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Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

164 points by HR01 2y ago

vehemenz 2y ago
The Cucuteni–Trypillia megasites in Ukraine appear to predate the Mesopotamian ones by a few centuries, though they didn't have writing (apparently).
- biorach 2y ago
  I think that part of the reason the Cucuteni–Trypillia megasites are not mentioned so much in this context is because they look like enormous villages, missing many of the characteristics of a city which are present in Sumer.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    Yeah there's other near east settlements of this sort going back a full 10,000 years. Sumer was the first with purpose-built monumental architecture.
- singularity2001 2y ago
  these sites were in close proximity to the Vinca culture which did have some precursor of writing
datadeft 2y ago
* that we are aware of as of 2024. I think most historical discoveries should be prefixed or suffixed with this because as we dig up more things we might learn that there was an even older writing system (in this case).
- frutiger 2y ago
  Isn’t that redundant? It’s like asking everyone to prefix every statement with “As far as I know…”
  - xeromal 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - soulofmischief 2y ago
      No, you can't. Our understanding of physical constants is based on empirical confirmation via multiple samples. They're still just probably correct, and we haven't confirmed the laws of physics are uniform across either time or space.
      - technothrasher 2y ago
        This whole concept is what the skeptical shorthand of "you can't prove a negative" actually means. You can show some instance or set of instances of something, but you cannot show that something is universally always true. The tentative nature of our ability to understand the world is the basis for why we use science to approximate objective reality.
        cbogie 2y ago
        so i tend to think that science, as approximated here^, is how i tend yo assertively believe as well. namely, that science reveals our perceptible reality, through a specific arrangement of direct and indirect observations following along philosophical notions through critically formulated discursive language. who is to say, like historical evidence, what type of philosophical investigations might provide us some way of becoming aware the breviously unknown? i suggest having an honest imagination to everyone!
    - ajross 2y ago
      There is literally another MOND article discussed in this very forum every week or so. All theories are provisional and based on finite evidence and general consensus. There is no such thing as empirical truth the way you imagine.
      - 2y ago
- dec0dedab0de 2y ago
  I think most of everything should be taught like this, especially from a young age. Too many people assume that other people already figured it all out, and never bother challenging facts or looking deeper. I think part of it is about not questioning authority, but it’s mostly about fear of the unknown. In some corporate environments there is pushback against so-called “weasel words.” Which is fine to call out for contractual obligations, but it is ridiculous when used against an engineer being honest. I once got reprimanded for explaining that “exactly once” is not possible in a distributed system, but I was going to do “at most once” and put some mitigations in place to handle most failure scenarios. Management was mad at me for not using more concrete language, even once they understood the problem. I bring it up because I believe it is a result of whatever personality traits that got them in management to begin with. The same types of people manage schools and publications, and they would fight back against a pedantic nerd saying “as far as we know” because they don’t want to use weak language. I don’t have a solution, but it has always been upsetting to me.
  - rglynn 2y ago
    I totally agree. However, in corporate politics especially, one has to acknowledge that truth is not the basis on which the organisation or individuals are operating on. It is money and status. Viewed through that lens, it is not important that statements made are exactly truthful or accurate, but that they are effective and have "good optics".
- abeppu 2y ago
  And in particular, I'm always curious -- how much of what we know of cuneiform is just because using clay tablets made examples more likely to survive to the present day? You can kind of imagine there being a soft temporal horizon for different kinds materials and artifacts -- far enough in the past, there are some kinds of things we should expect probably can't be discovered. If the people at Gobleki Tepe (or any other really old site) were writing by making marks on leaves or tree bark, we probably never know right?
  - hosh 2y ago
    And it follows: how much of the artifacts of our present civilization will last 3,000 years for future archaeologists and anthropologists?
matt_kirkland 2y ago
And that's why we have dumbcuneiform.com
- dang 2y ago
  Turn dumb tweets into cuneiform tablets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36275974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36275974 - June 2023 (47 comments) Dumb Cuneiform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526680 - Nov 2015 (16 comments)
snapcaster 2y ago
I would love if the government had a class people could take at 30, 40, whatever to catch me up on dinosaur lore updates and all the other shit i learned about in school
- dec0dedab0de 2y ago
  I would like something like that, but I wouldn’t want it to be run by the government.
  - snapcaster 2y ago
    Sure, really just fired off my comment without much thought and obviously would suck in real life since it would be hijacked by politicians. Not wedded to the government part, kinda just pretending US gov capable of public services like this
    - zackmorris 2y ago
      When I was growing up in the 1980s, the government provided public services like this and more. Somewhere along the way a government of the people, by the people, for the people, perished from the earth. Not from just one ailment like trickle-down economics, but from a thousand cuts delivered retroactively by revisionist history, until even the youth became their own wardens, and hope was finally lost.
      - whatwhaaaaat 2y ago
        I’d be interested a concrete example of how you believe the 1980s was somehow different as far as government services today - and our course what country.
        zackmorris 2y ago
        It was USA. It's hard to explain how the national debt eroded the government's ability to provide public education and other government services like it used to, but here's an attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_policy_of_the_Ronald_Reagan_administration#Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_policy_of_the_Ronald_... The irony is that we're still debating this after 40+ years with new calls to eliminate the Department of Education, so in a way, things haven't changed. That's not to say they didn't change, just that any progress made has been eroded back to square one. That's the tragedy I was trying to convey. I'd like to touch on how your tactic of undermining my point by asking me to do your legwork, then waiting for me or someone else to jump in and defend it, and then claiming victory when no one shows up, creates a climate of fear and ignorance. I can't find a logical fallacy for it: http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/fallacies.html http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/fallacies.html On the one hand, it's up to me to defend my point. But on the other, widespread criticism of the experiences of people who were there promotes division. Allowing the divide and conquer strategy to sway people into voting against their own self-interest, undermining democracy and the rule of law. The way these debates used to play out was that the academic position was held in high regard. Because it covers a broad context. Asking for specific answers that were already generally known was considered a distraction, or a rhetorical question used to distract from the speaker's main point. Ask yourself what common knowledge is known about education, where it receives its funding, who teaches and who attends. How that's changed in recent decades due to socioeconomic forces. Who might benefit from such changes, and who suffers due to them. And would I state something that can't be backed up by overwhelming evidence in the public record? Those critical thinking skills used to be prerequisites to winning debates. Now it's easier to just dismiss arguments because others don't have time to get involved, or just want to keep their heads down. I'd like to see a term for your tactic get added to the logical fallacies list. I just don't know what to call it. It's analogous to argumentum ad logicam, where you're implying that what I said was false, not because my argument was invalid, but because I omitted evidence that anyone could add or fact-check.
