The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing about 5000-5500Y ago.
This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today.
Mind-boggling.
This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today.
Mind-boggling.
Let that sink in!
It is extraordinary to me that they don't get as much clout as they deserve for maintaining human civilization for so long. They literally evolved cryptologically sound techniques for maintaining their history - through fires, floods, calamity and Mother Nature.
We can't even keep our stories straight in the modern era for longer than 8 months.
https://www.aboriginalculture.com.au/aboriginal-religion/
There are plenty of other places to start the journey but those will get you on the path.
I know that this is commonly believed, but how could you possibly know?
The simple answer is that some storied reference events that happened that long ago.[1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n6VJ5jq7zY
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/aboriginal-tale-anci...
This is another thing that you can't know.
If there is a match between an inferred geological event and a mythological event, you'd still have to ask "what is the rate of this happening by coincidence?"
Otherwise history is indeed much guesswork, as we don't have a timemachine and rely on lot's of indirect evidence for everything.
We do have methods of proving these stories - we can dig trenches and see the history as it was described, in the land itself.
Please, do not dismiss this on the basis of some authoritarian postulates about not having developed your own cultures time machines. Song lines literally are a verifiable time record.
Do you know their language? Can you rule out missunderstanding, misstranslation or plain fraud?
I cannot, so I fail to understand the absolute direct proof here. Do you have a researcher btw. who says there is absolute proof for this?
I doubt it, I rather think their language is along the lines of: "those findings indicate that ..".
"The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years."
And especially for this claim of yours, citing from the one given link:
"Eruption 37,000 years ago may have sparked a legend about four giants"
Notice the "may"?
There is no coincidence - the song lines record real geological events, such as the lowering of the oceans, the formations of islands, the drying up of lakes - on an ancient timeline - all of which are verified in the geological record.
Please, do not lean so hard on the petard of treating this subject as one of methods and coincidence.
These are real cultural artifacts, which encode real events.
The total amount of evidence for the second half of your claim is zero, and you should realize that.
It's something people want to believe, but it's not something there is any reason to believe.
There are a number of such stories which tell about landforms which have been under the ocean for 11,000 years, since the great meltwater pulses raised the ocean at the end of the ice age. Long after the stories were documented by anthropologists -- who thought it was unusual that so much mythology would be concerned with the topography of the seafloor -- sonar was invented, which confirmed that the landforms existed more or less exactly as the stories said.
So personally I think that's pretty hard proof of at least 11,000 years of accurate oral tradition.
“Prophecies” is a very euro-centric way to dismiss the subject. Indeed, there is encoding for you to be discovered, which has been rigorously demonstrated.
Dig deeper.
Why is the dismissive non-curious comment not getting down voted?
Am I in denial about whether the curios community still exists here?
To recognize the topic on hand... When a native community shares an oral tradition that accurately describes something that's been under water for 12+ thousand years despite not having the technology to map the sea floor that's pretty strong evidence in the accuracy of their ability to persist accuracy through oral tradition.
Parent is entirely valid in encouraging curiosity in this subject to anyone who is dismissive of it.
TLDR: the story is about a constellation that is seven sisters, but one is hiding; and that constellation does indeed have seven stars, but one hasn't been visible for 100k years.
If that can happen, it's not so surprising a story can last 20-30000 years either - especially not if there's not much else making a similar impression to tell stories about.
The one I know of by way of personal experience (heard the songs, been there many times) is the tale of the creation of Wadjemup (Rottnest Island) ...
I don’t have references handy at the moment - I leave it up to you as an exercise to go on a course of interesting discovery - because there are some very fascinating papers for you to read, if you maintain the interest in the subject. The treatise on the potential crypto mechanisms (kinship system in a multi-lingual environment) is extremely fascinating, if I get a chance to find the references in a few days or so I’ll try to follow up … but anyway, do go do your own search, it is worth the journey.
How is this confirmed without records?
The claims are confirmed.
The formation of islands, the kinds of animals that used to be found there, the movement of lakes, the lowering and raising of the oceans - these are all confirmed, recorded events.
The San have been around for over 100,000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_peoples
So to think that Egyptians and Romans in Cleopatra's era went to visit the Pyramids as a kind of tourist thing from a civilization 2 millennia removed from them is quite astounding.
I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.
https://www.theglobalwow.com/mammoths-alive-during-pyramids/
Shakespeare wrote a play about her and Elizabeth Taylor played her in a movie. The effect of modern media is 99% of the reason why Cleopatra feels more "contemporary" than, say, Hatshepsut (for whom plenty of artifacts exist) or even Nefertiti.
