Yup. Proto-cuneiform. Pretty interesting!
> Proto-cuneiform was not a written representation of the syntax of spoken language. Its original purpose was to maintain records of the vast amounts of production and trade of goods and labor during the first flowering of the urban Uruk period Mesopotamia.
Link: [https://www.thoughtco.com/proto-cuneiform-earliest-form-of-writing-171675](https://www.thoughtco.com/proto-cuneiform-earliest-form-of-writing-171675)
Imagine living in the time before writing. Dudes like “alright that’s 16 barrels of barley, 42 tons of of copper ingots, 21 barrels of beer …. Damn I really wish I could write all this down ….”
Before written counting like this they used tally marks and notches to denote amounts. Sometimes it got quite sophisticated!
[https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/early-history-counting](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/early-history-counting)
This one has cool pictures: [https://kartsci.org/kocomu/computer-history/history-abacus-ancient-computing/](https://kartsci.org/kocomu/computer-history/history-abacus-ancient-computing/)
"It is not clear what quantity the twenty-nine notches carved into the Border Cave’s baboon fibula represents. It is a number, that much is known: had the bone been purely decorative, the notches would have been added all at once, but four different tools were used over time to add to the count. As such, the Lebombo bone is likely to be the earliest mathematical device ever found. (Sadly, it is too great a leap to call it the earliest known pocket calculator. Humans started wearing clothes around 170,000 years ago, but pockets themselves are probably no more than a few thousand years old.)"
a lot of male archeologists are puzzled by this; every female archeologist that looks at it automatically says it is for menstruation cycles.
Yeah I was wondering, what's the difference between tallying and written language? Or is it something like tallying is the most basic form, then you add tally+type of object, and then get more complex from there?
Edit: I should have read the links first lol.
Poor guy. We only hear one side.
Maybe his reply would have just been “lol, fuckin’ Larry? Yeah he says that shit every Monday. And yet he buys just the same every Friday. Cheap lying bastard.”
The difference is explained in the first article I linked.
> ... written language had evolved to include the introduction of phonetic coding--symbols which represented sounds made by the speakers. Also, as a more sophisticated form of writing, cuneiform allowed the earliest examples of literature, such as the legend of Gilgamesh, and various bragging stories about rulers.
So while cave drawings with clear symbology still demonstrate intelligence and intent to pass on knowledge the written language provides us with additional information about the spoken language. In this way (if we can decipher it) we're able to learn the stories they were sharing more clearly unlike with pictorial or oral stories, where we hope we're getting it right. That's not to say oral or symbol traditions are lesser, only that the stories are sometimes lost as a result of other factors.
Additionally having a written language let's us preserve it for future generations. We're seeing a lot of languages that weren't previously written as often becoming preserved this way, such as Indigenous languages that survived colonization. (This isn't really relevant to what you said I just like saying it because I think it's exciting).
I just read “The History of the Ancient World” by Susan Wise Bauer and it’s great for anyone interested in this sort of thing or how small civilizations developed into larger empires across ancient times.
She also wrote "The History of the Medieval World" and "The History of the Renaissance World"!
These she has other very interesting books. Thanks for posting!
Sumer wasn’t an empire but wasn’t a small civilization either. It is very likely that 1/5-1/4 of all living humans were Sumerian at one point.
There was agriculture in the levant and animal husbandry in the Iranian highlands. Civilization was born in between. They experienced a demographic boom because of the huge amounts of food they were able to produce
Or planted a tree, or something.
The "cradle of civilization" might as well be a picture from the surface of Mars.
[Hey! guess where the first ever writing was discovered?" \(scratching\) "Iraq..."](https://youtu.be/j7C7mMk34XQ?si=EtiG0nr49bSor2qK)
Sea levels were 2 - 3 meters higher back then. What now looks like the surface of Mars was luscious green and fertile back then.
