Are the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia and their spiritual Traditions the most influential in all of human...

Are the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia and their spiritual Traditions the most influential in all of human history?

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No, Persia and Greece are

The cultures of Persia and Greece were built upon the spiritual Traditions founded by the priesthoods of Mesopotamia civilizations though

Aspects of Persian culture (writings, architecture) were built on the work of Mesopotamians. Persians had Zoroastrianism which was based on pagan proto-Indo-european roots and Greeks had their own mythology which was slowly switched out for their much better philosophy.

All of civilization was built on Mesopotamian foundations. Yeah, you had some civilizations in South America that developed independently, but nothing like what we know as civilization.

>Yeah, you had some civilizations in South America that developed independently, but nothing like what we know as civilization.


... wut?

Yes. we still maintain many of their traditions, from 60' in an hour to 360 degrees in a circle to some of their myths and stories, such as the saga of Utnapishtim, better known to us moderns as Noah.

The deluge myth was their way of creating a beginning for the mythohistoric chronicle of their civilization with a clean slate.

Clearly there is some kind of transcendent unity between the spiritual Traditions of these cultures

...

Okay, yeah. Clearly. Yeah.

I don't think the unity of the societal structure of these two distant cultures is something to dismiss off hand as if they have no real commonalities.

>spiritual Traditions

>spiritual Traditions

>spiritual Traditions

Something about this makes me think you're completely insane.

What do you mean?

Well, Voltaire said that what brought together people from different cultures in London at his time was the power of trade.
It was hard for the Americas to have the same kind of markets and giant city agglomerations when the only domesticable animals were South American camelids (alpacas and llamas).
There was just never any markets to bring all those tribes together, like bazaars and mercados did in European and Indo-Asian countries.

If only they reached some kind of unification with Spain and developed further as a civilization. The Aztec Empire is such an interesting culture.

It wasn't unification at all though. It was conquering and subjugation.
There were widespread pandemics when the Euros came to the Americas, something that the Amerindians had never seen before, simply because (like I mentioned) they had no great urban centers with deficient sewage systems and an abundance of sick, domesticated cattle from which they could've caught something like bird/swine/cow flu.
The only Amerindians that survived were the ones who became immune to the diseases the conquerors and they only survived to become slaves who had it worse off than blacks because they were considered truly expendable.

I just wonder what could have been if they were able to maintain their own culture while trading with the Spanish and the wider landscape of the worlds civilizations.

dude yeah. The spirits of the civilizations are everywhere man, how can you not feel it?

>they practiced human sacrifice they couldn't possibly be anything like western civilization

Wew lad you've got a lot of history to catch up on. The very Mesopotamians we're talking about practiced human sacrifice

natives didnt die mainly because of bad hygiene, they died because they had been separated from the rest of making since the last ice age and they had not defenses against the diseases of the old world.
The old world was interconnected, diseases spreaded from china to europe.

for the natives, the european conquest was like the Black Plague multiplied by 4, their immunological systems had to adapt in 2 centuries to something that evolved through many millenia in the old world.

and another thing you arent taking into account is that when spaniards fucked natives, they created mestizos.
the number of natives fell not only because of diseases and abuses, but because the number of mixed race people was increasing.

for more than 99 per cent of human evolutionary history, we have lived as hunter-gatherer communities surviving on our wits, leading to big-brained humans. Since the invention of agriculture and cities, however, natural selection on our intellect has effective stopped and mutations have accumulated in the critical “intelligence” genes.

technological and medical benefits of a scientific revolution, these have masked an underlying decline in brain power which is set to continue into the future leading to the ultimate dumbing-down of the human species

I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas and a clear-sighted view of important issues

independent.co.uk/news/science/human-intelligence-peaked-thousands-of-years-ago-and-weve-been-on-an-intellectual-and-emotional-8307101.html

science.slashdot.org/story/12/11/13/191217/study-claims-human-intelligence-peaked-two-to-six-millennia-ago

>The significant lifestyle changes from a small, nomadic, hunter-gatherer society to a large, sedentary, agrarian society resulted in major health changes among the population. After analyzing trends in bone growth, enamel development, lesions, and mortality, archaeologists determined that there was a major decline in health following the adoption and intensification of agriculture.[10] Compared to the hunter-gatherers before them, skeletons of farmers at Dickson Mounds indicate a significant increase in enamel defects, iron-deficiency anemia, bone lesions, and degenerative spinal conditions.

