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Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?

vectorian.be

71–80 of 97 posts

Re: Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?

#71

The idea that a list of kings from 4000 years ago would encodé global climate events for over 240.000 years is completely ludicrous. Astrology has a better grounding on reality than this idea. And the fact that all lengths are multiple of 600, is even more telling knowing that they counted in base 60

Most likely explanation is we're misreading some antique number system. Our interpretation of Sumerian numbering is tentative at best. The major indicator for accuracy was that early on a few different scholars converged on the same translation for the same tablets so we trust we got it right. The mathematical and astronomical tablet texts we have of Mesopotamia, where we understand the numbering very well, are much…

There is a table of squares from ≈2500 BC https://cdli.earth/artifacts/10678 that predates the earliest known copies of the Sumerian King List by a few centuries. With completely wrong values for the numerals, the math wouldn't add up: https://saalck.pressbooks.pub/mathhistory/chapter/vat-12593/ And many later kings on the list, in particular ones where we have independent evidence from inscriptions produced during their reigns, ruled for much more reasonable periods of a few years to a few decades. It's only the earlier kings that have ridiculous numbers. And at one point the list produces a subtotal of "24510 years, 3 months, and 3 1/2 days" for the 23 kings of the first dynasty of Kish, so the durations are hardly meant to be just some vague large number. (The half-day is contributed by En-tarah-ana, for unclear reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En-tarah-ana )

Re: Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?

#72
No, the kings list cant allign with anything but it's self and functioned as an internal cultural reference for the scribes, librarians, archivists, teachers, students, general beurocratic functionaries ,military and business, and was all in all an "about button" incorporated into a branded identity. They were aware of climate and weather changes and did everything they could through civil engineering mega projects and systems for food gathering,storage and distrubution to mitigate the varios ways that drought, disease, flooding, war, locusts, etc could destroy any single harvest in the field. They were also very fond of beer and partying ,wily business dealings, science and magic so trying to fit our current crisis into there mythologyis a bit lame.

Re: Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?

#73
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be more specific, I think most of us would like to have a "not the current tech thing" page. So a front page that isn't 50-90% LLM content in 2026. In 2020 that would be crypto. Etc

https://www.unslop.news/ has been a breeze of fresh air to avoid all the LLM news. I don't care so much about them but there's so much LLM-adjacent content that it requires actual effort to find the non-LLM stuff.

Thank you for recommending this to new people! I'm the developer :)

Re: Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?

#74
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most likely explanation is we're misreading some antique number system. Our interpretation of Sumerian numbering is tentative at best. The major indicator for accuracy was that early on a few different scholars converged on the same translation for the same tablets so we trust we got it right. The mathematical and astronomical tablet texts we have of Mesopotamia, where we understand the numbering very well, are much…

There is a table of squares from ≈2500 BC https://cdli.earth/artifacts/10678 that predates the earliest known copies of the Sumerian King List by a few centuries. With completely wrong values for the numerals, the math wouldn't add up: https://saalck.pressbooks.pub/mathhistory/chapter/vat-12593/ And many later kings on the list, in particular ones where we have independent evidence from inscriptions produced during t…

I'm reminded of the hundred or so fictional kings of Britain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legendary_kings_of_Bri... including King Lear. They didn't exist, but they all had normal lifespans. I'm uncertain to what extent they were ever sincerely believed to exist.

Re: Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?

#75

Interesting breakdown. The author clearly put in the work to test this theory. I like that he's not trying to force the data to fit the result but instead explains why even apparent matches could just be coincidental.

Feels like mostly LLM work...

Re: Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?

#76
This is pseudoscientific AI slop. Pangram is scoring it as 100% AI written. Modern humans originated 300kya, so the idea that oral to written culture could date back 240k years is absurd.

Checking to see if these dates correspond to climatic events only makes sense if the texts imply that. However, this list does not mention climatic events for these kings records. The only climatic event it does mention is the great flood which in their chronology comes after these lists of kings. So why would these writers use dates to some past events and leave out that context? I don't see any scholarly articles suggesting this. Googling for it only brings up this article. It comes across to me as ploy for self promotion rather than anything of value to prehistory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_King_List#Lines_1%E2%...

For a real example of a possible ancient human record of an actual event aboriginal australians have oral histories of a volcanic eruption 37kya.

https://www.science.org/content/article/aboriginal-tale-anci...

Re: Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?

#79
post #38
post #7

This was fun to read! I wish there was a no tech version of hackers news for this type of content only

> fun ... a no tech version Which means, surely, "no tech" and "no current impactful world". You would lose that sight from a community largely trained on hard facts ("works/doesnotwork") and creation, invention, management, on real grounds. "Intellectual curiosity" as a "bubble", as an escape into a closed reality, is not a good thing. "Oh, the colours of nature in its taxologies!". And meanwhile maybe the world tha…

Go one level up and you're talking about HN as it is echewing anything "political" for the same reason (politics is mainstream and doesn't satisfy intellectual curiosity.) But it isn't any more grounded in "reality" to discuss the taxonomy of programming languages than birds or Sumerian kings. All of it is an escape from reality. None of it is discussing children getting blown up in Gaza, or famine in Sudan, or what have you.

Re: Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?

#80
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I had Fable run through every version of it I could think of and it explained the numbering system was the root of everything being divisible by 60. I did find a pattern though. If you look at ALL the kings, rather than just those 8 it becomes obvious. The recent numbers are realistic and drift further apart, becoming less and less accurate, the further back you go. Interestingly it also compared some other cla…

Thinking that it was just a one off claim in a single text was my initial suspicion here, as someone who knows nothing about the subject. If it’s repeated across other “texts” (didn’t they use clay tablets?) then so much for that.

Yep. I only learned about it last night, but there are many of these king tablets. They mostly agree with each other within a margin, which is interesting. So the scribes were getting it right, but whatever came before clay tablets (oral history probably) had already goofed it up.

Also, one of those early kings was also literally a well known god. So it's possible they were just saying "Before the flood Gods ruled on earth", and we've since forgotten most of those gods.

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