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 systems not just in our species either. I guess most species aren't in situations where storing information like this offers much of a selective advantage. Maybe you can count an animal scent marking out its territory as a sort of proto writing system; it is only somewhat different than the plat map in your city hall.
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?
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 stories straight in the modern era for longer than 8 months.
Not sure what is mind boggling. The homo sapiens exists in the _current_ form ( physiologically and brain size, etc ) since at least 250k years. about 50k year ago abstract art was already in vogue.
one of those mind-boggling timeline comparisons I sometimes think about is Cleopatra and the Pyramids. The Giza pyramids were built around ~2600 years _before_ Cleopatra. And she's about 2000 years removed from us today.
So to think that Egyptians and Romans in Cleopatra's era went to visit the Pyramids as a kind of tourist thing from a civilization 2 millennia removed from them is quite astounding.
I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.
> 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 sheer volume is kind of hard to overstate. The Library of Ashurbanipal is a prime find but hardly the only one of its kind: 30,000 tablets including mostly-complete copies of epic poems, histories, dictionaries, and thousands of administrative and personal letters. And there's millions more tablets from thousands of other digs.
And the crates and crates and crates of ordinary shipping receipts, if ever systematically studied, offer the potential to understand their society in ways we never will with classical antiquity.
But most haven't been read. There aren't enough people who know Sumerian and Akkadian (and all the other languages written in cuneiform over its 3000 year history) and how to read cuneiform for the task to translate them all to be completed in our lifetimes.
Stories of Mesopotamia do not always resonate. In fact they are often very alien and inscrutable. It's very hard to grasp the Mesopotamian mind. I'm unsure if this is lack of familiarity or because they really were so different, because in the western tradition they are the canonical Eastern Other, and shrouded with thousands of years of myth and misunderstanding.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the strangeness, I found reading translations of Gilgamesh and Atra-Hasis to be revelatory and hope that my descriptions don't put anyone off. They're worth it. To this day "Babylon" has all sorts of associations, many of them unsavory. Which is rather unfair to them.
The Babylonians had 360 degrees in their circles, 24 hours in their days, and when they looked up at the stars they saw patterns like the Twins (what the Greeks would borrow as Gemini), the Bull of Heaven (Taurus), and the Crawfish (Cancer), the Hebrew month of Tammuz is named after the Sumerian fertility god Dumuzid, and the Mesopotamians leave many other echoes in the later cultures, now that we know to look.
I'm really (honestly) waiting for the day when an LLM gets into the Akkadian and Sumerian texts and starts revealing extremely mind-blowing details to the world.
I truly believe we might one day, soon hopefully, see an LLM making observations about our history which blow open the horizon of humanities future.
Imagine, if you will, some of the secrets buried in these texts, revealing to us all just how it all began, and where things are headed.
In the grand context of galactic-scale civilizations, we might be in for some surprises ..
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.
and imo ive also thought the same thing, but then it does still come down to the amount of people and time it would take to go over those rough translations and pull the wanted info out of it. manpower is lacking in a lot of those fields
I doubt there's much Akkadian and the 14 other languages written in cuneiform over more than 2,000 years. Several of these are language isolates. Its probably not intractable but would require a lot of human labeling and correcting by academics who can read these languages. It would be a fun legacy project for an eccentric billionaire. If I were Bezos, it would be on my todo list.
There was still a wooly mammoth population on Wrangel Island in the Artic when the pyramids were built. They didn't go extinct until several hundred years later.
>I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.
Shakespeare wrote a play about her and Elizabeth Taylor played her in a movie. The effect of modern media is 99% of the reason why Cleopatra feels more "contemporary" than, say, Hatshepsut (for whom plenty of artifacts exist) or even Nefertiti.
Cleopatra was a contemporary of Julius Caesar, and played a major role in his biography. (Which is why Plutarch wrote about her, which is why Shakespeare wrote about her, which is why 20th Century Fox made the film about her.) Julius Caesar is... a big name... in the West. Call that "the effect of media" if you like, but it's a thing.
Hatshepsut and Nefertiti lived respectively 1400 and 1300 years before Cleopatra, and about 700 years before even the founding of Rome. I'm no expert, but seems to me that those two names completely disappeared from the historical record between say 1000 BC and AD 1800, and were rescued from obscurity only by 19th-century archaeologists.
+1, I think the real reason that Cleopatra is still living in our common culture is mostly because of her association with Julius and Marcus Antonius, as well as of course proximity to Augustus.
