7 ms·

Founded c. 3800 BC Abandoned after 500 BC Whenever I look into the history of ancient cities numbers like this boggle my mind, how many thousands o

Founded c. 3800 BC Abandoned after 500 BC Whenever I look into the history of ancient cities numbers like this boggle my mind, how many thousands of years a city saw culture and life and death only to fade into nothing. I feel like we're lucky to have language be as widespread as it is today because the chances that our lives will be forgotten is at least just a little less likely due to our written record. I just wish we chose media that lasted as long as clay tablets could.

pocketarc 4y ago
It really is incredible to think about the age of things like this. The countless generations, countless lives, struggles, cultural changes, fashions, trends. That city went from the equivalent of the year 0 to the year 3300. Us here in the common era are barely halfway through the life of that city, and look at just how much history we’ve been through. Their history will have been much, much longer, with far more generations of people, but it’s all forgotten, to the point that to us it barely registers.
- eropple 4y ago
  We have to also keep in mind that 3800 BCE is the founding of Ur, sure--and we have anatomically modern human remains from about 193,000 BCE. Widespread control of fire seems to date to around 125,000 BCE. In that light? 3300 years is a blink. The span of human existence is marked by an ever increasing derivative in the rate of change. That said, barring cataclysm, I tend to think we've gotten much better (perhaps too much so) at recording things; I doubt our current era will be forgotten so much as categorized and filed away.
  - Tagbert 4y ago
    What we know about UR is largely due to the large number of clay tablets with writing on them. Those tablets are very durable and while they are degraded by now, many can still be read. Our own writing is mainly recorded on paper that is much, much less durable than clay tablets. More recently most of our writing isn’t even on paper but is stored electronically. It would not take much of a break in our civilization’s continuity for the paper documents to degrade. We have lost several of Shakespeare’s works even though civilization has been continuous since his time and that was only 500 years ago. Our electronic writing might blink out in a matter of hours.
    - enchantments 4y ago
      The clay tablets we have from the bronze age themselves seem only preserved by chance. They are found in store rooms in layers of cities that suffered widespread destruction, accidentally firing the clay records. So what we have is kind of sporadic, some letters from one king to another here, a bunch of apparently unremarkable palace economy bookkeeping there, then we tie it together with what we learn from archeology (and most exciting in recent times, from genetics). We also have a lot of stone stelas. But they certainly didn't leave us a well preserved big picture. I imagine future people would see the same story for us: A big stone inscription here, some documents accidentally printed on very high quality stock stored in an accidentally optimal place there, etc. Another fun glimpse: It has been speculated, based on evidence in the Uluburun shipwreck, that some bronze age societies used a wooden book-like object with wax or clay faces as an easily erasable notepad. Whoever owned that may have thought about it the same way we think about electronic records blinking out. Or maybe they didn't think about the future at all.
      - wl 4y ago
        Most clay tablets pulled out of the ground are unfired. The act of removing unfired tablets that have been in the ground for so long kicks off some decay, so it used to be common to fire excavated tablets to preserve them. There's modern conservation techniques that remove the need to fire tablets, but those techniques post-date the lawful flow of material culture to western museums, so pretty much everything you'll see is fired. While fires in antiquity might have inadvertantly helped preserve some tablets that might not have otherwise survived, this is hardly the most common case. The talk of fires preserving tablets is mostly used to illustrate the stark difference in durability between records recorded on clay and records recorded on vellum or papyrus.
    - loxs 4y ago
      This fascination with "being remembered" is strange. We shouldn't optimize for being remembered (or being easy to reconstruct archaeologically). We should try to not vanish. If we do vanish, why do we care about being remembered?
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Why bar cataclysm? The fragility of our current electronic systems subject us to particular recording weaknesses that previous generations did not have.
    - eropple 4y ago
      Because we have a lot more of them, spread out in a lot more places, and we invest in their upkeep. Writings from Minoan Crete were...in Crete. They weren't then duplicated thousands of miles. The societal investment in data storage and redundancy isn't going away tomorrow under any reasonable circumstances; as just one example, Amazon S3 going down with full data loss would be necessitate something close to a catastrophe by itself, and it's pretty unlikely that there won't be continuance going forward for most of our major data repositories--again, barring civilization-denting or -destroying cataclysm. The "particular recording weaknesses" of the past were air, fire, and invaders. All still exist, but our recordings are generally more proofed against them than in the past. I tend to think that at a societal level, data preservation is on such a serious upward trajectory that categorization in order to begin to find meaning will be the greater challenge for future anthropologists.
