[HN Gopher] Ur
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Ur
Author : tosh
Score : 330 points
Date : 2022-11-12 14:33 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Not to be confused with "U'r", an easy typo to make in English.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Don't forget the Royal (board) Game of Ur [1]!
|
| Boards of peculiar shape are widely available now. Including the
| smartphone [2]
|
| 1. https://habr.com/ru/post/225631/
|
| 2.
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.runserver....
| noobermin wrote:
| Founded c. 3800 BC Abandoned after 500 BC
|
| Whenever I look into the history of ancient cities numbers like
| this boggle my mind, how many thousands of years a city saw
| culture and life and death only to fade into nothing. I feel like
| we're lucky to have language be as widespread as it is today
| because the chances that our lives will be forgotten is at least
| just a little less likely due to our written record. I just wish
| we chose media that lasted as long as clay tablets could.
| squaredot wrote:
| I can share that feeling. However, more than the thought of
| passing on what is ours, what such a chronological fact
| inspires in me is the awe of realizing that a city like this
| represents a history within history. And like that there are
| many more.
| frozencell wrote:
| How to reproduce that clean text indentation? Is it done
| manually?
| kibwen wrote:
| Indent by two spaces: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
| pfdietz wrote:
| At this point I want to recommend the Fall of Civilizations
| podcast, available on Youtube:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/FallofCivilizationsPodcast
| Strom wrote:
| Fall of Civilizations is absolutely amazing stuff, I double
| recommend it. It has an episode that covers this specific
| topic as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA
| pocketarc wrote:
| It really is incredible to think about the age of things like
| this. The countless generations, countless lives, struggles,
| cultural changes, fashions, trends.
|
| That city went from the equivalent of the year 0 to the year
| 3300. Us here in the common era are barely halfway through the
| life of that city, and look at just how much history we've been
| through. Their history will have been much, much longer, with
| far more generations of people, but it's all forgotten, to the
| point that to us it barely registers.
| _dain_ wrote:
| On the other hand, there were far _fewer_ people who lived
| through it. From 3000 BC to 500 BC the global population went
| from 14 million to 100 million. Today there are just short of
| 8,000 million people, i.e. 80-570x as many. On the day Ur was
| founded, there were fewer people living on the entire planet
| than there are living in some modern cities. So in terms of
| the number of human stories being told, we are racing past
| the ancients at hundreds of times the rate. We have far more
| history per second than they do.
| layer8 wrote:
| Yeah, from a back-of-the-envelope calculation less that 10
| million people lived in Ur over those 3300 years, possibly
| less than 1 million. More people than that live in a single
| city like New York today, and they arguably have access to
| a wider variety of experiences than the citizens of Ur had
| over all of the 3300 years taken together.
| s3000 wrote:
| The strange thing is that many backwater towns have more
| inhabitants than Ur and the sibling cities. And yet, nobody
| expects significant cultural innovation to be made in those
| places.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| You don't give "us" nearly enough credit.
|
| "We"'ve been through exactly as much history as Ur. History
| didn't begin in year 1 CE.
|
| Even if you mean "Western civilization's heritage", that
| stretches back _checks Wikipedia_ 5000 years through still-
| occupied Athens. "We" beat Ur handily.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Rome is getting close.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| There are remains of settlements at Jericho that are more
| than 10,000 years old. That just blows my mind.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Gobekli Tepe dates back to 9500 BCE.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
| eropple wrote:
| We have to also keep in mind that 3800 BCE is the founding of
| Ur, sure--and we have anatomically modern human remains from
| about _193,000 BCE_. Widespread control of fire seems to date
| to around 125,000 BCE. In that light? 3300 years is a blink.
|
| The span of human existence is marked by an ever increasing
| derivative in the rate of change. That said, barring
| cataclysm, I tend to think we've gotten much better (perhaps
| too much so) at recording things; I doubt our current era
| will be forgotten so much as categorized and filed away.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Why bar cataclysm? The fragility of our current electronic
| systems subject us to particular recording weaknesses that
| previous generations did not have.
