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CommonShore posted:Yeah there's probably no universal flood myth, but some of them may reach back to the ice age. There are Australian flood myths that map pretty convincingly onto ice age geography. I thought this claim has drawn some pretty heavy skepticism. Primordial cultural memories are appealing in a Romantic sort of way but sadly not really a real thing.
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May 8, 2023 21:15
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Did they even have glaciers in Australia?
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May 8, 2023 21:17
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The floods were world wide as it was sea level rise We are still in an ice age too (for another 4 years or so )
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May 8, 2023 21:20
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 Concerning, seems like Tasmanian devils had unfettered access to the main continent before the ice age ended
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May 8, 2023 21:24
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My understanding is that it's an ice age if there is permanent ice on the Earth's surface at all.
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May 8, 2023 21:25
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Check out "The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World" by Patrick Nunn for some interesting discussion of this; I just read it recently, quite compelling
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May 8, 2023 21:33
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Su-omi Lol it honestly does make me think. But to add to the pile of reasons this is super unlikely, the word Sumer is an exonym from Akkadian.
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May 8, 2023 21:49
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Nessus posted:My understanding is that it's an ice age if there is permanent ice on the Earth's surface at all. yes, technically we are still in an ice age. man made climate change is not going to annihilate the planet, it is just accelerating it into an interglacial period. that does not mean it is not extremely concerning and bad, its just not going to turn the world into venus or something, the earth has been significantly warmer than now plenty of times
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May 8, 2023 22:09
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WoodrowSkillson posted:yes, technically we are still in an ice age. man made climate change is not going to annihilate the planet, it is just accelerating it into an interglacial period.
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May 8, 2023 22:20
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Oh yeah, Earth can definitely get hot enough for Antarctica to melt. There were polar forests during the Cretaceous warming period which blows away anything happening now, it was like 14 C above our baseline. What I'm saying is we're currently in amateur hour and need to step up. Burn every bit of coal you can find.
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May 8, 2023 22:26
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Grand Fromage posted:Oh yeah, Earth can definitely get hot enough for Antarctica to melt. There were polar forests during the Cretaceous warming period which blows away anything happening now, it was like 14 C above our baseline. I'm not sure Antarctica was in its present position at that time, either. I have heard theories that a pretty major part of our current world climate situation is because the Himalayas are so loving tall they're like a third pole. However, I do not believe continental drift is consequential on the human scale of events.
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May 8, 2023 22:30
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It wasn't, but Pangaea stretched to the poles so we have fossils of polar stuff from that period.
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May 8, 2023 22:35
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I believe having any year-round ice at sea level, anywhere on the planet, is a rarity at a geologic time scale. I've heard the term "ice age" restricted to specifically mean when there's year-round ice outside of the arctic and antarctic circles, though. There's another term for when there's permanent ice at the poles, but I forget what it is.
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May 8, 2023 22:40
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Koramei posted:I thought this claim has drawn some pretty heavy skepticism. Primordial cultural memories are appealing in a Romantic sort of way but sadly not really a real thing. I haven't dived too far into it tbh - skepticism is probably warranted but I saw a summary of a couple of the myths to geography that were enough to make me think "if the evidence has been presented fairly, that's pretty convincing" - stuff like "those islands out there used to be part of the mainland connected to that peninsula over there until [mythological narrative event]" or "our ancestors walked here from another land far to the north and then a flood cut us off and made the ocean." The main reason that I found it convincing enough is that the narrative, geographical, geological, and genetic data points all line up within a margin of error proportional to the specificity you can get out of myth. But, it's not a thing that I've properly studied. I'd be curious to read a critique of it.
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May 8, 2023 23:47
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Google seems to support this theory, to my surprise Huh, interesting. The trouble I have with the idea that the Sumerians were pushed into Mesopotamia by encroaching sea is that one of the big arcs of the Sumerian historical period is land filling in the Persian Gulf. Ur was a coastal city for example, and settlements would have to be abandoned because they no longer had access to sea trade/fishing.  Anyway in terms of crazy historical theories, one of my favorites (that has been thoroughly discredited) is Sino-Babylonianism, which is kind of what it sounds like: a theory that Chinese civilization is a descendant of Babylon. Specifically that the Yellow Emperor was a historical figure born in Mesopotamia who lead a mass migration to China. The weirdest part of this is that even though it reads like an insane white guy's racist theory from the 19th century (French in this case), it was actually really well received by Chinese nationalists, largely because it had a strong anti-Manchu angle.
