[HN Gopher] Archaeologists discover 4k-year-old ancient city in ...
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Archaeologists discover 4k-year-old ancient city in Iraqi desert
Author : andyxor
Score : 55 points
Date : 2021-08-13 17:37 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theartnewspaper.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theartnewspaper.com)
| pythonlion wrote:
| maybe its the lost city of Akkad. capital of the first empire
| andyxor wrote:
| this is just 30km from Ur, I thought Akkad capital was more to
| the north , in the traditionally Akkadian territory
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_Empire#/media/File:Em...
|
| btw this is great series on that time (and what preceded it)
| "The Sumerians - Fall of the First Cities"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA
| lostlogin wrote:
| Thank you. I'm always on the hunt for good archeology TV. The
| Netflix show ' Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb' was great and
| good for kids too. Much of Time Team was as well.
|
| I also enjoyed one on Must Farm - I believe it was this one.
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sX3bqmxD298
|
| Far too many searches for shows end up with crackpot 'Aliens
| did it' type scenarios, which irritates.
|
| Have you any other recommendations?
| andyxor wrote:
| not really, just falling into wikipedia & youtube rabbit
| hole, just found out that the biblical 'Cain & Abel' story
| could be an echo of earlier Sumerian myth of the Courtship
| of Inanna and Dumuzid, or even earlier one of the god Enlil
| "choosing the Farmer", and generally goes back to the pre-
| historic agriculture revolution which divided the settled
| farmer and the wandering hunter-gatherer
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain_and_Abel
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inanna#Courtship_of_Inanna_an
| d...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlil#Enlil_Chooses_the_Farme
| r...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_between_Winter_and_Sum
| m...
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Nice rabbit hole. To add to this, pretty much all pre-
| exodus biblical stories and myths have parallels in
| Mesopotamian myths, likely having originated there.
| pythonlion wrote:
| most famous is flood story and creation myth which have
| big similarity with the bible. also Habiru/afiru people
| have been theorized to be ancient Hebrew. also big
| parallax between Baal and the bible god and many
| traditions that were common all over the ancient near
| east, as well as myths.
| mwaitjmp wrote:
| Yes indeed! This is really fascinating.
|
| This comes to us via the epic of Gilgamesh[0], perhaps
| written around 2100 BCE.
|
| Small extract:
|
| " Ea commanded Utnapishtim to demolish his house and
| build a boat, regardless of the cost, to keep living
| beings alive.
|
| The boat must have equal dimensions with corresponding
| width and length and be covered over like Apsu boats."
|
| There is an excellent in our time episode which covers
| this epic, the Sumerian language and translation which I
| found one of the most interesting episodes they have made
| [1].
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b080wbrq
| pythonlion wrote:
| Dilmun[0] a ancient city contemporary to Akkadian culture
| in todays Bahrain was the place where that Utnapishtim
| was set to live forever and other similarities in
| mythology with Garden of Edan, although it was a great
| culture by itself.
|
| Cedar Forest [1] in Lebanon was a sacred place in the
| ancient world and had big appearance in Gilgamesh story.
| the forest was famous for its premium tress to build
| temples in some of the cultures around and the most
| famous one was the legendry the temple of Solomon. also
| Ugarit was a city where many interesting texts were found
| with huge similarity for later bible story
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilmun [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedar_Forest
| hiddencache wrote:
| Not TV, but something I used to look at every time I was at
| the British Museum. There's a virtual tour here: https://ww
| w.britishmuseum.org/collection/galleries/assyrian-...
| wswope wrote:
| Not the person you replied to, but as someone with very
| similar tastes, there's a Time Team spinoff called "Extreme
| Archaeology" that's pretty good, and some BBC specials with
| "Lost Kingdoms of [Region]" titles that I found scratched
| the same itch.
