[HN Gopher] Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
___________________________________________________________________
Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
Author : HR01
Score : 119 points
Date : 2024-11-27 13:15 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lithub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lithub.com)
| datadeft wrote:
| * 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 wrote:
| Isn't that redundant? It's like asking everyone to prefix every
| statement with "As far as I know..."
| xeromal wrote:
| [flagged]
| soulofmischief wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| psychoslave wrote:
| > There is no such thing as empirical truth the way you
| imagine.
|
| And statements misses the ability to hold an absolute
| truth. No, wait!
| datadeft wrote:
| As an anecdata most of my friends believe that we know
| everything about ancient history. They are also very eager to
| hear about other parts of human knowledge to be progressing,
| for example AI models. Yet, when it comes to history they
| have this sort of static view.
| ratorx wrote:
| Well, I can see how someone would naively think that was
| true, because only a fixed set of events have already
| happened in the past, so there is a correct answer.
|
| I think it also stems from the way it is taught in schools,
| where there is a lot of focus on memorising dates and
| events etc, rather than on the process of actually deriving
| them from sources of questionable trust.
|
| Also, the majority of focus in schools (in the UK) is on
| much more modern history and doesn't really focus too much
| on the really ancient stuff and the extra difficulties that
| arise from learning about it.
| cbogie wrote:
| it's kind of odd though to think about a kiddo learning
| history as the evidence allows it to be unfolded.
|
| they're brand new to being a human, and even then they
| aren't adult humans (i guess defined as such, post facto)
|
| seems like our brains are craving hard structural
| information to establish requisite coherency once fully
| 'weened off' by our family unit. so things are taught in
| the traditional scholastic type of way first, and then
| introduced to more scholarly approach later, revealing
| who is behind the curtain in oz.
| francisofascii wrote:
| Fair point, I think it depends on the certainty. I am just
| about 100% certain Neil Armstrong was the first human to walk
| on the moon, so "first" makes sense. Hillary and Norgay were
| the first "confirmed" climbers of Everest. The "confirmed"
| part is needed because it is reasonable that others before
| them made it without evidence. I am open to the possibility a
| civilization had a writing system before the Sumerians, and
| the evidence has been destroyed or not found yet.
| n4r9 wrote:
| I'm more than open to the possibility - I think it's very
| likely that _something_ existed beforehand which we don 't
| (yet) know about.
| seanw444 wrote:
| I'm intrigued by the possibility of Sumerian-level
| civilization existing prior to the Younger Drias.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Where are the city mounds?
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Right, but that's recent information. When talking about
| deep history, "that we know of" is effectively a given.
| There will never be true certainty.
| mistercheph wrote:
| We should openly discuss the epistemological standing of our
| claims.
|
| "The first day ever was last Thursday, according to this
| calendar."
| yieldcrv wrote:
| a significant portion of the US population believes the earth
| is 6,000 years old, tied to their religious sect and identity
|
| concepts such as Neolithic and Paleolithic fall on deaf ears
|
| getting just some people out of that funnel only to still
| have a static version of events is counterproductive as you
| are subverting a competing understanding of the world
|
| you are replacing unfalsifiable appeals to a Sky Daddy
| authority with falsifiable observations where a challenge is
| simply neglected
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| 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.
| abeppu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And it follows: how much of the artifacts of our present
| civilization will last 3,000 years for future archaeologists
| and anthropologists?
| matt_kirkland wrote:
| And that's why we have dumbcuneiform.com
| dang wrote:
| _Turn dumb tweets into cuneiform tablets_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36275974 - June 2023 (47
| comments)
|
| _Dumb Cuneiform_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526680 - Nov 2015 (16
| comments)
| vehemenz wrote:
| The Cucuteni-Trypillia megasites in Ukraine appear to predate the
| Mesopotamian ones by a few centuries, though they didn't have
| writing (apparently).
