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 development in this article would suggest.
Jennifer Pournelle's 2003 paper[1] presenting new evidence for the area's landscape in antiquity is also quite eye opening, as the presence of the coast further inland than was previously believed upended a lot of long-established notions about the development of civilization there.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258858442_The_Litto...
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.
I've always wondered whether the Sumerians knew they were the first. Past empires, lost civilizations, and ancient artifacts have always fascinated us. The first museum emerges is Mesopotamia around 530 BC; the Egyptian obelisk installed next to the brand-new Colosseum in Rome was older then than the Colosseum is now; legends of giants and heroes of bygone ages are literary universals. We hunger for the past.
But the Sumerians were first. 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.
Now consider that humanity is likely the first in the Milky Way galaxy. We too have to figure things out for the first time, but on a grander scale. What will history think of us?
The Epic of Gilgamesh references him gloriously restoring ancient cities destroyed by the Flood. Of course, by the time is was written, Sumerian civilisation was already ~2,500-3,000 years old, so it's hard to tell if Sumerians thought those cities were theirs, or someone else's.
The ever-scholarly answerers on r/AskHistorians think that yes, they believed they were the first: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8oskfv/did_a...
I love this question! I got curious about how ancient people interpreted stone tools. When did humanity first realize “cavemen” had come before?
I saw this guy on youtube talking specifically about this topic. Im no historian but i felt like he gave it a serious grounded exploration (no ancient aliens!)
They believed their writing was gifted to them by the Gods. According to them they were not the first, they were just the next in line after the Gods.
Sure. They had a creation mythos like everyone else. What they didn't have is evidence of a real precursor civilization to ground those myths. The classical Greeks could see Mycenaean ruins.
Not as many as later civilizations but there are buildings that likely pre-date the Sumerian civilization like the desert kites. And in Syria and Turkey there are megaliths and ruins which are older than Sumer which builders the Sumerians might have know of from oral history.
> The classical Greeks could see Mycenaean ruins.
Apparently, they Minoans had plumbing in the 1800s BC, so I'm sure the Greeks would have been surprised at what had preceded them by a long time.
> They believed their writing was gifted to them by the Gods.
This is an essentially universal belief in the past, and not just about writing. People are able to notice that their lifestyle depends on technologies, and that the only way to learn those technologies is for someone else to teach you. So they decide that the technologies on which their lives depend - pressing olives, farming grain, writing, harvesting wool*... - were taught to their ancestors by the gods.
In the case of writing specifically, the ancient Greeks attributed it to Cadmus, who was not personally a god. But (1) he was a hero with descent from Poseidon, (2) Greek heroes receive prayers and sacrifices and grant supernatural blessings just the same way gods do, and (3) they credited him with introducing writing from Phoenicia, not inventing it out of whole cloth.
* In early records, sheep are not yet sheared - they're plucked. The sheep we have today aren't the sheep they had then.
... 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.org/wiki/Ayn_Ghazal_(archaeological_sit...
Did Sumerians not know about any of those preexisting sites in the broader region? Maybe they built bigger cities, but I don't think they lacked for evidence of older civilizations and sites.
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.
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.
most chinese people have no interest in those who started the first civilization. in fact most of them there have to work about 12~14 hours a day and have no ability to spend any time to 'think' and 'assert'.
only a few people there that have higher position and get well educated that know a little about the very old times... and most of them believe Egipt or middle east started the first civilization because that's what the schools there teach.
The "5,000 year" claim is based purely on mythology. The archeological evidence makes 3500 - 4000 years more likely. In other words: the mythical events that happened 5000 years ago were likely oral history retellings of events that actually happened 3500 - 4000 years ago. Chinese history history certainly isn't much older than about ~2000 BCE, and that was prehistory as Chinese writing didn't develop until around 700 years later. There are older archeological sites for sure, but these likely don't correspond to the specific "5000 years" mythological figures and events, and AFAIK these earlier cultures don't demonstrate monumental architecture, the hallmark of the technical definition of "civilization." Though to be fair, China is unique in having developed writing prior to monumental architecture.
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.
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-...
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 created the first writing system”
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 first?
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.
