Ur-Nammu Founder of the Sumerian Renaissance
worldhistory.org
worldhistory.org
>The line in the chronicle stating, "Uruk was defeated," may refer to a military conquest, but could as easily mean that it lost its position of leadership
A word that once meant "succeeded in time" can shift in usage over a few scant generations (and motivated, "my side winning is as inevitable as the passage of time" rhetoric) to eventually become a synonym with "defeated in battle."
... enough to support a flourishing civilization (several) over thousands of years.-
Also, the parallels with today (power, war, "leadership" ...), "our highways are covered with weed and no wine nor syrup flows forth ..." are considerable.-
This means that the Akkadians could read a sign either with an approximation of how Sumerians had pronounced it or with the pronunciation of an Akkadian word that was a translation of the meaning of the original Sumerian word. Some signs did not correspond to the syllables that were pronounced, but they specified a class of things to which the word to which they were attached belonged.
Like in many other writing systems, the most ancient cuneiform signs were ideograms, which symbolized various things, like emojis now. Because at that time they had no phonetic meaning, we do not know which was the language of the writers, i.e. if it was Sumerian or some other language that may have been spoken in those places before Sumerian.
However, it is impossible to have a complete writing systems only with ideograms, where "complete" means that it can be used to write anything that you can communicate by speech.
So many centuries later, some of the signs that were used initially to designate a thing began to be used for any other thing that was pronounced in the same way, and eventually most signs were used to write syllables and the cuneiform writing system became a complete writing system. At the time when this transition from ideograms to phonograms happened, the language of the writers was Sumerian and the writing system became a mixture of syllabic signs and determinative signs.
As I mentioned above, after the Akkadians began to use the cuneiform signs they had their way to pronounce them. Because, like for Japanese texts, there are many alternatives for pronouncing the cuneiform signs, the correct deciphering of such texts is not easy.
Sure, there's accountancy and protowriting like
饞嚮 饞悮
sheep six
(pictogram of
a sheep butt)
Is this like the OG, millenary Goatse? (I mean, of all the things they could have picked to signify the poor thing ...)
You are right there at the beginning of cities and written language and entities recognizable as "governments" and record-keeping and all sorts of other things.
And yet you are millennia removed from the first large-scale organized societies, towns, building projects, non-nomadic agricultural practices, arts such as painting pottery, poetry/storytelling, language itself, and societal tropes and stereotypes and concepts -- concepts such as "greed" or "happiness", as well as social structures such as rulers and slaves and merchants and everyone in between.
What a strange time it must have been: writing was new technology at the time, and yet people were very much the same as they had already been for thousands of years prior, and of course are much the same as they are today. Add to it the substantial climactic and geographical changes that have occurred in the millennia since then, and the combined result is both uncannily familiar and extremely alien.
It's also fascinating to consider what changed and didn't change in the intervening thousands of years, and at different rates and in different directions in various parts of the world. Ancient Sumer would have been just as alien to a citizen of Roman or Sassanian Mesopotamia as the Meosopotamia of classical antiquity would be to someone living there today.
What particularly irks my mind is Ayanis Kalesi, and more specifically, the stonework over 20 meters beneath Lake Van discovered by Tawson Ceylon. Elaborate stonework, that deep, and our trusty gatekeepers say it's a medieval Urartian fortress. And yet, if we notice, on the land portion, this so called castle has lower layers that do not match Urartian stonework. But 24 meters beneath Lake Van? A rosette carved into the block?
We are finding many smaller sites around Gobekli Tepe and elsewhere... We've found stone mounds beneath the Baltic sea. Then there's Dwarka and the Gulf of Khambhat! And we do have more than a piece of wood to work with, but we dwell on it still.
I really wish we would get collectively obsessed with this all and impel more work. I look at Ukraine, Iran, other potential conflagrations, with whispers of nuclear... exceptions?, economic disintegration etc, and I fear, another setback. Even in 2026, there is so much to discover.
Idem. Spot on.-
Sadly that takes a (global) level of stability that we are well outside of nowadays.-
Not to mention how - peculiarly - these sites tend to be around hotspots themselves?
The fact that it happens to be an autocratic fundamentalist theocracy in a regional power struggle with a quasi-autocratic quasi-theocratic ethnostate, involved in a complicated web of alliances with both regional and distant nation-states -- some of which are the strongest powers in the world -- is sort of a coincidence.
But Iran has been important on a continental scale for ~forever, and that certainly has led to a history of it being an attractant for powers great and small to interact with whoever happens to occupy the region at the time. Whether that's trying to conquer it or making alliances or whatever.