| biorach wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| these sites were in close proximity to the Vinca culture which
| did have some precursor of writing
| snapcaster wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I would like something like that, but I wouldn't want it to be
| run by the government.
| snapcaster wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_Rona
| ld_...
|
| 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
|
| 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.
| Amezarak wrote:
| The Department of Education did not exist in the US until
| 1980. It was created by Carter and signed into law in
| late 1979. Reagan took office in 1981.
|
| It of course had a predecessor going far back. At any
| rate, in 1980, the Department of Education had a budget
| of 14 billion. Today, it gets about ~80 billion. A quick
| Google claims that 14 billion in 1980 dollars is equal to
| 53 billion today. So the federal government seems to be
| funding education at much higher levels. Of course, most
| education funding is at the state and local level, not
| federal.
|
| This generally goes along with expectations, since the
| USA spends more per capita on education than almost any
| other country in the world at #5.
|
| I agree that there are major problems with education in
| the US, but more money is not going to solve them. It
| simply gets redirected into unproductive outlets and
| education "science" quackery like three-cueing. We could
| probably go back to 1980 levels of spending with the
| right reforms, and then look at doing things like 2xing
| teacher salaries and reducing classroom sizes.
|
| Beyond K12 stats are harder to track down, but
| "continuing education" and government-funded classes for
| adults are easy to find. And of course, we have the
| Internet.
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| Ahh ok so you got nothing. I figured so. Thanks for
| confirming!
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It's called sealioning.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
|
| > Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type
| of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing
| people with relentless requests for evidence, often
| tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a
| pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to
| have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject
| matter. It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith
| invitations to engage in debate", and has been likened to
| a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings. The
| term originated with a 2014 strip of the webcomic
| Wondermark by David Malki, which The Independent called
| "the most apt description of Twitter you'll ever see".
|
| The original comic:
|
| https://wondermark.com/c/1062/
| hn_version_0023 wrote:
| The only reason the US government isn't capable of this is
| because one party has decided that government doesn't work.
| Period. Thats it. Deciding a thing "doesn't work" because
| you _don't want it to work_ is called "being full of shit"
| Loughla wrote:
| I legitimately do not understand politicians, career
| politicians specifically, who run on a platform of fixing
| a broken government.
|
| After your first term, you are the broken government.
| Either you have done everything you can possibly do and
| it really is a mess, or it's just a cynical sound bite to
| get people to clap. Either way you should be able to
| provide concrete evidence of nefarious action.
|
| I don't get it.
| blululu wrote:
| Which party is that? The one that constantly tries to cut
| the funding or the one that constantly tries to reward
| and excuse failure? The republicans in congress
| threatening to cut programs they don't like is probably
| not helping things. But there are numerous state and
| local governments that are the exclusive domain of the
| democrats that do a lousy job without any Republican
| boogeyman in sight.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Plenty more republican states on federal welfare.
| California should stop paying for their laziness.
| PrismCrystal wrote:
| The Nordic countries have a longstanding tradition of state-
| run "folk high schools". In fact, in modern economies where
| it is harder for unemployed middle-age people to find new
| work, and AI might cause unemployment in more sectors, this
| kind of state intervention seems like a good way to keep
| adults doing something enriching instead of doomscrolling or
| drinking all day.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_high_school
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| The equivalent in america would be non credit personal
| enrichment courses at the community college. Though they
| specialize on a specific skill. Some are useful in daily
| life, others are hobbies. For a humorous example watch
| Parks and Rec season 2 episode 14.
|
| Which makes me take back what I said. I wouldn't mind if
| local government did it.
| ysavir wrote:
| YouTube is wonderful for that! Try PBS Eons for dinosaur and
| general fossil history.
| kansface wrote:
| Why not just read a book or two?
| quotemstr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| jbattle wrote:
| I love this question! I got curious about how ancient people
| interpreted stone tools. When did humanity first realize
| "cavemen" had come before?
