5k-year-old tavern with food still inside discovered in iraq | Hacker News Reader

5k-year-old tavern with food still inside discovered in iraq

smithsonianmag.com

296 pointsrntn101 comments

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Great, it used to be a nice, chill place to grab a drink and some food but now it'll be swamped with tourists.

Did you even read the article? It’s an archaeological site… not an operating tavern…

Did you even read the comment? That was obvious humor.

"It used to be" - 5k years ago

"now it'll be swamped with tourists" - today now that its a famous dig site, people will come to look.

All of it parodying a common refrain from locals when ever a cool local spot gets media attention on the news or some national TV show.

Much like dissecting a frog, explaining humor kills the joke.

To OP: I liked the joke.

It's interesting seeing a joke as a top comment and someone downvoted for not getting the joke. I feel as though the voting would have been the opposite on this site years ago.

Yep, as much as I enjoy the occasional humour I don't want HN to become reddit.

They were down voted for the way they remarked on it. "Did you even read the article", berating the OP for missing something obvious (and also apparent just from the headline, not just the article).

People make jokes sometimes on here, its not all serious business, I don't think it would have been different years ago. You should get down voted for being a bit rude and simultaneously hypocritical because your criticism is also based on also missing something fairly obvious. The OP didn't deserve that comment, and the commenter should be corrected and have it pointed out they're actually the one making the embarrassing mistake.

It's not about not getting the joke, "did you even read the article?" is an explicitly against the rules comment[0], and it's snide to boot.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You ever go to Turkish Laundry? Nobody goes there any more, too many tourists.

I think you missed the joke. It was quiet because literally no one was there for thousands of years.

My expectations form the headline: Photos of dusty objects on some clay or stone made benches.

Reality: photo of a large square sandbox

Excited for SandBox in Shoreditch that sells desert themed craft beer for £7/pint

Only £7?

I bet you've been going there a looooong time too. This is really going to change your habits.

Internet Archive Scholar has some interesting results for "Lagash", it's a nice resource. See this from 1956:

https://archive.org/details/sim_transactions-of-the-american...

> "This is the dream contained in the famous Cylinder A of Gudea (published in TCL VIII), the ensi of the Sumerian city of Lagash, whose floruit falls about the very beginning of the second millennium B.C. Gudea, ruler of Lagash, desired to build a fitting temple for his god, NinGirsu, and, as was customary throughout the entire span of existence of the Mesopotamian civilization, the latter sent a dream..."

These kinds of modern excavations reveal a lot more about ordinary daily life than the older translation of temple documents and royal inscriptions do, however.

>These kinds of modern excavations reveal a lot more about ordinary daily life than the older translation of temple documents and royal inscriptions do, however.

I don't think these are separate things. Excavating is a blind effort, there is no 'modern excavation', we just find more interesting things now because we excavate a hell lot more then we used to decades ago. And these boring translations of temple documents and royal inscriptions is how we get context for the objects and layers we find.

>there is no 'modern excavation'

They describe the modern technique in the UPenn announcement...

Rather than digging according to architectural construction phases, the Lagash Archaeological Project is using an approach championed by Pisa’s Pizzimenti, who excavates by microstratigraphic layers, thin lens by thin lens horizontally, across a wide swath, “like doing very careful surgery,” Pittman says. “Just 50 centimeters down, we were able to capture all of this. We were happily astounded.”

That's a refinement of practices that are decades old. Comment I responded to seemed to imply we got evidence of this tavern due to some recent breakthrough, while before we'd be doing mostly work on temples and translation. Which is false, we have slice of life findings since the beginning of archeology, and ongoing efforts on prominent buildings and bodies of text.

I wonder why the tavern was abandoned with food in it in 2700 BC when the city itself was inhabitated far longer and according to Wikipedia might have been "the largest city in the world from c. 2075 to 2030 BC".

The article mentions that the city was surrounded by "fertile lands", so maybe there was no need for scavenging?

Ancient times must have had some equivalent to urban explorers.

edit: Bing Chat says...

>> "That’s an interesting question. I couldn’t find any direct evidence of ancient urban explorers, but there were many ancient explorers who traveled to different lands and cultures for various reasons123. Some of them may have explored urban areas as well, but they didn’t leave any records of their adventures."

>> "One possible exception is Xuan Zang (602-664), a Chinese Buddhist monk who traveled to India and visited many ancient cities and temples along the way. He wrote a detailed account of his journey, which is considered a valuable source of information on the history and culture of India and Central Asia1."

He looks like a backpacker tourist:

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

In hindsight, it's completely obvious, like of course it would be this way, but it's still amazing how ancient people were exactly the same as people are today.

