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The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing about 5000-5500Y ago. This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today. Mind-boggling

by lproven 2mo ago

The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing about 5000-5500Y ago. This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today. Mind-boggling.

Insanity 2mo ago
one of those mind-boggling timeline comparisons I sometimes think about is Cleopatra and the Pyramids. The Giza pyramids were built around ~2600 years _before_ Cleopatra. And she's about 2000 years removed from us today. So to think that Egyptians and Romans in Cleopatra's era went to visit the Pyramids as a kind of tourist thing from a civilization 2 millennia removed from them is quite astounding. I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.
- GolfPopper 2mo ago
  There was still a wooly mammoth population on Wrangel Island in the Artic when the pyramids were built. They didn't go extinct until several hundred years later. https://www.theglobalwow.com/mammoths-alive-during-pyramids/ https://www.theglobalwow.com/mammoths-alive-during-pyramids/
- krapp 2mo ago
  >I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire. Shakespeare wrote a play about her and Elizabeth Taylor played her in a movie. The effect of modern media is 99% of the reason why Cleopatra feels more "contemporary" than, say, Hatshepsut (for whom plenty of artifacts exist) or even Nefertiti.
  - quuxplusone 2mo ago
    Cleopatra was a contemporary of Julius Caesar, and played a major role in his biography. (Which is why Plutarch wrote about her, which is why Shakespeare wrote about her, which is why 20th Century Fox made the film about her.) Julius Caesar is... a big name... in the West. Call that "the effect of media" if you like, but it's a thing. Hatshepsut and Nefertiti lived respectively 1400 and 1300 years before Cleopatra, and about 700 years before even the founding of Rome. I'm no expert, but seems to me that those two names completely disappeared from the historical record between say 1000 BC and AD 1800, and were rescued from obscurity only by 19th-century archaeologists.
    - Insanity 2mo ago
      +1, I think the real reason that Cleopatra is still living in our common culture is mostly because of her association with Julius and Marcus Antonius, as well as of course proximity to Augustus. I don't think Sharespeare would have mentioned her had she not figured prominently in the lives of main figures during the fall of the Republic.
    - tmtvl 2mo ago
      That's why Cleopatra is a (relatively) household name while Sophonisba is an obscure historical trivia question.
    - vintermann 2mo ago
      Nefertiti was subject to a "damnatio memorae"-campaign as I recall, along with the rest of her monotheist (Aten-worshipping) family.
- PowerElectronix 2mo ago
  There were archeologists in ancient Egypt studying ancient(er?) Egypt.
- retrac 2mo ago
  > I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire. It's due to the historiography of western civilization that for so long always traced its origins back to Greece (and Cleopatra was, of course, Greek.) Compare to Mesopotamia, Sumer mentioned by the parent comment. There may be more surviving cuneiform literature than Greek and Latin. The sheer volume is kind of hard to overstate. The Library of Ashurbanipal is a prime find but hardly the only one of its kind: 30,000 tablets including mostly-complete copies of epic poems, histories, dictionaries, and thousands of administrative and personal letters. And there's millions more tablets from thousands of other digs. And the crates and crates and crates of ordinary shipping receipts, if ever systematically studied, offer the potential to understand their society in ways we never will with classical antiquity. But most haven't been read. There aren't enough people who know Sumerian and Akkadian (and all the other languages written in cuneiform over its 3000 year history) and how to read cuneiform for the task to translate them all to be completed in our lifetimes. Stories of Mesopotamia do not always resonate. In fact they are often very alien and inscrutable. It's very hard to grasp the Mesopotamian mind. I'm unsure if this is lack of familiarity or because they really were so different, because in the western tradition they are the canonical Eastern Other, and shrouded with thousands of years of myth and misunderstanding. Despite, or perhaps because of, the strangeness, I found reading translations of Gilgamesh and Atra-Hasis to be revelatory and hope that my descriptions don't put anyone off. They're worth it. To this day "Babylon" has all sorts of associations, many of them unsavory. Which is rather unfair to them. The Babylonians had 360 degrees in their circles, 24 hours in their days, and when they looked up at the stars they saw patterns like the Twins (what the Greeks would borrow as Gemini), the Bull of Heaven (Taurus), and the Crawfish (Cancer), the Hebrew month of Tammuz is named after the Sumerian fertility god Dumuzid, and the Mesopotamians leave many other echoes in the later cultures, now that we know to look.
