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Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
101–110 of 199 posts
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#102Earlier 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.
*All ancient construction that we've found and called cities had walls
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.
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#103[flagged]
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#104I'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…
... 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.or…
The first to have a writing system, as mentioned in the article.
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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.
> I never mentioned city,
Yes you did:
> first settled into fixed colonies/cities around 45,000 years ago
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What qualifies whether any fixed permanent or semi-permanent settlement is actually a city, town, hamlet, or village is entirely subjective. nope
I'm game. What is a city?
In the context of archaeology.... a good starting point would be
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344644569_Definitio...
Yes, the dividing lines are blurry.
No, it is not totally subjective
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#107Earlier 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…
Ahh ok so you got nothing. I figured so. Thanks for confirming!
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 tradit…
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.
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.
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#109How does Göbekli Tepe change our understanding on the rise of civilizations, including Mesopotamia?
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.
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#110We 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”