I don't think Sharespeare would have mentioned her had she not figured prominently in the lives of main figures during the fall of the Republic.
> Since systematic excavations began in 2019, a number of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figural sculptures have been found at Karahan Tepe, often in unusual combinations. Several examples of a human carrying a leopard on his back. The leopards in these sculptures are not slung on the man’s back as if he had killed them in the hunt or tamed them enough to carry them, but rather are depicted snarling, with teeth bared, very much alive and very much unfriendly.
Interesting that "you've got a monkey on your back" is a commonly-used expression in English. I could imagine these people saying the exact same thing, with "leopard" substituted in.
>> 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?
He could be trying to protect his junk from the leopards, or taunting the leopards by jerking at them. So many options. The past was just as juvenile and perverse as modernity.
This is most likely the explanation. Apex predators will often try to kill the seed of an enemy by tearing off their junk. It's much less dangerous than trying to kill the enemy, and it serves the same purpose of ending their genetic line.
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’s not really well carved… Tug-a-lug is the best carved of all and must be the centrepiece of the story.
If this is another great flood narrative, I sure prefer the Hebrew great flood story.
In a recent Irving Finkel interview he talks about Gulbekle Tepe and the proto-writing that was way older then even Sumerian.
Link: https://lexfridman.com/irving-finkel/
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 systems not just in our species either. I guess most species aren't in situations where storing information like this offers much of a selective advantage. Maybe you can count an animal scent marking out its territory as a sort of proto writing system; it is only somewhat different than the plat map in your city hall.
EDIT: Apparently neanderthals are thought to have used tally marks... (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-did-neanderth...)
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?
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 stories straight in the modern era for longer than 8 months.
What are some good books or websites where one can read these stories? I am interested in learning more about them.
Not sure what is mind boggling. The homo sapiens exists in the _current_ form ( physiologically and brain size, etc ) since at least 250k years. about 50k year ago abstract art was already in vogue.
one of those mind-boggling timeline comparisons I sometimes think about is Cleopatra and the Pyramids. The Giza pyramids were built around ~2600 years _before_ Cleopatra. And she's about 2000 years removed from us today.
So to think that Egyptians and Romans in Cleopatra's era went to visit the Pyramids as a kind of tourist thing from a civilization 2 millennia removed from them is quite astounding.
I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.
> 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 sheer volume is kind of hard to overstate. The Library of Ashurbanipal is a prime find but hardly the only one of its kind: 30,000 tablets including mostly-complete copies of epic poems, histories, dictionaries, and thousands of administrative and personal letters. And there's millions more tablets from thousands of other digs.
And the crates and crates and crates of ordinary shipping receipts, if ever systematically studied, offer the potential to understand their society in ways we never will with classical antiquity.
But most haven't been read. There aren't enough people who know Sumerian and Akkadian (and all the other languages written in cuneiform over its 3000 year history) and how to read cuneiform for the task to translate them all to be completed in our lifetimes.
Stories of Mesopotamia do not always resonate. In fact they are often very alien and inscrutable. It's very hard to grasp the Mesopotamian mind. I'm unsure if this is lack of familiarity or because they really were so different, because in the western tradition they are the canonical Eastern Other, and shrouded with thousands of years of myth and misunderstanding.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the strangeness, I found reading translations of Gilgamesh and Atra-Hasis to be revelatory and hope that my descriptions don't put anyone off. They're worth it. To this day "Babylon" has all sorts of associations, many of them unsavory. Which is rather unfair to them.
The Babylonians had 360 degrees in their circles, 24 hours in their days, and when they looked up at the stars they saw patterns like the Twins (what the Greeks would borrow as Gemini), the Bull of Heaven (Taurus), and the Crawfish (Cancer), the Hebrew month of Tammuz is named after the Sumerian fertility god Dumuzid, and the Mesopotamians leave many other echoes in the later cultures, now that we know to look.
> There aren't enough people who know Sumerian and Akkadian
one LLM is enough!
I'm really (honestly) waiting for the day when an LLM gets into the Akkadian and Sumerian texts and starts revealing extremely mind-blowing details to the world.
I truly believe we might one day, soon hopefully, see an LLM making observations about our history which blow open the horizon of humanities future.
Imagine, if you will, some of the secrets buried in these texts, revealing to us all just how it all began, and where things are headed.