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        It's very hard to say whether electronic data preservation will resist going further. Technologies change and data formats are lost and forgotten. People make breaking changes and those who can't or won't adapt will lose their data. Lots of data will also be lost to encryption - still stored on some tape, but with no one alive to remember who may have owned the keys, where they may be stored, and what formats everything is. I would bet that a vast amount of the data stored today in S3 that will never be read again - either because it will be forgotten or actually deleted by Amazon (people stop paying their bills, companies go bankrupt). Not to mention, we already know of things like the source code of 10-20 year old games that people still play having been entirely lost.
    - samatman 4y ago
      An interesting thing about cuneiform is that a lot of it is just receipts. Those weren't intended to be kept around, but fires happen in cities, whether from a sacking or just back luck, and sometimes this would be hot enough to fire the clay. In conclusion, the future will have just an enormous amount of coroplast political signs to fish out of landfills and decode, along with the ingredients on aluminium cans.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Rome is getting close.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  There are remains of settlements at Jericho that are more than 10,000 years old. That just blows my mind.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Göbekli Tepe dates back to 9500 BCE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  You don't give "us" nearly enough credit. "We"'ve been through exactly as much history as Ur. History didn't begin in year 1 CE. Even if you mean "Western civilization's heritage", that stretches back checks Wikipedia 5000 years through still-occupied Athens. "We" beat Ur handily.
- _dain_ 4y ago
  On the other hand, there were far fewer people who lived through it. From 3000 BC to 500 BC the global population went from 14 million to 100 million. Today there are just short of 8,000 million people, i.e. 80-570x as many. On the day Ur was founded, there were fewer people living on the entire planet than there are living in some modern cities. So in terms of the number of human stories being told, we are racing past the ancients at hundreds of times the rate. We have far more history per second than they do.
  - layer8 4y ago
    Yeah, from a back-of-the-envelope calculation less that 10 million people lived in Ur over those 3300 years, possibly less than 1 million. More people than that live in a single city like New York today, and they arguably have access to a wider variety of experiences than the citizens of Ur had over all of the 3300 years taken together.
  - s3000 4y ago
    The strange thing is that many backwater towns have more inhabitants than Ur and the sibling cities. And yet, nobody expects significant cultural innovation to be made in those places.
- sershe 4y ago
  To be fair, you have to remember as far as cultural changes, trends etc. is concerned the life for the entire period was pretty static by modern standards. The notion of progress, and especially the widespread expectation that things will get better / there will be progress, is at most 200 years old.
aszantu 4y ago
All our blogs twitter posts even online art will be just gone or unrecoverable data chips
- fedeb95 4y ago
  Ancient cultures really put things into perspective. Tablets from thousands of years ago: they still persist. Will our culture, 5000 years from now?
  - JW_00000 4y ago
    Surely, out of the billions of books that exist in the world right now, some will survive 5000 years. The Library of Congress is archiving many (but no longer all) tweets [1] and web pages. The British Library is similarly archiving tweets, podcasts, etc. The Internet Archive idem ditto, and many national libraries throughout the world are doing the same. If even a tiny fraction of that survives the next 10,000 years, there'll be much more remaining of the 21st century than of the 35th century BC. [1] https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the-library-of-congress-2/ https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-arch...
    - tsol 4y ago
      But the data on hard drives last a finite amount of time. And so do paper books. Time wears away at both.
      - throwaway932489 4y ago
        Good thing we create things like "forever chemicals", nuclear waste, single-use plastics then I guess ;)
    - fedeb95 4y ago
      Ok, but we don't know which kind of catastrophic event will wipe us out this time. So we can't know in advance which kind of media will survive best. Replication across many mediums seems the best approach, but it doesn't give us certainty.
luminouslow 4y ago
As you rightly pointed out our reords will be forgotten much more quickly because clay tablets and animal hides can last for centuries. None of our currently employed methods would last nearly as long.
- scubbo 4y ago
  A counterpoint is that verifiably-perfect duplication of data (and non-invasive integrity checking of backups) with our current methods is orders-of-magnitude easier than older ones. Sure, any _particular_ modern-day record has a shorter shelf-life than a clay tablet - but the lifespan of "a piece of information recorded and actively upkept on digital media" is much longer. Swings and roundabouts. One approach lasts longer in a state of passive neglect, the other lasts longer in a state of active upkeep. As the meme says: it depends.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    One that exists as long as the power stays on. Had the Carrington event happened 100 years later we'd have realized the weakness in this assumption.
    - samatman 4y ago
      Hard disks can park themselves with an immediate power cut, whether that corrupts the filesystem is mostly about the filesystem but it's been decades since a head crash was a realistic possibility. SSDs even more so. Contrary to your, frankly rather odd, assertion about digital media, they do not need power to store data. I did think tapes, DVDs, and USB thumb drives were common knowledge. A Carrington event is probably not a big deal these days, but let's pretend all the transformers blow, and the grid is down so badly that rural parts of North America don't get it back for two years. Data loss? Minimal. Any radiation which could get inside a hard drive or SSD and fry it, would kill us all, that's like a gamma ray burst. Some corruption from power spikes maybe, but for the most part, fuses and breakers work.
