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Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

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Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#61

Post by mtalantikite »

canjobear wrote: post #37
mtalantikite wrote: post #33

> Without writing, there was no history. Uh, is there not plenty of evidence of oral traditions and histories spanning back millennia? There are Aboriginal stories that go back 7000 years. [1][2] Kind of weak to open with a statement like that. Obviously not as old, but just in Toumani Diabaté's family they've passed down their familial history for 70 generations. [3] Clearly history exists without writing. [1] https…

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.

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.

Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#63

Post by Amezarak »

zackmorris wrote: post #57
whatwhaaaaat wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was USA. It's hard to explain how the national debt eroded the government's ability to provide public education and other government services like it used to, but here's an attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_policy_of_the_Ronald_... 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…

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.

Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#64

Post by adrian_b »

mistercheph wrote: post #58
adrian_b wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fled…

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?

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.

Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#65

Post by Amezarak »

adrian_b wrote: post #64
mistercheph wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 t…

I get what you're saying, but I also think it's hard to overstate how different ancient cultures and experiences made people.

Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#66

Post by biorach »

mistercheph wrote: post #58
adrian_b wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fled…

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?

Their point is that hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers have no use for a writing system. A complex urban society does.

Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#67

Post by Amezarak »

davoneus wrote: post #45
austin-cheney wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#68

Post by biorach »

vehemenz wrote: post #13

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

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.

Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#69

Post by dunefox »

quotemstr wrote: post #23
weavie wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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.

Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#70

Post by dunefox »

mtalantikite wrote: post #61
canjobear wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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,…

> 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.

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