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There was a lively pre-pottery agricultural phase about 12000 years ago - they made pots and plates out of stone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Pottery_Ne

There was a lively pre-pottery agricultural phase about 12000 years ago - they made pots and plates out of stone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Pottery_Neolithic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Pottery_Neolithic

andrewflnr 2y ago
I can imagine people at the transition saying things like "They don't make plates like they used to. It used to take days of grinding real stone to make a bowl, but it lasted! Now they're making them out of dirt? And they break as soon as you drop them? What's the world coming to?" Do I have evidence for this? No. But have people changed since then? Also no.
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/respectfully-quoted/tablet-babylon/ https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/respectfully-quoted/tablet-...
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    While that quotation is funny, it is unlikely to be true, because the stories about its origin contain serious errors. The two versions given there are contradictory: "unearthed not far from Babylon and dated back to 2800 B.C." can not be true together with "attributed to an Assyrian stone tablet of about 2800 B.C.". Assyria was far from Babylon, far towards the North. Moreover, neither Assyria nor Babylon were places of any importance around 2800 B.C. At that early time, there were neither Babylonian nor Assyrian tablets, but only Sumerian tablets (or in the neighboring lands there were Proto-Elamite tablets). Unlike the later Sumerian tablets, e.g. those after 2500 B.C., the tablets from around 2800 B.C. use an archaic variant of the cuneiform writing system which can be deciphered only with great uncertainties. There is no doubt that it would have been impossible to deduce a coherent text like "The world must be coming to an end. Children no longer obey their parents and every man wants to write a book." from such an archaic tablet. At most it could have been possible to identify a few known words among incomprehensible gibberish, e.g. "world ... end ... children ... obey ... parents ... man ... tablet". But even a so great number of recognizable words is unlikely to have been found. Nevertheless, similar texts are quite common in the Mesopotamian literature, but they have been found on much more recent tablets, e.g. from one thousand years after the claimed "2800 B.C." date. Perhaps the date was quoted wrongly and the original claim was about a tablet from 2800 years before present, which could have easily been true about a Babylonian or Assyrian tablet with such a content.
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      Weavers, Scribes, and Kings has a very fun description of a large document from ca. 2900 BC: > The reason that the artist immortalized Ushumgal and Shara-igizi-Abzu is that they were involved in a transaction so important that a record of it was carved onto a stone boulder, complete with pictures of the main parties. The roughly drawn cuneiform signs that litter the sides of the boulder, and even extend over the figures themselves, record that this transaction pertained to animals, land, and houses, in large quantities: 450 iku of fields are mentioned (about 158 hectares or 392 acres), along with three houses and some bulls, donkeys, and sheep. > Unfortunately, the inscription suffers from a dire shortage of verbs, which would have been useful in determining what exactly was going on.
  - valesco 2y ago
    What I find funny is that these kind of quotes are often used to mean that older generations will always criticize younger generations, no matter what. At the same time, those critics' civilizations all collapsed, sometimes catastrophically. Maybe these critics happen when a civilization ends. Maybe not.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  A stone bowl will break when you drop it.
  - andrewflnr 2y ago
    Ah well. I guess they'd have to come up with a different rationalization.

andrewflnr 2y ago

I can imagine people at the transition saying things like "They don't make plates like they used to. It used to take days of grinding real stone to make a bowl, but it lasted! Now they're making them out of dirt? And they break as soon as you drop them? What's the world coming to?" Do I have evidence for this? No. But have people changed since then? Also no.

Mistletoe 2y ago
https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/respectfully-quoted/tablet-babylon/ https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/respectfully-quoted/tablet-...
- adrian_b 2y ago
  While that quotation is funny, it is unlikely to be true, because the stories about its origin contain serious errors. The two versions given there are contradictory: "unearthed not far from Babylon and dated back to 2800 B.C." can not be true together with "attributed to an Assyrian stone tablet of about 2800 B.C.". Assyria was far from Babylon, far towards the North. Moreover, neither Assyria nor Babylon were places of any importance around 2800 B.C. At that early time, there were neither Babylonian nor Assyrian tablets, but only Sumerian tablets (or in the neighboring lands there were Proto-Elamite tablets). Unlike the later Sumerian tablets, e.g. those after 2500 B.C., the tablets from around 2800 B.C. use an archaic variant of the cuneiform writing system which can be deciphered only with great uncertainties. There is no doubt that it would have been impossible to deduce a coherent text like "The world must be coming to an end. Children no longer obey their parents and every man wants to write a book." from such an archaic tablet. At most it could have been possible to identify a few known words among incomprehensible gibberish, e.g. "world ... end ... children ... obey ... parents ... man ... tablet". But even a so great number of recognizable words is unlikely to have been found. Nevertheless, similar texts are quite common in the Mesopotamian literature, but they have been found on much more recent tablets, e.g. from one thousand years after the claimed "2800 B.C." date. Perhaps the date was quoted wrongly and the original claim was about a tablet from 2800 years before present, which could have easily been true about a Babylonian or Assyrian tablet with such a content.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Weavers, Scribes, and Kings has a very fun description of a large document from ca. 2900 BC: > The reason that the artist immortalized Ushumgal and Shara-igizi-Abzu is that they were involved in a transaction so important that a record of it was carved onto a stone boulder, complete with pictures of the main parties. The roughly drawn cuneiform signs that litter the sides of the boulder, and even extend over the figures themselves, record that this transaction pertained to animals, land, and houses, in large quantities: 450 iku of fields are mentioned (about 158 hectares or 392 acres), along with three houses and some bulls, donkeys, and sheep. > Unfortunately, the inscription suffers from a dire shortage of verbs, which would have been useful in determining what exactly was going on.
- valesco 2y ago
  What I find funny is that these kind of quotes are often used to mean that older generations will always criticize younger generations, no matter what. At the same time, those critics' civilizations all collapsed, sometimes catastrophically. Maybe these critics happen when a civilization ends. Maybe not.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
A stone bowl will break when you drop it.
- andrewflnr 2y ago
  Ah well. I guess they'd have to come up with a different rationalization.