| eropple wrote:
| Because we have a _lot_ more of them, spread out in a lot
| more places, and we invest in their upkeep. Writings from
| Minoan Crete were...in Crete. They weren 't then
| duplicated thousands of miles. The societal investment in
| data storage and redundancy isn't going away tomorrow
| under any reasonable circumstances; as just one example,
| Amazon S3 going down with full data loss would be
| necessitate something close to a catastrophe by itself,
| and it's pretty unlikely that there won't be continuance
| going forward for most of our major data repositories--
| again, barring civilization-denting or -destroying
| cataclysm.
|
| The "particular recording weaknesses" of the past were
| air, fire, and invaders. All still exist, but our
| recordings are generally more proofed against them than
| in the past. I tend to think that at a societal level,
| data preservation is on such a serious upward trajectory
| that categorization in order to _begin_ to find meaning
| will be the greater challenge for future anthropologists.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It's very hard to say whether electronic data
| preservation will resist going further. Technologies
| change and data formats are lost and forgotten. People
| make breaking changes and those who can't or won't adapt
| will lose their data.
|
| Lots of data will also be lost to encryption - still
| stored on some tape, but with no one alive to remember
| who may have owned the keys, where they may be stored,
| and what formats everything is.
|
| I would bet that a vast amount of the data stored today
| in S3 that will never be read again - either because it
| will be forgotten or actually deleted by Amazon (people
| stop paying their bills, companies go bankrupt).
|
| Not to mention, we already know of things like the source
| code of 10-20 year old games that people still play
| having been entirely lost.
| samatman wrote:
| An interesting thing about cuneiform is that a lot of it
| is just receipts.
|
| Those weren't intended to be kept around, but fires
| happen in cities, whether from a sacking or just back
| luck, and sometimes this would be hot enough to fire the
| clay.
|
| In conclusion, the future will have just an enormous
| amount of coroplast political signs to fish out of
| landfills and decode, along with the ingredients on
| aluminium cans.
| Tagbert wrote:
| What we know about UR is largely due to the large number of
| clay tablets with writing on them. Those tablets are very
| durable and while they are degraded by now, many can still
| be read. Our own writing is mainly recorded on paper that
| is much, much less durable than clay tablets. More recently
| most of our writing isn't even on paper but is stored
| electronically. It would not take much of a break in our
| civilization's continuity for the paper documents to
| degrade. We have lost several of Shakespeare's works even
| though civilization has been continuous since his time and
| that was only 500 years ago. Our electronic writing might
| blink out in a matter of hours.
| enchantments wrote:
| The clay tablets we have from the bronze age themselves
| seem only preserved by chance. They are found in store
| rooms in layers of cities that suffered widespread
| destruction, accidentally firing the clay records. So
| what we have is kind of sporadic, some letters from one
| king to another here, a bunch of apparently unremarkable
| palace economy bookkeeping there, then we tie it together
| with what we learn from archeology (and most exciting in
| recent times, from genetics). We also have a lot of stone
| stelas. But they certainly didn't leave us a well
| preserved big picture. I imagine future people would see
| the same story for us: A big stone inscription here, some
| documents accidentally printed on very high quality stock
| stored in an accidentally optimal place there, etc.
|
| Another fun glimpse: It has been speculated, based on
| evidence in the Uluburun shipwreck, that some bronze age
| societies used a wooden book-like object with wax or clay
| faces as an easily erasable notepad. Whoever owned that
| may have thought about it the same way we think about
| electronic records blinking out. Or maybe they didn't
| think about the future at all.
| loxs wrote:
| This fascination with "being remembered" is strange. We
| shouldn't optimize for being remembered (or being easy to
| reconstruct archaeologically). We should try to not
| vanish. If we do vanish, why do we care about being
| remembered?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| We will all die, and this time will pass - this is
| completely inevitable. There is no way to not vanish, the
| closest you can come is being remembered.
|
| Our civilization may well continue and prosper for a
| thousand years more, but unless we care about being
| remembered, they will have no idea what Pink Floyd, or
| Harry Potter, or A Hundred Years of Solitude, or an
| iPhone, or Linux, or anything else you consider important
| of our time were/was. Just like we have almost no idea
| about the pop culture or songs of people living in, say,
| the area of Berlin in the year 1022 was.
| aszantu wrote:
| All our blogs twitter posts even online art will be just gone
| or unrecoverable data chips
| fedeb95 wrote:
| Ancient cultures really put things into perspective. Tablets
| from thousands of years ago: they still persist. Will our
| culture, 5000 years from now?