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May 9, 2023 00:05
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I wasn't kidding about the Korean thing, it's a real assertion by a certain brand of Korean nationalists. There's a book called the Samguk Yusa which purports to be history but is mostly legends and fairy tales, mentioned in it is a Korean land called Sumiliguk. Sumili sounds like Sumer, therefore Sumerians were Koreans. This isn't exactly a common belief, but it's more widespread than you might imagine. There's levels of nutty Korean nationalist things and this is maybe like 60% toward the insane end. Tulip posted:The weirdest part of this is that even though it reads like an insane white guy's racist theory from the 19th century (French in this case), it was actually really well received by Chinese nationalists, largely because it had a strong anti-Manchu angle. This happens a lot more than you might think. Like the entire basis for Koreans believing that turtle ships were ironclads was a mistranslation an American missionary made, there's nothing in the historical record to support it and lots of evidence against. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 00:15 on May 9, 2023 |
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May 9, 2023 00:10
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There's a lot of nationalists who want to claim their origin with the Sumerians. Turkish nationalists and Tamil nationalists both also sometimes do this. As the oldest known literate civilization, the attaching yourself to the Sumerians are an attractive way to claim your people are more ancient than anyone else.
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May 9, 2023 01:04
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Double posting, going back to the original question about the Sumerians and the Babylonians, one thing that makes the distinction very hard to draw is the fact that Babylonian culture was thoroughly imbued with Sumerian heritage. Babylonian literature draws heavily on earlier Sumerian works, Babylonian religion is largely identical to Sumerian religion (the link here is even closer than Roman and Greek religions), and Babylonian systems of administration, mathematics, and law borrow very heavily from Sumerian predecessors. Babylonian temple architecture is exceptionally similar to the Sumerian model (major changes in Mesopotamian temples don't show up until the Neo-Assyrians in the 1st millennium BC). Babylonian scribal culture also highly prized knowledge of Sumerian. One Babylonian proverb (written in Sumerian) says that a scribe who does not Sumerian is not actually a scribe at all. It's extremely difficult to isolate "Babylonian" vs "Sumerian" cultural elements, since so much was borrowed, mixed, and re-mixed, and re-interpreted. This is not say that nothing changed in Mesopotamian culture over time, things certainly did, sometimes quite significantly. There were some very important cultural innovations in the 2nd and 1st millennia, but there is not a moment you can point to and say this is when the culture became Babylonian instead of Sumerian.
CrypticFox fucked around with this message at 01:15 on May 9, 2023 |
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May 9, 2023 01:12
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Basically once the Babylonians became a dominant power they told everyone that the Sumerian gods were pretty cool, but too terrified of Tiamat, so the Babylonian god Marduk showed up and suplexed Tiamat back into the sea, so the Sumerian gods made Marduk the king of the gods and that's why the Sumerians need to follow Babylon. Also we're moving all the holy relics of the Sumerian gods into Babylon. For safekeeping.
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May 9, 2023 04:18
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Marduk sounds pretty cool.
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May 9, 2023 04:32
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sullat posted:Basically once the Babylonians became a dominant power they told everyone that the Sumerian gods were pretty cool, but too terrified of Tiamat, so the Babylonian god Marduk showed up and suplexed Tiamat back into the sea, so the Sumerian gods made Marduk the king of the gods and that's why the Sumerians need to follow Babylon. Also we're moving all the holy relics of the Sumerian gods into Babylon. For safekeeping. That's not really a "once Babylonians became a dominant power" thing though, the religious changes you are describing don't begin to occur until around 1200 BC, 600 years after Babylon became the dominant city in Southern Mesopotamia, and they took centuries to complete. During the days of Hammurabi and his dynasty, and during the following dynasty, no one made any attempt to elevate Marduk to the status of king of the gods. There's really no evidence of ethnic conflict between Babylonians and Sumerians during the rise of Babylon. In fact there's not really a distinct Sumerian ethnic identity during this period. Babylon was not culturally or ethnically distinct from any other city in Southern Mesopotamia during their rise to power. The religion practiced by Hammurabi was extremely similar to that practiced in Uruk or Ur. Enlil was recognized as the king of of gods, as he had been for at least the past thousand years, and Marduk was limited to being the city god of Babylon. The transition from "Sumerian" to "Babylonian" was not the result of the Babylonian conquest of the region. In the two centuries preceding Hammurabi's birth, significant political and cultural changes had been underway in Mesopotamia. The Sumerian language began to die out as a spoken language around 2000 BC, and it was most certainly dead as a spoken language by Hammurabi's day. However, Sumerian personal names remained in use for many centuries after, and many legal documents, religious hymns, and literary works continued to be composed in Sumerian well into the 2nd millennium. Following the end of the Kingdom of Ur in 2004 BC, large numbers of nomadic Amorites migrated into Mesopotamia and settled there. The Amorites largely assimilated into the Sumero-Akkadian culture of the region, but people retained an Amorite identity on top of that. For reasons that are rather unclear, by 1900 BC or so, essentially all of the Southern Mesopotamian cities were ruled by Amorite kings. This didn't change the culture hugely. The Amorite language was never really written down, and religion, architecture, and most other aspects of Mesopotamian