Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system
lithub.com
lithub.com
Jennifer Pournelle's 2003 paper[1] presenting new evidence for the area's landscape in antiquity is also quite eye opening, as the presence of the coast further inland than was previously believed upended a lot of long-established notions about the development of civilization there.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258858442_The_Litto...
My sole interest was in confirming the family connection, which I vaguely recalled, but the blurb was strange enough that I felt I needed to share it anyway. Brilliant AI-powered future we have here.
But the Sumerians were first. There was no glorious but crumbled past empire to inspire them. They figured out everything for the first time, and we know little about what they thought about it.
Now consider that humanity is likely the first in the Milky Way galaxy. We too have to figure things out for the first time, but on a grander scale. What will history think of us?
Apparently, they Minoans had plumbing in the 1800s BC, so I'm sure the Greeks would have been surprised at what had preceded them by a long time.
This is an essentially universal belief in the past, and not just about writing. People are able to notice that their lifestyle depends on technologies, and that the only way to learn those technologies is for someone else to teach you. So they decide that the technologies on which their lives depend - pressing olives, farming grain, writing, harvesting wool*... - were taught to their ancestors by the gods.
In the case of writing specifically, the ancient Greeks attributed it to Cadmus, who was not personally a god. But (1) he was a hero with descent from Poseidon, (2) Greek heroes receive prayers and sacrifices and grant supernatural blessings just the same way gods do, and (3) they credited him with introducing writing from Phoenicia, not inventing it out of whole cloth.
* In early records, sheep are not yet sheared - they're plucked. The sheep we have today aren't the sheep they had then.
From Weavers, Scribes, and Kings:
> "Shearing" is actually a misnomer. The Akkadian term was "plucking." Before the end of the Bronze Age, domestic sheep did not continuously grow wool, and the wool could be combed or plucked when their coats shed in the spring.
Why would you think modern sheep make a relevant comparison point after I explicitly point out that they don't?
I saw this guy on youtube talking specifically about this topic. Im no historian but i felt like he gave it a serious grounded exploration (no ancient aliens!)
The ever-scholarly answerers on r/AskHistorians think that yes, they believed they were the first: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8oskfv/did_a...
In the middle east, there had been millennia of settlement and agriculture by this point. Gobekli Tepe is apparently ~9000 BC. The Tower of Jericho was built around 8000 BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_prehistory
Circa 7500 BC there were a bunch of significant sites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Ghazal_(archaeological_sit...
Did Sumerians not know about any of those preexisting sites in the broader region? Maybe they built bigger cities, but I don't think they lacked for evidence of older civilizations and sites.
> Past empires, lost civilizations, and ancient artifacts have always fascinated us.
> There was no glorious but crumbled past empire to inspire them. They figured out everything for the first time, and we know little about what they thought about it.
I think the Sumerians were not without crumbled past ruins of civilizations that covered broad swathes of territory, though they may not have been "empires". But also, to us "the Sumerians" can seem like a brief period in time. But the Uruk period is almost a millennia in duration. For each individual, it may have seemed that the world changed very little over the course of their lifespan, and by 3100 BC, each city would have felt very old to its inhabitants.
> the original organized, literate, urban culture was produced by a far crueler and more challenging environment than either of those (Indus, Nile)
Egypt and the Nile don't seem particularly different as an environment. Dry desert with regular river floodings etc.
> The Sumerians invented kingship, priesthood, diplomacy, law, and war.
Of those, only law sounds like a legitimate priority claim, in the sense of having writen, thus fixed, laws rather than whatever the potentate of the day feels like declaring as being the law today.
What can be attributed to the Sumerian cities is the first appearance of several professions which are not directly productive and which have remained important until today.
By profession, I mean an activity that was all that a certain human did in order to obtain all the resources required for living. Before Sumer, those activities were done by certain people, but only occasionally, besides their main craft, e.g. a shaman was likely to also act as a medical doctor when needed and a chief of tribe was likely to also judge conflicts.
