Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?
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And the fact that all lengths are multiple of 600, is even more telling knowing that they counted in base 60
The mathematical and astronomical tablet texts we have of Mesopotamia, where we understand the numbering very well, are much later, in Babylonian Akkadian from the 5th century BCE.
Could be a simple misunderstanding as interpreting something that was intended to be metaphorically read as "quite a long time". Like myriad - literal translations might yield Chinese historical texts claiming unlikely numbers in multiples of 10.000 when the author might have intended to say just "very, very large number, beyond what we have seen around here in living memory".
There's always the possibility that it is just some mythology without deeper meaning, that it represents garbled memories from pre-literary times. It might be encoding something we don't understand or just collectively misremembered stories or even just gibberish that came to be seen as significant purely by tradition or repetition.
We don't really know all that much about these peoples who lived at the early stages of our current post glacial stage of human society. We have a lot of data, to be sure, but very little in the way of a coherent interpretation for it all. In fact, the vast majority of the cuneiform tablets that have been digged up haven't even been examined properly yet, as in transcribed, translated and analyzed.
We have a few glimpses of the culture of Sumerian and some of it is this odd lists of names and numbers. I mean, even calling them "kings" is anachronistically projecting a very recent concept of Medieval Europe into a past at least 3 times as distant from as as the very earliest tribal leaders that came to be termed 'kings'. One common title used translated as 'king' (I am not sure it is written in these name lists) is lu-gal. It means 'big man', or magnate.
Hell, Sumerian is a language isolate. We interpret it largely based on context from later vocabulary borrowed by Semitic languages such as Akkadian and more recent descendants in Assyrian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic and so on... Studying ancient Sumer and ancient Egypt is very very close to studying alien societies. We share very little with them other then happening to inhabit the same planet. We only understand Egyptian writing because some stone inscription had the same text in common late antiquity Greek, and ancient Egyptian written in hieroglyphics, and a script believed to be its more 'cursive' form.
Note that the odd precision is due to just a single entry. Remove that entry, and pretty much all of the old entries are either perfect squares or nicely round numbers in their numeral system.
From what we gather, around 2300/2200 BCE the very first territorial empire known, the Akkadian empire rose and then fell. There's a great book about it called "The Age of Agade". Enheduanna, thought to be a daughter of one of the Akkadian rulers, is one of the oldest authors known! She is thought to have authored some poetry we've found from back then. After the Akkadian territorial polity fell, southern Mesopotamia fragmented into city states and that is when these 'king list' tablets are thought to date from.
I know this must somehow explain the giant numbers but I'm still not sure how precisely.
Counting in base 60 would make for much smaller numbers, no ?
For example, the number 16 in base 2 is 1111. but in base 10 it is 16. Ergo smaller base, larger number, and vice versa.
So did you mean to say they counted in units that are made of 1/600 of our solar years? I think that would make more sense, putting their reigns between 31-72 years of our counting.
I noticed the deviation because there are mechanical watch movements that run at 18000 and 21600 beats per hour.
Are these individual human kings, or dynastic reigns, such as the Tudors, Windsors, etc.
So, OK, maybe it really means "Kug-Bau, the woman tavern-keeper, and her descendents, not mentioned here".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal#Babylonian_mathema...
"For example, the symbols for 1 and 60 are identical."
I did find a pattern though. If you look at ALL the kings, rather than just those 8 it becomes obvious. The recent numbers are realistic and drift further apart, becoming less and less accurate, the further back you go.
Interestingly it also compared some other clay tablets and they were close. So it seems that they were probably written down based on a verbal history that had already drifted wildly well before it was written down .
Also, one of those early kings was also literally a well known god. So it's possible they were just saying "Before the flood Gods ruled on earth", and we've since forgotten most of those gods.
I used to think the same thing, but I've come to appreciate exposure to highly-technical content (outside my wheelhouse) that also "gratifies ones intellectual curiosity." I don't necessarily deeply care about the merits of GUIs and TUIs, but once it's pointed out, I can see the importance of being keyboard driven (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479837). And I find it valuable fairly often to have a passing familiarity with the fact that something like this is being discussed by intellectuals in the tech space.
For smart, curious people, exposure is valuable even if you don't have the time to understand something very well.
This is a forum run by a Silicon Valley startup incubator. Unfortunately tech stories and whatever the current tech thing is will always dominate. And HN's design ethos of "no silos" means everyone has to see all of that content, and it will always push everything else down, especially anything non-technical (unless the mods force it up, which they can and sometimes do.)
The only way to get what you want (I do think it's an interesting idea and I'd like to see it) would be to start another forum entirely or else build a third party client to filter out all of the AI slop. Such stories will always be diamonds in the rough here.
Not to burst your bubble but registrations are open to the public here on HN.
Which means, surely, "no tech" and "no current impactful world". You would lose that sight from a community largely trained on hard facts ("works/doesnotwork") and creation, invention, management, on real grounds.