Outside of a philosophy class, 'know' takes on quite a bit more pragmatic meaning which is perfectly appropriate here.
And inside philosophy class, I would argue, that the knowlege of the chair your are sitting on, is also not so much more confirmed and solid knowledge, than ones own birthday.
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 river floodings etc.
> The Sumerians invented kingship, priesthood, diplomacy, law, and war.
Of those, only law sounds like a legitimate priority claim, in the sense of having writen, thus fixed, laws rather than whatever the potentate of the day feels like declaring as being the law today.
> 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.
That phrase is rather imprecise.
What can be attributed to the Sumerian cities is the first appearance of several professions which are not directly productive and which have remained important until today.
By profession, I mean an activity that was all that a certain human did in order to obtain all the resources required for living. Before Sumer, those activities were done by certain people, but only occasionally, besides their main craft, e.g. a shaman was likely to also act as a medical doctor when needed and a chief of tribe was likely to also judge conflicts.
Among the professions that have first appeared in Sumer during the third millennium BC, are: judge, medical doctor, accountant, musician, prostitute.
The equivalent of priests and kings, though only at smaller scales, e.g. for a tribe or a confederation of tribes, have certainly existed much earlier than Sumer and Egypt. "Chief" is likely to be the oldest profession, as that exists at many social animals, including apes.
Highly recommend the "Tides of History" podcast (hosted by an actual historian who keeps up with the field), which has several episodes on Mesopotamian civilization.
There was an article 3 days ago that said the oldest known writing system was from Syria: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42224330
That's the earliest alphabetic writing system. The Sumerian writing system started out pictographic (like hieroglyphs), and predates that Syrian find by about 800 years.
It became less pictographic over time, and that Syrian site is only 500 miles from the Sumerian empire. My amateur speculation would be that trade with Sumer brought writing to Syria and they developed the idea in a different direction, arriving at this alphabetic system.
describing the surrounding countries as barbarian is such a bad narrative given what we now know about the Jiroft, Elamite, Harappan and Egyptian culture.
Those cultures postdate this part of the chronology by about a thousand years. And in any case, the article is just quoting what the records say.
Isn't this a book with extracts from documents written near 5000 years ago?
I will once again recommend the Fall of Civilizations Podcast. It's incredibly informative. Here's the ep on the Sumerians:
https://soundcloud.com/fallofcivilizations/8-the-sumerians-f...
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?
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.
"...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.
This does not seem very likely, because earlier than this people did not really need a writing system. More precisely, they had no reason to believe that a writing system would be useful, so there was no pressure to invent one.
In Mesopotamia we can see the evolution over many hundreds of years and even a few millennia from an accounting system that used a few symbols for the things that were recorded, to a full fledged writing system that was able to record any spoken sentence.
Before the societies of Mesopotamia and Egypt, which required a complex management of the available resources, there was no need for accounting with written records for great quantities of varied goods.
It is likely that for tens of thousands of years people have been able to make drawings that recorded useful things, like maps, and they probably have used some sets of symbols for various important things, like kinds of humans, kinds of animals, kinds of plants and so on.
Nevertheless, it is very unlikely that any such set of symbols used in the distant past has ever been able to record any complete sentence spoken in their language, with all the grammatical markers that do not have a concrete meaning.
The Mayans were writing with knotted rope around 1900BCE, so I would very much say it wouldn't be beyond possibility. Most of the early use was for tracking the seasons for religious rites - a pressure for developing writing that would exist across most early cultures.
I wonder about the knotted rope. How much information could it contain? Not very much. It's hard to imagine it being very useful.
How do you know so much about the motivations of people that have been dead for tens of thousands of years? Maybe you can speak to the dead?
If you're a nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe, you're not going to carry around clay tablets that say "Happy Birthday, love Gramma" on them.
The people from fifty thousand years ago do not differ in any essential way from the people of today, except in the knowledge and in the set of skills that they were taught.
Most human societies that have not seen a writing system at other people have never invented any writing system.
All those that are likely to have invented writing independently (though for some of them it is not certain that they have not seen the writing used by others) have invented writing systems in contexts similar to those of Mesopotamia and Egypt, i.e. in a settled agricultural society where cooperation was required at a large scale and management and accounting of resources was necessary.