      - 4y ago
squaredot 4y ago
I can share that feeling. However, more than the thought of passing on what is ours, what such a chronological fact inspires in me is the awe of realizing that a city like this represents a history within history. And like that there are many more.
frozencell 4y ago
How to reproduce that clean text indentation? Is it done manually?
- kibwen 4y ago
  Indent by two spaces: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
bobthepanda 4y ago
I wonder what accurate population figures per decade would look like. At points during our recorded history Rome’s population fell into the low tens of thousands.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  At the Corning Museum of Glass, there's a display where the time series of populations of global cities have been rendered into glass, hanging vertically with time going upward. https://whatson.cmog.org/exhibitions-galleries/global-cities https://whatson.cmog.org/exhibitions-galleries/global-cities
retrac 4y ago
It is particularly poignant with Mesopotamian civilization. Sargon II was king of Assyria, ruling from 722 BC until death in battle in 702 BC. He almost completely reunified Assyria in the then millennia-old tradition of grand empire-building in the region. His assumed name Sargon was appropriate; Sargon I, Sargon the Great, was the first to have created a unified empire in Mesopotamia, nearly two thousand years earlier. The records of Sargon the Great's exploits were still around to read, and people could still read them. Although he was near-mythical by then, like Gilgamesh. The subsequent wars Sargon II's empire-building led to would effectively destroy the Mesopotamian political-economic system and leave it ripe for external conquest, first by Persians, and then Greeks, effectively bringing that 3000 year old civilization to a whimpering end over the next couple hundred years. His name was actually more like Sharrukin, or Sarrukin, in the Akkadian language. We call him Sargon II because that is the Greek version of the name recorded in the Bible and transmitted in the Western canon. He is mentioned only once, in passing, in the Book of Isiah. That single passing reference to him as King of Assyria, was everything that was known of him for 2500 years, until the ruins of Dur-Sharrukin, his capital (destroyed during the mentioned wars) were excavated in the 19th century. Only the faintest echoes of the very last stages of Mesopotamia survived through the transmission of Western/Persian/Islamic civilization. Faded memories several generations old, by the time the earliest Greek and Jewish authors started writing things down. Like you say, it's a good thing clay lasts.
- withoutboats2 4y ago
  > That single passing reference to him as King of Assyria, was everything that was known of him for 2500 years, until the ruins of Dur-Sharrukin, his capital (destroyed during the mentioned wars) were excavated in the 19th century. I only have a layman's knowledge of this part of history, but this strikes me as unlikely. Surely something was known of him for some time in other sources, probably hundreds of years at least, before those source were also lost? The loss of knowledge is also second-order: we have lost knowledge of what was known to our predecessors.
  - retrac 4y ago
    Sure, I might have overstated the case a bit. There was scattered used of Akkadian as a written language into Alexander the Great's time; there was possibly some knowledge of that time in Babylon around then. Still, the end of Mesopotamian records is abrupt. There's a written record from prehistory until the wars of around 700 BC, where the use of writing drops off but doesn't completely stop. But written records in Akkadian, the education of priests and scribes in Akkadian and Sumerian (itself dead for 2000 years by then as a purely liturgical language) basically stops after the fall of Babylon in 539 BC. I'd note that writing in antiquity was deeply tied to both administration and to religion. The Persians were Zoroastrians; they do not seem to have oppressed, but state support went to Zoroastrianism and not the traditional Mesopotamian cults (and their scribes and schools). They imposed their own administrative structure on the conquered territories. Persian became the written standard, pretty much overnight. Akkadian seems to have ceased to be spoken within a couple generations among the ruling class, and within a few hundred more years it was not only dead but basically forgotten.
layer8 4y ago
> the chances that our lives will be forgotten is at least just a little less likely due to our written record. I’d be cautious to not underestimate the effects of dilution due to the sheer growing size of that written record. Given enough time, almost everyone will be effectively forgotten, like a drop of ink in the ocean.
pfdietz 4y ago
At this point I want to recommend the Fall of Civilizations podcast, available on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FallofCivilizationsPodcast https://www.youtube.com/c/FallofCivilizationsPodcast
- Strom 4y ago
  Fall of Civilizations is absolutely amazing stuff, I double recommend it. It has an episode that covers this specific topic as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA
hammock 4y ago
There are cities in the US that have been founded and abandoned in our lifetime https://archive.ph/3PCY4 https://archive.ph/3PCY4 And if you are willing to go a couple generations back, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160715-the-ghost-towns-left-by-oil-booms-and-busts https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160715-the-ghost-towns-...
rkagerer 4y ago
Curious how the longevity will turn out for projects like Internet Archive's Wayback machine and Wikipedia. I know the latter can be downloaded to a reasonably sized USB key, and storage will continue to get more dense / cheaper. How long will the populace keep maintaining such works? If civilization breaks down will individuals keep copies propagating faster than media rots out? (Like how ancient myths were kept alive through storytelling)