culture were not hugely influenced by Amorite culture. However, being Amorite was an important point of social and political identification. Hammurabi was descended from Amorites, like nearly all Mesopotamian kings of his day. In practice he was deeply steeped in Sumero-Akkadian cultural traditions, and its not clear if he even would have spoken Amorite. But the main point here is that when Babylon rose to power, it wasn't Babylonians trying to convince Sumerians to follow Babylon. Instead, it was a world where everyone in the political elite (and many outside it) identified as Amorite, and considered themselves to have a shared Amorite ancestry. This shared Amorite ancestry was very important to Mesopotamian kings, they invoke in letters to each others. The key intermediate step in identity between "Sumerian" and "Babylonian" is "Amorite," and these were gradual changes that did not move in a linear direction. Sumerian identity (as such as it ever even really existed, this is debatable), was not trampled by an ascendant Babylon. Rather, gradual changes over time lead to the development of a shared, blended Akkadian-Sumerian-Amorite culture throughout Mesopotamia that was already in place by the time Babylon took over the region.
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May 9, 2023 05:53
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Huh, I might have had the right idea the first time around that the centre of power drifted over time rather than being a particular conquest or such. And also one of those things to keep in mind that people of that time do not necessarily at all identify in the same ways that we've been taught to identify them historically. Religion also tends to be weird at the best of times, look at the umbrella of 'Christianity' for modern examples of weirdness that'd be hard to explain without cultural context and not much easier with it. Actually, speaking of religion, I'm wondering about 'household gods', or penates and lares, and their equivalents across various cultures. I'm mostly thinking that Doctor Who episode where the dad reminds his son to give thanks to the household gods like telling a surly teenager to wipe his feet.
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May 9, 2023 10:20
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Benagain posted:Marduk sounds pretty cool. Marduk rules!! But he desires not the barren wasteland of your desiccated viscera.
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May 9, 2023 14:10
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Wikipedia mentions this site but does not discuss it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_el-%27Oueili Does anyone have more info ?
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May 9, 2023 16:13
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Is it Mar-duck like the wet bird or Msr-dook like the seminal 1994 Green Day album Dookie?
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May 9, 2023 16:55
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Actually, speaking of religion, I'm wondering about 'household gods', or penates and lares, and their equivalents across various cultures. I'm mostly thinking that Doctor Who episode where the dad reminds his son to give thanks to the household gods like telling a surly teenager to wipe his feet. Yeah pretty sure this was standard. Most folks were pantheists, and believed there were gods everywhere. I read a great paper once about religious practices around construction. Apparently, while building a house, you would have a shrine with an idol representing the god of construction on-site to bless the process. (Of course, the icon wasn't just a representation, but an actual instantiation of the god himself.) But at the end of construction, you didn't want the god of construction to stick around, because if there was more construction, it meant that something had gone terribly wrong. So there was a whole process for decommissioning the shrine. They would take the idol, with great ceremony, chants, burning incense, etc, through the city on a litter, on down to the river. There they would place him on a specially-prepared mini-boat, and very ceremoniously kick him off to be carried as far down the loving river as possible.
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May 10, 2023 05:57
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CommonShore posted:I haven't dived too far into it tbh - skepticism is probably warranted but I saw a summary of a couple of the myths to geography that were enough to make me think "if the evidence has been presented fairly, that's pretty convincing" - stuff like "those islands out there used to be part of the mainland connected to that peninsula over there until [mythological narrative event]" or "our ancestors walked here from another land far to the north and then a flood cut us off and made the ocean." My favorite example of this is the catastrophic eruption of Mt Mazama that created Crater Lake. Human habitation in the area is well attested to at least 10,000 years ago, and the eruption was 7700 years ago. Local myths speak to it pretty directly: quote:
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May 10, 2023 06:01
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euphronius posted:Yeah and it’s cool to me at least to try and piece together what was going on there from Sumer. Although I think what we have from archeology in Sumer is still thousands of years after whenever the flood was The Archaeological evidence on Sumer is interesting because we have incredibly detail records on certain aspects of their society while lacking extremely basic knowledge in other areas like for example we do not know who the early Sumer kings are (the Sumerian king list is obviously not reliable as they claim reigns of 1000+ years for some of those kings). However we also have bureaucratic records on agricultural production in the 22nd century BC that allow us to figure out how much wheat vs barley the Sumerians were planting. Like it's as if tomorrow a giant meteor destroyed the US: then 10,000 years later future historians uncover this intact IRS office: so they can figure out what the annual budget of the US federal government was in the year 2023 but can't tell whether George Washington was actually the first president or a made up legendary figure Typo fucked around with this message at 15:58 on May 10, 2023 |
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May 10, 2023 15:56
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He's both.
