Founded c. 3800 BC
Abandoned after 500 BC
Sargon II was king of Assyria, ruling from 722 BC until death in battle in 702 BC. He almost completely reunified Assyria in the then millennia-old tradition of grand empire-building in the region. His assumed name Sargon was appropriate; Sargon I, Sargon the Great, was the first to have created a unified empire in Mesopotamia, nearly two thousand years earlier. The records of Sargon the Great's exploits were still around to read, and people could still read them. Although he was near-mythical by then, like Gilgamesh. The subsequent wars Sargon II's empire-building led to would effectively destroy the Mesopotamian political-economic system and leave it ripe for external conquest, first by Persians, and then Greeks, effectively bringing that 3000 year old civilization to a whimpering end over the next couple hundred years.
His name was actually more like Sharrukin, or Sarrukin, in the Akkadian language. We call him Sargon II because that is the Greek version of the name recorded in the Bible and transmitted in the Western canon. He is mentioned only once, in passing, in the Book of Isiah. That single passing reference to him as King of Assyria, was everything that was known of him for 2500 years, until the ruins of Dur-Sharrukin, his capital (destroyed during the mentioned wars) were excavated in the 19th century. Only the faintest echoes of the very last stages of Mesopotamia survived through the transmission of Western/Persian/Islamic civilization. Faded memories several generations old, by the time the earliest Greek and Jewish authors started writing things down. Like you say, it's a good thing clay lasts.
If you find yourself in Chicago, you can see carved stone reliefs and a lamassu from the palace at Dur-Sharrukin at the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago.
If you’re talking about the recent Syrian war, Ive read there’s reason for optimism.
Many of the ancient fortress were used by fighters, not necessarily to defend against attack. More to keep prisoner, train, etc.
But what I read was about medieval Kracs, which are still functioning fortresses, not ancient Mesopotamian structures.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.I only have a layman's knowledge of this part of history, but this strikes me as unlikely. Surely something was known of him for some time in other sources, probably hundreds of years at least, before those source were also lost? The loss of knowledge is also second-order: we have lost knowledge of what was known to our predecessors.
Still, the end of Mesopotamian records is abrupt. There's a written record from prehistory until the wars of around 700 BC, where the use of writing drops off but doesn't completely stop. But written records in Akkadian, the education of priests and scribes in Akkadian and Sumerian (itself dead for 2000 years by then as a purely liturgical language) basically stops after the fall of Babylon in 539 BC.
I'd note that writing in antiquity was deeply tied to both administration and to religion. The Persians were Zoroastrians; they do not seem to have oppressed, but state support went to Zoroastrianism and not the traditional Mesopotamian cults (and their scribes and schools). They imposed their own administrative structure on the conquered territories. Persian became the written standard, pretty much overnight. Akkadian seems to have ceased to be spoken within a couple generations among the ruling class, and within a few hundred more years it was not only dead but basically forgotten.
This probably isn't so much a move away from the use of writing, but a shift away from Akkadian cuneiform on clay tablets to Aramaic on vellum. Clay tablets, even unfired, survive a long time. Vellum doesn't in that climate.
[1]: https://youtu.be/cq1g8czIBJY [2]: https://youtu.be/Qr4FiT0ks7I
That city went from the equivalent of the year 0 to the year 3300. Us here in the common era are barely halfway through the life of that city, and look at just how much history we’ve been through. Their history will have been much, much longer, with far more generations of people, but it’s all forgotten, to the point that to us it barely registers.
The span of human existence is marked by an ever increasing derivative in the rate of change. That said, barring cataclysm, I tend to think we've gotten much better (perhaps too much so) at recording things; I doubt our current era will be forgotten so much as categorized and filed away.
Another fun glimpse: It has been speculated, based on evidence in the Uluburun shipwreck, that some bronze age societies used a wooden book-like object with wax or clay faces as an easily erasable notepad. Whoever owned that may have thought about it the same way we think about electronic records blinking out. Or maybe they didn't think about the future at all.
Given the choice, would you rather your civilization be understood to people in the future, or would you leave as little as possible behind and leave future historians with only guesses?
> we should try to not vanish
If this civilization survives for the next few thousand years, the work of the preservationists will end up in a museum to early Earth civilization. If not, then the preserved work will end up in a museum to early Earth civilization, but run by aliens or something.
The need to be remembered is more of a philosophical argument, but I think it's just part of the human condition. It's why we pass our names to our children, why we tell stories. Thousands of years after the fact, almost everyone on the planet knows the names of at least some of the great conquerors of antiquity. Just about anyone you meet could probably tell you at least one story about Alexander the Great, or Genghis Khan, or Julius Caesar.