quotemstr 2y ago
I've always wondered whether the Sumerians knew they were the first. Past empires, lost civilizations, and ancient artifacts have always fascinated us. The first museum emerges is Mesopotamia around 530 BC; the Egyptian obelisk installed next to the brand-new Colosseum in Rome was older then than the Colosseum is now; legends of giants and heroes of bygone ages are literary universals. We hunger for the past. But the Sumerians were first. There was no glorious but crumbled past empire to inspire them. They figured out everything for the first time, and we know little about what they thought about it. Now consider that humanity is likely the first in the Milky Way galaxy. We too have to figure things out for the first time, but on a grander scale. What will history think of us?
- weavie 2y ago
  They believed their writing was gifted to them by the Gods. According to them they were not the first, they were just the next in line after the Gods.
  - quotemstr 2y ago
    Sure. They had a creation mythos like everyone else. What they didn't have is evidence of a real precursor civilization to ground those myths. The classical Greeks could see Mycenaean ruins.
    - jeltz 2y ago
      Not as many as later civilizations but there are buildings that likely pre-date the Sumerian civilization like the desert kites. And in Syria and Turkey there are megaliths and ruins which are older than Sumer which builders the Sumerians might have know of from oral history.
    - dunefox 2y ago
      > The classical Greeks could see Mycenaean ruins. Apparently, they Minoans had plumbing in the 1800s BC, so I'm sure the Greeks would have been surprised at what had preceded them by a long time.
  - 2y ago
openrisk 2y ago
Lots of interesting details around the beginning of writing systems but it seems to overdramatise the conditions and role of Sumer in kickstarting civilization as we know it? > the original organized, literate, urban culture was produced by a far crueler and more challenging environment than either of those (Indus, Nile) Egypt and the Nile don't seem particularly different as an environment. Dry desert with regular river floodings etc. > The Sumerians invented kingship, priesthood, diplomacy, law, and war. Of those, only law sounds like a legitimate priority claim, in the sense of having writen, thus fixed, laws rather than whatever the potentate of the day feels like declaring as being the law today.
- adrian_b 2y ago
  That phrase is rather imprecise. What can be attributed to the Sumerian cities is the first appearance of several professions which are not directly productive and which have remained important until today. By profession, I mean an activity that was all that a certain human did in order to obtain all the resources required for living. Before Sumer, those activities were done by certain people, but only occasionally, besides their main craft, e.g. a shaman was likely to also act as a medical doctor when needed and a chief of tribe was likely to also judge conflicts. Among the professions that have first appeared in Sumer during the third millennium BC, are: judge, medical doctor, accountant, musician, prostitute. The equivalent of priests and kings, though only at smaller scales, e.g. for a tribe or a confederation of tribes, have certainly existed much earlier than Sumer and Egypt. "Chief" is likely to be the oldest profession, as that exists at many social animals, including apes.
- Tuna-Fish 2y ago
  > Egypt and the Nile don't seem particularly different as an environment. Dry desert with regular river floodings etc. The Nile flood was extremely benign compared to Mesopotamia. You can set your calendar by it (and the Egyptians did), you can measure the height of the flood for a few years and be very confident that the flood of the next year will be similar to the ones of the past few years. And most crucially, the Nile flows in a deep river valley, with fairly steep sides, meaning that you can build your houses and granaries within comfortable walking distance of the flood plain and still be confident that you will be safe from the floods. In contrast, the floods of Tigris and Euphrates were extremely unpredictable in both timing and strength, and the flood plain was so large that the entire civilizations working it had to live in it. This resulted in very different outlooks, most visible in how they viewed their river gods. The Egyptian ones were friendly, the Sumerian ones were capricious and cruel.
austin-cheney 2y ago
The article misstates a few things in its opening. Evidence so far indicates humans first settled into fixed colonies/cities around 45,000 years ago starting in eastern Europe. These people are referred to as neolithic, where as mobile units without a fixed geography are referred to as archaic. It wasn't until around 10,000 years ago that humans first civilized (around 8,000 to 7,000 BCE). So this means people, the same mentioned in the article, civilized several thousand years before they had writing. The only real difference between neolithic settlements and civilization is governance and influence. Writing is beneficial, but influence can be accomplish through various means including: arts, religion, culture, organized military activity, and more. It is also worth pointing that civilization was extremely unappealing to the uncivilized who first encountered it. The most immediate symptoms of civilization are social restrictions, class stratification, and loss of mobility of which all are essentially opposing aspects of freedom.
- 7thaccount 2y ago
  What is the evidence of cities existing 45,000 years ago? I thought the earliest we had was around 10,000 years ago in Turkey?
  - otabdeveloper4 2y ago
    A "city" is a specific type of "settlement" -- one that has walls and can't produce its own food.
    - saghm 2y ago
      Are walls really a requirement for something being considered a city? Off the top of my head, I've been to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston and don't recall anything I'd describe as a "wall" around any of them. Is not having walls just an American thing? I could imagine the historical definition of "city" not being consistent with modern cities, but if that's the case, it's no wonder that this would confuse people and require clarifications like the one you give here.
myriadoptimum 2y ago
James Scott, in his book Against the Grain, offers an in-depth and nuanced exploration of the factors that led to the appearance of projects such as writing and irrigation channels in Mesopotamia as intensive agriculture gradually became the only possible means of sustenance. There was a lot more going on than a simple/linear intensification, and it was less cut and dry than the brief summary given of that development in this article would suggest. Jennifer Pournelle's 2003 paper[1] presenting new evidence for the area's landscape in antiquity is also quite eye opening, as the presence of the coast further inland than was previously believed upended a lot of long-established notions about the development of civilization there. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258858442_The_Littoral_Foundations_of_The_Uruk_State_Using_Satellite_Photography_Toward_a_New_Understanding_Of_5th4th_Millenium_BCE_Landscapes_in_the_Warka_Survey_Area_Iraq https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258858442_The_Litto...
- samatman 2y ago
