[HN Gopher] Archaeologists discover 4k-year-old ancient city in ... ___________________________________________________________________ Archaeologists discover 4k-year-old ancient city in Iraqi desert Author : andyxor Score : 55 points Date : 2021-08-13 17:37 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.theartnewspaper.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.theartnewspaper.com) | pythonlion wrote: | maybe its the lost city of Akkad. capital of the first empire | andyxor wrote: | this is just 30km from Ur, I thought Akkad capital was more to | the north , in the traditionally Akkadian territory | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_Empire#/media/File:Em... | | btw this is great series on that time (and what preceded it) | "The Sumerians - Fall of the First Cities" | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA | lostlogin wrote: | Thank you. I'm always on the hunt for good archeology TV. The | Netflix show ' Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb' was great and | good for kids too. Much of Time Team was as well. | | I also enjoyed one on Must Farm - I believe it was this one. | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sX3bqmxD298 | | Far too many searches for shows end up with crackpot 'Aliens | did it' type scenarios, which irritates. | | Have you any other recommendations? | andyxor wrote: | not really, just falling into wikipedia & youtube rabbit | hole, just found out that the biblical 'Cain & Abel' story | could be an echo of earlier Sumerian myth of the Courtship | of Inanna and Dumuzid, or even earlier one of the god Enlil | "choosing the Farmer", and generally goes back to the pre- | historic agriculture revolution which divided the settled | farmer and the wandering hunter-gatherer | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain_and_Abel | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inanna#Courtship_of_Inanna_an | d... | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlil#Enlil_Chooses_the_Farme | r... | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_between_Winter_and_Sum | m... | Mikeb85 wrote: | Nice rabbit hole. To add to this, pretty much all pre- | exodus biblical stories and myths have parallels in | Mesopotamian myths, likely having originated there. | pythonlion wrote: | most famous is flood story and creation myth which have | big similarity with the bible. also Habiru/afiru people | have been theorized to be ancient Hebrew. also big | parallax between Baal and the bible god and many | traditions that were common all over the ancient near | east, as well as myths. | mwaitjmp wrote: | Yes indeed! This is really fascinating. | | This comes to us via the epic of Gilgamesh[0], perhaps | written around 2100 BCE. | | Small extract: | | " Ea commanded Utnapishtim to demolish his house and | build a boat, regardless of the cost, to keep living | beings alive. | | The boat must have equal dimensions with corresponding | width and length and be covered over like Apsu boats." | | There is an excellent in our time episode which covers | this epic, the Sumerian language and translation which I | found one of the most interesting episodes they have made | [1]. | | [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth | | [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b080wbrq | pythonlion wrote: | Dilmun[0] a ancient city contemporary to Akkadian culture | in todays Bahrain was the place where that Utnapishtim | was set to live forever and other similarities in | mythology with Garden of Edan, although it was a great | culture by itself. | | Cedar Forest [1] in Lebanon was a sacred place in the | ancient world and had big appearance in Gilgamesh story. | the forest was famous for its premium tress to build | temples in some of the cultures around and the most | famous one was the legendry the temple of Solomon. also | Ugarit was a city where many interesting texts were found | with huge similarity for later bible story | | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilmun [1] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedar_Forest | hiddencache wrote: | Not TV, but something I used to look at every time I was at | the British Museum. There's a virtual tour here: https://ww | w.britishmuseum.org/collection/galleries/assyrian-... | wswope wrote: | Not the person you replied to, but as someone with very | similar tastes, there's a Time Team spinoff called "Extreme | Archaeology" that's pretty good, and some BBC specials with | "Lost Kingdoms of [Region]" titles that I found scratched | the same itch. | pythonlion wrote: | on YouTube 3 channels I really recommend : history with CY | - very easy to follow animated videos and great narration , | Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages - have everything | and good quality, also talk about mythology. World of | Antiquity - most scientific vibe | christkv wrote: | Tides of history podcast is great and talks a lot about | ancient civilizations from all over the world. | zetazzed wrote: | Wondrium (formerly the Great Courses) has many excellent | related series. Academic but very watchable. Like a 20 | lecture series on the history of Jerusalem. I particularly | liked their series on the Etruscans: | https://www.wondrium.com/the-mysterious-etruscans | hiddencache wrote: | I remember learning that cuneiform isn't an alphabet and doesn't | have characters, but rather characters to write syllables so it | could be used to spell English or Chinese. | pythonlion wrote: | Its more complicated then that. for example Akkadian is a | language that used the Sumerian cuneiform. the way they used it | was divided into two. Sumerian was written in a simple way that | in which every word have unique symbol. the first advancement | in written happened with the second written language Akkadian | as so: first, because of many words in Sumerian had only 1 | consonant the Akkadians used the symbol of that word to | represent 1 consonant. let say the world Ki in Sumerian meant a | star and had a symbol * you can use that symbol in you language | to write *d and read it "kid" (but you also need a sign for d, | I don't have real example). second the used complete Sumerian | symbols but read them in Akkadian like Korean used Chinese | symbols until 1500. this got evolved until the Assyrian which | used old Akkadian system and the new (normal) alphabet system | that was invented by the Phoenician long time after. | philipov wrote: | Japanese is a better example than Korean. Hanzi/Kanji are | Chinese ideographic characters adopted by Japan and still | used today. But Chinese is an 'analytic' language that uses | grammatical words instead of conjugation (much like most of | English). Japanese words have significant and complex | morphology depending on the grammatical context, and Chinese | characters aren't well suited for writing that. | | Ideographs aren't great for languages where the same word is | written differently depending on the tense, case, person, etc | (like English '-ed' for past tense; 'is' vs 'was'). They're | good when you have a distinct word for expressing those | things (like English 'will' for future tense). | | The Hiragana syllabus was developed to write the grammatical | parts of words. It was developed by taking existing Chinese | characters, just like you described with Akkadian, and | simplifying them to make them easier to write. Many Japanese | words will contain a mix of writing systems, with the root of | the word written in ideographic Kanji and the grammatical | conjugation written in syllabaric Hiragana. | | And there's also Katakana which is a syllabus of even further | simplified characters derived from Hiragana, which is used | for writing loan words not derived from either Chinese or | Japanese. | | It's of course a bit more complicated and messy than just | what I described, but that's the gist of it. | DFHippie wrote: | The number of symbols a syllabary would have to have to | represent all the syllables of Sumerian (and Akkadian and | Babylonian and whatnot) and both English and Chinese is | monstrous. English has syllables like "strengths". Chinese has | four tones. | tasogare wrote: | I wish people could stop spreading lies about writing systems; | giving 3 false information in a single sentence is quite a | feat. Of course cuneiform writing is a set of characters, a lot | of which being encoded in Unicode starting at U+12000 | codepoint. One character doesn't equate a syllable, some even | are unpronunced (determiners), and the phonology of Sumerian | make its a poor way for its writing system to transcribe | English. | macintux wrote: | It's entirely possible to correct someone politely, and it's | strongly encouraged here. | | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | tasogare wrote: | My comment isn't unpolite in any way. On the other hand | your patronizing comment is rude, so it would be good you | start applying to yourself what you are preaching. | AnimalMuppet wrote: | > giving 3 false information in a single sentence is | quite a feat. | | I'm with macintux. I think that was rather rude. Nor do I | think macintux was patronizing. | dane-pgp wrote: | Iraqi researchers get to do their work on a 4k year-old tablet, | while I'm stuck with a 1080p flat screen from 2016? I should | change career! ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-08-13 23:00 UTC)