121–130 of 199 posts
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.
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…
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. Göbekli 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.
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 c…
So why can't we call it the first?
describing the surrounding countries as barbarian is such a bad narrative given what we now know about the Jiroft, Elamite, Harappan and Egyptian culture.
How 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 develop…
"...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.
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.
"...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.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm intrigued by the possibility of Sumerian-level civilization existing prior to the Younger Drias.