|
| I saw this guy on youtube talking specifically about this
| topic. Im no historian but i felt like he gave it a serious
| grounded exploration (no ancient aliens!)
|
| https://youtu.be/4jRbHhOOjw4
| lores wrote:
| The Epic of Gilgamesh references him gloriously restoring
| ancient cities destroyed by the Flood. Of course, by the time
| is was written, Sumerian civilisation was already ~2,500-3,000
| years old, so it's hard to tell if Sumerians thought those
| cities were theirs, or someone else's.
|
| The ever-scholarly answerers on r/AskHistorians think that yes,
| they believed they were the first:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8oskfv/did_a...
| abeppu wrote:
| ... were the Sumerians the first? The first _what_? The article
| discusses the Uruk period, of maybe 4000 - 3000 BC.
|
| In the middle east, there had been millennia of settlement and
| agriculture by this point. Gobekli Tepe is apparently ~9000 BC.
| The Tower of Jericho was built around 8000 BC.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_prehistory
|
| Circa 7500 BC there were a bunch of significant sites:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Ghazal_(archaeological_sit...
|
| Did Sumerians not know about any of those preexisting sites in
| the broader region? Maybe they built bigger cities, but I don't
| think they lacked for evidence of older civilizations and
| sites.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| The first to have a writing system, as mentioned in the
| article.
| abeppu wrote:
| But quotemstr seems interested in something else, not
| specific to writing.
|
| > Past empires, lost civilizations, and ancient artifacts
| have always fascinated us.
|
| > 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.
|
| I think the Sumerians were not without crumbled past ruins
| of civilizations that covered broad swathes of territory,
| though they may not have been "empires". But also, to us
| "the Sumerians" can seem like a brief period in time. But
| the Uruk period is almost a millennia in duration. For each
| individual, it may have seemed that the world changed very
| little over the course of their lifespan, and by 3100 BC,
| each city would have felt very old to its inhabitants.
| openrisk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| A "city" is a specific type of "settlement" -- one that has
| walls and can't produce its own food.
| saghm wrote:
| 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.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Walls are generally not a formal requirement, but are
| implied so due to their commonality. All ancient cities,
| especially pre-civilization, had walls though, often
| several layers of walls built on top of each other as the
| given cities were pillaged and rebuilt.
|
| Its not confusing to anybody vaguely aware of ancient
| history.
| davoneus wrote:
| IIRC, the Sumerians (through the Akkadians perhaps) left
| records stating they had to build walls around their
| cities. Which to me certainly implies the Sumerians had
| cities without walls for some time. Pretty big deal that,
| to have recorded it.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Don't assume things not stated.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent
| Amezarak wrote:
| Cities subjected by some empire or another were sometimes
| forced to tear down their walls and there were perhaps
| periods of relative isolation and peacefulness during the
| founding of some cities where one wasn't immediately
| necessary, but even very ancient settlements commonly had
| at least palisades. There are probably some other
| exceptions; Sparta famously did not have walls under the
| philosophy that nobody should ever dare even try them,
| but they were also blessed by geography.
| mistercheph wrote:
| *All ancient construction that we've found and called
| cities had walls
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Neither ancient Rome nor Sparta had walls for centuries
| after their rise to prominence. A number of per-Colombian
| Andean cities didn't have walls. Tenochtitlan didn't have
| walls and it doesn't look like Cholula did either. And in
| the Indus Valley Civilization Harappa and Mohenjo-daro
| didn't have walls.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Tenochtitlan didn't have walls because it already had
| natural defenses (water); so that's a particular case.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I don't know about "required" but in ancient times walls
| were what typically defined the city as a "city" rather
| than simply an undefined agglomeration of dwellings /
| farms
|
| They were absolutely necessary as protection for stores
| of food (food storage being a defining feature of a city)
| austin-cheney wrote:
| According to Wikipedia it is 25,000 years ago and in Eastern
| Europe
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedentism#Requirements_for_per.