  Daughter of Jerry Pournelle, btw. Google identifies her in the knowledge bar as "Jerry Pournelle's son", which is not the case, and furthermore, never was. My sole interest was in confirming the family connection, which I vaguely recalled, but the blurb was strange enough that I felt I needed to share it anyway. Brilliant AI-powered future we have here.
JimmyWilliams1 2y ago
[flagged]
mtalantikite 2y ago
> Without writing, there was no history. Uh, is there not plenty of evidence of oral traditions and histories spanning back millennia? There are Aboriginal stories that go back 7000 years. [1][2] Kind of weak to open with a statement like that. Obviously not as old, but just in Toumani Diabaté's family they've passed down their familial history for 70 generations. [3] Clearly history exists without writing. [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2015.10... [2] https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/edge-of-memory-9781472943279/ https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/edge-of-memory-9781472943279/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toumani_Diabat%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toumani_Diabat%C3%A9
- canjobear 2y ago
  Obviously no one is claiming that nothing happened before writing. Historians use “history” as a technical term for events recorded in written and other durable records. They use “prehistory” for events recorded in oral traditions and archaeology.
  - mtalantikite 2y ago
    I'm aware, but it seems silly to me to say oral traditions aren't durable and that writing is the only way to get at history. As linked above as an example, there's recent scholarship that points to oral traditions that encode history perfectly well across enormous timelines. Even in written form, we have vague translations in ancient Buddhist texts that require cross referencing multiple sources to get at a meaning, and even then there is plenty of disagreement. Thich Nhat Hanh brought this up in his translation and commentary on the Heart Sutra [1], as he believed an early translation was not skillful enough. That's one of the reasons it's important to have a guru-shishya relationship with your teacher. As we all know, writing is plenty capable of transmitting falsehoods. I'm married to a professional novelist and memoirist, and we often talk about how non-fiction often contains plenty of fictions. Obviously none of this is to say that writing isn't great and important, it just doesn't pass the smell test for me to say that history is what is written when we have plenty of contrary examples. Maybe to assert that in an academic journal where language tends to have more technical meaning is fine, but this is lithub. I know plenty of writers that write for them personally, my wife included, and it's certainly a self-important claim they'd love to be able to make! [1] https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/thich-nhat-hanh-new-heart-sutra-translation#thays-letter https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/thich-... -- the introduction in the published text is better than this one, but the gist is the same.
ordu 2y ago
> the symbol for “woman,” a downward-pointing triangle with a notch at the bottom tip It is curious. Today a pictogram of a woman is an upward-pointing triangle with some small details added, while a downward-pointing triangle with the same details is a man. Sumerians would use a wrong bathroom all the time. Or we would use a wrong sumerian bathroom if we time traveled there.
- adrian_b 2y ago
  The symbol is a pubic triangle, so it is quite accurate in showing the distinction between a female and a male (the "notch" mentioned above is the cleft between the labia majora). Similarly, the Egyptian symbol for male was just a relatively accurate drawing of the male genital organs. The modern symbols shy from drawing the body parts that distinguish males from females, hence the drawing of the entire body with the addition of features that are sometimes, but not always, associated with gender.
skapa_flow 2y ago
"...Created the World’s First Writing System" that we know of. They used burned clay, which lasts forever. I am sure there have been writing systems before, they just rotted away.
- Koshkin 2y ago
  Yes, there must have been a long pre-history of writing proper, like, leaving marks on trees or soil as a guide, a warning, etc. But it takes a civilization to start writing on a scale comparable to that of the Sumerians, and such a civilization cannot be lost to time so completely as to leave behind some evidence if its writing - especially given that they would likely use different media, including clay and stone.
  - hosh 2y ago
    It depends on the material. Incas uses knots for record keeping. Those are not as durable as burned clay. In our current global civilization with advanced computing tech, magnetic tapes, cdroms, and hard drives won't last very long. Maybe SSDs have greater durability, but they will also require computing tech to dicipher. I do not think the existence of surviving writing materials is a strong argument for evidence of civilization, and speaks more to the limitations of the technology.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    Leaving marks on trees and such is not writing. It is not the transcription of spoken language. We have examples of this kind of symbol-placement on ancient cave art stretching far back into the ice age. It is not considered writing.
    - shakna 2y ago
      Written language is rarely just a transcription. It usually has a number of distinct differences in both lexicon and syntax. There are languages that are only written. Art is not writing, true. Distinct symbols and syntax are required for writing. But it need not be transcription of anything spoken.
mistercheph 2y ago
*that we've found.
atentaten 2y ago
There was an article 3 days ago that said the oldest known writing system was from Syria: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42224330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42224330
- wongarsu 2y ago
  That's the earliest alphabetic writing system. The Sumerian writing system started out pictographic (like hieroglyphs), and predates that Syrian find by about 800 years. It became less pictographic over time, and that Syrian site is only 500 miles from the Sumerian empire. My amateur speculation would be that trade with Sumer brought writing to Syria and they developed the idea in a different direction, arriving at this alphabetic system.
- singularity2001 2y ago
  that was about the oldest alphabet, not writing system
TheRealPomax 2y ago
Title should be "How the Ancient Sumerians Created the World’s First Writing System"
- wongarsu 2y ago
  HN automatically removes the word how from the start of titles. A controversial choice, but I don't see a big issue with it in this case
hosh 2y ago
How does Göbekli Tepe change our understanding on the rise of civilizations, including Mesopotamia?
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  Gobekli tepe isn't nearly as exciting as popular media makes it out to be. It's an extremely early example of amazing monumental architecture, but neither unique (it's one of many sites from an archaeological culture in the area) nor the oldest. In general, Northern Mesopotamia where GT was seems to have evolved as a separate, contemporaneous urban tradition from southern Mesopotamia and Sumeria. It seemingly developed in a different way, with distinct architectural styles, social organization, and politics.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    What monumental architecture is older than Göbekli Tepe?
    - AlotOfReading 2y ago