I get what you're saying, but I also think it's hard to overstate how different ancient cultures and experiences made people.
Their point is that hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers have no use for a writing system. A complex urban society does.
We can follow the development of the Sumerian writing system, so we know it didn't derive from an older source.
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.
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.
It depends on the material. Incas uses knots for record keeping. Those are not as durable as burned clay. In our current global civilization with advanced computing tech, magnetic tapes, cdroms, and hard drives won't last very long. Maybe SSDs have greater durability, but they will also require computing tech to dicipher. I do not think the existence of surviving writing materials is a strong argument for evidence of civilization, and speaks more to the limitations of the technology.
Leaving marks on trees and such is not writing. It is not the transcription of spoken language. We have examples of this kind of symbol-placement on ancient cave art stretching far back into the ice age. It is not considered writing.
Written language is rarely just a transcription. It usually has a number of distinct differences in both lexicon and syntax. There are languages that are only written.
Art is not writing, true. Distinct symbols and syntax are required for writing. But it need not be transcription of anything spoken.
I am reminded of the Polynesians creating a sort of "map" using the stick chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Islands_stick_chart
Agreed. Examples include the Inca civilization using knots to record complex information and accounts. Those won't last as long as burned clay.
Anyone here ever read The Urantia Book? IMO, it's truly fascinating, and brushes up against this post
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 developed in a different way, with distinct architectural styles, social organization, and politics.
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.
At least when I took world history and anthropology classes, the academic term for 'monumental architecture' was quite well defined: large-scale man-made structures that are built to impress and convey symbolic meanings. Göbekli Tepe is definitely that. The definition you offer seems quite subjective, and maybe more suited to art history than archeology.
I'm an archaeologist (or was?) who's specifically done work on the Neolithic transition. I don't know much about art history, so I couldn't say whether they'd use a similar definition.
What's often taught in introductory classes is usually more of a basic outline of actual archaeological thought rather than a perfect reflection of literature. Not knowing your curriculum, level, or when you were in school, but it probably came up with either Childe's 10 traits or from Trigger's definition. Childe's definition is basically anything that shows off power. Trigger's definition is anything that's elaborated beyond practical function, either in size or ornamentation. The common examples when teaching both of these are large structures, but that's mainly a bias in common examples. Size isn't the sole factor, just one of several and the easiest to observe because of the inherent labor costs. It also makes for a nice exercise to have students wander around campus looking for monumental architecture and explaining why different structures are or aren't.
Over the last 20ish years people have moved away from emphasizing the size aspect because it doesn't encompass what we want to include, particularly as we look at things a little more exotic than classical centers like southern Mesopotamia. Joyce Marcus had an explicit response to Trigger that's pretty well known de-emphasizing size, Rosemary Joyce (unrelated) argued that the size aspect was a category error in monumentality of early mesoamerican pyramid construction, and Osborne gave a definition that's very similar to what I said above. I'm doing the same thing here to make it clear that the actual physical size of the structure isn't what's important, the intangible mental aspects are.
I still don't understand your intangible mental aspects claim. That seems a nonphysical, and really nonscientific subjective evaluation. You didn't go back in time and interview the builders, so how do you know what the intangible mental aspects were? It's guesswork.
Physical size isn't necessary, and I didn't mean to clean that it was. The more fundamental connection would be labor expenditure, and directed organization. There's a bunch of old cities in the Levant that were occupied for thousands of years and which developed into very large beehive-like structures. These aren't monumental architecture in the way a smaller, but purpose-built temple or city walls would be.
The connection to 'civilization', as I understand it, is that a social organization beyond mere family units making incremental home improvements over generations is required to build monumental architecture, so it directly implies the existence of some form of societal structure to organize the work. That's what turns a 'culture' into a 'civilization.'
"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."
I think that suggests to me a greater level of sophistication for neolithic cultures than we give credit for in our current histories.
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.
