Discovering a New Neolithic World
archaeology.org
archaeology.org
I never got these kinds of statements. What on earth are you comparing us to? Somehow people who make the above statement never remark how slow it was moving from the development of agriculture to being sedentary, for instance.
In science and technology things develop in many areas concurrently and at some point stars suddenly align and boom things happen extremely quickly.
It's a bit like small drones these days. They require small powerful motors, high energy density batteries, and integrated semiconductors. All those technologies developed independently and then as soon as they all became available, boom, drones everywhere.
Do I have evidence for this? No. But have people changed since then? Also no.
The two versions given there are contradictory: "unearthed not far from Babylon and dated back to 2800 B.C." can not be true together with "attributed to an Assyrian stone tablet of about 2800 B.C.".
Assyria was far from Babylon, far towards the North.
Moreover, neither Assyria nor Babylon were places of any importance around 2800 B.C.
At that early time, there were neither Babylonian nor Assyrian tablets, but only Sumerian tablets (or in the neighboring lands there were Proto-Elamite tablets).
Unlike the later Sumerian tablets, e.g. those after 2500 B.C., the tablets from around 2800 B.C. use an archaic variant of the cuneiform writing system which can be deciphered only with great uncertainties.
There is no doubt that it would have been impossible to deduce a coherent text like "The world must be coming to an end. Children no longer obey their parents and every man wants to write a book." from such an archaic tablet.
At most it could have been possible to identify a few known words among incomprehensible gibberish, e.g. "world ... end ... children ... obey ... parents ... man ... tablet". But even a so great number of recognizable words is unlikely to have been found.
Nevertheless, similar texts are quite common in the Mesopotamian literature, but they have been found on much more recent tablets, e.g. from one thousand years after the claimed "2800 B.C." date. Perhaps the date was quoted wrongly and the original claim was about a tablet from 2800 years before present, which could have easily been true about a Babylonian or Assyrian tablet with such a content.
> The reason that the artist immortalized Ushumgal and Shara-igizi-Abzu is that they were involved in a transaction so important that a record of it was carved onto a stone boulder, complete with pictures of the main parties. The roughly drawn cuneiform signs that litter the sides of the boulder, and even extend over the figures themselves, record that this transaction pertained to animals, land, and houses, in large quantities: 450 iku of fields are mentioned (about 158 hectares or 392 acres), along with three houses and some bulls, donkeys, and sheep.
> Unfortunately, the inscription suffers from a dire shortage of verbs, which would have been useful in determining what exactly was going on.