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Comment by mistrial9 | Hacker News Reader

oh definitely - that must explain why I saw a guy with a white shawl and a black box filled with written prayer, tied to his forehead today.. counting grains, no doubt!

to be very clear - the ways of sacred writing are very old, and not the same as counting grains.

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If you're trying to make a point about sacred writings being the first texts, you may want to consider Linear B and cuneiform, some of the oldest texts of the Mediterranean and which are almost exclusively inventory lists. While we have things like the epic of Gilgamesh preserved in baked tablets, this is the exception to the rule. For the vast majority of these most ancient texts, tabulation was the main use of writing: how many animals were sacrificed, how many sheaves of wheat were in storage, how much fruit a plot of land could produce, etc. As for sacred writings: Many religions were hesitant to commit their wisdom to writing - one reason why so much of Greco-Roman religion is unknown to us. The Oral Torah was supposedly passed on for centuries until the destruction of the temple and fragmentation of the Jews necessitated the writing down of this knowledge. Heck, Homeric poetry (the hymns as well as the epics) was not written down until centuries of oral development had gone on; not because writing had not been invented, but because it was not used for literary material.

Something important to remember is that the transient documents in the Ancient Mediterranean and Mesopotamian days were scratched into clay (a medium which allows it to be easily erased and adjusted if necessary, and is plentifully available in quantity). One consequence is that if you have these things in a storage building that catches on fire, the clay is baked into pottery and essentially permanently preserved for archaeologists to uncover. Texts written on organic parchment or papyrus are far less durable, as they tend to decompose unless properly stored.

This means we probably have an exaggerated abundance of economic documents due to survivorship bias of the things they wrote economic data on.

Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar hell. That's the last thing we need here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37708558.

Edit: we've had to warn you about this specifically once before, as well as several other past warnings about breaking the site guidelines. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on? We have to ban accounts that won't, and I don't want to ban you.

what ? this is not flamewar? I am being completely misunderstood here.. I am not guilty .. dang - honestly, I meant to be fully supportive of prayer and I am deeply wronged in this sequence.. I regularly support religious topics if you read my writing

note: I will re-read the guidelines in an abundance of caution, but I repeat.. I am being misunderstood deeply .. this is not at all meant as some kind of problem thing to say

I'm sorry. I obviously misread you.

Unfortunately, the comment is still a flamewar starter even if you didn't intend it that way, because it didn't make your intent clear enough. I wasn't the only person who took it the wrong way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37709050. If we had left it in its original position, there would likely have been others.

The burden is on the commenter to disambiguate intent in such cases (I was just writing about this elsewhere - perhaps it will help explain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37709303). And as the site guidelines say, "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ok - I deeply apologize and since we are detached, I will also add that I study the Bible myself, and my first wife was in fact Jewish. Please, really sorry to be in this awkward moment

No worries! These things happen.

odd thing to be snarky about. organized religious practices coevolved with agricultural societies. I don't think this is that scandalous?

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