I was going to say "but backpackers never wore clothes that wild", but then I remembered backpacking in India!

That's not really urbex though. Not sure ancient times had closed down industrial and commercial sites like the ones we have now.

Building falls or burns down perhaps? The ruins cover the site and people just rebuild on top of it.

There's a site in the UK from slightly later (1000BC) that had food still found in containers but that was the result of a fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Must_Farm_Bronze_Age_settlemen...

I was mainly wondering why noone else claimed the tavern or demolished it to make room for a new building considering that the city was probably growing between 2700 BC and 2075 BC. Looking at the photo it seems the tavern was found in the top soil layer with nothing above it. But perhaps the photo looks like that because there have been several excavations since 1887. Or maybe the photo just shows some random building...

It's hard for humans to fathom timelines beyond our life span. But over the course of 100s or 1000s of years, cities can be abandoned and population migrates. Think about the Detroit suburbs in recent years where entire neighborhoods were abandoned. https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/abandoned-houses-in-detro...

That looks like the City of Detroit, not its suburbs, though I'm sure some of them do suffer some decay, in general Detroit's suburbs are pretty healthy.

The definition of 'suburb' has been changing over time. I can't speak to Detroit but for instance with Boston the original 'suburbs' would now be described as "the city of Boston, not its suburbs". Likewise the town I grew up in as a kid (mumble) years ago, I would have been laughed at for calling it a 'suburb' of Boston as it was too far out of the city. Now Wikipedia calls it a suburb of Boston.

I can speak to Detroit, and it's the same. The areas south of 8 Mile but not downtown would by definition be "suburbs" (and structurally resemble the outside of the city), but I'm used to people reserving the term for outside city limits. Now that I'm in Nashville, "suburbs" seem to usually still be inside the city, so I'm guessing it changes as cities grow/decay.

Nashville has experienced really rapid growth too over the last 20 years, and I think it takes a while for naming conventions to catch up. Given by the fact that what people call suburbs appear to you (as I'm assuming, a relative newcomer) to be "inside the city".

My own hometown has experienced rapid growth over the same time span as Nashville, and has annexed large portions of what were commonly known as the suburbs. So there has been a literal change from what used to be suburbs to now be within city limits, in the course of a generation.

Nashville is a bizarre metro. It is a conglomerate that really does include areas that by all appearances are suburbs.

The incredibly low population density you can find on Wikipedia reflects the sprawling suburbia that composes the "city."

This seems like the impending future for San Francisco

Japan is another great example as they're now seeing population decline by the millions.

I think we often forget just how many of us there are on this planet (or even in a given country). Each of those million people all had their own homes, lives, businesses, and so on. And as the country sees population decline, much of that just gets left to rot. Homes that have been completely abandoned, usually because the owner died and left no heir, even have a term - akiya. Here's [1] an image search with all sorts of them. They make up more than 13% of all homes in Japan now. They have more homes than people to live in them!

And if things don't suddenly turn around in dramatic fashion, soon there will be tens of millions of these sort of places. In some you may even find the old owner. There's also a term for that - kodokushi [2].

[1] - https://search.brave.com/images?q=akiya%20houses&source=web

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi

Plenty of abandoned taverns in inhabited cities in the modern world. Owners die or suffer financial or social death, businesses become too unprofitable to run in parts of cities where the land also isn't worth much, structures start looking alarmingly unstable and aren't worth repairing etc etc.

And regardless of how long bits of the food are preserved for future archaeologists, a couple of days after the tavern's closed most of it isn't really edible any more...

You'd expect scavengers to get the food: rodents, insects, etc.?

Buildings that fall into disrepair tend to be scavenged by humans for materials too. Much moreso anywhere there's wealth disparity or resource shortages.

You'd be surprised. It depends heavily on the prevailing social mores. Besides, much of what archaeologists recover is the stuff that survived, not the 99% that didn't.

Notice that they didn't find any beer or wine. It seems the important stuff got scavenged.

Presumably just the eras equivalent of Hákarl or Surströmming was left, alongside the pizza-with-pineapple equivalent and Dr. Pepper-equivalent.

In archaeological terms, they could be discovering stuff like microscopic grain husks embedded into the clay of the containers. Though they could have found whole chicken skeletons or fossilized garlic or something else too... I searched for a moment but couldn't find more details from this dig about the food specifically.

> Plenty of abandoned taverns in inhabited cities in the modern world.

This is a key plot point of the excellent novel Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow. Highly recommended.

Free ebook download from the author's site, here: https://craphound.com/pc/download/

One can think of a million reasons, but we will never know. Maybe the owner died and the kids didn't want to take it over and boarded it up.

