numbers.