Among the professions that have first appeared in Sumer during the third millennium BC, are: judge, medical doctor, accountant, musician, prostitute.
The equivalent of priests and kings, though only at smaller scales, e.g. for a tribe or a confederation of tribes, have certainly existed much earlier than Sumer and Egypt. "Chief" is likely to be the oldest profession, as that exists at many social animals, including apes.
The Nile flood was extremely benign compared to Mesopotamia. You can set your calendar by it (and the Egyptians did), you can measure the height of the flood for a few years and be very confident that the flood of the next year will be similar to the ones of the past few years. And most crucially, the Nile flows in a deep river valley, with fairly steep sides, meaning that you can build your houses and granaries within comfortable walking distance of the flood plain and still be confident that you will be safe from the floods.
In contrast, the floods of Tigris and Euphrates were extremely unpredictable in both timing and strength, and the flood plain was so large that the entire civilizations working it had to live in it.
This resulted in very different outlooks, most visible in how they viewed their river gods. The Egyptian ones were friendly, the Sumerian ones were capricious and cruel.
While writing was developing in China, the Great Pyramids were already 1,000 years old, and the great city walls of Uruk were 1500 years old. Cuneiform writing is older still. Göbekli Tepe had already had its golden era and had bee abandoned for 6500 years by the time the first writing started to develop in China.
China is not the oldest civilization. It is barely even in the running, and only if you take the mythological 5000 years at face value. Comparing archeological evidence, ancient china isn't actually that ancient, compared to the Middle East.
I know it's widely believed there that China is the oldest civilization. But it's a laughable claim.
https://archaeologymag.com/2024/10/5000-year-old-royal-tomb-...
only a few people there that have higher position and get well educated that know a little about the very old times... and most of them believe Egipt or middle east started the first civilization because that's what the schools there teach.
It’s fine to speculate, but it’s pointless to just decide that our speculation is fact when there is absurdly huge numbers of pre-historic people who may have stumbled upon writing, but never care about permanence.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the proposition: “Ancient Sumerians probably created the first writing system”
So why can't we call it the first?
It is fine to assume all sorts, that your birthday is as your parents say, that sumerians are the oldest civilization, etc, but history, esp. ancient history is not knowledge, and can never be 'known'.
Using 'probably' indicates that this is one's best hypothesis, but doesn't overstate the case (nor mislead) by stating it as an indisputable, known fact.
But for all practical matters, I can say I know it.
Do you think different? I have not had a flat earth debate on HN yet, but am open to it.
In my first comment, I made a point about what is called knowledge. Read this thread again and you will see I don't object to the common usage - I was merely trying to address the original commentator's confusion.
As you say, you agree certain things you believe (earth shape, birth date) but do not know, you nevertheless characterise as 'practical knowledge'. This is fine, and a common usage. I get it.
What I would ask you though, is whether there is a value to you or in general in using the word 'know' as distinct from 'believe' - does 'know' mean something special that 'believe' cannot mean? And what about 'think' or 'feel' - can these also be used instead of 'know'?
I personally do find a value in trying to say what I mean (and no more!) - I try not to overstate or understate my position. I appreciate when others also try to be clear.
I am perhaps a bit excessive in this with my own behaviour as I consider it a form of lie to over- or under- state something, as I may erroneously indicate a level of certainty that could mislead others. For me, being careful with language relates to my morality.
But yes, some people do use 'know', 'think', 'believe', 'feel', etc almost interchangeably. I think this cannot help but lead to confusion.
Tally sticks as primitive ledgers predate writing by at least 15,000 years. A lot occurred between this time and the first evidence of writing. We'd know a lot more if wood and bone held up as well as clay and stone. Either way, the sparseness of the archaeological record should humble us into not making any sweeping claims.
https://soundcloud.com/fallofcivilizations/8-the-sumerians-f...
No icons for me. I'm more evolved!
