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broke: being remembered 4000 years hence for murdering, looting, and raping a whole bunch woke: being remembered 4000 years hence for inventing the fart joke bespoke: being remembered 4000 years hence for scamming some rubes
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Apr 23, 2023 13:04
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*khanishly* it's a living
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Apr 24, 2023 17:56
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a fatguy baldspot posted:That’s Tom, the guy who loves minerals, from Breaking Bad. his name is finger, actually
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Apr 25, 2023 02:37
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Tulip posted:My favorite is Life and Society in the Hittite World, which is overall a social history of a kingdom, but the Hittites were a pretty pluralistic empire and so relations between the Hittites, Mittani, Egyptians, Luwians, and Canaanites is a significant part of it. I haven't read it yet but the same author wrote The Kingdom of the Hittites which I think focuses more on their place in a foreign policy context. Thanks for these recommendations, they all look great!
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Apr 29, 2023 01:31
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https://twitter.com/alloy_dr/status/1653514266266279936?s=20
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May 2, 2023 22:40
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Say, uh, Lemon, do you like to read? I just got a great book on tape. It's about life in ancient Greece and...
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May 2, 2023 23:23
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Question from another thread that y'all can probably answer.Rabbit Hill posted:Is the Greek text below written in ancient, medieval, or modern Greek? (The book is a 1571 edition of the Roman Pandects, which were originally written in the 6th century AD.)
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May 5, 2023 18:14
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Mr. Nice! posted:Question from another thread that y'all can probably answer. Wish I could help but it’s Greek to me
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May 5, 2023 19:36
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BUMBACLOT posted:Wish I could help but it’s Greek to me 
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May 6, 2023 05:28
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There's no way an ancient Greek source would be writing of an "autocrat Caesar", right?
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May 7, 2023 14:47
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Autokrator is the Greek translation for imperator. Also, similar to tyrant, it doesn't have quite the same implications for ancient Greeks as it does for us.
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May 7, 2023 15:04
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How can Ea-Nasir sell poor "quality" copper ingots if copper is an element?
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May 8, 2023 04:07
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Baron Porkface posted:How can Ea-Nasir sell poor "quality" copper ingots if copper is an element? His copper wasn't particularly elemental and had a lot of impurities in it. I'll leave it to you to explain to ancient Sumerians what an element is.
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May 8, 2023 04:09
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Baron Porkface posted:How can Ea-Nasir sell poor "quality" copper ingots if copper is an element? Aha, a smart customer who doesn't listen to slander! I have a special price just for you.
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May 8, 2023 04:36
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Is there a serious distinction between the Sumerian and Babylonian civilizations?
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May 8, 2023 04:42
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Baron Porkface posted:Is there a serious distinction between the Sumerian and Babylonian civilizations? sumer is southern iraq. Babylon is a city just north of that region. When people talk about "Sumerian civilizations", in my experience they're usually talking about truly ancient stuff, like before 2000 BC (though of course the geographic region continued to exist and have civilizations in it all the way to the present day). Babylon first became important around 2000 BC. cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 05:31 on May 8, 2023 |
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May 8, 2023 05:21
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cheetah7071 posted:sumer is southern iraq. Babylon is a city just north of that region. Is Akkad and Assyria Sumerian then? Did they worship the same gods and have a similar cultural and material society to the Sumerians?
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May 8, 2023 07:15
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cheetah7071 posted:sumer is southern iraq. Babylon is a city just north of that region. Yeah one big obvious dividing line is the dying out of Sumerian as a spoken language sometime around 2000 BCE. Babylon was later and Akkadian-speaking. Also while Babylon traced a lot of cultural heritage to the broader Sumerian city-states (e.g. continuing to use Sumerian as a written language for academic topics, having a lot of the same gods), there were definitely big differences (e.g. the pre-eminence of Marduk in the state religion).
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May 8, 2023 07:17
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Centres of power can change for various reasons, and are usually probably as good a marker as any for distinct historical epochs in the area.