Maybe someone was murdered there or everyone got food poisoning and it was closed up because people were superstitious.

I used to live across an abandoned building that was falling apart; one day I forced the door to have a look inside (the place was already beyond salvage) and there was all sorts of stuff inside; some furniture, bunch of magazines and newspapers, empty bottles. Today's refuse, tomorrow's archaeology. Lots of boring mundane stuff gets interesting hundreds of years in the future.

Or the owner burned the place down after a tourist from a faraway land sold him a polly sea for some inn sewer ants.

I was thinking exactly this.

It’s not surprised it would be abandoned, but the story makes it sound like it was suddenly abandoned.

The simplest explanation to me is likely the untimely death of the proprietor, but even that doesn’t seem like a sufficient answer.

IIRC there’s a lot of totally abandoned places around there (like Babylon) because the Tigris and Euphrates changed course quite a bit? So what might have been a riverside city soon was just sitting in the middle of the desert.

Kinda like the fishing towns around the Aral Sea.

The archaeology content on HN is some of my favorite. I think what this find is getting at is more evidence that Sumerian civilization was more egalitarian than we may have thought if we projected our understanding of feudal civilizations all the way back.

Interesting. I've always seen feudalism as the response to civilization/empires collapsing (e.g. europe in the dark ages, Japan), and Mesopotamia was a thriving civilization

Feudalism was not entirely new to the Middle Ages - it was partially derived from the Ancient Roman system of Patronage [0] between a Patron and Client. So this kind of hierarchical social structure predates the civilizational collapses that led to the Middle Ages. Of course, Mesopotamia predates Ancient Rome, so perhaps it was even more egalitarian. Although slavery has existed since pretty much day one of civilization.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage_in_ancient_Rome

such a system more or less existed in every premodern society. Some sort of a patron-сlient to system is absolutely inevitable in any complex non egalitarian society unless there is a strong state that can protect the rights of individuals.

These finds that teach us about everyday life are interesting to me because they remind us that people are people. I remember looking at an exhibit of Babylonian seal cylinders, which were a kind of tool that a Babylonian would use to sign a document written on a wet clay tablet. It suddenly occurred to me that what I was looking at was not a work of art intended to be displayed and enjoyed just for its aesthetic value: it was the everyday tool of an ordinary clerk who lived and died thousands of years ago. I pictured this ancient Babylonian at the office, rolling the cylinder over wet tablets, looking forward to quitting time when he could go home, maybe stop for a beer on the way, play with the kids, kiss his wife. All of which would also be normal behavior for a white-collar worker alive today.

And on the table a Big Mac with fries, looking as fresh as on its first day.

I was expecting ever-fresh spam & twinkies.

I don't know what I was expecting, but those photos weren't it.

yea, i wanted to see this food.

No word on whether any of the beers had coasters over their tops. I mean maybe they still plan to come back and boy are they going to be pissed if the archeologists have stolen their beers.

> the tyranny of kings

English had inns and pubs, when toiling under the "tyranny of kings", right?

https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/The-Great-British-Pub/

> They also found a domestic dwelling that contained a toilet

A toilet?

A toilet is a place where people go take a shit or piss.

Before the invention of flushing toilets, the place where people were going to shit or piss was generally outside the house, also known as an "outhouse". A "domestic dwelling that contained a toilet and a kitchen" does sound unusual.

Hell no. People have never been ok to stump on someone else shit and feces have been used in the past as construction material and fertilizer.

There are still old dry toilets in my grandparents old farm. Basically a cabin with a toilet seat made of wood on top of a big hole. Wood chips and saw dust was kept in a bucket for the user to cover his shit with.

Mixed with compost the end result was used as fertilizer.

>...a cabin with a toilet seat made of wood on top of a big hole.

In Australian slang this is called a 'long drop' after a particular style of judicial hanging.

And yes, there are spiders.

I would have guessed long dropbears instead of spiders.

I have never given outhouses a second thought before this, but I wonder how often people fall in.

Or as fuel for fire. (Once dired)

The Indus Valley Civilization had toilets that could be flushed using a pipe coming from a water source above it. That's from about 6,000 years ago.

The Romans had indoor toilets. They also existed in medieval times but only the very rich had them. most castles had a toilet or two. of course it was probably reserved for the lord and other high ranking individuals.

[writes that down]

It can be an item into which one deposits bodily waste, or an area/room where one goes to defecate and/or micturate. The earlier meaning, very occasionally still used, is a place for dressing and/or grooming (eg powdering a wig).

