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Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

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Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#111

Post by Aachen »

austin-cheney wrote: post #32
7thaccount wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

> 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

Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#112

Post by abeppu »

galleywest200 wrote: post #104
abeppu wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

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.

Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#114

Post by insane_dreamer »

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.

Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#115

Post by insane_dreamer »

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,…

> 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)

Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#116

Post by insane_dreamer »

saghm wrote: post #35
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "city" is a specific type of "settlement" -- one that has walls and can't produce its own food.

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…

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)

Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#117

Post by insane_dreamer »

ch4s3 wrote: post #102
mistercheph wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*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.

Tenochtitlan didn't have walls because it already had natural defenses (water); so that's a particular case.

Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#118

Post by samatman »

myriadoptimum wrote: post #25

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 developmen…

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.

Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#119

Post by Tuna-Fish »

openrisk wrote: post #17

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 r…

> 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.

Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system

#120

Post by krapp »

blastro wrote: post #87

Anyone here ever read The Urantia Book? IMO, it's truly fascinating, and brushes up against this post

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.

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