"Intellectual curiosity" as a "bubble", as an escape into a closed reality, is not a good thing. "Oh, the colours of nature in its taxologies!". And meanwhile maybe the world that is allowing you that intellectual growth is eroded.
Just skim through the submissions and pick your thing, obviously.
And there are reasons why what will concern us directly is important to be notified and discussed to be clarified.
It is precisely the hard tech articles and focus that keeps the valuable community on HN.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Together with the out-of-the-box no effort AI slop design it's an immediate turn off.
"One theory" implies that someone somewhere has ever claimed this. But has anyone? TFA gives no source for the claim, AFAICT (although I skimmed a bit).
Interesting nevertheless.
1. The Literature of Ancient Sumer - Jeremy Black. It is a quite substantial anthology, has myths, hymns, laments, royal praise poetry, proverbs, literary debates, etc.
2. Myths from Mesopotamia - Stephanie Dalley. I bought this for Gilgamesh, loved the rest of it too. One of my most treasured books.
3. Weavers, Scribes, and Kings - Amanda Podany. Not Sumerian literature, but my favorite comprehensive history book covering all of Mesopotamian history. I mention this particularly because all the literature we do have came to us through scribes, and this book gets into whatever we can know about their internal lives really well. Reading about their tutoring and how they learnt to write, what we can deduce about how their lessons were structured - fascinating stuff.
For such an ancient civilization, it is astounding how much we do have and how closely we can meet them.
[1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-literature-of-an...
[2] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/myths-from-mesopotam...
[3] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/weavers-scribes-and-...
Feedback welcome
Checking to see if these dates correspond to climatic events only makes sense if the texts imply that. However, this list does not mention climatic events for these kings records. The only climatic event it does mention is the great flood which in their chronology comes after these lists of kings. So why would these writers use dates to some past events and leave out that context? I don't see any scholarly articles suggesting this. Googling for it only brings up this article. It comes across to me as ploy for self promotion rather than anything of value to prehistory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_King_List#Lines_1%E2%...
For a real example of a possible ancient human record of an actual event aboriginal australians have oral histories of a volcanic eruption 37kya.
https://www.science.org/content/article/aboriginal-tale-anci...
The dark ages were anything but dark.
Ancient Europe was anything but primitive.
And yet it’s so rarely discussed in the mainstream.
So you're not really filling me with confidence about your idea here. Perhaps you can provide some sort of evidence?
Would you mind being a little clearer about what it is you’re saying here?
The period is only called dark age in English for what it’s worth, that should make it pretty obvious it’s not a universal understanding of that era
After the fall of the Roman empire primitive religion came to rule Europe. The science the Greeks gave Europe were lost or stagnated, and literacy was almost exclusively the domain of the church. Europe regressed, while the Islamic world preserved the Greek science texts and China thrived (inventing gunpowder and money to start with).
Everything is named by comparison, and we compare that age to the age of enlightenment. I don't care how unpopular it is to say it out loud, it's the literal, provable, and easily verified truth that Europe during that time was an age of intellectual darkness.
I get that you want to bash Christianity, but... it's not like it was less progressive than worshipping force-of-nature gods with a propensity for rape and petty revenge.
Not at all. The dark ages were dark. Pretending like they weren't because of your religious choices is just intellectually dishonest, regardless of your faith.
Were they dark because religion was in charge? Yes.
Atheists have perpetrated their fair share of horrors (and then some) as well. So have most/many other religions.
Using weak language to avoid having to consider the horrors of the past helps no-one except those who wish to repeat those horrors.
My objection is not to Christianity, it is to revisionists who want to pretend like Christianity didn't already have a go at being in charge or forget the monstrosity of what happened when it was.
Some people also interpret some symbols on mammoth tusks going back 50k years as writing but that's a stretch IMO.
It's clear by the number of symbols it's a writing system of sorts (proto-writing). It could definitely be pictograms (probably IMO), but then again, cuneiform, hieroglyphics and Chinese writing all started as pictograms as well.
Well ... some factors are recurring, e. g. energy coming from the sun. So downwards pattern will be created due to that. But many things are rather hard to predict, magnetic changes, eruptions on the sun and even local climate. Antarctica was not always covered in ice, that started at around 34 million years ago, give or take - as one example. Or, as a much more profound case: dinosaurs ruling the lands, then a meteorite induced climate change and dinosaurs went extinct. That would be hard to predict (you can of course calculate trajectories, but what I mean is if you look at Earth as an isolated system only, then it is hard to predict).
I think the "xyz human list" aligns with "paleoclimate events" does not work that well. You don't need a human list to help "align" anything with recurring patterns. Geology isn't based on fantasy events but on specific factors that can be calculated with some extent of certainty; perhaps not 100% (weather remains hard to predict today for some n days in the future) but to a high percentage degree.
To use that human list to then predict the future, makes little to no sense. It makes no real sense. Measuring current data points is much better than some random human-made list ages ago. It seems the author is desperate in wanting to make such an analogy.