As a wildly successful civilization, the need to be remembered for that success is strong. Maybe just for vanity, but maybe future generations can learn from our stories as well. If our civilization does fall and we are not remembered, what happens next? Would we have another Dark Age? If the remnants of our civilization can still use the knowledge we've accumulated, would that help them rebuild?
It's really an unknowable question. The only thing we can be sure about is that it costs us relatively very, very little to preserve our records. If that effort is wasted, then so be it, but not putting in the effort would probably be bad in almost all situations, depending on your perspective.
Our civilization may well continue and prosper for a thousand years more, but unless we care about being remembered, they will have no idea what Pink Floyd, or Harry Potter, or A Hundred Years of Solitude, or an iPhone, or Linux, or anything else you consider important of our time were/was. Just like we have almost no idea about the pop culture or songs of people living in, say, the area of Berlin in the year 1022 was.
We can listen to the music of Hildegard of Bingen, who lived a little after that time in another part of Germany. It's not folk music, sure, but that's still pretty cool.
This seems to be like end of Ottonian Renaissance. So maybe someone like Hermann of Reichenau?
What if it’s about remembering rather than being remembered? There are some good lessons in past events.
Those weren't intended to be kept around, but fires happen in cities, whether from a sacking or just back luck, and sometimes this would be hot enough to fire the clay.
In conclusion, the future will have just an enormous amount of coroplast political signs to fish out of landfills and decode, along with the ingredients on aluminium cans.
The "particular recording weaknesses" of the past were air, fire, and invaders. All still exist, but our recordings are generally more proofed against them than in the past. I tend to think that at a societal level, data preservation is on such a serious upward trajectory that categorization in order to begin to find meaning will be the greater challenge for future anthropologists.
Lots of data will also be lost to encryption - still stored on some tape, but with no one alive to remember who may have owned the keys, where they may be stored, and what formats everything is.
I would bet that a vast amount of the data stored today in S3 that will never be read again - either because it will be forgotten or actually deleted by Amazon (people stop paying their bills, companies go bankrupt).
Not to mention, we already know of things like the source code of 10-20 year old games that people still play having been entirely lost.
"We"'ve been through exactly as much history as Ur. History didn't begin in year 1 CE.
Even if you mean "Western civilization's heritage", that stretches back checks Wikipedia 5000 years through still-occupied Athens. "We" beat Ur handily.
I’d be cautious to not underestimate the effects of dilution due to the sheer growing size of that written record. Given enough time, almost everyone will be effectively forgotten, like a drop of ink in the ocean.
Swings and roundabouts. One approach lasts longer in a state of passive neglect, the other lasts longer in a state of active upkeep. As the meme says: it depends.
Contrary to your, frankly rather odd, assertion about digital media, they do not need power to store data. I did think tapes, DVDs, and USB thumb drives were common knowledge.
A Carrington event is probably not a big deal these days, but let's pretend all the transformers blow, and the grid is down so badly that rural parts of North America don't get it back for two years.
Data loss? Minimal. Any radiation which could get inside a hard drive or SSD and fry it, would kill us all, that's like a gamma ray burst. Some corruption from power spikes maybe, but for the most part, fuses and breakers work.
Hard drives are a non-starter. Mechanical drives have the obvious mechanical issues, and over long term can develop bitrot. SSDs store bits as static charges which slowly deplete. Magnetic tapes seem to be the best option, but require climate control to last for more than a decade or so.
We don't really have any good way to store digital data unpowered for long periods of time. The best right now is just duplicating it across multiple types of media and replacing each as it fails, which requires active attention and functional infrastructure.
Yes, that was what I initially claimed. No-one's claiming that digital media can be copied without power, no-one's claiming that a single digital storage artifact has a longer lifespan than (e.g.) a clay tablet. You appear to be arguing for a position ("sophisticated digital media storage artifacts have an individual shorter shelf-life than rudimentary ones") that no-one is arguing against.
I 100% agree that electronic records require active upkeep. I am not arguing, nor have I ever argued, that they can outlast a discontinuity of civilization. If your threat model is addressing that risk, then electronic media is a poor solution. If your threat model instead wants to preserve huge quantity of information in an easily accessible format and you can assume the continued availability of electricity and maintenance, electronic media (with active upkeep) is a better option than durable physical record-keeping.
I was (and still am) just pointing out that different "solutions" apply to different problems. There _is no_ single "problem in this context" - I agree that one of the solutions is ill-suited to the problem you're choosing to highlight, while maintaining that it is well-suited to another problem.
(Please note that I'm not /u/samatman!)
And if you are willing to go a couple generations back, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160715-the-ghost-towns-...
At points during our recorded history Rome’s population fell into the low tens of thousands.
https://whatson.cmog.org/exhibitions-galleries/global-cities
[1] https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-arch...