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?
Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
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Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#132How 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?
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.
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#133Earlier 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…
> 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:
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#134The 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…
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-...
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#135someone should checkout nilesh oak
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What monumental architecture is older than Göbekli Tepe?
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.
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
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.
Please, as if you have to ask. You’re already defensive about it, defending your chosen side with whataboutisms.
I’ll say it again: full of shit.
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
That's a lot of different kinds of definitions, some overlap, other disagree. Seems to me a similar problem with naming and categorizing -- whether it is something useful (as a framework for thinking through things), or for communication. They all create biases in how we see things, and it isn't as if it is something intrinsic to the known universe says, that is a city.
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#139We 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…
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 emphasis is on 'know'. This is epistemology and logic. Do you know you are sitting on a chair? Yes. Do you know your birthday? No, in so far as you cannot personally verify it, as you do not recollect that time.
It is fine to assume all sorts, that your birthday is as your parents say, that sumerians are the oldest civilization, etc, but history, esp. ancient history is not knowledge, and can never be 'known'.
Using 'probably' indicates that this is one's best hypothesis, but doesn't overstate the case (nor mislead) by stating it as an indisputable, known fact.
Re: Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm just jumping in on someone else's thread with my comment about Nacirema; those other points are made by other people.
'However, using the word "history" in a way different to historians is not going to uncover any blind spots.'
Yes it does. There are non-written, non-durable sources that would suggest a different story. A great example is the story of the Seven Sisters. Among oral traditions collected from around the world in different cultures, that story has remarkably high degree of agreement across variants of that story -- probably owing to the one of the Pleiades growing too dim to see with the naked eye, and witnessed around the world.
Even written sources can be overlooked because of narrative biases. I grew up with an Euro-centric world history only to find out that lands connected by the Silk Roads had a much longer history as the center of the old world.