It became less pictographic over time, and that Syrian site is only 500 miles from the Sumerian empire. My amateur speculation would be that trade with Sumer brought writing to Syria and they developed the idea in a different direction, arriving at this alphabetic system.
In general, Northern Mesopotamia where GT was seems to have evolved as a separate, contemporaneous urban tradition from southern Mesopotamia and Sumeria. It seemingly developed in a different way, with distinct architectural styles, social organization, and politics.
Gobekli Tepe is monumental in an extremely obvious way, which means GT Layer III constructions are the earliest securely dated structures that are obviously monumental. If that's what you mean, I agree.
The oldest parts of nearby Karahan Tepe are probably of similar age from archaeoastronomical evidence, but aren't as well preserved or securely dated. Tell Qaramel is much older than GT and has large constructions that some have argued were monumental. The monumental relationship isn't as clear as GT though. Tells themselves can often be monumental and we have many tells older than GT. Other sites from the same or earlier periods (PPNA) as GT layer III like the tower at Jericho or the communal structures at Cemka hoyuk, Jerf el-Ahmar and Tell Abr may not have been monumental in the same way, but were large constructions involving large amounts of manpower.
I'll let you make your own decisions about whether any of these count as monumental. I'm just emphasizing that Gobekli Tepe isn't a totally standalone precursor that's wildly distant from anything else we've found. It's an old and beautiful site that existed within the broader context of an entire landscape of early neolithic structures.
I think that suggests to me a greater level of sophistication for neolithic cultures than we give credit for in our current histories.
What's often taught in introductory classes is usually more of a basic outline of actual archaeological thought rather than a perfect reflection of literature. Not knowing your curriculum, level, or when you were in school, but it probably came up with either Childe's 10 traits or from Trigger's definition. Childe's definition is basically anything that shows off power. Trigger's definition is anything that's elaborated beyond practical function, either in size or ornamentation. The common examples when teaching both of these are large structures, but that's mainly a bias in common examples. Size isn't the sole factor, just one of several and the easiest to observe because of the inherent labor costs. It also makes for a nice exercise to have students wander around campus looking for monumental architecture and explaining why different structures are or aren't.
Over the last 20ish years people have moved away from emphasizing the size aspect because it doesn't encompass what we want to include, particularly as we look at things a little more exotic than classical centers like southern Mesopotamia. Joyce Marcus had an explicit response to Trigger that's pretty well known de-emphasizing size, Rosemary Joyce (unrelated) argued that the size aspect was a category error in monumentality of early mesoamerican pyramid construction, and Osborne gave a definition that's very similar to what I said above. I'm doing the same thing here to make it clear that the actual physical size of the structure isn't what's important, the intangible mental aspects are.
Physical size isn't necessary, and I didn't mean to clean that it was. The more fundamental connection would be labor expenditure, and directed organization. There's a bunch of old cities in the Levant that were occupied for thousands of years and which developed into very large beehive-like structures. These aren't monumental architecture in the way a smaller, but purpose-built temple or city walls would be.
The connection to 'civilization', as I understand it, is that a social organization beyond mere family units making incremental home improvements over generations is required to build monumental architecture, so it directly implies the existence of some form of societal structure to organize the work. That's what turns a 'culture' into a 'civilization.'
That seems a nonphysical, and really nonscientific subjective evaluation.
We're talking past each other a bit because we're referring to different things with our use of "monumental" though. I'm talking about monumental as a way of understanding how the structure was perceived and used by humans. You're using monumental as a way of understanding to the social organization of the society that constructed it. This is much more in line with Childe's use that I mentioned earlier.
Part of the problem is that the scale and sophistication of social organization associated with the classical mesopotamian states is not at all reflective of what would have been going on with Gobekli Tepe. In other words, we wouldn't traditionally call the GT builders a "civilization" (civilization being a bad word that makes archaeologists cry).