| JW_00000 wrote:
| Surely, out of the billions of books that exist in the
| world right now, some will survive 5000 years. The Library
| of Congress is archiving many (but no longer all) tweets
| [1] and web pages. The British Library is similarly
| archiving tweets, podcasts, etc. The Internet Archive idem
| ditto, and many national libraries throughout the world are
| doing the same. If even a tiny fraction of that survives
| the next 10,000 years, there'll be much more remaining of
| the 21st century than of the 35th century BC.
|
| [1] https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-
| twitter-arch...
| tsol wrote:
| But the data on hard drives last a finite amount of time.
| And so do paper books. Time wears away at both.
| throwaway932489 wrote:
| Good thing we create things like "forever chemicals",
| nuclear waste, single-use plastics then I guess ;)
| luminouslow wrote:
| As you rightly pointed out our reords will be forgotten much
| more quickly because clay tablets and animal hides can last for
| centuries. None of our currently employed methods would last
| nearly as long.
| scubbo wrote:
| A counterpoint is that verifiably-perfect duplication of data
| (and non-invasive integrity checking of backups) with our
| current methods is orders-of-magnitude easier than older
| ones. Sure, any _particular_ modern-day record has a shorter
| shelf-life than a clay tablet - but the lifespan of "a piece
| of information recorded and actively upkept on digital media"
| is much longer.
|
| Swings and roundabouts. One approach lasts longer in a state
| of passive neglect, the other lasts longer in a state of
| active upkeep. As the meme says: it depends.
| pixl97 wrote:
| One that exists as long as the power stays on. Had the
| Carrington event happened 100 years later we'd have
| realized the weakness in this assumption.
| samatman wrote:
| Hard disks can park themselves with an immediate power
| cut, whether that corrupts the filesystem is mostly about
| the filesystem but it's been decades since a head crash
| was a realistic possibility. SSDs even more so.
|
| Contrary to your, frankly rather odd, assertion about
| digital media, they do not need power to store data. I
| did think tapes, DVDs, and USB thumb drives were common
| knowledge.
|
| A Carrington event is probably not a big deal these days,
| but let's pretend all the transformers blow, and the grid
| is down so badly that rural parts of North America don't
| get it back for two years.
|
| Data loss? Minimal. Any radiation which could get inside
| a hard drive or SSD and fry it, would kill us all, that's
| like a gamma ray burst. Some corruption from power spikes
| maybe, but for the most part, fuses and breakers work.
| retrac wrote:
| It is particularly poignant with Mesopotamian civilization.
|
| Sargon II was king of Assyria, ruling from 722 BC until death
| in battle in 702 BC. He almost completely reunified Assyria in
| the then millennia-old tradition of grand empire-building in
| the region. His assumed name Sargon was appropriate; Sargon I,
| Sargon the Great, was the first to have created a unified
| empire in Mesopotamia, nearly two thousand years earlier. The
| records of Sargon the Great's exploits were still around to
| read, and people could still read them. Although he was near-
| mythical by then, like Gilgamesh. The subsequent wars Sargon
| II's empire-building led to would effectively destroy the
| Mesopotamian political-economic system and leave it ripe for
| external conquest, first by Persians, and then Greeks,
| effectively bringing that 3000 year old civilization to a
| whimpering end over the next couple hundred years.
|
| His name was actually more like Sharrukin, or Sarrukin, in the
| Akkadian language. We call him Sargon II because that is the
| Greek version of the name recorded in the Bible and transmitted
| in the Western canon. He is mentioned only once, in passing, in
| the Book of Isiah. That single passing reference to him as King
| of Assyria, was everything that was known of him for 2500
| years, until the ruins of Dur-Sharrukin, his capital (destroyed
| during the mentioned wars) were excavated in the 19th century.
| Only the faintest echoes of the very last stages of Mesopotamia
| survived through the transmission of Western/Persian/Islamic
| civilization. Faded memories several generations old, by the
| time the earliest Greek and Jewish authors started writing
| things down. Like you say, it's a good thing clay lasts.
| withoutboats2 wrote:
| > That single passing reference to him as King of Assyria,
| was everything that was known of him for 2500 years, until
| the ruins of Dur-Sharrukin, his capital (destroyed during the
| mentioned wars) were excavated in the 19th century.