      That's a very different question than what I said. The word "monument" in archaeology denotes a mental relation between the human and the space modified by the structure. It's not something inherent to the structure itself. You can have structures that are monumental that we can't easily identify as such today (many burial mounds were like this), structures we see as monumental that the original inhabitants would not have (some midden heaps, tells and urban centers), or monumental structures with no physical components like the Nazi's Cathedral of Light. Gobekli Tepe is monumental in an extremely obvious way, which means GT Layer III constructions are the earliest securely dated structures that are obviously monumental. If that's what you mean, I agree. The oldest parts of nearby Karahan Tepe are probably of similar age from archaeoastronomical evidence, but aren't as well preserved or securely dated. Tell Qaramel is much older than GT and has large constructions that some have argued were monumental. The monumental relationship isn't as clear as GT though. Tells themselves can often be monumental and we have many tells older than GT. Other sites from the same or earlier periods (PPNA) as GT layer III like the tower at Jericho or the communal structures at Cemka hoyuk, Jerf el-Ahmar and Tell Abr may not have been monumental in the same way, but were large constructions involving large amounts of manpower. I'll let you make your own decisions about whether any of these count as monumental. I'm just emphasizing that Gobekli Tepe isn't a totally standalone precursor that's wildly distant from anything else we've found. It's an old and beautiful site that existed within the broader context of an entire landscape of early neolithic structures.
blastro 2y ago
Anyone here ever read The Urantia Book? IMO, it's truly fascinating, and brushes up against this post
- krapp 2y ago
  Ah yes, the doctrine of the Sleepytime Tea cult. It's racist, eugenicist mystical woo-woo nonsense, and not worth discussing in a thread about actual history.
  - blastro 2y ago
    yeah it's a pretty wild book. disagree that it's not worth discussing, however
singularity2001 2y ago
describing the surrounding countries as barbarian is such a bad narrative given what we now know about the Jiroft, Elamite, Harappan and Egyptian culture.
- ghjfrdghibt 2y ago
  Isn't this a book with extracts from documents written near 5000 years ago?
- adastra22 2y ago
  Those cultures postdate this part of the chronology by about a thousand years. And in any case, the article is just quoting what the records say.
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bargainbot3k 2y ago
[flagged]
scoofy 2y ago
We can’t know they were the first. We can’t even know what the idea of a singular Sumerian culture or civilization was. It’s fine to speculate, but it’s pointless to just decide that our speculation is fact when there is absurdly huge numbers of pre-historic people who may have stumbled upon writing, but never care about permanence. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the proposition: “Ancient Sumerians probably created the first writing system”
- adastra22 2y ago
  Why? We have no records of other writing systems that have been conclusively dated to be earlier, and in this case (unlike others, e.g. Chinese) we DO have a very clear record of the development of the script, from accounting symbols to pictograms to ideograms to phonetic transcription. It definitely did not derive from an earlier script, as we see the progression of development in isolation. So why can't we call it the first?
  - verisimi 2y ago
    The emphasis is on 'know'. This is epistemology and logic. Do you know you are sitting on a chair? Yes. Do you know your birthday? No, in so far as you cannot personally verify it, as you do not recollect that time. It is fine to assume all sorts, that your birthday is as your parents say, that sumerians are the oldest civilization, etc, but history, esp. ancient history is not knowledge, and can never be 'known'. Using 'probably' indicates that this is one's best hypothesis, but doesn't overstate the case (nor mislead) by stating it as an indisputable, known fact.
    - adastra22 2y ago
      Outside of a philosophy class, 'know' takes on quite a bit more pragmatic meaning which is perfectly appropriate here.
      - lukan 2y ago
        And inside philosophy class, I would argue, that the knowlege of the chair your are sitting on, is also not so much more confirmed and solid knowledge, than ones own birthday.
alsetmusic 2y ago
I will once again recommend the Fall of Civilizations Podcast. It's incredibly informative. Here's the ep on the Sumerians: https://soundcloud.com/fallofcivilizations/8-the-sumerians-fall-of-the-first-cities https://soundcloud.com/fallofcivilizations/8-the-sumerians-f...
insane_dreamer 2y ago
The Chinese assert that they in fact started the first civilization, before the civilizations of the Tigris/Euphrates, Nile, or Indus. I never had the time to really dig into it to evaluate the arguments, but I don't think it's correct because the Shang Dynasty is usually placed around 1600 BC while Sumer is dated around 3000 BC (or even earlier). So I don't know how the Chinese claim they were first. But I can tell you from living there, that it is very widely and very firmly believed as fact.
- adastra22 2y ago
  The "5,000 year" claim is based purely on mythology. The archeological evidence makes 3500 - 4000 years more likely. In other words: the mythical events that happened 5000 years ago were likely oral history retellings of events that actually happened 3500 - 4000 years ago. Chinese history history certainly isn't much older than about ~2000 BCE, and that was prehistory as Chinese writing didn't develop until around 700 years later. There are older archeological sites for sure, but these likely don't correspond to the specific "5000 years" mythological figures and events, and AFAIK these earlier cultures don't demonstrate monumental architecture, the hallmark of the technical definition of "civilization." Though to be fair, China is unique in having developed writing prior to monumental architecture. While writing was developing in China, the Great Pyramids were already 1,000 years old, and the great city walls of Uruk were 1500 years old. Cuneiform writing is older still. Göbekli Tepe had already had its golden era and had bee abandoned for 6500 years by the time the first writing started to develop in China. China is not the oldest civilization. It is barely even in the running, and only if you take the mythological 5000 years at face value. Comparing archeological evidence, ancient china isn't actually that ancient, compared to the Middle East. I know it's widely believed there that China is the oldest civilization. But it's a laughable claim.
- Hilift 2y ago
  China has a lot of fertile ground for archaeological discovery. "The tomb, designated M27, is located in the Wangzhuang ruins in Yongcheng city and dates back to the middle and late periods of the Dawenkou Culture (4000 BCE-2600 BCE), a Neolithic culture in ancient China." https://archaeologymag.com/2024/10/5000-year-old-royal-tomb-in-central-china/ https://archaeologymag.com/2024/10/5000-year-old-royal-tomb-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawenkou_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawenkou_culture
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mapcars 2y ago
How true is that? I see people talking about Sanskrit being 3 to 5 thousand years old. Or was it not a written at that time?
- prosody 2y ago
  The oldest Sanskrit text, the Rigveda, is usually dated to 1500 BC as an oral tradition. It wasn't written down until much later. The oldest surviving unambiguously Sanskrit writing is from 100 BC, using the Brahmi script. It actually isn't the surviving oldest Indic written language either, the Edicts of Ashoka date to 300 BC and are texts written using various scripts and vernacular languages.
rvalue 2y ago
someone should checkout nilesh oak
senderista 2y ago
Highly recommend the "Tides of History" podcast (hosted by an actual historian who keeps up with the field), which has several episodes on Mesopotamian civilization. https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/ https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/
WalterBright 2y ago
"A representational writing system has significant limitations. It is not practical to have a symbol for everything. The symbols must mean the same to all who use the writing. Users must memorize thousands of these symbols and must also be familiar with that which is being expressed. Tenses, cases, and voices are mostly impossible to depict." No icons for me. I'm more evolved!
WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
for egypt to turn into sand, there must have been a cataclysmic event that burried much of the ancient history "who was first" doesn't make much sense when you know we are missing most of the data "the first of the last 5"