| ..
|
| The 45,000 years ago number I referred to earlier comes from
| sources that are not online. Either way, the start of human
| settlement occurred on the Eastern European plain during the
| ice age, which is far before anything in Anatolia or
| Mesopotamia.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > The 45,000 years ago number I referred to earlier comes
| from sources that are not online.
|
| Are you referring to a book, or unpublished academic work?
| Is there a particular scholar you have in mind?
| biorach wrote:
| > According to Wikipedia it is 25,000 years ago and in
| Eastern Europe
|
| The person you were replying to was asking about cities.
| The article you are posting is about Sedentism - "the
| practice of living in one place for a long time". The
| figure of 25,000 years ago is for the first evidence of
| permanent settlements. These do not fit anyone's definition
| of a city.
|
| The first evidence of cities are from Sumer, which is what
| this whole thread is about.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Look, I know this is confusing (no, it isn't).
|
| The person I replied to replied to me. I never mentioned
| city, but they injected the word _city_ nonetheless
| probably because they had no idea what they were replying
| to or what the words meant. What qualifies whether any
| fixed permanent or semi-permanent settlement is actually
| a _city_ , _town_ , _hamlet_ , or _village_ is entirely
| subjective.
| biorach wrote:
| > What qualifies whether any fixed permanent or semi-
| permanent settlement is actually a city, town, hamlet, or
| village is entirely subjective.
|
| nope
| hosh wrote:
| I'm game. What is a city?
| biorach wrote:
| In the context of archaeology.... a good starting point
| would be
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344644569_Defini
| tio...
|
| Yes, the dividing lines are blurry.
|
| No, it is not totally subjective
| olddustytrail wrote:
| > I never mentioned city,
|
| Yes you did:
|
| > first settled into fixed colonies/cities around 45,000
| years ago
| Aachen wrote:
| > comes from sources that are not online.
|
| As someone who grew up with the internet, I don't know
| whether to take this as a dismissive "trust me" (sorta
| religious) type of statement, or legitimate research that
| somehow nobody ever bothered to even reference online in a
| way that you could link it. Since you're not saying what
| the offline thing is, I'd guess the former but not sure
| myriadoptimum wrote:
| 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_Litto...
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| > 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 Diabate'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/10.1080/00049182.2015.10...
|
| [2] https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/edge-of-memory-9781472943279/
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toumani_Diabat%C3%A9
| canjobear wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-... -- the introduction in the published
| text is better than this one, but the gist is the same.
| dunefox wrote:
| > but it seems silly to me to say oral traditions aren't
| durable and that writing is the only way to get at history
|
| I mean, it is true. There are no oral traditions left of
| the Sumerians or the Assyrians that I know of. Meanwhile,
| you can find buildings and clay tablets and translate them.
| biorach wrote:
| > 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.
|
| no one said that
|
| but there is a definitional issue here - to reiterate the
| previous poster's point:
|
| > Historians use "history" as a technical term for events
| recorded in written and other durable records.
|
| That's how the word is defined by historians. It's not a
| value judgement on oral traditions.
|
| Your post is using the word "history" in a different way.
| You have some good points to make, but as long as you're
| using "history" in a different way to everyone else you're
| not going to get very far in conversation.
| hosh wrote:
| It's those kinds of paradigmatic biases that someone has
| written the satire, "Nacirema", to illustrate how
| "everyone else is saying it" can lead to blind spots.
| biorach wrote:
| Yeah, maybe. Like I said you have some good points to
| make.
|
| However, using the word "history" in a way different to
| historians is not going to uncover any blind spots.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > oral traditions aren't durable
|
| they aren't really durable as they are heavily distorted as
| they are passed down (thus "legends"); whereas with writing
| you could, for the first time, read the events as they were
| originally described at the time (whether the description
| was truthful in another matter, but there is no distortion
| in the transmission, though there is the question of
| translation of course)
| ordu wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "...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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| adrian_b wrote:
| This does not seem very likely, because earlier than this
| people did not really need a writing system. More precisely,
| they had no reason to believe that a writing system would be
| useful, so there was no pressure to invent one.