Yeah there's other near east settlements of this sort going back a full 10,000 years. Sumer was the first with purpose-built monumental architecture.
these sites were in close proximity to the Vinca culture which did have some precursor of writing
And that's why we have dumbcuneiform.com
Turn dumb tweets into cuneiform tablets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36275974 - June 2023 (47 comments)
Dumb Cuneiform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526680 - Nov 2015 (16 comments)
Title should be "How the Ancient Sumerians Created the World’s First Writing System"
HN automatically removes the word how from the start of titles. A controversial choice, but I don't see a big issue with it in this case
I would love if the government had a class people could take at 30, 40, whatever to catch me up on dinosaur lore updates and all the other shit i learned about in school
YouTube is wonderful for that! Try PBS Eons for dinosaur and general fossil history.
I would like something like that, but I wouldn’t want it to be run by the government.
The Nordic countries have a longstanding tradition of state-run “folk high schools”. In fact, in modern economies where it is harder for unemployed middle-age people to find new work, and AI might cause unemployment in more sectors, this kind of state intervention seems like a good way to keep adults doing something enriching instead of doomscrolling or drinking all day.
The equivalent in america would be non credit personal enrichment courses at the community college. Though they specialize on a specific skill. Some are useful in daily life, others are hobbies. For a humorous example watch Parks and Rec season 2 episode 14.
Which makes me take back what I said. I wouldn’t mind if local government did it.
Sure, really just fired off my comment without much thought and obviously would suck in real life since it would be hijacked by politicians. Not wedded to the government part, kinda just pretending US gov capable of public services like this
The only reason the US government isn’t capable of this is because one party has decided that government doesn’t work. Period. Thats it. Deciding a thing “doesn’t work” because you don’t want it to work is called “being full of shit”
I legitimately do not understand politicians, career politicians specifically, who run on a platform of fixing a broken government.
After your first term, you are the broken government. Either you have done everything you can possibly do and it really is a mess, or it's just a cynical sound bite to get people to clap. Either way you should be able to provide concrete evidence of nefarious action.
I don't get it.
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.
Plenty more republican states on federal welfare. California should stop paying for their laziness.
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.
In the interest of this being a place for discussions: I have frequently heard the slogan that the republican efforts to cut federal programs is a major cause of why these programs failure. As I mentioned above, I am sure that such policy is not helping these programs, but as a bigger point, there is just not a good correlation between such policies and the actual effectiveness of various government programs. The military/dod is a great example of a part of the government that has received bipartisan budget increases for more than two decades running (it always escapes republican calls for fiscal responsibility) and yet the military is a pretty bloated and ineffective operation. Meanwhile the parks service, department of interior, EPA, etc are all constantly getting squeezed by the republicans and yet they are all pretty good at what they do and deliver a lot on a tight budget. If anything I would say that the effectiveness of government programs is inversely correlated with the intensity of republican assaults on them. Meanwhile in solidly blue areas there are plenty of government programs that just plain suck and plenty that work very well. If it were a simply matter of one party being the difference then you would not see so much variance. There is a lot more to what makes a government program effective than whether it is well funded. Saying that government is incapable of delivering core services is clearly a nonsense position, but blaming the failures of government on the republicans doesn't really seem to be supported by any evidence.
When I was growing up in the 1980s, the government provided public services like this and more.
Somewhere along the way a government of the people, by the people, for the people, perished from the earth.
Not from just one ailment like trickle-down economics, but from a thousand cuts delivered retroactively by revisionist history, until even the youth became their own wardens, and hope was finally lost.
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 they didn't change, just that any progress made has been eroded back to square one. That's the tragedy I was trying to convey.
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.
I can't find a logical fallacy for it:
http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/fallacies.html
On the one hand, it's up to me to defend my point. But on the other, widespread criticism of the experiences of people who were there promotes division. Allowing the divide and conquer strategy to sway people into voting against their own self-interest, undermining democracy and the rule of law.
The way these debates used to play out was that the academic position was held in high regard. Because it covers a broad context. Asking for specific answers that were already generally known was considered a distraction, or a rhetorical question used to distract from the speaker's main point.
Ask yourself what common knowledge is known about education, where it receives its funding, who teaches and who attends. How that's changed in recent decades due to socioeconomic forces. Who might benefit from such changes, and who suffers due to them. And would I state something that can't be backed up by overwhelming evidence in the public record?