  - 0xffff2 2mo ago
    I really hate that I'm even typing these words right now, but wouldn't this be one of the few fields where modern LLMs would potentially provide a real capability that was previously lacking? I'm imagining an LLM might be able to provide rough first pass translations and provide hints about which specific tablets might be most interesting for a human that can't possibly look at them all.
asdff 2mo ago
Writing seems like it should be far more ancient than we ought to assume. You make some tally marks to count something, show someone else how to read your tallys, now you have a proto writing system. All you need is to iterate more symbols describing more things to scale it out, and this sort of thing seems like it would snowball over time and generations. Seems like there ought to be countless ancient proto writing systems not just in our species either. I guess most species aren't in situations where storing information like this offers much of a selective advantage. Maybe you can count an animal scent marking out its territory as a sort of proto writing system; it is only somewhat different than the plat map in your city hall. EDIT: Apparently neanderthals are thought to have used tally marks... (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-did-neanderthals-and-other-ancient-humans-learn-to-count/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-did-neanderth...)
- exhumet 2mo ago
  they have found tally markers on bones and other objects like that, so yeah you would be correct, i guess it really comes down to what "writing" is i guess?
  - inanutshellus 2mo ago
    My first thought was that I'd argue that tally marks are "counting" not "writing" ...but... if "writing" is the act of conveying ideas through markings then... I guess it is kinda writing.
    - asdff 1mo ago
      We get caught up with English being so removed from the underlying symbology, but the older you get in terms of language development the more it becomes a sort of "symbol that looks like ripples = water" sort of language, and the number system that goes along with that is often some form of tally marking that just happens to be in some other shape. A lot of east asian languages are still like this, basically stylized pictographs. And once it gets invented it snowballs as it is shared. How old were we when we learned to tally mark? 4-5 years old in the playground sandbox maybe? I remember thinking how great it was you slashed for 5 to just count blocks of 5 tallys. But its one thing to learn it from others and understand it. Another thing to come up with the system entirely. No one in the playground was probably clever enough to do that yet. We could learn but few could probably be the doers.
ccozan 2mo ago
Not sure what is mind boggling. The homo sapiens exists in the _current_ form ( physiologically and brain size, etc ) since at least 250k years. about 50k year ago abstract art was already in vogue.
MomsAVoxell 2mo ago
The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years. Let that sink in! It is extraordinary to me that they don't get as much clout as they deserve for maintaining human civilization for so long. They literally evolved cryptologically sound techniques for maintaining their history - through fires, floods, calamity and Mother Nature. We can't even keep our stories straight in the modern era for longer than 8 months.
- ViktorRay 2mo ago
  What are some good books or websites where one can read these stories? I am interested in learning more about them.
  - MomsAVoxell 2mo ago
    https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/marlaloo-songline https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/marlaloo-songline https://www.aboriginalculture.com.au/aboriginal-religion/ https://www.aboriginalculture.com.au/aboriginal-religion/ There are plenty of other places to start the journey but those will get you on the path.
- lisper 2mo ago
  > The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years. I know that this is commonly believed, but how could you possibly know?
  - bcraven 2mo ago
    I recommend everyone watch the documentary First Footprints[0], it is the most wondrous thing I have ever seen. The simple answer is that some storied reference events that happened that long ago.[1] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n6VJ5jq7zY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n6VJ5jq7zY [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/aboriginal-tale-ancient-volcano-oldest-story-ever-told https://www.science.org/content/article/aboriginal-tale-anci...
nashashmi 2mo ago
nitpicking: Sumerians were the oldest civilization to have been found using cuneiform or scripted writing. The actual civilization to have truly invented writing is not known.
- lproven 2mo ago
  Conceded. :-)

by lproven 2mo ago

The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing about 5000-5500Y ago. This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today. Mind-boggling.