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May 8, 2023 09:06
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Baron Porkface posted:Is Akkad and Assyria Sumerian then? Did they worship the same gods and have a similar cultural and material society to the Sumerians? Extremely short answer: no. More reasonable answer: these are all geographically proximate powers that share a number of similarities but are generally distinguished politically and temporally. There's a lot of cultural commonalities among all these groups for a variety of reasons, mostly that these groups communicated with each other, but colloquially people do tend to mean fairly distinct (but again, very related) groups. The geographic region is "Mesopotamia." The umbrella terms are going to be "Ancient Mesopotamia" and "Ancient Near East," which in terms of time basically means "after writing, before the Achaemid conquests." A scholar who studies any of these groups - east of Egypt and the Hittites, west of Persia, south of the Caucasus - is going to be called an "Assyriologist" due to academic tradition, but there is no guarantee that any given Assyriologist knows any Assyrian. Assyrians, for what is worth, are a still extant ethnic group. So the terms I'm going to approach are "Sumerian," "Babylonian," "Akkadian," and "Assyrian," since you asked. In general, when people aren't being very fussy about the terms, Sumerian is pretty broad but refers to a lot of the cultural practices of the whole region (note that "Ancient Sumeria" was never really unified as a thing unto itself, but instead a series of city states with often complicated relationships), but as a political concept its generally considered to have been killed by the Akkadians. When people are being fussy they generally will try to be more specific than "Sumerian" and say stuff like "Uruk period," or they're specifically referring to the Sumerian language. This last part is kind of important to what you asked because Akkadian isn't Sumerian. Worth noting that there are independent Sumerian political projects after the Akkadian empire as well, this is VERY messy. When people say Akkadian as a political entity, they really just mean roughly 100 years, when it was a unified empire that ruled over both basically all Sumerian and Akkadian city states. It is a totally distinct language from Sumerian, which is incredibly easy to say because Sumerian is a linguistic isolate, and its linguistic footprint dramatically outlives its political prominence, because the language became the language of diplomacy, academics, religion, and politics for thousands of years. It did use the Sumerian developed Cuneiform for writing. Its very hard to talk about it having a distinct material culture, because we haven't actually nailed down the specific city of Akkad as an archaeological site. Babylonian and Assyrian are both easier and harder in some ways. They refer to specific cities (Babylon and Assur) that had multiple different periods of imperial power that were at one point each Sumerian cities. However, both developed significant enough political reputations that they get, rightfully IMO, treated as their own thing. Sort of like how America is not generally treated as just an extension of the UK. In popular culture, people tend to mean specific periods of these two states, respectively the Neo-Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian empires. The Neo-Babylonian Empire is most famous for the Babylonian Captivity of Biblical fame. The Neo-Assyrian Empire is most associated with the methods of warfare practiced by the Neo-Assyrians, the unbearably useful library of Nineveh, and the incredible drama that was the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. (I can't not talk about this: The Neo-Assyrian Empire lasted 300 years, which is pretty good for an incredibly violent imperial power, and was at its height the largest empire the world had ever seen up to that point. And when it collapsed it was FAST, you could credibly say that Assyria looked incredibly strong in 631BCE and it was gone by 609 BCE. The Neo-Assyrian Empire was incredibly good at a number of things: assaulting walled cities, binding together administrations, wiping out ethnicities, and absolutely infuriating their vassals. The only power that seemed to want the Neo-Assyrians to survive was Late Period Egypt, who intervened waaaay too late to do anything about the Medean-Babylonian alliance). So, there are specific moments when we can say with confidence that we mean one specific thing by e.g. Babylonian, but when we let the time periods go into the thousands of years, these terms get fuzzy and overlap a lot.
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May 8, 2023 10:54
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Sumerians are special imho as they are the survivors of a drowned civilization.
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May 8, 2023 15:07
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Baron Porkface posted:Is Akkad and Assyria Sumerian then? Did they worship the same gods and have a similar cultural and material society to the Sumerians? No, most obvious example is their language. Sumerian is a language isolate and is from a different language family than all the other languages around it, including Akkadian. Akkadian OTOH was similar to -other- non-Sumerian languages in Mesopotamia at the time and eventually became the langa franca of the ancient near east. And this was a major factor in the gradual extinction of Sumerian as a spoken language. If you spoke Akkadian you can use if for trade etc with other peoples living around you, if you spoke Sumerian you couldn't do that. So over time more and more of the population spoke Akkadian just because it was what everyone else was speaking. Typo fucked around with this message at 15:31 on May 8, 2023 |
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May 8, 2023 15:28
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Also a big difference is Sumerians were actually Koreans.
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May 8, 2023 15:29
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Oh right. The hyperwar.