|
| I only have a layman's knowledge of this part of history, but
| this strikes me as unlikely. Surely something was known of
| him for some time in other sources, probably hundreds of
| years at least, before those source were also lost? The loss
| of knowledge is also second-order: we have lost knowledge of
| what was known to our predecessors.
| retrac wrote:
| Sure, I might have overstated the case a bit. There was
| scattered used of Akkadian as a written language into
| Alexander the Great's time; there was possibly some
| knowledge of that time in Babylon around then.
|
| Still, the end of Mesopotamian records is abrupt. There's a
| written record from prehistory until the wars of around 700
| BC, where the use of writing drops off but doesn't
| completely stop. But written records in Akkadian, the
| education of priests and scribes in Akkadian and Sumerian
| (itself dead for 2000 years by then as a purely liturgical
| language) basically stops after the fall of Babylon in 539
| BC.
|
| I'd note that writing in antiquity was deeply tied to both
| administration and to religion. The Persians were
| Zoroastrians; they do not seem to have oppressed, but state
| support went to Zoroastrianism and not the traditional
| Mesopotamian cults (and their scribes and schools). They
| imposed their own administrative structure on the conquered
| territories. Persian became the written standard, pretty
| much overnight. Akkadian seems to have ceased to be spoken
| within a couple generations among the ruling class, and
| within a few hundred more years it was not only dead but
| basically forgotten.
| layer8 wrote:
| > the chances that our lives will be forgotten is at least just
| a little less likely due to our written record.
|
| I'd be cautious to not underestimate the effects of dilution
| due to the sheer growing size of that written record. Given
| enough time, almost everyone will be effectively forgotten,
| like a drop of ink in the ocean.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I wonder what accurate population figures per decade would look
| like.
|
| At points during our recorded history Rome's population fell
| into the low tens of thousands.
| pfdietz wrote:
| At the Corning Museum of Glass, there's a display where the
| time series of populations of global cities have been
| rendered into glass, hanging vertically with time going
| upward.
|
| https://whatson.cmog.org/exhibitions-galleries/global-cities
| astrostl wrote:
| This makes me want to play Quake 1.
| pr0crastin8 wrote:
| My all-time favourite podcast episode [0] is on the Sumerians in
| the Fall of Civilisations series [1]. As a STEM-focused SWE, I
| can't overstate how captivating it was for me. The podcast's
| narrative style brings history alive, deeply humanising the epic
| scale of the accomplishments, greed and suffering of our past.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq1g8czIBJY [1]
| https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/
| camel_Snake wrote:
| Came here to mention this podcast as well. By far one of my
| favorites, and I do think the Sumerian episode is one of the
| best.
| whorleater wrote:
| I actually live close to here, and trek out occasionally to show
| friends the ziggurat. There's some live excavation going on
| sponsored by the UN, but what's wild is that every random rock in
| the area that you kick over has Sumerian writing on it.
| fedeb95 wrote:
| I've been fascinated by Sumerian culture lately, it must be
| awesome to have such close access to Ur. It's amazing how many
| artifacts are still not translated and for how much such a
| culture was forgotten.
| jl6 wrote:
| Can you tell a little more about those random rocks? Is nobody
| gathering them up and cataloguing them? Why is the UN
| excavating when there are artefacts lying there on the surface?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| They're only doing excavations necessary to
| maintain/stabilize the site and finalize the conservation
| plan they've been putting together since 2014.
| dom96 wrote:
| How's tourism in Iraq these days? Would you say the
| infrastructure is there for western visitors to come and see
| the Ziggurat?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Related, because I just happened to listen to a audiobook version
| of it:
|
| The Gilgamesh Epos, a mythic tale about an old Sumerian King. One
| of the oldest books in human history. Interesting to dive into
| the mindset of the time. To see what is different - and what is
| pretty much the same ..
|
| (the german audiobook from Klaus Buhlert is fantastic)
| jimhefferon wrote:
| I'm thinking I need a patron deity.
| layer8 wrote:
| I read that as "patreon deity" at first, which kind-of exist.
