A 3400-year-old city emerges from the Tigris River | Hacker News Reader

A 3400-year-old city emerges from the Tigris River

phys.org

163 pointspseudolus72 comments

If you haven't already, give the Fall of Civilizations podcast [1] a listen. It's one of my favourites - informative, engaging and peaceful listening - about how civilizations rise and fall. Episode 8 is about the Sumerians in Iraq and might give you a picture of how these people lived (if nearly 1500 years earlier).

[1]: https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/

Thanks for the lead. I tried. I cannot handle the music bed.

YES! I was born in 1989 and have played quite a bit of age of empires 1. I find this podcast gave me goosebumps.

The one on the Assyrians is my favorite podcast i've ever heard.

Sweet, I’ll check it out tonight.

Have you listened to The History of Rome podcast?

I’ve spent 3 years listening to it (twice) and I have to make conscious effort not to pick it up again. It’s sooo good.

The History lf Rome was my first podcast I've listen to. It is such a treat to listen. I've tried to continue with The History of Byzantium and it was just not the same. So now I've picked up Revolutions since I think it was really Mike Duncan style I appreciated (well that and the Romans)

The two books by Paul (host of that podcast) are fantastic. I cannot recommend them enough.

I love this one, sad that it doesn't have any new episodes for some time now.

Sort of related: I also do recommend the very excellent Pirate History Podcast.

They found cuneiform tablets, that's pretty fascinating. There's a really good Royal Institution talk on cuneiform and how difficult it is to translate:

Cracking Ancient Codes: Cuneiform Writing - with Irving Finkel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfYYraMgiBA

That video is super interesting and amusing. Thanks!

Prof. Finkel is certified nuts, love the show

Wow, the ability to mobilize and execute that mission on short notice, not knowing when the rains will return and resubmerge the city is awesome.

I wonder if that's the closest that real archeologists will get to Indiana Jones style adventures.

There are some very intriguing links between the Mittani and the Indo-Aryans. There are very similar words in Mittani and Sanskrit. It would be interesting if some of these clay tablets provided more background on this link.

Given the Indo-Aryan character of the rulers of Mittani, it's easy to postulate that any similarity between Hurrian (the common language of the Mittani empire) and Sanskrit are an elite import to the former language, not unlike English words with a Norman-French background.

These cuneiform tablets are written in which dialect and which alphabet?

Cuneiform isn’t exactly an alphabet. It can represent sounds, letters, whole words, or broad ideas in single symbols. It true that it was used for many languages, but if this is a trove of documents from a palace or temple then many will likely be in Akkadian. Akkadian was the diplomatic language[1] of the region until the rise of the Achaemenid empire in 550 BCE.

Since the site is from Mitanni[2] then some will also surely be in Hurrian[3] and maybe Amorite.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language#Development

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitanni

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurrian_language

Semantics. Some people consider Runes alphabetic and some do not because it does not follow the order of ABC. Some consider the prominent Semitic scripts, Arabic eg.، not alphabetic but Abjad because it has no vowels, although phoenician is usually considered the first alphabet. Alpha is Greek. So I can guess there's a sense of classicist classism

> Some people consider Runes alphabetic and some do not because it does not follow the order of ABC.

Even in narrow contexts, that's not how linguists use the term. Futhark runes are pretty clearly alphabets, because consonants and vowels are treated as independent symbols.

In the narrower sense, some scholars distinguish "true" alphabets from two other types of segmental script, abjads and abugidas. These three differ from each other in the way they treat vowels: abjads have letters for consonants and leave most vowels unexpressed; abugidas are also consonant-based but indicate vowels with diacritics to or a systematic graphic modification of the consonants. In alphabets in the narrow sense, on the other hand, consonants and vowels are written as independent letters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet#Types

In this sense you're correct, but it is more often refered to as specificly futhark, outside cladistics, if talked about individually, in which case ''it'' may be a subset that would not be refered to in the definite as alphabets, not at all. There are strong arguments for some changes in the order that we see, but that's overall uncertain, so the cladistics argument would be shaky anyway.

What would remain 3400 years from now if a modern city like Tokyo, London, or New York were abandoned today?

Reinforced concrete is probably more durable than unfired clay.

Unreinforced concrete will last a lot longer than reinforced concrete. Steel rebar rusts away.

Regarding clay vs modern concrete formulations, my money's on the clay.

Steel reinforcement is only one type. You now have fiberglass reinforced rods or you can use an additive like fiber mesh.