In the grand context of galactic-scale civilizations, we might be in for some surprises ..
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.
and imo ive also thought the same thing, but then it does still come down to the amount of people and time it would take to go over those rough translations and pull the wanted info out of it. manpower is lacking in a lot of those fields
I doubt there's much Akkadian and the 14 other languages written in cuneiform over more than 2,000 years. Several of these are language isolates. Its probably not intractable but would require a lot of human labeling and correcting by academics who can read these languages. It would be a fun legacy project for an eccentric billionaire. If I were Bezos, it would be on my todo list.
There was still a wooly mammoth population on Wrangel Island in the Artic when the pyramids were built. They didn't go extinct until several hundred years later.
https://www.theglobalwow.com/mammoths-alive-during-pyramids/
There were archeologists in ancient Egypt studying ancient(er?) Egypt.
>I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.
Shakespeare wrote a play about her and Elizabeth Taylor played her in a movie. The effect of modern media is 99% of the reason why Cleopatra feels more "contemporary" than, say, Hatshepsut (for whom plenty of artifacts exist) or even Nefertiti.
Cleopatra was a contemporary of Julius Caesar, and played a major role in his biography. (Which is why Plutarch wrote about her, which is why Shakespeare wrote about her, which is why 20th Century Fox made the film about her.) Julius Caesar is... a big name... in the West. Call that "the effect of media" if you like, but it's a thing.
Hatshepsut and Nefertiti lived respectively 1400 and 1300 years before Cleopatra, and about 700 years before even the founding of Rome. I'm no expert, but seems to me that those two names completely disappeared from the historical record between say 1000 BC and AD 1800, and were rescued from obscurity only by 19th-century archaeologists.
+1, I think the real reason that Cleopatra is still living in our common culture is mostly because of her association with Julius and Marcus Antonius, as well as of course proximity to Augustus.
I don't think Sharespeare would have mentioned her had she not figured prominently in the lives of main figures during the fall of the Republic.
The aesthetics of this sculpture look very similar to the Moai on Rapa Nui (Easter Island).
They remind me of Cycladic sculptures:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycladic_art
> Since systematic excavations began in 2019, a number of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figural sculptures have been found at Karahan Tepe, often in unusual combinations. Several examples of a human carrying a leopard on his back. The leopards in these sculptures are not slung on the man’s back as if he had killed them in the hunt or tamed them enough to carry them, but rather are depicted snarling, with teeth bared, very much alive and very much unfriendly.
Interesting that "you've got a monkey on your back" is a commonly-used expression in English. I could imagine these people saying the exact same thing, with "leopard" substituted in.
"Bro, I gotta get this leopard off my back..."
No, you have it reversed, the leopards have the monkey on their back.
more like, "bruh, do I even keep riding this Leopard?"
mmmmhm, riding?
>> 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?
It’s a cautionary tale: man who jerks his meat in the woods risks getting eaten by leopards.
Man gripping his phallus was a popular character in Karahan Tepe in the old times.
See his 2.6 meter statue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe#/media/File:Karah...
No cougars were hurt during filming that scene.
Depends on the nature of the grip.
He could be trying to protect his junk from the leopards, or taunting the leopards by jerking at them. So many options. The past was just as juvenile and perverse as modernity.
Given that they went to considerable effort to carve it in stone as part of a temple complex, it was likely neither juvenile nor perverse
I think you underestimate the amount of effort people are willing to put in to being juvenile or perverse.
Have I got some ancient Greek theatre to show you?
Some people like making others laugh, maybe they thought we'd appreciate it
Humor and jokes exist since the great apes!
Wait until you see some of the carvings in Gothic cathedrals.
This is most likely the explanation. Apex predators will often try to kill the seed of an enemy by tearing off their junk. It's much less dangerous than trying to kill the enemy, and it serves the same purpose of ending their genetic line.
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’s not really well carved… Tug-a-lug is the best carved of all and must be the centrepiece of the story.
If this is another great flood narrative, I sure prefer the Hebrew great flood story.
The simple joys of being a man.
What a downgrade. We were riding leopards back then!
"riding" and "leopard" are doing a lot of work here
he might be standing and holding it, but that's a nice find
I spent so much time looking at it, how do they see a leopard there?
"Hold my..." checks notes, yeah it's a couple thousand years earlier and near enough "...beer and watch this!"
Exact same thought, “Oldest evidence of bad ideas found in Turkey”.