Insanity 2mo ago

one of those mind-boggling timeline comparisons I sometimes think about is Cleopatra and the Pyramids. The Giza pyramids were built around ~2600 years _before_ Cleopatra. And she's about 2000 years removed from us today. So to think that Egyptians and Romans in Cleopatra's era went to visit the Pyramids as a kind of tourist thing from a civilization 2 millennia removed from them is quite astounding. I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.

GolfPopper 2mo ago
There was still a wooly mammoth population on Wrangel Island in the Artic when the pyramids were built. They didn't go extinct until several hundred years later. https://www.theglobalwow.com/mammoths-alive-during-pyramids/ https://www.theglobalwow.com/mammoths-alive-during-pyramids/
krapp 2mo ago
>I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire. Shakespeare wrote a play about her and Elizabeth Taylor played her in a movie. The effect of modern media is 99% of the reason why Cleopatra feels more "contemporary" than, say, Hatshepsut (for whom plenty of artifacts exist) or even Nefertiti.
- quuxplusone 2mo ago
  Cleopatra was a contemporary of Julius Caesar, and played a major role in his biography. (Which is why Plutarch wrote about her, which is why Shakespeare wrote about her, which is why 20th Century Fox made the film about her.) Julius Caesar is... a big name... in the West. Call that "the effect of media" if you like, but it's a thing. Hatshepsut and Nefertiti lived respectively 1400 and 1300 years before Cleopatra, and about 700 years before even the founding of Rome. I'm no expert, but seems to me that those two names completely disappeared from the historical record between say 1000 BC and AD 1800, and were rescued from obscurity only by 19th-century archaeologists.
  - Insanity 2mo ago
    +1, I think the real reason that Cleopatra is still living in our common culture is mostly because of her association with Julius and Marcus Antonius, as well as of course proximity to Augustus. I don't think Sharespeare would have mentioned her had she not figured prominently in the lives of main figures during the fall of the Republic.
  - tmtvl 2mo ago
    That's why Cleopatra is a (relatively) household name while Sophonisba is an obscure historical trivia question.
  - vintermann 2mo ago
    Nefertiti was subject to a "damnatio memorae"-campaign as I recall, along with the rest of her monotheist (Aten-worshipping) family.
PowerElectronix 2mo ago
There were archeologists in ancient Egypt studying ancient(er?) Egypt.
retrac 2mo ago
> I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire. It's due to the historiography of western civilization that for so long always traced its origins back to Greece (and Cleopatra was, of course, Greek.) Compare to Mesopotamia, Sumer mentioned by the parent comment. There may be more surviving cuneiform literature than Greek and Latin. The sheer volume is kind of hard to overstate. The Library of Ashurbanipal is a prime find but hardly the only one of its kind: 30,000 tablets including mostly-complete copies of epic poems, histories, dictionaries, and thousands of administrative and personal letters. And there's millions more tablets from thousands of other digs. And the crates and crates and crates of ordinary shipping receipts, if ever systematically studied, offer the potential to understand their society in ways we never will with classical antiquity. But most haven't been read. There aren't enough people who know Sumerian and Akkadian (and all the other languages written in cuneiform over its 3000 year history) and how to read cuneiform for the task to translate them all to be completed in our lifetimes. Stories of Mesopotamia do not always resonate. In fact they are often very alien and inscrutable. It's very hard to grasp the Mesopotamian mind. I'm unsure if this is lack of familiarity or because they really were so different, because in the western tradition they are the canonical Eastern Other, and shrouded with thousands of years of myth and misunderstanding. Despite, or perhaps because of, the strangeness, I found reading translations of Gilgamesh and Atra-Hasis to be revelatory and hope that my descriptions don't put anyone off. They're worth it. To this day "Babylon" has all sorts of associations, many of them unsavory. Which is rather unfair to them. The Babylonians had 360 degrees in their circles, 24 hours in their days, and when they looked up at the stars they saw patterns like the Twins (what the Greeks would borrow as Gemini), the Bull of Heaven (Taurus), and the Crawfish (Cancer), the Hebrew month of Tammuz is named after the Sumerian fertility god Dumuzid, and the Mesopotamians leave many other echoes in the later cultures, now that we know to look.
- 0xffff2 2mo ago
  I really hate that I'm even typing these words right now, but wouldn't this be one of the few fields where modern LLMs would potentially provide a real capability that was previously lacking? I'm imagining an LLM might be able to provide rough first pass translations and provide hints about which specific tablets might be most interesting for a human that can't possibly look at them all.