Those critical thinking skills used to be prerequisites to winning debates. Now it's easier to just dismiss arguments because others don't have time to get involved, or just want to keep their heads down.
I'd like to see a term for your tactic get added to the logical fallacies list. I just don't know what to call it. It's analogous to argumentum ad logicam, where you're implying that what I said was false, not because my argument was invalid, but because I omitted evidence that anyone could add or fact-check.
> 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:
The Department of Education did not exist in the US until 1980. It was created by Carter and signed into law in late 1979. Reagan took office in 1981.
It of course had a predecessor going far back. At any rate, in 1980, the Department of Education had a budget of 14 billion. Today, it gets about ~80 billion. A quick Google claims that 14 billion in 1980 dollars is equal to 53 billion today. So the federal government seems to be funding education at much higher levels. Of course, most education funding is at the state and local level, not federal.
This generally goes along with expectations, since the USA spends more per capita on education than almost any other country in the world at #5.
I agree that there are major problems with education in the US, but more money is not going to solve them. It simply gets redirected into unproductive outlets and education "science" quackery like three-cueing. We could probably go back to 1980 levels of spending with the right reforms, and then look at doing things like 2xing teacher salaries and reducing classroom sizes.
Beyond K12 stats are harder to track down, but "continuing education" and government-funded classes for adults are easy to find. And of course, we have the Internet.
* that we are aware of as of 2024.
I think most historical discoveries should be prefixed or suffixed with this because as we dig up more things we might learn that there was an even older writing system (in this case).
I think most of everything should be taught like this, especially from a young age. Too many people assume that other people already figured it all out, and never bother challenging facts or looking deeper. I think part of it is about not questioning authority, but it’s mostly about fear of the unknown.
In some corporate environments there is pushback against so-called “weasel words.” Which is fine to call out for contractual obligations, but it is ridiculous when used against an engineer being honest.
I once got reprimanded for explaining that “exactly once” is not possible in a distributed system, but I was going to do “at most once” and put some mitigations in place to handle most failure scenarios. Management was mad at me for not using more concrete language, even once they understood the problem.
I bring it up because I believe it is a result of whatever personality traits that got them in management to begin with. The same types of people manage schools and publications, and they would fight back against a pedantic nerd saying “as far as we know” because they don’t want to use weak language.
I don’t have a solution, but it has always been upsetting to me.
I totally agree. However, in corporate politics especially, one has to acknowledge that truth is not the basis on which the organisation or individuals are operating on. It is money and status. Viewed through that lens, it is not important that statements made are exactly truthful or accurate, but that they are effective and have "good optics".
Isn’t that redundant? It’s like asking everyone to prefix every statement with “As far as I know…”
Fair point, I think it depends on the certainty. I am just about 100% certain Neil Armstrong was the first human to walk on the moon, so "first" makes sense. Hillary and Norgay were the first "confirmed" climbers of Everest. The "confirmed" part is needed because it is reasonable that others before them made it without evidence. I am open to the possibility a civilization had a writing system before the Sumerians, and the evidence has been destroyed or not found yet.
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.
Right, but that's recent information. When talking about deep history, "that we know of" is effectively a given. There will never be true certainty.
In formal contexts, I believe this is reasonable. Some statements can still be made in confidence without the preface, particularly concerning the present or recent past. Given the existence of such certainties, I think it is important to differentiate those which are not.
As an anecdata most of my friends believe that we know everything about ancient history. They are also very eager to hear about other parts of human knowledge to be progressing, for example AI models. Yet, when it comes to history they have this sort of static view.
Well, I can see how someone would naively think that was true, because only a fixed set of events have already happened in the past, so there is a correct answer.
I think it also stems from the way it is taught in schools, where there is a lot of focus on memorising dates and events etc, rather than on the process of actually deriving them from sources of questionable trust.
Also, the majority of focus in schools (in the UK) is on much more modern history and doesn’t really focus too much on the really ancient stuff and the extra difficulties that arise from learning about it.
it’s kind of odd though to think about a kiddo learning history as the evidence allows it to be unfolded.
they’re brand new to being a human, and even then they aren’t adult humans (i guess defined as such, post facto)
seems like our brains are craving hard structural information to establish requisite coherency once fully ‘weened off’ by our family unit. so things are taught in the traditional scholastic type of way first, and then introduced to more scholarly approach later, revealing who is behind the curtain in oz.