So let's go back to the scale and grandeur thing. If we have to understand the intention, that's one of the tangibles encapsulated in my definition. What I'm saying is that it's the mental relationship between the human, the structure and the context that gives rise to monumentality. The physical structure can facilitate that creation by intentional design (e.g. large imposing size, etc), but it can also arise naturally or change over time.
We don't actually understand enough of the ancient world to definitively establish monumentality everywhere because our understanding of those intangibles is so patchy. The tower of Jericho was thought to be monumental for many years because of the obvious size and labor investment it represents. The thinking nowadays is that it had more utilitarian purposes and probably wasn't monumental. The structure is the same either way, the only thing that's changed there is our understanding of how ancient people would have engaged with it.
It's racist, eugenicist mystical woo-woo nonsense, and not worth discussing in a thread about actual history.
"who was first" doesn't make much sense when you know we are missing most of the data
"the first of the last 5"
Dumb Cuneiform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10526680 - Nov 2015 (16 comments)
Art is not writing, true. Distinct symbols and syntax are required for writing. But it need not be transcription of anything spoken.
Yes writing systems evolved from earlier symbols used to indicate general concepts without a linguistic context. And those symbols go far back into the ice age -- we see such symbols on the walls of cave paintings in Europe, for example. In the case of Sumer, we certainly know that the writing system derived from accounting symbols for livestock and grain and such.
But going from simple context-free symbols to transcribing spoken language or thought with grammar and structure is a conceptual leap worth tracking.
In Mesopotamia we can see the evolution over many hundreds of years and even a few millennia from an accounting system that used a few symbols for the things that were recorded, to a full fledged writing system that was able to record any spoken sentence.
Before the societies of Mesopotamia and Egypt, which required a complex management of the available resources, there was no need for accounting with written records for great quantities of varied goods.
It is likely that for tens of thousands of years people have been able to make drawings that recorded useful things, like maps, and they probably have used some sets of symbols for various important things, like kinds of humans, kinds of animals, kinds of plants and so on.
Nevertheless, it is very unlikely that any such set of symbols used in the distant past has ever been able to record any complete sentence spoken in their language, with all the grammatical markers that do not have a concrete meaning.
Most human societies that have not seen a writing system at other people have never invented any writing system.
All those that are likely to have invented writing independently (though for some of them it is not certain that they have not seen the writing used by others) have invented writing systems in contexts similar to those of Mesopotamia and Egypt, i.e. in a settled agricultural society where cooperation was required at a large scale and management and accounting of resources was necessary.
However, people generally underestimate how culture differs. The idea of belonging to a certain group was vital in the Middle Ages. And that’s something modern people would probably not put much thought in if time travel was possible.
Single digit thousands of years is a drop in the bucket for evolution. The people back then were largely the same as they are now. They just lived in different cultures. Modern innovations are all motivated by a need. Some form of pressure to come up with a solution. Pre civilization societies just don’t have a need. It’s accounting and management of a large population that requires some form of book keeping and written records. There is no reason to believe, without need and cultural precedence, that writing would have been invented by societies in earlier stages.
In the same way classical physics isn’t wrong about the world compared to modern physics, calling this the first writing system is just in the context of our current understanding of the world of the past. We can be pedantic about the details but going by our current understanding, this is what makes sense. This understanding might change but it’s is needlessly pedantic, especially in a field like this that is less „cold hard truth“-ish compared to physics.
We haven't ever observed the invention of a writing system in the absence of cultural contact with written language, so we actually have no basis in evidence for the motivations that bring such a thing about, we just have speculations based on preconceived notions about why people might use writing, which is fine, but don't pretend like it isn't blindly opining on why you think someone would've invented or used a writing system
The depth of the information contained can be debated, but as the Spanish utilised the related quipu following their invasion, for their own record keeping needs, it is "of use". (The Spanish used those for tracking crop growth, timelines, deliveries, royal decrees, family trees, and spread of illnesses in remote areas. They're also still used in some religious sects today.)
