8 ms·

It really is incredible to think about the age of things like this. The countless generations, countless lives, struggles, cultural changes, fashions, trends.

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?
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      We will all die, and this time will pass - this is completely inevitable. There is no way to not vanish, the closest you can come is being remembered. Our civilization may well continue and prosper for a thousand years more, but unless we care about being remembered, they will have no idea what Pink Floyd, or Harry Potter, or A Hundred Years of Solitude, or an iPhone, or Linux, or anything else you consider important of our time were/was. Just like we have almost no idea about the pop culture or songs of people living in, say, the area of Berlin in the year 1022 was.
      - jackcosgrove 4y ago
        > Just like we have almost no idea about the pop culture or songs of people living in, say, the area of Berlin in the year 1022 was. We can listen to the music of Hildegard of Bingen, who lived a little after that time in another part of Germany. It's not folk music, sure, but that's still pretty cool.
        johnofthesea 4y ago
        > 1022 This seems to be like end of Ottonian Renaissance. So maybe someone like Hermann of Reichenau?
      - loxs 4y ago
        And so what?
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        It's OK to say "being remembered doesn't matter", I was only pointing out that the alternatives are "being remembered" or "being forgotten" - and both are fine. There is no third option, though, "not vanishing".
- 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.

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?
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    We will all die, and this time will pass - this is completely inevitable. There is no way to not vanish, the closest you can come is being remembered. Our civilization may well continue and prosper for a thousand years more, but unless we care about being remembered, they will have no idea what Pink Floyd, or Harry Potter, or A Hundred Years of Solitude, or an iPhone, or Linux, or anything else you consider important of our time were/was. Just like we have almost no idea about the pop culture or songs of people living in, say, the area of Berlin in the year 1022 was.
    - jackcosgrove 4y ago
      > Just like we have almost no idea about the pop culture or songs of people living in, say, the area of Berlin in the year 1022 was. We can listen to the music of Hildegard of Bingen, who lived a little after that time in another part of Germany. It's not folk music, sure, but that's still pretty cool.
      - johnofthesea 4y ago
        > 1022 This seems to be like end of Ottonian Renaissance. So maybe someone like Hermann of Reichenau?
    - loxs 4y ago
      And so what?
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        It's OK to say "being remembered doesn't matter", I was only pointing out that the alternatives are "being remembered" or "being forgotten" - and both are fine. There is no third option, though, "not vanishing".
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.