We should openly discuss the epistemological standing of our claims.
"The first day ever was last Thursday, according to this calendar."
a significant portion of the US population believes the earth is 6,000 years old, tied to their religious sect and identity
concepts such as Neolithic and Paleolithic fall on deaf ears
getting just some people out of that funnel only to still have a static version of events is counterproductive as you are subverting a competing understanding of the world
you are replacing unfalsifiable appeals to a Sky Daddy authority with falsifiable observations where a challenge is simply neglected
[flagged]
No, you can't.
Our understanding of physical constants is based on empirical confirmation via multiple samples. They're still just probably correct, and we haven't confirmed the laws of physics are uniform across either time or space.
This whole concept is what the skeptical shorthand of "you can't prove a negative" actually means. You can show some instance or set of instances of something, but you cannot show that something is universally always true. The tentative nature of our ability to understand the world is the basis for why we use science to approximate objective reality.
so i tend to think that science, as approximated here^, is how i tend yo assertively believe as well.
namely, that science reveals our perceptible reality, through a specific arrangement of direct and indirect observations following along philosophical notions through critically formulated discursive language.
who is to say, like historical evidence, what type of philosophical investigations might provide us some way of becoming aware the breviously unknown?
i suggest having an honest imagination to everyone!
There is literally another MOND article discussed in this very forum every week or so. All theories are provisional and based on finite evidence and general consensus. There is no such thing as empirical truth the way you imagine.
> There is no such thing as empirical truth the way you imagine.
And statements misses the ability to hold an absolute truth. No, wait!
And in particular, I'm always curious -- how much of what we know of cuneiform is just because using clay tablets made examples more likely to survive to the present day? You can kind of imagine there being a soft temporal horizon for different kinds materials and artifacts -- far enough in the past, there are some kinds of things we should expect probably can't be discovered. If the people at Gobleki Tepe (or any other really old site) were writing by making marks on leaves or tree bark, we probably never know right?
And it follows: how much of the artifacts of our present civilization will last 3,000 years for future archaeologists and anthropologists?
> the symbol for “woman,” a downward-pointing triangle with a notch at the bottom tip
It is curious. Today a pictogram of a woman is an upward-pointing triangle with some small details added, while a downward-pointing triangle with the same details is a man. Sumerians would use a wrong bathroom all the time. Or we would use a wrong sumerian bathroom if we time traveled there.
The symbol is a pubic triangle, so it is quite accurate in showing the distinction between a female and a male (the "notch" mentioned above is the cleft between the labia majora).
Similarly, the Egyptian symbol for male was just a relatively accurate drawing of the male genital organs.
The modern symbols shy from drawing the body parts that distinguish males from females, hence the drawing of the entire body with the addition of features that are sometimes, but not always, associated with gender.
> Without writing, there was no history.
Uh, is there not plenty of evidence of oral traditions and histories spanning back millennia? There are Aboriginal stories that go back 7000 years. [1][2] Kind of weak to open with a statement like that.
Obviously not as old, but just in Toumani Diabaté's family they've passed down their familial history for 70 generations. [3]
Clearly history exists without writing.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2015.10...
[2] https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/edge-of-memory-9781472943279/
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, and even then there is plenty of disagreement. Thich Nhat Hanh brought this up in his translation and commentary on the Heart Sutra [1], as he believed an early translation was not skillful enough. That's one of the reasons it's important to have a guru-shishya relationship with your teacher.
As we all know, writing is plenty capable of transmitting falsehoods. I'm married to a professional novelist and memoirist, and we often talk about how non-fiction often contains plenty of fictions.
Obviously none of this is to say that writing isn't great and important, it just doesn't pass the smell test for me to say that history is what is written when we have plenty of contrary examples. Maybe to assert that in an academic journal where language tends to have more technical meaning is fine, but this is lithub. I know plenty of writers that write for them personally, my wife included, and it's certainly a self-important claim they'd love to be able to make!
[1] https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/thich-... -- the introduction in the published text is better than this one, but the gist is the same.