While nobody can prove there wasn't some civilization that had writing prior to Sumer (can't prove a negative), it stretches the imagination to think that a civilization ONLY ever wrote on perishable media and not on, say, pottery or building walls. Then died out without transmitting their invention to successor civilizations, all of which we can account for their development of writing.
Also, what perishable media? The invention of papyrus was contemporary with Sumer's clay tablets.
Somewhere along the way a government of the people, by the people, for the people, perished from the earth.
Not from just one ailment like trickle-down economics, but from a thousand cuts delivered retroactively by revisionist history, until even the youth became their own wardens, and hope was finally lost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_policy_of_the_Ronald_...
The irony is that we're still debating this after 40+ years with new calls to eliminate the Department of Education, so in a way, things haven't changed. That's not to say they didn't change, just that any progress made has been eroded back to square one. That's the tragedy I was trying to convey.
I'd like to touch on how your tactic of undermining my point by asking me to do your legwork, then waiting for me or someone else to jump in and defend it, and then claiming victory when no one shows up, creates a climate of fear and ignorance.
I can't find a logical fallacy for it:
http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/fallacies.html
On the one hand, it's up to me to defend my point. But on the other, widespread criticism of the experiences of people who were there promotes division. Allowing the divide and conquer strategy to sway people into voting against their own self-interest, undermining democracy and the rule of law.
The way these debates used to play out was that the academic position was held in high regard. Because it covers a broad context. Asking for specific answers that were already generally known was considered a distraction, or a rhetorical question used to distract from the speaker's main point.
Ask yourself what common knowledge is known about education, where it receives its funding, who teaches and who attends. How that's changed in recent decades due to socioeconomic forces. Who might benefit from such changes, and who suffers due to them. And would I state something that can't be backed up by overwhelming evidence in the public record?
Those critical thinking skills used to be prerequisites to winning debates. Now it's easier to just dismiss arguments because others don't have time to get involved, or just want to keep their heads down.
I'd like to see a term for your tactic get added to the logical fallacies list. I just don't know what to call it. It's analogous to argumentum ad logicam, where you're implying that what I said was false, not because my argument was invalid, but because I omitted evidence that anyone could add or fact-check.
It of course had a predecessor going far back. At any rate, in 1980, the Department of Education had a budget of 14 billion. Today, it gets about ~80 billion. A quick Google claims that 14 billion in 1980 dollars is equal to 53 billion today. So the federal government seems to be funding education at much higher levels. Of course, most education funding is at the state and local level, not federal.
This generally goes along with expectations, since the USA spends more per capita on education than almost any other country in the world at #5.
I agree that there are major problems with education in the US, but more money is not going to solve them. It simply gets redirected into unproductive outlets and education "science" quackery like three-cueing. We could probably go back to 1980 levels of spending with the right reforms, and then look at doing things like 2xing teacher salaries and reducing classroom sizes.
Beyond K12 stats are harder to track down, but "continuing education" and government-funded classes for adults are easy to find. And of course, we have the Internet.
It’s called sealioning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
> Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter. It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate", and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings. The term originated with a 2014 strip of the webcomic Wondermark by David Malki, which The Independent called "the most apt description of Twitter you'll ever see".
The original comic:
I’ll say it again: full of shit.
Which makes me take back what I said. I wouldn’t mind if local government did it.
I think most historical discoveries should be prefixed or suffixed with this because as we dig up more things we might learn that there was an even older writing system (in this case).
Our understanding of physical constants is based on empirical confirmation via multiple samples. They're still just probably correct, and we haven't confirmed the laws of physics are uniform across either time or space.
namely, that science reveals our perceptible reality, through a specific arrangement of direct and indirect observations following along philosophical notions through critically formulated discursive language.
who is to say, like historical evidence, what type of philosophical investigations might provide us some way of becoming aware the breviously unknown?
i suggest having an honest imagination to everyone!
And statements misses the ability to hold an absolute truth. No, wait!
I think it also stems from the way it is taught in schools, where there is a lot of focus on memorising dates and events etc, rather than on the process of actually deriving them from sources of questionable trust.