pocketarc 4y ago

It really is incredible to think about the age of things like this. The countless generations, countless lives, struggles, cultural changes, fashions, trends. That city went from the equivalent of the year 0 to the year 3300. Us here in the common era are barely halfway through the life of that city, and look at just how much history we’ve been through. Their history will have been much, much longer, with far more generations of people, but it’s all forgotten, to the point that to us it barely registers.

eropple 4y ago
We have to also keep in mind that 3800 BCE is the founding of Ur, sure--and we have anatomically modern human remains from about 193,000 BCE. Widespread control of fire seems to date to around 125,000 BCE. In that light? 3300 years is a blink. The span of human existence is marked by an ever increasing derivative in the rate of change. That said, barring cataclysm, I tend to think we've gotten much better (perhaps too much so) at recording things; I doubt our current era will be forgotten so much as categorized and filed away.
- Tagbert 4y ago
  What we know about UR is largely due to the large number of clay tablets with writing on them. Those tablets are very durable and while they are degraded by now, many can still be read. Our own writing is mainly recorded on paper that is much, much less durable than clay tablets. More recently most of our writing isn’t even on paper but is stored electronically. It would not take much of a break in our civilization’s continuity for the paper documents to degrade. We have lost several of Shakespeare’s works even though civilization has been continuous since his time and that was only 500 years ago. Our electronic writing might blink out in a matter of hours.
  - enchantments 4y ago
    The clay tablets we have from the bronze age themselves seem only preserved by chance. They are found in store rooms in layers of cities that suffered widespread destruction, accidentally firing the clay records. So what we have is kind of sporadic, some letters from one king to another here, a bunch of apparently unremarkable palace economy bookkeeping there, then we tie it together with what we learn from archeology (and most exciting in recent times, from genetics). We also have a lot of stone stelas. But they certainly didn't leave us a well preserved big picture. I imagine future people would see the same story for us: A big stone inscription here, some documents accidentally printed on very high quality stock stored in an accidentally optimal place there, etc. Another fun glimpse: It has been speculated, based on evidence in the Uluburun shipwreck, that some bronze age societies used a wooden book-like object with wax or clay faces as an easily erasable notepad. Whoever owned that may have thought about it the same way we think about electronic records blinking out. Or maybe they didn't think about the future at all.
    - wl 4y ago
      Most clay tablets pulled out of the ground are unfired. The act of removing unfired tablets that have been in the ground for so long kicks off some decay, so it used to be common to fire excavated tablets to preserve them. There's modern conservation techniques that remove the need to fire tablets, but those techniques post-date the lawful flow of material culture to western museums, so pretty much everything you'll see is fired. While fires in antiquity might have inadvertantly helped preserve some tablets that might not have otherwise survived, this is hardly the most common case. The talk of fires preserving tablets is mostly used to illustrate the stark difference in durability between records recorded on clay and records recorded on vellum or papyrus.
  - loxs 4y ago
    This fascination with "being remembered" is strange. We shouldn't optimize for being remembered (or being easy to reconstruct archaeologically). We should try to not vanish. If we do vanish, why do we care about being remembered?
- pixl97 4y ago
  Why bar cataclysm? The fragility of our current electronic systems subject us to particular recording weaknesses that previous generations did not have.
  - eropple 4y ago