Hmmm...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toilet

> "1917, Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge": "It is a quarter-past two," he said. "Your telegram was dispatched about one. But no one can glance at your toilet and attire without seeing that your disturbance dates from the moment of your waking."

For those wondering why people were living in the middle of a desert 5k years ago...

It seems the global temperature then was much the same as today: https://scitechdaily.com/images/Global-Average-Surface-Tempe...

Would there have perhaps been a locally different climate, for example because the african and middle eastern rainforests hadn't yet vanished after the global temperature rises 5k years earlier?

The Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians) as well as the Sumerians we're all attracted to the Mesopotamian area in general due to it being between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They flooded on regular intervals, thus creating fertile land despite the general desert like climate.

A dog walks into a bar. “I can’t see anything!” He says. “I’ll take this one.” —oldest joke in the book

I wonder why it was abandoned so rapidly that food was left in the fridge etc

how can food last for 5k years? doesn't it decompose during such a long period?

The article didn't imply that the food was still edible.

I wasn't implying that either. But how can you recognize organic food after 5k years? In my compost bin it lasts only a few weeks :)

Composting is a process specifically intended to break down organics. A closed tavern in the desert isn't likely to have the same conditions, and I'd imagine the remnants of the fish are largely bones and scales of the sort you wouldn't put in home compost.

You can't compost food in the desert, it's to dry.

Depends on the conditions, see mummies for examples. Don't expect fresh looking food though, it probably amounts to super dry rock looking objects

Reminds me of this article[0] about a guy that revitalized 4500 years old Egyptian yeast and baked bread using old grains.

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bread-was-made-usi...

The guy, Seamus Blackley, a game programmer who proposed the original Xbox, no less. Also made Trespasser (1998) realistic open world 3D game with physics engine [1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSDa4VZbJzI

they mentioned they found the "remains" of fish, presumably liquefied along with possibly some bones

bones, seeds etc. can fossilize

They can, but usually not on the relatively short timescales we use in archaeology. It's not what happened here, for example.

maybe they found it in a sumerian freezer

5000 year old fish would probably be excellent fish sauce by now

You've never found McDonalds of unknown age under the seat of your car?

Another piece of evidence that Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilisation.

Civilization might be much older than that but the traces in Mesopotamia are the oldest ones we could find.

I find the concept of pre-human civilisations fascinating. For how long would we be able to find our own civilisation’s remains and what would they look like in a million years, or a 100 million?

I would expect plastic and radioactive waste to be our longest lived tell-tale markers, along with stuff we've left on the moon, if anybody ever makes it there again.

Millions of years from now, even the devices we left on the moon will be under regolith or mowed down by incoming micrometeorites.

You are probably right that the most obvious signs will look like mineral deposits. Plastic will be back to oil by then.

No way a civilization would ever die out in a scenario where a significant fraction of terrestrial vertebrate species survive. Civilizations are much hardier than any terrestrial animal life more complex than insects.

We don't have evidence either way. As we are now a single global civilization, we may be more resilient, but imagine what would it take to wipe out the Sumerians or the Egyptians at their peaks and how little of them would be left a million years after.

Imagine then a species of dinosaurs that invented written language, started melting metals and built roads to transport their goods from production centres to specialized high-density habitation complexes, only to be wiped out by a mountain falling from the skies.

If they happened to live near the ocean shores, nothing would be left just a few hours after the impact. We'd be extremely lucky to find a fossil of a dinosaur wearing jewelry or any other indication of cultural development.

You're right. I thought you were referring to a civilization like our contemporary one, with the technologies and productive potential available to it. The scenario you describe, of a Bronze Age civilization being wiped out in one of the mass extinction events that life on Earth faced, is plausible.

I'd add however that it didn't take long at all on a geological timescale for our civilization to go from its inception, with the invention of agriculture, to having advanced industrial technologies, and I assume the same would apply to other civilizations. So the probability of a civilization having emerged but having faced a cataclysm in the short span of time it would have taken for it to achieve the level of sophistication of our civilization is quite slim.

I still don't think we are past the Great Filter yet. When we have 1M+ people living outside Earth's atmosphere in 10+ independent self-sufficient habitats, then I'll breathe in relief.

I'd add that the habitats should be moving away from each other and from Earth fast enough to make any physical interference too costly for sustained war. Communication should be encouraged though, with provisions against psyops.

Why aren't inner wall orthogonal to outer walls?

I believe what you're calling the "outer wall" is just the edge of the excavation grid, not a wall in the original city. The grid plan used by the archeologists won't necessarily align to the city plan.

We missed it the first time around, quick, let’s bomb it!

Tough crowd

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