If the steel rusts away, you just have unreinforced concrete.

You have unreinforced concrete riddled with holes, in a shape designed to depend on the steel. It won't last nearly as long as a structure designed with unreinforced concrete in mind.

Tunnels perhaps.

Anything made of stainless steel and plastics.

You mean all of those religious artifacts?

How else would you explain Anime figurines in 3400 years? :)

Tunnels (as mentioned below), sewage systems, foundations of large structures, detritus, glass and ceramics. Most modern concretes would decay quite rapidly on these scales, metals would disperse, plastics get eaten.

The patterns we have made on multi-kilometer scales will remain for very long timescales. We have altered floodplains, water tables, and ecosystems so much so quickly that we will recognise artificial desertification for a very long time indeed.

And we'll still be confused about whatever the fuck we were up to, other than enjoying the human condition :)

Apart from sites devastated by a natural disaster like Pompei, why are there so many artifacts left behind/discovered at so many archaeological locations?

If you look at photographs of recent ruins, say from schools or hotels that have fallen into disuse, you'll often see the same thing: desks, cabinets, chairs, computers and all sorts of other objects still in place. Maybe the only explanation that is needed is that people couldn't be bothered to dispose of low-value items and just abandoned them? You may even have some of these mini-ruins at home or work: projects you abandoned halfway but that you never consciously decided to abandon and hence didn't clean up, so they were just left there.

Just watch a few Shiey episodes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OAKNxl2Jmw

His train episodes are crazy

why is he in remote places, all by himself wearing a covid mask? - kinda of makes them the whole premise laughable and easy to write off.

he's not wearing a covid mask, he is hiding his identity.

it is pretty well known that those face coverings don't do anything for covid.

There are whole towns like this in Japan. Schools, huge hotels almost untouched and abandoned. Pretty eerie but fun to see.

In this case, it was devastated by an earthquake.

In fire or earthquake, buildings collapse, burying everything in situ. Any new construction goes up on top, because clearing it away would be more work nobody wants.

In a fire, cuneiform tablets turn into fired ceramic, preserving a snapshot of what would have been evanescent records. Sometimes kitchen contents are charred but remain recognizable.

Without garbage trucks, trash gets thrown out right in back, in "middens" that build up layer by layer until they get too big and are left, providing a chronology tagged with pollen grains.

How old is this reservoir? Why wasn’t the archeology done before it was first flooded?

The dam was built in the 80s by Saddam, and it isn't clear why they didn't excavate the palace which was known to be there. There was some work in the area in 82[1], but I don't know what they excavated. I imagine the Iran-Iraq war made it impractical. There were bombings and missile attacks in Mosul and Kirkuk at the time.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/4200223

If I recall correctly, these were built during Saddam's era to ensure water for his people. Iraq doesn't have many, if any, water sources that aren't controlled by other countries so they were in a rush to build these to ensure a national water supply. They didn't have the luxury to do archeology.

my (distant) understanding -- reasons include that various waves of modern political movements attack and destroy archeological artifacts of the past, as a rite of passage to modern power.

In some areas of the world, with some of their histories, sure - but Iraq tends to be pretty proud of their ancient heritage.

this https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-33369701

If you're talking about ISIS please just specifically call out ISIS, it's arguable whether they ever achieved statehood but their terror base approach (toward their citizens rather than global terrorism) seems like a pretty big outlier in the modern world so I don't know if their state would have been sustainable even if major powers hadn't stepped in to erase them from the face of the earth.

Even ideologically extreme countries like Iran, UAE and Saudi Arabia have placed a strong emphasis on historical preservation - there are always compromises and violations, but I think that's a pretty safe broad generalization.

> arguable whether they ever achieved statehood

The Taliban, who've achieved statehood at least twice, blew up the absolutely amazing Buddhas of Bamiyan during their earlier reign in 2001.

"The statues were destroyed in March 2001, after the Taliban government declared that they were idols. International and local opinion strongly condemned the destruction of the Buddhas."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan

> To avert further damage to the important site by the rising water, the excavated buildings were completely covered with tight-fitting plastic sheeting and covered with gravel fill

Recently I was reading about how an ancient settlement in Turkey was discovered to have been deliberately buried thousands of years ago, with no explanation as to why it had been buried ( https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/does-an-unknown-extraord... ). Perhaps it was just the work of ancient archaeologists seeking to preserve the site. :)

Sounds like the plot to a horror movie

Had a big HN thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31452449

Reply on news.ycombinator.com