    Because we have a lot more of them, spread out in a lot more places, and we invest in their upkeep. Writings from Minoan Crete were...in Crete. They weren't then duplicated thousands of miles. The societal investment in data storage and redundancy isn't going away tomorrow under any reasonable circumstances; as just one example, Amazon S3 going down with full data loss would be necessitate something close to a catastrophe by itself, and it's pretty unlikely that there won't be continuance going forward for most of our major data repositories--again, barring civilization-denting or -destroying cataclysm. The "particular recording weaknesses" of the past were air, fire, and invaders. All still exist, but our recordings are generally more proofed against them than in the past. I tend to think that at a societal level, data preservation is on such a serious upward trajectory that categorization in order to begin to find meaning will be the greater challenge for future anthropologists.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      It's very hard to say whether electronic data preservation will resist going further. Technologies change and data formats are lost and forgotten. People make breaking changes and those who can't or won't adapt will lose their data. Lots of data will also be lost to encryption - still stored on some tape, but with no one alive to remember who may have owned the keys, where they may be stored, and what formats everything is. I would bet that a vast amount of the data stored today in S3 that will never be read again - either because it will be forgotten or actually deleted by Amazon (people stop paying their bills, companies go bankrupt). Not to mention, we already know of things like the source code of 10-20 year old games that people still play having been entirely lost.
  - samatman 4y ago
    An interesting thing about cuneiform is that a lot of it is just receipts. Those weren't intended to be kept around, but fires happen in cities, whether from a sacking or just back luck, and sometimes this would be hot enough to fire the clay. In conclusion, the future will have just an enormous amount of coroplast political signs to fish out of landfills and decode, along with the ingredients on aluminium cans.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Rome is getting close.
jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
There are remains of settlements at Jericho that are more than 10,000 years old. That just blows my mind.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Göbekli Tepe dates back to 9500 BCE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
rhn_mk1 4y ago
You don't give "us" nearly enough credit. "We"'ve been through exactly as much history as Ur. History didn't begin in year 1 CE. Even if you mean "Western civilization's heritage", that stretches back checks Wikipedia 5000 years through still-occupied Athens. "We" beat Ur handily.
_dain_ 4y ago
On the other hand, there were far fewer people who lived through it. From 3000 BC to 500 BC the global population went from 14 million to 100 million. Today there are just short of 8,000 million people, i.e. 80-570x as many. On the day Ur was founded, there were fewer people living on the entire planet than there are living in some modern cities. So in terms of the number of human stories being told, we are racing past the ancients at hundreds of times the rate. We have far more history per second than they do.
- layer8 4y ago
  Yeah, from a back-of-the-envelope calculation less that 10 million people lived in Ur over those 3300 years, possibly less than 1 million. More people than that live in a single city like New York today, and they arguably have access to a wider variety of experiences than the citizens of Ur had over all of the 3300 years taken together.
- s3000 4y ago
  The strange thing is that many backwater towns have more inhabitants than Ur and the sibling cities. And yet, nobody expects significant cultural innovation to be made in those places.
sershe 4y ago
To be fair, you have to remember as far as cultural changes, trends etc. is concerned the life for the entire period was pretty static by modern standards. The notion of progress, and especially the widespread expectation that things will get better / there will be progress, is at most 200 years old.