164 points by HR01 2y ago

The Cucuteni–Trypillia megasites in Ukraine appear to predate the Mesopotamian ones by a few centuries, though they didn't have writing (apparently).

biorach 2y ago
I think that part of the reason the Cucuteni–Trypillia megasites are not mentioned so much in this context is because they look like enormous villages, missing many of the characteristics of a city which are present in Sumer.
- adastra22 2y ago
  Yeah there's other near east settlements of this sort going back a full 10,000 years. Sumer was the first with purpose-built monumental architecture.
singularity2001 2y ago
these sites were in close proximity to the Vinca culture which did have some precursor of writing

datadeft 2y ago

* that we are aware of as of 2024. I think most historical discoveries should be prefixed or suffixed with this because as we dig up more things we might learn that there was an even older writing system (in this case).

frutiger 2y ago
Isn’t that redundant? It’s like asking everyone to prefix every statement with “As far as I know…”
- xeromal 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    No, you can't. Our understanding of physical constants is based on empirical confirmation via multiple samples. They're still just probably correct, and we haven't confirmed the laws of physics are uniform across either time or space.
    - technothrasher 2y ago
      This whole concept is what the skeptical shorthand of "you can't prove a negative" actually means. You can show some instance or set of instances of something, but you cannot show that something is universally always true. The tentative nature of our ability to understand the world is the basis for why we use science to approximate objective reality.
      - cbogie 2y ago
        so i tend to think that science, as approximated here^, is how i tend yo assertively believe as well. namely, that science reveals our perceptible reality, through a specific arrangement of direct and indirect observations following along philosophical notions through critically formulated discursive language. who is to say, like historical evidence, what type of philosophical investigations might provide us some way of becoming aware the breviously unknown? i suggest having an honest imagination to everyone!
  - ajross 2y ago
    There is literally another MOND article discussed in this very forum every week or so. All theories are provisional and based on finite evidence and general consensus. There is no such thing as empirical truth the way you imagine.
    - 2y ago
dec0dedab0de 2y ago
I think most of everything should be taught like this, especially from a young age. Too many people assume that other people already figured it all out, and never bother challenging facts or looking deeper. I think part of it is about not questioning authority, but it’s mostly about fear of the unknown. In some corporate environments there is pushback against so-called “weasel words.” Which is fine to call out for contractual obligations, but it is ridiculous when used against an engineer being honest. I once got reprimanded for explaining that “exactly once” is not possible in a distributed system, but I was going to do “at most once” and put some mitigations in place to handle most failure scenarios. Management was mad at me for not using more concrete language, even once they understood the problem. I bring it up because I believe it is a result of whatever personality traits that got them in management to begin with. The same types of people manage schools and publications, and they would fight back against a pedantic nerd saying “as far as we know” because they don’t want to use weak language. I don’t have a solution, but it has always been upsetting to me.
- rglynn 2y ago
  I totally agree. However, in corporate politics especially, one has to acknowledge that truth is not the basis on which the organisation or individuals are operating on. It is money and status. Viewed through that lens, it is not important that statements made are exactly truthful or accurate, but that they are effective and have "good optics".
abeppu 2y ago
And in particular, I'm always curious -- how much of what we know of cuneiform is just because using clay tablets made examples more likely to survive to the present day? You can kind of imagine there being a soft temporal horizon for different kinds materials and artifacts -- far enough in the past, there are some kinds of things we should expect probably can't be discovered. If the people at Gobleki Tepe (or any other really old site) were writing by making marks on leaves or tree bark, we probably never know right?
- hosh 2y ago
  And it follows: how much of the artifacts of our present civilization will last 3,000 years for future archaeologists and anthropologists?

matt_kirkland 2y ago

And that's why we have dumbcuneiform.com

dang 2y ago
Turn dumb tweets into cuneiform tablets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36275974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36275974 - June 2023 (47 comments) Dumb Cuneiform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526680 - Nov 2015 (16 comments)

snapcaster 2y ago

I would love if the government had a class people could take at 30, 40, whatever to catch me up on dinosaur lore updates and all the other shit i learned about in school

dec0dedab0de 2y ago
I would like something like that, but I wouldn’t want it to be run by the government.
- snapcaster 2y ago
  Sure, really just fired off my comment without much thought and obviously would suck in real life since it would be hijacked by politicians. Not wedded to the government part, kinda just pretending US gov capable of public services like this
  - zackmorris 2y ago
    When I was growing up in the 1980s, the government provided public services like this and more. Somewhere along the way a government of the people, by the people, for the people, perished from the earth. Not from just one ailment like trickle-down economics, but from a thousand cuts delivered retroactively by revisionist history, until even the youth became their own wardens, and hope was finally lost.
    - whatwhaaaaat 2y ago
      I’d be interested a concrete example of how you believe the 1980s was somehow different as far as government services today - and our course what country.
      - zackmorris 2y ago
        It was USA. It's hard to explain how the national debt eroded the government's ability to provide public education and other government services like it used to, but here's an attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_policy_of_the_Ronald_Reagan_administration#Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_policy_of_the_Ronald_... The irony is that we're still debating this after 40+ years with new calls to eliminate the Department of Education, so in a way, things haven't changed. That's not to say they didn't change, just that any progress made has been eroded back to square one. That's the tragedy I was trying to convey. I'd like to touch on how your tactic of undermining my point by asking me to do your legwork, then waiting for me or someone else to jump in and defend it, and then claiming victory when no one shows up, creates a climate of fear and ignorance. I can't find a logical fallacy for it: http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/fallacies.html http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/fallacies.html On the one hand, it's up to me to defend my point. But on the other, widespread criticism of the experiences of people who were there promotes division. Allowing the divide and conquer strategy to sway people into voting against their own self-interest, undermining democracy and the rule of law. The way these debates used to play out was that the academic position was held in high regard. Because it covers a broad context. Asking for specific answers that were already generally known was considered a distraction, or a rhetorical question used to distract from the speaker's main point. Ask yourself what common knowledge is known about education, where it receives its funding, who teaches and who attends. How that's changed in recent decades due to socioeconomic forces. Who might benefit from such changes, and who suffers due to them. And would I state something that can't be backed up by overwhelming evidence in the public record? Those critical thinking skills used to be prerequisites to winning debates. Now it's easier to just dismiss arguments because others don't have time to get involved, or just want to keep their heads down. I'd like to see a term for your tactic get added to the logical fallacies list. I just don't know what to call it. It's analogous to argumentum ad logicam, where you're implying that what I said was false, not because my argument was invalid, but because I omitted evidence that anyone could add or fact-check.