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May 8, 2023 15:32
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the fact that the Sumerian language is in an entire different family from everyone else in the region does support the theory that they migrated into the region at a different time and from a different place than everyone else Sumerian legend talks a lot about a water god emerging from the sea to teach the people how to build farms or whatever. So maybe the Sumerians originally migrated into Mesopotamia via boats from somewhere, possibly escaping some sort of flooding triggered by the end of the last ice age
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May 8, 2023 15:33
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Typo posted:the fact that the Sumerian language is in an entire different family from everyone else in the region does support the theory that they migrated into the region at a different time and from a different place than everyone else I thought they literally lived in the area that is now the Persian Gulf. The flood myth comes from them literally fleeing an ever encroaching ocean as it filled in following the glacial meltoff. They didn't have to arrive by boat.
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May 8, 2023 15:37
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I had heard rumors and theories that the legend of the Great Deluge came from a glacial lake breaking loose somewhere upstream, but that might have been commentary on how the scablands on the northwest USA formed.
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May 8, 2023 15:42
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I've never considered it anything more than the fact that 100-, 1000-year floods happen all the time across history and every culture has experienced many, many of these, (especially since many, if not all, of these societies were built on major rivers) I don't think it reaches as far back as millennia-old cultural memories of the end of the Ice Age.
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May 8, 2023 15:44
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zoux posted:I've never considered it anything more than the fact that 100-, 1000-year floods happen all the time across history and every culture has experienced many, many of these, (especially since many, if not all, of these societies were built on major rivers) I don't think it reaches as far back as millennia-old cultural memories of the end of the Ice Age.
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May 8, 2023 15:45
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Mr. Nice! posted:I thought they literally lived in the area that is now the Persian Gulf. The flood myth comes from them literally fleeing an ever encroaching ocean as it filled in following the glacial meltoff. They didn't have to arrive by boat. that seems very likely
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May 8, 2023 15:46
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Nessus posted:Well that's no fun. I can tell you about growing up as a Young Earth Creationist and what they told us the flood was, scientifically (all water was held back by the firmament and the great deluge was THE LORD letting all this water fall through at once)
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May 8, 2023 15:52
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zoux posted:I can tell you about growing up as a Young Earth Creationist and what they told us the flood was, scientifically (all water was held back by the firmament and the great deluge was THE LORD letting all this water fall through at once)
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May 8, 2023 15:54
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Typo posted:the fact that the Sumerian language is in an entire different family from everyone else in the region does support the theory that they migrated into the region at a different time and from a different place than everyone else Or perhaps Sumerian was once widespread and became a remnant after everyone around them got displaced. Thus they're an isolate not because they came from somewhere else, but because they're the only ones left, and everyone else came from somewhere else.
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May 8, 2023 15:58
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Su-omi Su-mer makes you think
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May 8, 2023 16:02
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Mesopotamia is also in between two big-rear end rivers so of course everyone living there is going to have flood stories.
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May 8, 2023 16:19
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Rivers also just move all over the drat place, and floods are a major reason of why the land right next to the river is so fertile. Maybe they'll figure out how to create their own little rivers for irrigation, but it'd take a long time to even begin to control whether the river can flood houses next to the river, and even now we're not very good at controlling rivers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBivwxBgdPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLZElIYHmAI
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May 8, 2023 16:56
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Yeah there's probably no universal flood myth, but some of them may reach back to the ice age. There are Australian flood myths that map pretty convincingly onto ice age geography.
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May 8, 2023 17:10
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Yeah "every culture has a flood myth!" is just the telephone game internet listicle output of every culture that experiences floods has a myth about "what if flood, but big", and many cultures that don't regularly experience floods can hear the story about Big Flood from five towns over and decide that's their own original intellectual property. and also there's a lot of cultures with no flood myth but there's no wikipedia page for "list of floodless creation myths"Grand Fromage posted:Also a big difference is Sumerians were actually Koreans. Serbians actually. Easy mistake to make, though.
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May 8, 2023 18:26
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Mr. Nice! posted:I thought they literally lived in the area that is now the Persian Gulf. The flood myth comes from them literally fleeing an ever encroaching ocean as it filled in following the glacial meltoff. They didn't have to arrive by boat. Google seems to support this theory, to my surprise https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news-a...%20Rose%20said.
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May 8, 2023 19:24
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Yeah and it’s cool to me at least to try and piece together what was going on there from Sumer. Although I think what we have from archeology in Sumer is still thousands of years after whenever the flood was
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May 8, 2023 21:04
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