aszantu 4y ago

All our blogs twitter posts even online art will be just gone or unrecoverable data chips

fedeb95 4y ago
Ancient cultures really put things into perspective. Tablets from thousands of years ago: they still persist. Will our culture, 5000 years from now?
- JW_00000 4y ago
  Surely, out of the billions of books that exist in the world right now, some will survive 5000 years. The Library of Congress is archiving many (but no longer all) tweets [1] and web pages. The British Library is similarly archiving tweets, podcasts, etc. The Internet Archive idem ditto, and many national libraries throughout the world are doing the same. If even a tiny fraction of that survives the next 10,000 years, there'll be much more remaining of the 21st century than of the 35th century BC. [1] https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the-library-of-congress-2/ https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-arch...
  - tsol 4y ago
    But the data on hard drives last a finite amount of time. And so do paper books. Time wears away at both.
    - throwaway932489 4y ago
      Good thing we create things like "forever chemicals", nuclear waste, single-use plastics then I guess ;)
  - fedeb95 4y ago
    Ok, but we don't know which kind of catastrophic event will wipe us out this time. So we can't know in advance which kind of media will survive best. Replication across many mediums seems the best approach, but it doesn't give us certainty.

luminouslow 4y ago

As you rightly pointed out our reords will be forgotten much more quickly because clay tablets and animal hides can last for centuries. None of our currently employed methods would last nearly as long.

scubbo 4y ago
A counterpoint is that verifiably-perfect duplication of data (and non-invasive integrity checking of backups) with our current methods is orders-of-magnitude easier than older ones. Sure, any _particular_ modern-day record has a shorter shelf-life than a clay tablet - but the lifespan of "a piece of information recorded and actively upkept on digital media" is much longer. Swings and roundabouts. One approach lasts longer in a state of passive neglect, the other lasts longer in a state of active upkeep. As the meme says: it depends.
- pixl97 4y ago
  One that exists as long as the power stays on. Had the Carrington event happened 100 years later we'd have realized the weakness in this assumption.
  - samatman 4y ago
    Hard disks can park themselves with an immediate power cut, whether that corrupts the filesystem is mostly about the filesystem but it's been decades since a head crash was a realistic possibility. SSDs even more so. Contrary to your, frankly rather odd, assertion about digital media, they do not need power to store data. I did think tapes, DVDs, and USB thumb drives were common knowledge. A Carrington event is probably not a big deal these days, but let's pretend all the transformers blow, and the grid is down so badly that rural parts of North America don't get it back for two years. Data loss? Minimal. Any radiation which could get inside a hard drive or SSD and fry it, would kill us all, that's like a gamma ray burst. Some corruption from power spikes maybe, but for the most part, fuses and breakers work.
    - 4y ago

squaredot 4y ago

I can share that feeling. However, more than the thought of passing on what is ours, what such a chronological fact inspires in me is the awe of realizing that a city like this represents a history within history. And like that there are many more.

frozencell 4y ago

How to reproduce that clean text indentation? Is it done manually?

kibwen 4y ago
Indent by two spaces: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

bobthepanda 4y ago

I wonder what accurate population figures per decade would look like. At points during our recorded history Rome’s population fell into the low tens of thousands.