quotemstr 2y ago

I've always wondered whether the Sumerians knew they were the first. Past empires, lost civilizations, and ancient artifacts have always fascinated us. The first museum emerges is Mesopotamia around 530 BC; the Egyptian obelisk installed next to the brand-new Colosseum in Rome was older then than the Colosseum is now; legends of giants and heroes of bygone ages are literary universals. We hunger for the past. But the Sumerians were first. There was no glorious but crumbled past empire to inspire them. They figured out everything for the first time, and we know little about what they thought about it. Now consider that humanity is likely the first in the Milky Way galaxy. We too have to figure things out for the first time, but on a grander scale. What will history think of us?

weavie 2y ago
They believed their writing was gifted to them by the Gods. According to them they were not the first, they were just the next in line after the Gods.
- quotemstr 2y ago
  Sure. They had a creation mythos like everyone else. What they didn't have is evidence of a real precursor civilization to ground those myths. The classical Greeks could see Mycenaean ruins.
  - jeltz 2y ago
    Not as many as later civilizations but there are buildings that likely pre-date the Sumerian civilization like the desert kites. And in Syria and Turkey there are megaliths and ruins which are older than Sumer which builders the Sumerians might have know of from oral history.
  - dunefox 2y ago
    > The classical Greeks could see Mycenaean ruins. Apparently, they Minoans had plumbing in the 1800s BC, so I'm sure the Greeks would have been surprised at what had preceded them by a long time.
- 2y ago

openrisk 2y ago

Lots of interesting details around the beginning of writing systems but it seems to overdramatise the conditions and role of Sumer in kickstarting civilization as we know it? > the original organized, literate, urban culture was produced by a far crueler and more challenging environment than either of those (Indus, Nile) Egypt and the Nile don't seem particularly different as an environment. Dry desert with regular river floodings etc. > The Sumerians invented kingship, priesthood, diplomacy, law, and war. Of those, only law sounds like a legitimate priority claim, in the sense of having writen, thus fixed, laws rather than whatever the potentate of the day feels like declaring as being the law today.

adrian_b 2y ago
That phrase is rather imprecise. What can be attributed to the Sumerian cities is the first appearance of several professions which are not directly productive and which have remained important until today. By profession, I mean an activity that was all that a certain human did in order to obtain all the resources required for living. Before Sumer, those activities were done by certain people, but only occasionally, besides their main craft, e.g. a shaman was likely to also act as a medical doctor when needed and a chief of tribe was likely to also judge conflicts. Among the professions that have first appeared in Sumer during the third millennium BC, are: judge, medical doctor, accountant, musician, prostitute. The equivalent of priests and kings, though only at smaller scales, e.g. for a tribe or a confederation of tribes, have certainly existed much earlier than Sumer and Egypt. "Chief" is likely to be the oldest profession, as that exists at many social animals, including apes.
Tuna-Fish 2y ago
> Egypt and the Nile don't seem particularly different as an environment. Dry desert with regular river floodings etc. The Nile flood was extremely benign compared to Mesopotamia. You can set your calendar by it (and the Egyptians did), you can measure the height of the flood for a few years and be very confident that the flood of the next year will be similar to the ones of the past few years. And most crucially, the Nile flows in a deep river valley, with fairly steep sides, meaning that you can build your houses and granaries within comfortable walking distance of the flood plain and still be confident that you will be safe from the floods. In contrast, the floods of Tigris and Euphrates were extremely unpredictable in both timing and strength, and the flood plain was so large that the entire civilizations working it had to live in it. This resulted in very different outlooks, most visible in how they viewed their river gods. The Egyptian ones were friendly, the Sumerian ones were capricious and cruel.

austin-cheney 2y ago

The article misstates a few things in its opening. Evidence so far indicates humans first settled into fixed colonies/cities around 45,000 years ago starting in eastern Europe. These people are referred to as neolithic, where as mobile units without a fixed geography are referred to as archaic. It wasn't until around 10,000 years ago that humans first civilized (around 8,000 to 7,000 BCE). So this means people, the same mentioned in the article, civilized several thousand years before they had writing. The only real difference between neolithic settlements and civilization is governance and influence. Writing is beneficial, but influence can be accomplish through various means including: arts, religion, culture, organized military activity, and more. It is also worth pointing that civilization was extremely unappealing to the uncivilized who first encountered it. The most immediate symptoms of civilization are social restrictions, class stratification, and loss of mobility of which all are essentially opposing aspects of freedom.

7thaccount 2y ago
What is the evidence of cities existing 45,000 years ago? I thought the earliest we had was around 10,000 years ago in Turkey?
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago
  A "city" is a specific type of "settlement" -- one that has walls and can't produce its own food.
  - saghm 2y ago
    Are walls really a requirement for something being considered a city? Off the top of my head, I've been to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston and don't recall anything I'd describe as a "wall" around any of them. Is not having walls just an American thing? I could imagine the historical definition of "city" not being consistent with modern cities, but if that's the case, it's no wonder that this would confuse people and require clarifications like the one you give here.

myriadoptimum 2y ago

James Scott, in his book Against the Grain, offers an in-depth and nuanced exploration of the factors that led to the appearance of projects such as writing and irrigation channels in Mesopotamia as intensive agriculture gradually became the only possible means of sustenance. There was a lot more going on than a simple/linear intensification, and it was less cut and dry than the brief summary given of that development in this article would suggest. Jennifer Pournelle's 2003 paper[1] presenting new evidence for the area's landscape in antiquity is also quite eye opening, as the presence of the coast further inland than was previously believed upended a lot of long-established notions about the development of civilization there. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258858442_The_Littoral_Foundations_of_The_Uruk_State_Using_Satellite_Photography_Toward_a_New_Understanding_Of_5th4th_Millenium_BCE_Landscapes_in_the_Warka_Survey_Area_Iraq https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258858442_The_Litto...

samatman 2y ago
Daughter of Jerry Pournelle, btw. Google identifies her in the knowledge bar as "Jerry Pournelle's son", which is not the case, and furthermore, never was. My sole interest was in confirming the family connection, which I vaguely recalled, but the blurb was strange enough that I felt I needed to share it anyway. Brilliant AI-powered future we have here.