|
| In Mesopotamia we can see the evolution over many hundreds of
| years and even a few millennia from an accounting system that
| used a few symbols for the things that were recorded, to a full
| fledged writing system that was able to record any spoken
| sentence.
|
| Before the societies of Mesopotamia and Egypt, which required a
| complex management of the available resources, there was no
| need for accounting with written records for great quantities
| of varied goods.
|
| It is likely that for tens of thousands of years people have
| been able to make drawings that recorded useful things, like
| maps, and they probably have used some sets of symbols for
| various important things, like kinds of humans, kinds of
| animals, kinds of plants and so on.
|
| Nevertheless, it is very unlikely that any such set of symbols
| used in the distant past has ever been able to record any
| complete sentence spoken in their language, with all the
| grammatical markers that do not have a concrete meaning.
| mistercheph wrote:
| How do you know so much about the motivations of people that
| have been dead for tens of thousands of years? Maybe you can
| speak to the dead?
| adrian_b wrote:
| The people from fifty thousand years ago do not differ in
| any essential way from the people of today, except in the
| knowledge and in the set of skills that they were taught.
|
| Most human societies that have not seen a writing system at
| other people have never invented any writing system.
|
| All those that are likely to have invented writing
| independently (though for some of them it is not certain
| that they have not seen the writing used by others) have
| invented writing systems in contexts similar to those of
| Mesopotamia and Egypt, i.e. in a settled agricultural
| society where cooperation was required at a large scale and
| management and accounting of resources was necessary.
| Amezarak wrote:
| I get what you're saying, but I also think it's hard to
| overstate how different ancient cultures and experiences
| made people.
| biorach wrote:
| Their point is that hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers
| have no use for a writing system. A complex urban society
| does.
| shrubble wrote:
| I am reminded of the Polynesians creating a sort of "map" using
| the stick chart:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Islands_stick_chart
| hosh wrote:
| Agreed. Examples include the Inca civilization using knots to
| record complex information and accounts. Those won't last as
| long as burned clay.
| adastra22 wrote:
| We can follow the development of the Sumerian writing system,
| so we know it didn't derive from an older source.
|
| While nobody can prove there wasn't some civilization that had
| writing prior to Sumer (can't prove a negative), it stretches
| the imagination to think that a civilization ONLY ever wrote on
| perishable media and not on, say, pottery or building walls.
| Then died out without transmitting their invention to successor
| civilizations, all of which we can account for their
| development of writing.
|
| Also, what perishable media? The invention of papyrus was
| contemporary with Sumer's clay tablets.
| mistercheph wrote:
| *that we've found.
| atentaten wrote:
| There was an article 3 days ago that said the oldest known
| writing system was from Syria:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42224330
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| that was about the oldest alphabet, not writing system
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Title should be "How the Ancient Sumerians Created the World's
| First Writing System"
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How does Gobekli Tepe change our understanding on the rise of
| civilizations, including Mesopotamia?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What monumental architecture is older than Gobekli Tepe?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Anyone here ever read The Urantia Book? IMO, it's truly
| fascinating, and brushes up against this post
| krapp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| yeah it's a pretty wild book. disagree that it's not worth
| discussing, however
| singularity2001 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Isn't this a book with extracts from documents written near
| 5000 years ago?
| adastra22 wrote:
| 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.
| bargainbot3k wrote:
| Graham Hancock.
| scoofy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| alsetmusic wrote:
| 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-f...
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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. Gobekli 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 wrote:
| 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-...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawenkou_culture
| mapcars wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| someone should checkout nilesh oak
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-11-27 23:00 UTC)