> 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.
no one said that
but there is a definitional issue here - to reiterate the previous poster's point:
> Historians use “history” as a technical term for events recorded in written and other durable records.
That's how the word is defined by historians. It's not a value judgement on oral traditions.
Your post is using the word "history" in a different way. You have some good points to make, but as long as you're using "history" in a different way to everyone else you're not going to get very far in conversation.
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.
> 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)
> but it seems silly to me to say oral traditions aren't durable and that writing is the only way to get at history
I mean, it is true. There are no oral traditions left of the Sumerians or the Assyrians that I know of. Meanwhile, you can find buildings and clay tablets and translate them.
The article misstates a few things in its opening.
Evidence so far indicates humans first settled into fixed colonies/cities around 45,000 years ago starting in eastern Europe. These people are referred to as neolithic, where as mobile units without a fixed geography are referred to as archaic. It wasn't until around 10,000 years ago that humans first civilized (around 8,000 to 7,000 BCE).
So this means people, the same mentioned in the article, civilized several thousand years before they had writing. The only real difference between neolithic settlements and civilization is governance and influence. Writing is beneficial, but influence can be accomplish through various means including: arts, religion, culture, organized military activity, and more.
It is also worth pointing that civilization was extremely unappealing to the uncivilized who first encountered it. The most immediate symptoms of civilization are social restrictions, class stratification, and loss of mobility of which all are essentially opposing aspects of freedom.
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
> According to Wikipedia it is 25,000 years ago and in Eastern Europe
The person you were replying to was asking about cities. The article you are posting is about Sedentism - "the practice of living in one place for a long time". The figure of 25,000 years ago is for the first evidence of permanent settlements. These do not fit anyone's definition of a city.
The first evidence of cities are from Sumer, which is what this whole thread is about.
Look, I know this is confusing (no, it isn't).
The person I replied to replied to me. I never mentioned city, but they injected the word city nonetheless probably because they had no idea what they were replying to or what the words meant. What qualifies whether any fixed permanent or semi-permanent settlement is actually a city, town, hamlet, or village is entirely subjective.
I didn't inject the word "city", you did.
You referred in your above post to colonies/cities that were over 45,000 years old. Although I don't doubt such a thing is possible (maybe just lost to history), my last dive into this had scholars claiming the oldest known cities to be in the range of 9,000-11,000 years old like Gobekli Tepe and its sister cities. I was just asking if that consensus still holds. I can see this is getting into semantics a bit though and what the definition of city is.
> I never mentioned city,
Yes you did:
> first settled into fixed colonies/cities around 45,000 years ago
> What qualifies whether any fixed permanent or semi-permanent settlement is actually a city, town, hamlet, or village is entirely subjective.
nope
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.
> The 45,000 years ago number I referred to earlier comes from sources that are not online.
Are you referring to a book, or unpublished academic work? Is there a particular scholar you have in mind?
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 would confuse people and require clarifications like the one you give here.
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)
Walls are generally not a formal requirement, but are implied so due to their commonality. All ancient cities, especially pre-civilization, had walls though, often several layers of walls built on top of each other as the given cities were pillaged and rebuilt.
Its not confusing to anybody vaguely aware of ancient history.
IIRC, the Sumerians (through the Akkadians perhaps) left records stating they had to build walls around their cities. Which to me certainly implies the Sumerians had cities without walls for some time. Pretty big deal that, to have recorded it.
Cities subjected by some empire or another were sometimes forced to tear down their walls and there were perhaps periods of relative isolation and peacefulness during the founding of some cities where one wasn't immediately necessary, but even very ancient settlements commonly had at least palisades. There are probably some other exceptions; Sparta famously did not have walls under the philosophy that nobody should ever dare even try them, but they were also blessed by geography.
*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.
Neither of the other city states in the Aztec Triple Alliance had walls either and they weren’t built on islands.[1] They seem to have had some walled precincts to separate sacred spaces from common areas but now broader system of defensive walls. Much like Ancient Rome they had large and well organized armies.
[1] https://www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9/1-CompleteSet/MES-SAA-0...
#/media/File:Fertile_crescent_Neolithic_B_circa_7500_BC.jpg){kind=link}