JimmyWilliams1 2y ago

[flagged]

mtalantikite 2y ago

> Without writing, there was no history. Uh, is there not plenty of evidence of oral traditions and histories spanning back millennia? There are Aboriginal stories that go back 7000 years. [1][2] Kind of weak to open with a statement like that. Obviously not as old, but just in Toumani Diabaté's family they've passed down their familial history for 70 generations. [3] Clearly history exists without writing. [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2015.10... [2] https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/edge-of-memory-9781472943279/ https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/edge-of-memory-9781472943279/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toumani_Diabat%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toumani_Diabat%C3%A9

canjobear 2y ago
Obviously no one is claiming that nothing happened before writing. Historians use “history” as a technical term for events recorded in written and other durable records. They use “prehistory” for events recorded in oral traditions and archaeology.
- mtalantikite 2y ago
  I'm aware, but it seems silly to me to say oral traditions aren't durable and that writing is the only way to get at history. As linked above as an example, there's recent scholarship that points to oral traditions that encode history perfectly well across enormous timelines. Even in written form, we have vague translations in ancient Buddhist texts that require cross referencing multiple sources to get at a meaning, and even then there is plenty of disagreement. Thich Nhat Hanh brought this up in his translation and commentary on the Heart Sutra [1], as he believed an early translation was not skillful enough. That's one of the reasons it's important to have a guru-shishya relationship with your teacher. As we all know, writing is plenty capable of transmitting falsehoods. I'm married to a professional novelist and memoirist, and we often talk about how non-fiction often contains plenty of fictions. Obviously none of this is to say that writing isn't great and important, it just doesn't pass the smell test for me to say that history is what is written when we have plenty of contrary examples. Maybe to assert that in an academic journal where language tends to have more technical meaning is fine, but this is lithub. I know plenty of writers that write for them personally, my wife included, and it's certainly a self-important claim they'd love to be able to make! [1] https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/thich-nhat-hanh-new-heart-sutra-translation#thays-letter https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/thich-... -- the introduction in the published text is better than this one, but the gist is the same.

ordu 2y ago

> the symbol for “woman,” a downward-pointing triangle with a notch at the bottom tip It is curious. Today a pictogram of a woman is an upward-pointing triangle with some small details added, while a downward-pointing triangle with the same details is a man. Sumerians would use a wrong bathroom all the time. Or we would use a wrong sumerian bathroom if we time traveled there.

adrian_b 2y ago
The symbol is a pubic triangle, so it is quite accurate in showing the distinction between a female and a male (the "notch" mentioned above is the cleft between the labia majora). Similarly, the Egyptian symbol for male was just a relatively accurate drawing of the male genital organs. The modern symbols shy from drawing the body parts that distinguish males from females, hence the drawing of the entire body with the addition of features that are sometimes, but not always, associated with gender.

skapa_flow 2y ago

"...Created the World’s First Writing System" that we know of. They used burned clay, which lasts forever. I am sure there have been writing systems before, they just rotted away.

Koshkin 2y ago
Yes, there must have been a long pre-history of writing proper, like, leaving marks on trees or soil as a guide, a warning, etc. But it takes a civilization to start writing on a scale comparable to that of the Sumerians, and such a civilization cannot be lost to time so completely as to leave behind some evidence if its writing - especially given that they would likely use different media, including clay and stone.
- hosh 2y ago
  It depends on the material. Incas uses knots for record keeping. Those are not as durable as burned clay. In our current global civilization with advanced computing tech, magnetic tapes, cdroms, and hard drives won't last very long. Maybe SSDs have greater durability, but they will also require computing tech to dicipher. I do not think the existence of surviving writing materials is a strong argument for evidence of civilization, and speaks more to the limitations of the technology.
- adastra22 2y ago
  Leaving marks on trees and such is not writing. It is not the transcription of spoken language. We have examples of this kind of symbol-placement on ancient cave art stretching far back into the ice age. It is not considered writing.
  - shakna 2y ago
    Written language is rarely just a transcription. It usually has a number of distinct differences in both lexicon and syntax. There are languages that are only written. Art is not writing, true. Distinct symbols and syntax are required for writing. But it need not be transcription of anything spoken.

mistercheph 2y ago

*that we've found.

atentaten 2y ago

There was an article 3 days ago that said the oldest known writing system was from Syria: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42224330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42224330

wongarsu 2y ago
That's the earliest alphabetic writing system. The Sumerian writing system started out pictographic (like hieroglyphs), and predates that Syrian find by about 800 years. It became less pictographic over time, and that Syrian site is only 500 miles from the Sumerian empire. My amateur speculation would be that trade with Sumer brought writing to Syria and they developed the idea in a different direction, arriving at this alphabetic system.
singularity2001 2y ago
that was about the oldest alphabet, not writing system

TheRealPomax 2y ago

Title should be "How the Ancient Sumerians Created the World’s First Writing System"

wongarsu 2y ago
HN automatically removes the word how from the start of titles. A controversial choice, but I don't see a big issue with it in this case

hosh 2y ago

How does Göbekli Tepe change our understanding on the rise of civilizations, including Mesopotamia?

AlotOfReading 2y ago
Gobekli tepe isn't nearly as exciting as popular media makes it out to be. It's an extremely early example of amazing monumental architecture, but neither unique (it's one of many sites from an archaeological culture in the area) nor the oldest. In general, Northern Mesopotamia where GT was seems to have evolved as a separate, contemporaneous urban tradition from southern Mesopotamia and Sumeria. It seemingly developed in a different way, with distinct architectural styles, social organization, and politics.
- adastra22 2y ago
  What monumental architecture is older than Göbekli Tepe?
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    That's a very different question than what I said. The word "monument" in archaeology denotes a mental relation between the human and the space modified by the structure. It's not something inherent to the structure itself. You can have structures that are monumental that we can't easily identify as such today (many burial mounds were like this), structures we see as monumental that the original inhabitants would not have (some midden heaps, tells and urban centers), or monumental structures with no physical components like the Nazi's Cathedral of Light. Gobekli Tepe is monumental in an extremely obvious way, which means GT Layer III constructions are the earliest securely dated structures that are obviously monumental. If that's what you mean, I agree. The oldest parts of nearby Karahan Tepe are probably of similar age from archaeoastronomical evidence, but aren't as well preserved or securely dated. Tell Qaramel is much older than GT and has large constructions that some have argued were monumental. The monumental relationship isn't as clear as GT though. Tells themselves can often be monumental and we have many tells older than GT. Other sites from the same or earlier periods (PPNA) as GT layer III like the tower at Jericho or the communal structures at Cemka hoyuk, Jerf el-Ahmar and Tell Abr may not have been monumental in the same way, but were large constructions involving large amounts of manpower. I'll let you make your own decisions about whether any of these count as monumental. I'm just emphasizing that Gobekli Tepe isn't a totally standalone precursor that's wildly distant from anything else we've found. It's an old and beautiful site that existed within the broader context of an entire landscape of early neolithic structures.