| ;)
| bentley wrote:
| Famously, Abraham, the grandfather of the man Israel, was from
| "Ur of the Chaldees" according to the Bible. Ur is very possibly
| the same place as Ur of the Chaldees (Wikipedia calls it "the
| current scholarly consensus" although I don't know enough
| archaeology to confirm that).
| layer8 wrote:
| It doesn't sound that conclusive on the Wikipedia page:
|
| > Ur is possibly the city of Ur Kasdim mentioned in the Book of
| Genesis as the birthplace of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim
| patriarch Abraham (Ibrahim in Arabic), traditionally believed
| to have lived some time in the 2nd millennium BC. There are
| however conflicting traditions and scholarly opinions
| identifying Ur Kasdim with the sites of Sanliurfa, Urkesh,
| Urartu or Kutha. [etc.]
| fedeb95 wrote:
| I've been reading "I Sumeri" by Pettinato and he says that it's
| very probable that they are both the same city. However I too
| am not an expert in this field
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| It's almost certainly the same place. Ur existed through many
| empires (Sumerian, Old Babylonian, Chaldean, etc...) and the
| era that the Torah was written in is most likely when southern
| Mesopotamia was known as "Chaldea" (ie. Of the "Chaldees").
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I think we can give the ancient writers their credit. Ur was
| famous then, its name linked to the one city.
|
| If future generations read that someone contemporary was born
| in an equivalently famous city like New York, they'll know
| where we mean.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| On Wikipedia, there are nine places called New York outside
| of New York state.
|
| It's pretty easy to imagine someone getting confused if you
| told them you're from New York Texas now, I wouldn't expect
| someone millennia from now to know for sure.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Plus there might be confusion with the many Yorks:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/York_(disambiguation)
|
| British settlers had zero imagination at all.
| _dain_ wrote:
| >British settlers had zero imagination at all.
|
| Surely you must admit that eastern Australia is the
| spitting image of South Wales. There's hardly a more
| appropriate name.
| samatman wrote:
| Yes, but this would be like saying they're from "New York
| of the Yankees", since we know that Ur was Chaldean.
|
| Little room left for doubt.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| If you're coming from New York, Texas to some village in
| Romania and founding a religion here, they may well
| misunderstand which speicifc city you mean, and believe
| (and write down) that you're coming from the much more
| famous NYC.
| lioeters wrote:
| The "Standard of Ur" mosaic is beautiful. Made almost five
| thousand years ago. Unfathomable length of time, and yet, the
| images are somehow relatable - workers, vehicles, musicians,
| dancers, cows, horses, armies..
|
| > [The mosaic is] from the royal tombs of Ur, is made of red
| limestone, bitumen, lapis lazuli, and shell. The "peace" side
| shows comfort, music, and prosperity. The "war" side of the
| Standard of Ur shows the king, his armies, and chariots trampling
| on enemies.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Standard...
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Standard...
| janandonly wrote:
| Another interesting point is that the city of Ur had a harbour,
| which connected it directly to shipping routes with India [1] and
| Bahrain [2]. The shipping connection with India meant that Ur was
| able to import a funny blue-coloured stone from Afghanistan,
| called Lapis Lazuli [3].
|
| Nowadays, Ur isn't even close to the sea, but appears to be about
| 200 km inland. That is what 2,5 thousand years of silt build-up
| will do...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation
|
| [2] Bahrain was known to the Sumerians (people of Ur and other
| southern Babylonian peoples) as "Dilmun".
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilmun
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapis_lazuli
| hrnn wrote:
| Tangentially related, there was a comic "Nippur of Lagash" based
| on a fictional Sumerian warrior. Total hit in my day:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nippur_de_Lagash
| kazinator wrote:
| Did someone read the German School of Lisp submission and look up
| "Ur"? :)
| dunefox wrote:
| I'm playing a board game set in ancient Mesopotamia called Tigris
| and Euphrates, It's old, but fantastic.
|
| https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/42/tigris-euphrates
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigris_and_Euphrates
|
| And the best part is that it's available on BGA:
| https://boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=tigriseuphrates
| Lio wrote:
| I'm a big fan of the Royal Game of Ur. Here's an update online
| version:
|
| https://royalur.net/game/#
| itronitron wrote:
| It's a fun game, I made a very basic physical copy a few
| years ago. Instead of dice, which I wasn't able to find a
| source for, I created a spinner with the same probabilities.
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