pfdietz 4y ago
At the Corning Museum of Glass, there's a display where the time series of populations of global cities have been rendered into glass, hanging vertically with time going upward. https://whatson.cmog.org/exhibitions-galleries/global-cities https://whatson.cmog.org/exhibitions-galleries/global-cities

retrac 4y ago

It is particularly poignant with Mesopotamian civilization. Sargon II was king of Assyria, ruling from 722 BC until death in battle in 702 BC. He almost completely reunified Assyria in the then millennia-old tradition of grand empire-building in the region. His assumed name Sargon was appropriate; Sargon I, Sargon the Great, was the first to have created a unified empire in Mesopotamia, nearly two thousand years earlier. The records of Sargon the Great's exploits were still around to read, and people could still read them. Although he was near-mythical by then, like Gilgamesh. The subsequent wars Sargon II's empire-building led to would effectively destroy the Mesopotamian political-economic system and leave it ripe for external conquest, first by Persians, and then Greeks, effectively bringing that 3000 year old civilization to a whimpering end over the next couple hundred years. His name was actually more like Sharrukin, or Sarrukin, in the Akkadian language. We call him Sargon II because that is the Greek version of the name recorded in the Bible and transmitted in the Western canon. He is mentioned only once, in passing, in the Book of Isiah. That single passing reference to him as King of Assyria, was everything that was known of him for 2500 years, until the ruins of Dur-Sharrukin, his capital (destroyed during the mentioned wars) were excavated in the 19th century. Only the faintest echoes of the very last stages of Mesopotamia survived through the transmission of Western/Persian/Islamic civilization. Faded memories several generations old, by the time the earliest Greek and Jewish authors started writing things down. Like you say, it's a good thing clay lasts.

withoutboats2 4y ago
> That single passing reference to him as King of Assyria, was everything that was known of him for 2500 years, until the ruins of Dur-Sharrukin, his capital (destroyed during the mentioned wars) were excavated in the 19th century. I only have a layman's knowledge of this part of history, but this strikes me as unlikely. Surely something was known of him for some time in other sources, probably hundreds of years at least, before those source were also lost? The loss of knowledge is also second-order: we have lost knowledge of what was known to our predecessors.
- retrac 4y ago
  Sure, I might have overstated the case a bit. There was scattered used of Akkadian as a written language into Alexander the Great's time; there was possibly some knowledge of that time in Babylon around then. Still, the end of Mesopotamian records is abrupt. There's a written record from prehistory until the wars of around 700 BC, where the use of writing drops off but doesn't completely stop. But written records in Akkadian, the education of priests and scribes in Akkadian and Sumerian (itself dead for 2000 years by then as a purely liturgical language) basically stops after the fall of Babylon in 539 BC. I'd note that writing in antiquity was deeply tied to both administration and to religion. The Persians were Zoroastrians; they do not seem to have oppressed, but state support went to Zoroastrianism and not the traditional Mesopotamian cults (and their scribes and schools). They imposed their own administrative structure on the conquered territories. Persian became the written standard, pretty much overnight. Akkadian seems to have ceased to be spoken within a couple generations among the ruling class, and within a few hundred more years it was not only dead but basically forgotten.

layer8 4y ago

> the chances that our lives will be forgotten is at least just a little less likely due to our written record. I’d be cautious to not underestimate the effects of dilution due to the sheer growing size of that written record. Given enough time, almost everyone will be effectively forgotten, like a drop of ink in the ocean.

pfdietz 4y ago

At this point I want to recommend the Fall of Civilizations podcast, available on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FallofCivilizationsPodcast https://www.youtube.com/c/FallofCivilizationsPodcast

Strom 4y ago
Fall of Civilizations is absolutely amazing stuff, I double recommend it. It has an episode that covers this specific topic as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA

hammock 4y ago

There are cities in the US that have been founded and abandoned in our lifetime https://archive.ph/3PCY4 https://archive.ph/3PCY4 And if you are willing to go a couple generations back, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160715-the-ghost-towns-left-by-oil-booms-and-busts https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160715-the-ghost-towns-...

rkagerer 4y ago

Curious how the longevity will turn out for projects like Internet Archive's Wayback machine and Wikipedia. I know the latter can be downloaded to a reasonably sized USB key, and storage will continue to get more dense / cheaper. How long will the populace keep maintaining such works? If civilization breaks down will individuals keep copies propagating faster than media rots out? (Like how ancient myths were kept alive through storytelling)