blastro 2y ago

Anyone here ever read The Urantia Book? IMO, it's truly fascinating, and brushes up against this post

krapp 2y ago
Ah yes, the doctrine of the Sleepytime Tea cult. It's racist, eugenicist mystical woo-woo nonsense, and not worth discussing in a thread about actual history.
- blastro 2y ago
  yeah it's a pretty wild book. disagree that it's not worth discussing, however

singularity2001 2y ago

describing the surrounding countries as barbarian is such a bad narrative given what we now know about the Jiroft, Elamite, Harappan and Egyptian culture.

ghjfrdghibt 2y ago
Isn't this a book with extracts from documents written near 5000 years ago?
adastra22 2y ago
Those cultures postdate this part of the chronology by about a thousand years. And in any case, the article is just quoting what the records say.

deleted 2y ago

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bargainbot3k 2y ago

[flagged]

scoofy 2y ago

We can’t know they were the first. We can’t even know what the idea of a singular Sumerian culture or civilization was. It’s fine to speculate, but it’s pointless to just decide that our speculation is fact when there is absurdly huge numbers of pre-historic people who may have stumbled upon writing, but never care about permanence. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the proposition: “Ancient Sumerians probably created the first writing system”

adastra22 2y ago
Why? We have no records of other writing systems that have been conclusively dated to be earlier, and in this case (unlike others, e.g. Chinese) we DO have a very clear record of the development of the script, from accounting symbols to pictograms to ideograms to phonetic transcription. It definitely did not derive from an earlier script, as we see the progression of development in isolation. So why can't we call it the first?
- verisimi 2y ago
  The emphasis is on 'know'. This is epistemology and logic. Do you know you are sitting on a chair? Yes. Do you know your birthday? No, in so far as you cannot personally verify it, as you do not recollect that time. It is fine to assume all sorts, that your birthday is as your parents say, that sumerians are the oldest civilization, etc, but history, esp. ancient history is not knowledge, and can never be 'known'. Using 'probably' indicates that this is one's best hypothesis, but doesn't overstate the case (nor mislead) by stating it as an indisputable, known fact.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    Outside of a philosophy class, 'know' takes on quite a bit more pragmatic meaning which is perfectly appropriate here.
    - lukan 2y ago
      And inside philosophy class, I would argue, that the knowlege of the chair your are sitting on, is also not so much more confirmed and solid knowledge, than ones own birthday.

alsetmusic 2y ago

I will once again recommend the Fall of Civilizations Podcast. It's incredibly informative. Here's the ep on the Sumerians: https://soundcloud.com/fallofcivilizations/8-the-sumerians-fall-of-the-first-cities https://soundcloud.com/fallofcivilizations/8-the-sumerians-f...

insane_dreamer 2y ago

The Chinese assert that they in fact started the first civilization, before the civilizations of the Tigris/Euphrates, Nile, or Indus. I never had the time to really dig into it to evaluate the arguments, but I don't think it's correct because the Shang Dynasty is usually placed around 1600 BC while Sumer is dated around 3000 BC (or even earlier). So I don't know how the Chinese claim they were first. But I can tell you from living there, that it is very widely and very firmly believed as fact.

adastra22 2y ago
The "5,000 year" claim is based purely on mythology. The archeological evidence makes 3500 - 4000 years more likely. In other words: the mythical events that happened 5000 years ago were likely oral history retellings of events that actually happened 3500 - 4000 years ago. Chinese history history certainly isn't much older than about ~2000 BCE, and that was prehistory as Chinese writing didn't develop until around 700 years later. There are older archeological sites for sure, but these likely don't correspond to the specific "5000 years" mythological figures and events, and AFAIK these earlier cultures don't demonstrate monumental architecture, the hallmark of the technical definition of "civilization." Though to be fair, China is unique in having developed writing prior to monumental architecture. While writing was developing in China, the Great Pyramids were already 1,000 years old, and the great city walls of Uruk were 1500 years old. Cuneiform writing is older still. Göbekli Tepe had already had its golden era and had bee abandoned for 6500 years by the time the first writing started to develop in China. China is not the oldest civilization. It is barely even in the running, and only if you take the mythological 5000 years at face value. Comparing archeological evidence, ancient china isn't actually that ancient, compared to the Middle East. I know it's widely believed there that China is the oldest civilization. But it's a laughable claim.
Hilift 2y ago
China has a lot of fertile ground for archaeological discovery. "The tomb, designated M27, is located in the Wangzhuang ruins in Yongcheng city and dates back to the middle and late periods of the Dawenkou Culture (4000 BCE-2600 BCE), a Neolithic culture in ancient China." https://archaeologymag.com/2024/10/5000-year-old-royal-tomb-in-central-china/ https://archaeologymag.com/2024/10/5000-year-old-royal-tomb-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawenkou_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawenkou_culture

deleted 2y ago

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mapcars 2y ago

How true is that? I see people talking about Sanskrit being 3 to 5 thousand years old. Or was it not a written at that time?

prosody 2y ago
The oldest Sanskrit text, the Rigveda, is usually dated to 1500 BC as an oral tradition. It wasn't written down until much later. The oldest surviving unambiguously Sanskrit writing is from 100 BC, using the Brahmi script. It actually isn't the surviving oldest Indic written language either, the Edicts of Ashoka date to 300 BC and are texts written using various scripts and vernacular languages.

rvalue 2y ago

someone should checkout nilesh oak

senderista 2y ago

Highly recommend the "Tides of History" podcast (hosted by an actual historian who keeps up with the field), which has several episodes on Mesopotamian civilization. https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/ https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/

WalterBright 2y ago

"A representational writing system has significant limitations. It is not practical to have a symbol for everything. The symbols must mean the same to all who use the writing. Users must memorize thousands of these symbols and must also be familiar with that which is being expressed. Tenses, cases, and voices are mostly impossible to depict." No icons for me. I'm more evolved!

WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago

for egypt to turn into sand, there must have been a cataclysmic event that burried much of the ancient history "who was first" doesn't make much sense when you know we are missing most of the data "the first of the last 5"