Also, the majority of focus in schools (in the UK) is on much more modern history and doesn’t really focus too much on the really ancient stuff and the extra difficulties that arise from learning about it.
they’re brand new to being a human, and even then they aren’t adult humans (i guess defined as such, post facto)
seems like our brains are craving hard structural information to establish requisite coherency once fully ‘weened off’ by our family unit. so things are taught in the traditional scholastic type of way first, and then introduced to more scholarly approach later, revealing who is behind the curtain in oz.
"The first day ever was last Thursday, according to this calendar."
concepts such as Neolithic and Paleolithic fall on deaf ears
getting just some people out of that funnel only to still have a static version of events is counterproductive as you are subverting a competing understanding of the world
you are replacing unfalsifiable appeals to a Sky Daddy authority with falsifiable observations where a challenge is simply neglected
In some corporate environments there is pushback against so-called “weasel words.” Which is fine to call out for contractual obligations, but it is ridiculous when used against an engineer being honest.
I once got reprimanded for explaining that “exactly once” is not possible in a distributed system, but I was going to do “at most once” and put some mitigations in place to handle most failure scenarios. Management was mad at me for not using more concrete language, even once they understood the problem.
I bring it up because I believe it is a result of whatever personality traits that got them in management to begin with. The same types of people manage schools and publications, and they would fight back against a pedantic nerd saying “as far as we know” because they don’t want to use weak language.
I don’t have a solution, but it has always been upsetting to me.
It is curious. Today a pictogram of a woman is an upward-pointing triangle with some small details added, while a downward-pointing triangle with the same details is a man. Sumerians would use a wrong bathroom all the time. Or we would use a wrong sumerian bathroom if we time traveled there.
Similarly, the Egyptian symbol for male was just a relatively accurate drawing of the male genital organs.
The modern symbols shy from drawing the body parts that distinguish males from females, hence the drawing of the entire body with the addition of features that are sometimes, but not always, associated with gender.
Uh, is there not plenty of evidence of oral traditions and histories spanning back millennia? There are Aboriginal stories that go back 7000 years. [1][2] Kind of weak to open with a statement like that.
Obviously not as old, but just in Toumani Diabaté's family they've passed down their familial history for 70 generations. [3]
Clearly history exists without writing.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2015.10...
[2] https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/edge-of-memory-9781472943279/
Even in written form, we have vague translations in ancient Buddhist texts that require cross referencing multiple sources to get at a meaning, and even then there is plenty of disagreement. Thich Nhat Hanh brought this up in his translation and commentary on the Heart Sutra [1], as he believed an early translation was not skillful enough. That's one of the reasons it's important to have a guru-shishya relationship with your teacher.
As we all know, writing is plenty capable of transmitting falsehoods. I'm married to a professional novelist and memoirist, and we often talk about how non-fiction often contains plenty of fictions.
Obviously none of this is to say that writing isn't great and important, it just doesn't pass the smell test for me to say that history is what is written when we have plenty of contrary examples. Maybe to assert that in an academic journal where language tends to have more technical meaning is fine, but this is lithub. I know plenty of writers that write for them personally, my wife included, and it's certainly a self-important claim they'd love to be able to make!
[1] https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/letters/thich-... -- the introduction in the published text is better than this one, but the gist is the same.
I mean, it is true. There are no oral traditions left of the Sumerians or the Assyrians that I know of. Meanwhile, you can find buildings and clay tablets and translate them.
no one said that
but there is a definitional issue here - to reiterate the previous poster's point:
> Historians use “history” as a technical term for events recorded in written and other durable records.
That's how the word is defined by historians. It's not a value judgement on oral traditions.
Your post is using the word "history" in a different way. You have some good points to make, but as long as you're using "history" in a different way to everyone else you're not going to get very far in conversation.
However, using the word "history" in a way different to historians is not going to uncover any blind spots.
'However, using the word "history" in a way different to historians is not going to uncover any blind spots.'
