Hey Veeky Forums. I seem to be the one person on here who has studied Assyriology and I can't sleep. I generally only trip for this topic.
So if anyone wants to know anything/discuss Sumerians/Akkadians/other peoples of the clusterfuck that is Mesopotamia, I'm here.
Preemptively, the youtuber known as Sargon of Akkad is a faggot.
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what could be a possible origin of sumerians?
What do you think was happening in the near east in the thousand or so years before writing?
Also, where before 2000 BC would you pick to live in if you had to.
is there anything we will never know because isis destroyed it?
Minoan civilization
Sumer?
Well, they called themselves 'the black-headed people' and their spoken language is, as far as we were aware, a language isolate that isn't semitic and, fascinatingly, has a substrata of high-civilisation words (eg. table, chef) that aren't from it. So presumaby there's some other civ out there that was highly civilised before them, but didn't write. Akkadians were also seemingly around from the dawn of their history, and there was a relatively mixed population - Akkadian was the lingua franca from as early as 2200 BC.
Before writing, or before true writing? Remember, they were using signs as a mnemonic aid/for accounting purposes way, way before actual recorded language (eg sign for grain + 500 = 500 bushels of wheat). In either case, highly advanced civilisation. Uruk was already approaching the size of imperal rome under trajan before true writing had emerged, and already had a trade 'empire' with commerical agents.
Fucking probably. I hate those savages so indescribably much. Having said this, there's a lot of stuff there - so much they could never destroy it entirely, and would likely miss the siginificance of other things (eg tablets).
Somewhat. Uruk and many of the city states are far, far older. Uruk had something like an empire as early as 3500BC - control over trade-routes/local garrisons on waterways.
Is there anything in Judaism that DIDN'T come from Sumer?
Also, is Herakles Enkidu?
Are there people or organizations out there that are actively trying to rescue what they could from ISIS' onslaught?
do you believe the Akkadians could have maintained their empire through the drought had they been willing to balkanize their economic control? Less central planning, allowing commodities [or God forbid, political authority] to move more freely?
No, ancient societies couldn't work without strong centralization. You'd have a return to the age of warring city states. Also, fuck the Akkadians.
We tend to think of Sumer as a specific region/culture. Would the people we think of as Sumerians have thought of themselves as a common culture (like the Greeks), or would they have seen themselves as separate city states?
Heh. Considering Abraham was from Ur, debatable. The ritualisitc address to 'the god of my fathers' is actually the formal address in sumerian for an appeal to the 'personal god' of the family. This in turn is a sort of guradian angel/soul, passed down the paternal line. A rather strong hypothesis is that after the fall of UrIII, there is a loss of the cults of the gods - or, more likely, that the common people didn't go in for the pantheon all that much - and this transmutes into monotheism. The Jewish month 'Tammuz' is from Dumuzi, the shepherd god and, of course, the flood epic is pure sumerian.
Doubtful. The entirety of UrIII was literally 'let's cripple the cities because they keep fucking revolting.' The city-states that presage Sargon are all individual political entities that coalesce into larger polities of a few cities in a sort of league. The evolution from that into a unified state was inevitable, but always tenuous.
Yes, although remember that the city states were already joined in many places. Ur was joined with two other cities with an inter-related dynasty before even the Lagash-Umma border conflict. Equally, from the prestige of various cities (Kish and Uruk especially) we can see that there was likely some sort of hegemon system. 'King of Kish' was a highly prestigious title meaning something like 'king of kings' for a very long time. Mesannepeda was invoked up to 300 years after his death.
how authentic is this music?
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Ha, I actually wrote my undergraduate dissertation on that. Essentially both. Thorkild Jacobsen (a genius) actually argued for an extremely early 'league of kings' that met at Eridu, which was responsible for pan-sumerian legislation, and we have a very, very early tablet that talks of 'a force of wariors, Sumerians' which is presumably a pan-sumerian force against an external threat. 'All the throne diases of Kengir (Sumer)' is another term. The panthoen, though not really unified until UrIII/Sargon, is also a force for unification and division, as while all cities had the same basic gods, they also had a 'city god' which was their cultural ubermensch.
All this more or less falls apart from EDII/EDIII when we get all the cities suddenly building giant walls, and more conflict, associated with the rise in prominence of the Lugal king over the En - the Lugal king is the warlord. So presumably there was a general crossing of the rubicon and the warrior caste took more control, either amid or resulting in internecine conflicts.
Who fucking knows? I like this guy youtube.com
Thank you for a good thread user
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Is there any reliability to the whole "Sargon the Gardner" story?
Also, why do you think the law code of hammurabi is still cited as the "oldest", or at least as being more influential, when we have Ur-Nammu's from 3 centuries earlier?
>and this transmutes into monotheism
Historically Jews weren't monotheists, just monolatrists. They didn't reject the existence of other gods until after Christianity started going about doing just that.
Can we expect anything interesting from those untranslated tablets?
Do Assyiologists and Egyptologists get into fights and slash each other's tires?
1. I really, really hope so. Certainly, he was a highly capable leader and it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility to have him rising from military might, but who knows.
2. Popularity, pretty much. We found out about the far more sophisticated Ur-Nammu code later, and Hammurabi's 'eye for an eye' style fits very well with the antiquated notion of 'oriental despotism,' as well as contrasting nicely with christian values.
Undoubtedly. Although there's a hell of a lot of 'Meskalagam has a goat. The goat is 3 years old. It's name is Snowy' from Ur III economic tablets. I'm not even exagurating. UrIII was crazy about keeping records.
There was apparently at least one instance of them fencing with umbrellas in Oxford circa 1890 or so after someone said something about idiosyncrasies between mesopotamian art and Narmer era egyptian, but sadly academia has settled down. Although Algave was apparently once forcible evicted from a chicago seminar because security thought he was a homeless guy who had wandered in. He was not the best dressed dude.
How fast are those translations going?
Chicago does a fair few, but they can be a bit shoddy. It's all in the funding. British museum's output is steady, but also slow. The field tends to be notoriously small, since all the money goes to the Egyptians/etc, as they made pretty pictures that survive better and their country is less of a chronically wartorn clusterfuck.
how does this image make you feel? imagine those late neolithic sites/early bronze age sites all underwater.
Who the fuck are the Gutians actually?
Mountain people, Uruk was probably trading with them very early. Could well be cliched nomads, like the Martu - but in both cases, it's almost certainly a vast ethonym for a variety of largely unrelated peoples.
Do you have any book/essay recommendations for learning about ancient Sumer? I learned about the Sumerians in pic related, but books dedicated to the Sumerian civilisation seem pretty sparse.
Algaze - Uruk World System, anything by Thorkild Jacobsen, Algave, Muchou Poo
thanks again for a quality thread user, keep up the good work
Thanks for the recommendations.
No worries, dudes. Veeky Forums has been unusually shit today.
Were Assyrian kings as ruthless as they said or did they exaggerate?
well, I just liked the Minoans. And they were stylish.
I like this thread, thank you
How much Mesopotamian porn is there.