>the decline in health of Dickson Mounds’ population over time can be attributed to the increased reliance on agriculture, which led to a less varied and less nutritious diet, more strenuous physical labor in the fields, and more crowded permanent settlements that facilitated the spread of infectious diseases.[9] Some also say the decline in health is due to the expansion of long-distance trade with larger economic systems, such as Cahokia, which resulted in exploitative relations in which residents of Dickson Mounds were giving away needed food for items of symbolic value.

Romans only prohibited human sacrifiece 96BC as unroman.

t. Stirnerfaggot

It's funny to me how we've developed such a sense of arrogance in regards to our intelligence in the modern world, and how we view the people of the ancient world as ignorant

So we need indeed eugenic programms.

Except intelligence in industrialized countries started to recover after the industrial revolution.

Industrialization has only urged human effort towards simplicity and convenience. All cultural expression has declined in quality with industrialization.

>All cultural expression has declined in quality with industrialization
That statement is just too retarded for words

What do you mean?

tribal natives lived in abundance of food while laboring only 8hrs per week, while being hunters and gatherers

HGs had the greatest leisure time of all human societies and spent it on tribal dances, celebrations, stories, singing, and raw sex and orgies

anthropologists compared the sickly, pale, weak, depressed, diseased, overworked Euro of the 1800s w/ the healthy, strong, cheerful, and free aboriginals and concluded that white man's society is suicidal and antilife

Don't forget that it was even easier for hunter-gatherers, who on top of having easy lives and tons of free time, had excellent health and perfect teeth. The early agricultural lifestyle was so bad most of them saw no reason to transition.

this so much

civilisation is the anti-thesis of biological evolution, it is a phenomenon that allows the physically and mentally weak to exploit nature

t. simpleton

Think of a book that's intellectually stimulating.
Was it written after 1760-ish?
But post-industrial life is better than hunter-gatherer life by any metric
If anyone actually bothered to read Crabtrees article, they'd know it's not a study. There is no data. It's bad science, just a musing built mostly on assumptions. He even offers compelling counterarguments, especially:
>Another common counter argument to the possibility that we are losing our intellectual fitness raised by my colleagues is that we are under constant selection for our intellectual traits. Presumably, musical ability, employment and emotional stability may all have mating advantages that would reduce the rate at which mutations that affect these traits become fixed in our genome.

He doesn't actually dismiss this in any meaningful way. He only claims that this is a less powerful pressure than the ones hunter--gatherers would experience.

Yes, along with the ones from the Indus valley, the Nile and the Yellow river

>post-industrial life is better than hunter-gatherer life by any metric
like the majority of society are on anti-depressents in westernised nations

>more stressed, overworked, alienated, disenfranchised, depressed, aimless, purposeless, with no close-knit group to depend on and look after eachother thru any situation
>better

Polytheism preexists writing, so we have no way of knowing where the concept first originated. It's not an overly complex concept, so I don't think we need to assume it "began" any one place. For all we know, some little Greek tribe ate some bad shrimp and had near-death tripping experiences, then told everyone about it, in idea exchange for agriculture.

You're asking something which can't be known.

The Greek spiritualists were inhalant addicts, too. Oracle at Delphi, for example, was planted over one of Earth's exhaust pipes.

I could write a new Theogony on 50 cans of dustoff.

Where are they now user? Dust.

None of their ideas or culture were worth preserving, otherwise people would have preserved it. Inb4 tortillas and hacks sack.

>like the majority of society are on anti-depressents in westernised nations
Try one in 20, but you're right as hunter-gatherers they'd be dead already

...

Yeah. You can find the basis of all things found in modern civilization there. From religious things to civil

>sickly, pale, weak, depressed, diseased, overworked euros of the 1800s
You mean the strong, fair, happy, healthy and hard-working Euros of the 1800s. Most of them lived in the countryside in their ancestral villages living the fulfilling life of a pious Christian peasant surrounded by his kinsmen. Granted there were times of tumult and political strife.