Yes it does. There are non-written, non-durable sources that would suggest a different story. A great example is the story of the Seven Sisters. Among oral traditions collected from around the world in different cultures, that story has remarkably high degree of agreement across variants of that story -- probably owing to the one of the Pleiades growing too dim to see with the naked eye, and witnessed around the world.
Even written sources can be overlooked because of narrative biases. I grew up with an Euro-centric world history only to find out that lands connected by the Silk Roads had a much longer history as the center of the old world.
they aren't really durable as they are heavily distorted as they are passed down (thus "legends"); whereas with writing you could, for the first time, read the events as they were originally described at the time (whether the description was truthful in another matter, but there is no distortion in the transmission, though there is the question of translation of course)
Evidence so far indicates humans first settled into fixed colonies/cities around 45,000 years ago starting in eastern Europe. These people are referred to as neolithic, where as mobile units without a fixed geography are referred to as archaic. It wasn't until around 10,000 years ago that humans first civilized (around 8,000 to 7,000 BCE).
So this means people, the same mentioned in the article, civilized several thousand years before they had writing. The only real difference between neolithic settlements and civilization is governance and influence. Writing is beneficial, but influence can be accomplish through various means including: arts, religion, culture, organized military activity, and more.
It is also worth pointing that civilization was extremely unappealing to the uncivilized who first encountered it. The most immediate symptoms of civilization are social restrictions, class stratification, and loss of mobility of which all are essentially opposing aspects of freedom.
I could imagine the historical definition of "city" not being consistent with modern cities, but if that's the case, it's no wonder that this would confuse people and require clarifications like the one you give here.
Its not confusing to anybody vaguely aware of ancient history.
[1] https://www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9/1-CompleteSet/MES-SAA-0...
The defining characteristic of a city is that it can't feed itself. (Hence the "urban" vs "rural" dichotomy.)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Tenochtitlan was a closed system and used to have farms on the lake and the islands.
Knossos or other Minoan cities didn’t have walls either. Sure they were in an island but Crete is large enough for there to be enough opportunities for large scale internal conflicts, yet it implies that their societies were relatively peaceful.
They were absolutely necessary as protection for stores of food (food storage being a defining feature of a city)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedentism#Requirements_for_per...
The 45,000 years ago number I referred to earlier comes from sources that are not online. Either way, the start of human settlement occurred on the Eastern European plain during the ice age, which is far before anything in Anatolia or Mesopotamia.
Are you referring to a book, or unpublished academic work? Is there a particular scholar you have in mind?
The person you were replying to was asking about cities. The article you are posting is about Sedentism - "the practice of living in one place for a long time". The figure of 25,000 years ago is for the first evidence of permanent settlements. These do not fit anyone's definition of a city.
The first evidence of cities are from Sumer, which is what this whole thread is about.
The person I replied to replied to me. I never mentioned city, but they injected the word city nonetheless probably because they had no idea what they were replying to or what the words meant. What qualifies whether any fixed permanent or semi-permanent settlement is actually a city, town, hamlet, or village is entirely subjective.
nope
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344644569_Definitio...
Yes, the dividing lines are blurry.
No, it is not totally subjective
Yes you did:
> first settled into fixed colonies/cities around 45,000 years ago
You referred in your above post to colonies/cities that were over 45,000 years old. Although I don't doubt such a thing is possible (maybe just lost to history), my last dive into this had scholars claiming the oldest known cities to be in the range of 9,000-11,000 years old like Gobekli Tepe and its sister cities. I was just asking if that consensus still holds. I can see this is getting into semantics a bit though and what the definition of city is.
As someone who grew up with the internet, I don't know whether to take this as a dismissive "trust me" (sorta religious) type of statement, or legitimate research that somehow nobody ever bothered to even reference online in a way that you could link it. Since you're not saying what the offline thing is, I'd guess the former but not sure
Is there any actual evidence of that? Even the tiniest amount?