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May 10, 2023 16:32
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I'm not surprised, especially with Are You Being Served? being on the nose enough about the British class system and stereotypes for the audience to pick up on what the joke is meant to be, and those being all the funnier to a different culture. Columbo's popular everywhere. It almost caused an international incident in Romania because they ran out of episodes to air and started airing reruns right when relations between Romania and the US publicly nosedived so everyone thought it was government retaliation. The state department had Peter Falk film a PSA explaining that they stopped filming 10 years ago to prevent riots.
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May 10, 2023 16:52
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The sagas claim he was "Six-foot-twenty, loving killing for fun" Edit: George Washington, not Peter Falk
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May 10, 2023 16:52
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euphronius posted:Wikipedia mentions this site but does not discuss it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_el-%27Oueili That site was excavated by a French team, so most of the scholarship about it is written in French. I did find this short article by one of the excavators of the site in English though: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.2307/3210313, which should be freely accessible and has a lot more information than the wiki page. The site is important because its the earliest evidence of occupation in the Southern Mesopotamian alluvium. The oldest accessible layer shows fairly significant architecture already in place. Unfortunately, its not possible to reach the earliest layer of the site, because the earliest layers are now below the water table. They had to invent a new term for the period discovered at this site. The earliest occupation of the alluvium is called the Ubaid period, and it had previously divided into five sub periods, numbered 1 to 5, based on stratigraphic layers at Eridu and Ur. But when this site was discovered, they had a layer earlier than Ubaid 1, which they named Ubaid 0.
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May 10, 2023 16:55
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CrypticFox posted:That site was excavated by a French team, so most of the scholarship about it is written in French. I did find this short article by one of the excavators of the site in English though: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.2307/3210313, which should be freely accessible and has a lot more information than the wiki page. The site is important because its the earliest evidence of occupation in the Southern Mesopotamian alluvium. The oldest accessible layer shows fairly significant architecture already in place. Unfortunately, its not possible to reach the earliest layer of the site, because the earliest layers are now below the water table. They had to invent a new term for the period discovered at this site. The earliest occupation of the alluvium is called the Ubaid period, and it had previously divided into five sub periods, numbered 1 to 5, based on stratigraphic layers at Eridu and Ur. But when this site was discovered, they had a layer earlier than Ubaid 1, which they named Ubaid 0. lol hell yeah, video-game rear end naming scheme
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May 10, 2023 23:19
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It’s wants 20$ for the article hahah. I’d give them 50c for it oh well.
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May 10, 2023 23:23
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Tulip posted:lol hell yeah, video-game rear end naming scheme They didn't call it Big Ubaid though.
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May 10, 2023 23:32
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:Columbo's popular everywhere. It almost caused an international incident in Romania because they ran out of episodes to air and started airing reruns right when relations between Romania and the US publicly nosedived so everyone thought it was government retaliation. The state department had Peter Falk film a PSA explaining that they stopped filming 10 years ago to prevent riots.
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May 10, 2023 23:37
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Tulip posted:lol hell yeah, video-game rear end naming scheme Ubaid 0 was a big deal because while you could excavate Eridu in all the previous ones, it was the first time you could switch between excavating Eridu and Ur.
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May 25, 2023 13:40
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Reading ‘The Horse, the Wheel, and Language’ and just thought this was a funny way to characterize megalithsquote:“In northern and western Europe, some Neolithic communities celebrated their hauling capacities by moving gigantic stones to make megalithic community tombs and stone henges; other communities hauled earth, making massive earthworks. These constructions demonstrated in a visible, permanent way the solidity and strength of the communities that made them, which depended in many ways on human hauling capacities.”
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May 26, 2023 09:48
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Koramei posted:Reading ‘The Horse, the Wheel, and Language’ and just thought this was a funny way to characterize megaliths lol
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May 26, 2023 09:55
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Neolithic peoples would've lived the Ford F-150.
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