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11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

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Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#71

Post by pazimzadeh »

asdff wrote: post #33
lproven wrote: post #8

The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing about 5000-5500Y ago. This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today. Mind-boggling.

Writing seems like it should be far more ancient than we ought to assume. You make some tally marks to count something, show someone else how to read your tallys, now you have a proto writing system. All you need is to iterate more symbols describing more things to scale it out, and this sort of thing seems like it would snowball over time and generations. Seems like there ought to be countless ancient proto writing…

Probably happened on wood, which wasn’t preserved

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#73

Post by AngryData »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #53
MomsAVoxell wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years. Let that sink in! It is extraordinary to me that they don't get as much clout as they deserve for maintaining human civilization for so long. They literally evolved cryptologically sound techniques for maintaining their history - through fires, floods, calamity and Mother Nature. We can't even keep our stor…

> the same stories orally for 40,000 years How is this confirmed without records?

It isn't confirmed but their stories do match some geological and enviromental events going back that far.

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#74

Post by ericmay »

0xffff2 wrote: post #31
retrac wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire. It's due to the historiography of western civilization that for so long always traced its origins back to Greece (and Cleopatra was, of course, Greek.) Compare to Mesopotamia, Sumer mentioned by the parent comment. There may be more surviving cuneiform literature than Greek and Latin. The…

I really hate that I'm even typing these words right now, but wouldn't this be one of the few fields where modern LLMs would potentially provide a real capability that was previously lacking? I'm imagining an LLM might be able to provide rough first pass translations and provide hints about which specific tablets might be most interesting for a human that can't possibly look at them all.

Why would you hate that you're typing those words? Technology is useful and neutral, and if we have good uses for it like it seems so here, let's do it! :)

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#75

Post by tootie »

asdff wrote: post #33
lproven wrote: post #8

The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing about 5000-5500Y ago. This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today. Mind-boggling.

Writing seems like it should be far more ancient than we ought to assume. You make some tally marks to count something, show someone else how to read your tallys, now you have a proto writing system. All you need is to iterate more symbols describing more things to scale it out, and this sort of thing seems like it would snowball over time and generations. Seems like there ought to be countless ancient proto writing…

We can presume with near certainty that there are vast quantities of lost artifacts from lost civilizations of early humans that were crafted from organic matter that have just deteriorated to dust. We say "Stone Age" only because stone artifacts are the only to survive. You can assume there were orders of magnitude more and more sophisticated artifacts and art works made from wood or mud or skins that are just gone forever. It's also entirely possible some of those artifacts contained something akin to written language but whatever it was is long gone.

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#76

Post by inanutshellus »

exhumet wrote: post #34
asdff wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing seems like it should be far more ancient than we ought to assume. You make some tally marks to count something, show someone else how to read your tallys, now you have a proto writing system. All you need is to iterate more symbols describing more things to scale it out, and this sort of thing seems like it would snowball over time and generations. Seems like there ought to be countless ancient proto writing…

they have found tally markers on bones and other objects like that, so yeah you would be correct, i guess it really comes down to what "writing" is i guess?

My first thought was that I'd argue that tally marks are "counting" not "writing"

...but...

if "writing" is the act of conveying ideas through markings then... I guess it is kinda writing.

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#77

Post by stevenwoo »

asdff wrote: post #33
lproven wrote: post #8

The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing about 5000-5500Y ago. This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today. Mind-boggling.

Writing seems like it should be far more ancient than we ought to assume. You make some tally marks to count something, show someone else how to read your tallys, now you have a proto writing system. All you need is to iterate more symbols describing more things to scale it out, and this sort of thing seems like it would snowball over time and generations. Seems like there ought to be countless ancient proto writing…

The book The Language Puzzle delves into this a bit - even our closest genetic primate cousins appear to lack the physical adaptations in both brain and voice box/mouth to develop verbal language and written language is a step farther, other species show some signs like cetaceans and elephants. There’s a bit of speculation in there that advanced hand tools and language may have been coincident (from archaeological evidence with close time stamps) and that still took a very long time.

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#78

Post by doodlebugging »

ks2048 wrote: post #55
adityapatadia wrote: post #7

What a downgrade. We were riding leopards back then!

And leopards were riding humans. Image on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe

I'm not sure I would call that riding. With all the poses I suspect this was some odd-ball cult practice. I'm sure the archaeologist who had to polish that knob on that anthropomorphic figure in that one panel #3 has some good stories. Probably significant that its the smoothest part of that figure.

The old joke about what they call a chicken fucker in Oklahoma comes to mind here except I think those pre-Turks were cavorting with leopards.

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#79

Post by inanutshellus »

ericmay wrote: post #74
0xffff2 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate that I'm even typing these words right now, but wouldn't this be one of the few fields where modern LLMs would potentially provide a real capability that was previously lacking? I'm imagining an LLM might be able to provide rough first pass translations and provide hints about which specific tablets might be most interesting for a human that can't possibly look at them all.

Why would you hate that you're typing those words? Technology is useful and neutral, and if we have good uses for it like it seems so here, let's do it! :)

because it's a fad-ish response right now.

A decade ago every "omg just use [answer]!" was to suggest blockchain solve your problem.

Every possible problem seemed to have a solution that involved blockchain.

... now that "[answer]" is always "AI".

So I get his sense of cringe... while also acknowledging I had the same thought. We've never been better at pattern matching, pattern identification, OCR, translating across languages... seems like a great use of an LLM.

Re: 11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

#80

Post by doodlebugging »

hluska wrote: post #12
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #2

>> Less than 12 miles away from Karahan Tepe, a high relief of a man gripping his phallus flanked by two roaring/biting leopards carved into the stone is the earliest narrative scene ever discovered. So, er, what is the um narrative conveyed by this scene?

There are pictures available. I’m certainly not an expert but he’s holding his stomach in one hand, giving himself a good tug with the other and looks somewhere between scared and confused. The leopard on the left is all smiles. There’s another dude standing a few figures away with his back turned to old tug-a-lug. He’s holding something and looks kind of ashamed though I could be reading that into the image since it…

After looking at the 3D relief of the guy with his pecker in his hand I feel like this was carved in the period immediately preceding the abandonment of the site in pre-history. I base that on the definition of the outlines of the leopards. It appears that initial work had started on giving each of them a 3D view as they are cut in along the margins of the belly and back. Maybe the entire panel would've been a 3D relief had the people been around to complete it.

Something came along and compelled these people to abandon the site or they were killed off by a different group. Very interesting anyway why a group would put so much effort into constructing these sites without the sites being places where they lived. I think I read somewhere that there is no evidence to suggest that anyone ever lived there. They were places where people gathered. I could be wrong though.

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