| pythonlion wrote:
| on YouTube 3 channels I really recommend : history with CY
| - very easy to follow animated videos and great narration ,
| Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages - have everything
| and good quality, also talk about mythology. World of
| Antiquity - most scientific vibe
| christkv wrote:
| Tides of history podcast is great and talks a lot about
| ancient civilizations from all over the world.
| zetazzed wrote:
| Wondrium (formerly the Great Courses) has many excellent
| related series. Academic but very watchable. Like a 20
| lecture series on the history of Jerusalem. I particularly
| liked their series on the Etruscans:
| https://www.wondrium.com/the-mysterious-etruscans
| hiddencache wrote:
| I remember learning that cuneiform isn't an alphabet and doesn't
| have characters, but rather characters to write syllables so it
| could be used to spell English or Chinese.
| pythonlion wrote:
| Its more complicated then that. for example Akkadian is a
| language that used the Sumerian cuneiform. the way they used it
| was divided into two. Sumerian was written in a simple way that
| in which every word have unique symbol. the first advancement
| in written happened with the second written language Akkadian
| as so: first, because of many words in Sumerian had only 1
| consonant the Akkadians used the symbol of that word to
| represent 1 consonant. let say the world Ki in Sumerian meant a
| star and had a symbol * you can use that symbol in you language
| to write *d and read it "kid" (but you also need a sign for d,
| I don't have real example). second the used complete Sumerian
| symbols but read them in Akkadian like Korean used Chinese
| symbols until 1500. this got evolved until the Assyrian which
| used old Akkadian system and the new (normal) alphabet system
| that was invented by the Phoenician long time after.
| philipov wrote:
| Japanese is a better example than Korean. Hanzi/Kanji are
| Chinese ideographic characters adopted by Japan and still
| used today. But Chinese is an 'analytic' language that uses
| grammatical words instead of conjugation (much like most of
| English). Japanese words have significant and complex
| morphology depending on the grammatical context, and Chinese
| characters aren't well suited for writing that.
|
| Ideographs aren't great for languages where the same word is
| written differently depending on the tense, case, person, etc
| (like English '-ed' for past tense; 'is' vs 'was'). They're
| good when you have a distinct word for expressing those
| things (like English 'will' for future tense).
|
| The Hiragana syllabus was developed to write the grammatical
| parts of words. It was developed by taking existing Chinese
| characters, just like you described with Akkadian, and
| simplifying them to make them easier to write. Many Japanese
| words will contain a mix of writing systems, with the root of
| the word written in ideographic Kanji and the grammatical
| conjugation written in syllabaric Hiragana.
|
| And there's also Katakana which is a syllabus of even further
| simplified characters derived from Hiragana, which is used
| for writing loan words not derived from either Chinese or
| Japanese.
|
| It's of course a bit more complicated and messy than just
| what I described, but that's the gist of it.
| DFHippie wrote:
| The number of symbols a syllabary would have to have to
| represent all the syllables of Sumerian (and Akkadian and
| Babylonian and whatnot) and both English and Chinese is
| monstrous. English has syllables like "strengths". Chinese has
| four tones.
| tasogare wrote:
| I wish people could stop spreading lies about writing systems;
| giving 3 false information in a single sentence is quite a
| feat. Of course cuneiform writing is a set of characters, a lot
| of which being encoded in Unicode starting at U+12000
| codepoint. One character doesn't equate a syllable, some even
| are unpronunced (determiners), and the phonology of Sumerian
| make its a poor way for its writing system to transcribe
| English.
| macintux wrote:
| It's entirely possible to correct someone politely, and it's
| strongly encouraged here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| tasogare wrote:
| My comment isn't unpolite in any way. On the other hand
| your patronizing comment is rude, so it would be good you
| start applying to yourself what you are preaching.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > giving 3 false information in a single sentence is
| quite a feat.
|
| I'm with macintux. I think that was rather rude. Nor do I
| think macintux was patronizing.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Iraqi researchers get to do their work on a 4k year-old tablet,
| while I'm stuck with a 1080p flat screen from 2016? I should
| change career!
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