asdff 2mo ago

Writing seems like it should be far more ancient than we ought to assume. You make some tally marks to count something, show someone else how to read your tallys, now you have a proto writing system. All you need is to iterate more symbols describing more things to scale it out, and this sort of thing seems like it would snowball over time and generations. Seems like there ought to be countless ancient proto writing systems not just in our species either. I guess most species aren't in situations where storing information like this offers much of a selective advantage. Maybe you can count an animal scent marking out its territory as a sort of proto writing system; it is only somewhat different than the plat map in your city hall. EDIT: Apparently neanderthals are thought to have used tally marks... (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-did-neanderthals-and-other-ancient-humans-learn-to-count/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-did-neanderth...)

exhumet 2mo ago
they have found tally markers on bones and other objects like that, so yeah you would be correct, i guess it really comes down to what "writing" is i guess?
- inanutshellus 2mo ago
  My first thought was that I'd argue that tally marks are "counting" not "writing" ...but... if "writing" is the act of conveying ideas through markings then... I guess it is kinda writing.
  - asdff 1mo ago
    We get caught up with English being so removed from the underlying symbology, but the older you get in terms of language development the more it becomes a sort of "symbol that looks like ripples = water" sort of language, and the number system that goes along with that is often some form of tally marking that just happens to be in some other shape. A lot of east asian languages are still like this, basically stylized pictographs. And once it gets invented it snowballs as it is shared. How old were we when we learned to tally mark? 4-5 years old in the playground sandbox maybe? I remember thinking how great it was you slashed for 5 to just count blocks of 5 tallys. But its one thing to learn it from others and understand it. Another thing to come up with the system entirely. No one in the playground was probably clever enough to do that yet. We could learn but few could probably be the doers.

ccozan 2mo ago

Not sure what is mind boggling. The homo sapiens exists in the _current_ form ( physiologically and brain size, etc ) since at least 250k years. about 50k year ago abstract art was already in vogue.

MomsAVoxell 2mo ago

The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years. Let that sink in! It is extraordinary to me that they don't get as much clout as they deserve for maintaining human civilization for so long. They literally evolved cryptologically sound techniques for maintaining their history - through fires, floods, calamity and Mother Nature. We can't even keep our stories straight in the modern era for longer than 8 months.

ViktorRay 2mo ago
What are some good books or websites where one can read these stories? I am interested in learning more about them.
- MomsAVoxell 2mo ago
  https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/marlaloo-songline https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/marlaloo-songline https://www.aboriginalculture.com.au/aboriginal-religion/ https://www.aboriginalculture.com.au/aboriginal-religion/ There are plenty of other places to start the journey but those will get you on the path.
lisper 2mo ago
> The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years. I know that this is commonly believed, but how could you possibly know?
- bcraven 2mo ago
  I recommend everyone watch the documentary First Footprints[0], it is the most wondrous thing I have ever seen. The simple answer is that some storied reference events that happened that long ago.[1] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n6VJ5jq7zY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n6VJ5jq7zY [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/aboriginal-tale-ancient-volcano-oldest-story-ever-told https://www.science.org/content/article/aboriginal-tale-anci...

nashashmi 2mo ago

nitpicking: Sumerians were the oldest civilization to have been found using cuneiform or scripted writing. The actual civilization to have truly invented writing is not known.

lproven 2mo ago
Conceded. :-)