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I wonder why the tavern was abandoned with food in it in 2700 BC when the city itself was inhabitated far longer and according to Wikipedia might have been "the
by ftrobro 4y ago
I wonder why the tavern was abandoned with food in it in 2700 BC when the city itself was inhabitated far longer and according to Wikipedia might have been "the largest city in the world from c. 2075 to 2030 BC".
- ggeorgovassilis 4y agoThe article mentions that the city was surrounded by "fertile lands", so maybe there was no need for scavenging?
- Kye 4y agoAncient times must have had some equivalent to urban explorers. edit: Bing Chat says... >> "That’s an interesting question. I couldn’t find any direct evidence of ancient urban explorers, but there were many ancient explorers who traveled to different lands and cultures for various reasons123. Some of them may have explored urban areas as well, but they didn’t leave any records of their adventures." >> "One possible exception is Xuan Zang (602-664), a Chinese Buddhist monk who traveled to India and visited many ancient cities and temples along the way. He wrote a detailed account of his journey, which is considered a valuable source of information on the history and culture of India and Central Asia1."
- ralfd 4y agoHe looks like a backpacker tourist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xuanzang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xuanzang
- thesuitonym 4y agoIn hindsight, it's completely obvious, like of course it would be this way, but it's still amazing how ancient people were exactly the same as people are today.
- notahacker 4y agoI was going to say "but backpackers never wore clothes that wild", but then I remembered backpacking in India!
- speed_spread 4y agoThat's not really urbex though. Not sure ancient times had closed down industrial and commercial sites like the ones we have now.
- forgotusername6 4y agoBuilding falls or burns down perhaps? The ruins cover the site and people just rebuild on top of it. There's a site in the UK from slightly later (1000BC) that had food still found in containers but that was the result of a fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Must_Farm_Bronze_Age_settlement?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Must_Farm_Bronze_Age_settlemen...
- ftrobro 4y agoI was mainly wondering why noone else claimed the tavern or demolished it to make room for a new building considering that the city was probably growing between 2700 BC and 2075 BC. Looking at the photo it seems the tavern was found in the top soil layer with nothing above it. But perhaps the photo looks like that because there have been several excavations since 1887. Or maybe the photo just shows some random building...
- anonu 4y agoIt's hard for humans to fathom timelines beyond our life span. But over the course of 100s or 1000s of years, cities can be abandoned and population migrates. Think about the Detroit suburbs in recent years where entire neighborhoods were abandoned. https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/abandoned-houses-in-detroit https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/abandoned-houses-in-detro...
- hackernewds 4y agoThis seems like the impending future for San Francisco
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoThat looks like the City of Detroit, not its suburbs, though I'm sure some of them do suffer some decay, in general Detroit's suburbs are pretty healthy.
- jghn 4y agoThe definition of 'suburb' has been changing over time. I can't speak to Detroit but for instance with Boston the original 'suburbs' would now be described as "the city of Boston, not its suburbs". Likewise the town I grew up in as a kid (mumble) years ago, I would have been laughed at for calling it a 'suburb' of Boston as it was too far out of the city. Now Wikipedia calls it a suburb of Boston.
- gs17 4y agoI can speak to Detroit, and it's the same. The areas south of 8 Mile but not downtown would by definition be "suburbs" (and structurally resemble the outside of the city), but I'm used to people reserving the term for outside city limits. Now that I'm in Nashville, "suburbs" seem to usually still be inside the city, so I'm guessing it changes as cities grow/decay.
- Infernal 4y agoNashville has experienced really rapid growth too over the last 20 years, and I think it takes a while for naming conventions to catch up. Given by the fact that what people call suburbs appear to you (as I'm assuming, a relative newcomer) to be "inside the city". My own hometown has experienced rapid growth over the same time span as Nashville, and has annexed large portions of what were commonly known as the suburbs. So there has been a literal change from what used to be suburbs to now be within city limits, in the course of a generation.
- notahacker 4y agoPlenty of abandoned taverns in inhabited cities in the modern world. Owners die or suffer financial or social death, businesses become too unprofitable to run in parts of cities where the land also isn't worth much, structures start looking alarmingly unstable and aren't worth repairing etc etc. And regardless of how long bits of the food are preserved for future archaeologists, a couple of days after the tavern's closed most of it isn't really edible any more...
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoYou'd expect scavengers to get the food: rodents, insects, etc.? Buildings that fall into disrepair tend to be scavenged by humans for materials too. Much moreso anywhere there's wealth disparity or resource shortages.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoYou'd be surprised. It depends heavily on the prevailing social mores. Besides, much of what archaeologists recover is the stuff that survived, not the 99% that didn't.
- giantg2 4y agoNotice that they didn't find any beer or wine. It seems the important stuff got scavenged.
- einherjae 4y agoPresumably just the eras equivalent of Hákarl or Surströmming was left, alongside the pizza-with-pineapple equivalent and Dr. Pepper-equivalent.
- nick123567 4y agoIn archaeological terms, they could be discovering stuff like microscopic grain husks embedded into the clay of the containers. Though they could have found whole chicken skeletons or fossilized garlic or something else too... I searched for a moment but couldn't find more details from this dig about the food specifically.
- 4y ago
- oh_sigh 4y agoOne can think of a million reasons, but we will never know. Maybe the owner died and the kids didn't want to take it over and boarded it up. Maybe someone was murdered there or everyone got food poisoning and it was closed up because people were superstitious.
- arp242 4y agoI used to live across an abandoned building that was falling apart; one day I forced the door to have a look inside (the place was already beyond salvage) and there was all sorts of stuff inside; some furniture, bunch of magazines and newspapers, empty bottles. Today's refuse, tomorrow's archaeology. Lots of boring mundane stuff gets interesting hundreds of years in the future. Or the owner burned the place down after a tourist from a faraway land sold him a polly sea for some inn sewer ants.
- jcutrell 4y agoI was thinking exactly this. It’s not surprised it would be abandoned, but the story makes it sound like it was suddenly abandoned. The simplest explanation to me is likely the untimely death of the proprietor, but even that doesn’t seem like a sufficient answer.
- pram 4y agoIIRC there’s a lot of totally abandoned places around there (like Babylon) because the Tigris and Euphrates changed course quite a bit? So what might have been a riverside city soon was just sitting in the middle of the desert. Kinda like the fishing towns around the Aral Sea.