Hatshepsut and Nefertiti lived respectively 1400 and 1300 years before Cleopatra, and about 700 years before even the founding of Rome. I'm no expert, but seems to me that those two names completely disappeared from the historical record between say 1000 BC and AD 1800, and were rescued from obscurity only by 19th-century archaeologists.
I don't think Sharespeare would have mentioned her had she not figured prominently in the lives of main figures during the fall of the Republic.
It's due to the historiography of western civilization that for so long always traced its origins back to Greece (and Cleopatra was, of course, Greek.)
Compare to Mesopotamia, Sumer mentioned by the parent comment. There may be more surviving cuneiform literature than Greek and Latin. The sheer volume is kind of hard to overstate. The Library of Ashurbanipal is a prime find but hardly the only one of its kind: 30,000 tablets including mostly-complete copies of epic poems, histories, dictionaries, and thousands of administrative and personal letters. And there's millions more tablets from thousands of other digs.
And the crates and crates and crates of ordinary shipping receipts, if ever systematically studied, offer the potential to understand their society in ways we never will with classical antiquity.
But most haven't been read. There aren't enough people who know Sumerian and Akkadian (and all the other languages written in cuneiform over its 3000 year history) and how to read cuneiform for the task to translate them all to be completed in our lifetimes.
Stories of Mesopotamia do not always resonate. In fact they are often very alien and inscrutable. It's very hard to grasp the Mesopotamian mind. I'm unsure if this is lack of familiarity or because they really were so different, because in the western tradition they are the canonical Eastern Other, and shrouded with thousands of years of myth and misunderstanding.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the strangeness, I found reading translations of Gilgamesh and Atra-Hasis to be revelatory and hope that my descriptions don't put anyone off. They're worth it. To this day "Babylon" has all sorts of associations, many of them unsavory. Which is rather unfair to them.
The Babylonians had 360 degrees in their circles, 24 hours in their days, and when they looked up at the stars they saw patterns like the Twins (what the Greeks would borrow as Gemini), the Bull of Heaven (Taurus), and the Crawfish (Cancer), the Hebrew month of Tammuz is named after the Sumerian fertility god Dumuzid, and the Mesopotamians leave many other echoes in the later cultures, now that we know to look.
https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/publications/mesopotamia/202...
"Artificial intelligence can therefore provide researchers with a significant support, helping them link together texts that mention the same individual, a geographical site, or a word within a large digitised corpus. But we are still far from machine decipherment of texts."
A decade ago every "omg just use [answer]!" was to suggest blockchain solve your problem.
Every possible problem seemed to have a solution that involved blockchain.
... now that "[answer]" is always "AI".
So I get his sense of cringe... while also acknowledging I had the same thought. We've never been better at pattern matching, pattern identification, OCR, translating across languages... seems like a great use of an LLM.
one LLM is enough!
I truly believe we might one day, soon hopefully, see an LLM making observations about our history which blow open the horizon of humanities future.
Imagine, if you will, some of the secrets buried in these texts, revealing to us all just how it all began, and where things are headed.
In the grand context of galactic-scale civilizations, we might be in for some surprises ..
They’d be very, very good at reading, discerning, summarizing, etc, vast quantities of text like this.
I hope for example, that I live long enough to get an understanding of Rongorongo .. imagine the tales - or otherwise mundane details - we may some day extract from these immensely interesting human mysteries ..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo
Disclaimer: I’m also a fan of Protong and would love to see LLM also look for a prototype tongue along a similar framework of artistic interpretation … without Szukalski’s baggage, of course …
There are more direct connections. The Greek god Adonis, Aphrodite's consort, is the near Eastern god Tammuz, with the same mythology and worship rites. (And his name reflects that; it's the Semitic title "lord", cognate with Hebrew adonai.)
Seems like there ought to be countless ancient proto writing systems not just in our species either. I guess most species aren't in situations where storing information like this offers much of a selective advantage. Maybe you can count an animal scent marking out its territory as a sort of proto writing system; it is only somewhat different than the plat map in your city hall.
EDIT: Apparently neanderthals are thought to have used tally marks... (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-did-neanderth...)
...but...
if "writing" is the act of conveying ideas through markings then... I guess it is kinda writing.
And once it gets invented it snowballs as it is shared. How old were we when we learned to tally mark? 4-5 years old in the playground sandbox maybe? I remember thinking how great it was you slashed for 5 to just count blocks of 5 tallys. But its one thing to learn it from others and understand it. Another thing to come up with the system entirely. No one in the playground was probably clever enough to do that yet. We could learn but few could probably be the doers.