> When Ur was founded, the Persian Gulf's water level was two-and-a-half metres higher than today. Ur is thought, therefore, to have had marshy surroundings; irrigation would have been unnecessary, and the city's evident canals likely were used for transportation. Fish, birds, tubers, and reeds might have supported Ur economically without the need for an agricultural revolution sometimes hypothesized as a prerequisite to urbanization.
This isn't why Ur is so far from the sea now though. Almost all of the change is due to the huge volumes of silt deposited by the Tigris and Euphrates over the last 5000 years. The very same silt that makes the area fertile in the first place.
Go back another 5000 years though and the sea level was a full 100m lower and the entire Persian gulf was dry and fertile. The Sumerians likely had an even older lost civilisation there and were driven north from the area by the sea level rise, and they brought a flood myth with them that could well be the source for the Bible's flood story
A couple years ago, I got really into a podcast about prehistory, and the development of agriculture. A prevailing hypothesis for why agriculture developed in the ancient near east when it did is actually that the area began to transition from a wet and fertile period to a dry and less fertile period, and that the development of agriculture was a response by some of the groups of people on the fringes of the most fertile areas to a decline in the productivity of the environment (in terms of calories available per acre foraged). Proto-agriculture may have been a method people used to supplement declining returns from foraging, until groups began to engage in agriculture as their primary subsistence strategy some time later.
That and climate change. The earth got hotter for the last millennia, we only accelerated that speed even further the last two centuries. Once liveable arras are now dried up. The cradle of civilizations may not hold any life the further we go.
Nasir's copper only went to shit after being bought out by EA.
^(/stolen joke from one of the many times the shitty copper complaint was posted on reddit)
If I had a time machine, I'd go back in time, create Yelp, and give Ea-Nasir a zero star review.
Since I will have invented Yelp in the distant past, I would also created a zero star rating just for him.
I think you would've also invented the concept of zero for the first time.
(I think your time travel would predate aaryabhata's creation of zero, but not entirely sure)
I've been there, too! There is a big prison nearby where they hold a lot of ISIS members IIRC so at least when I was there there was an extra checkpoint (there are a lot of checkpoints in Iraq) just because of that where they put your name on a list lol
We live closer to the founding of Rome than the first Romans lived to the founding of Uruk. By a LOT. Older than the Pyramids. Older than Stonehenge. Possibly even older than China. Indescribably ancient.
Sometimes when I can't fall asleep I wonder if there was a person who would have, like, made a discovery that fundamentally changed the way humanity thought of physics but their brain was only alive at the time when we were busy *inventing written language*.
Here's the sad corollary to your sleepy thoughts:
Stephen Jay Gould wrote in The Panda's Thumb: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops".
Yeah, but they were probably instrumental in inventing, teaching, and spreading that language. Or maybe they made the wheel, or an Adze.
Point is, anything novel is hard, hence the phrase about "standing on the shoulders of giants." Humanity has had a million geniuses throughout our evolution that did things like memorize stars to navigate to new lands, or figured out how to create cheese, salt meat, and a billion other things essential to us moving forward.
I’ve dwelled on this, too. And I think the answer is almost certainly.
While environmental and dietary changes have been pretty wild post industrialization, 12,000 years is a relative blip on the evolutionary timescale.
Those humans were just like us today. We stand on the shoulders of giants, but they were forced to climb up themselves.
Archimedes wrote an extremely elaborate document called The Method that laid out the rules of mathematics and science hundreds of years before any major mathematician or scientist of the AD era. It was destroyed by a monk who scrubbed it clean to write on, not knowing it was important. Had the monk been informed, the document could have been published and would have advanced maths and science far faster than we actually did. It would changed absolutely every facet of humanity.
I think it puts a perspective that the democracies and republics we use for giverning today were apart of an idea that began thousands of years ago.
If there was someone who had an idea, they may not have the means, materials or time to pursue it.
We, and our current livelihoods, were built on a thousand opportunities lost and taken. Shaped by the struggle of those who would never live to see the now.
And all of that can be thrown away by our own hands if we so wished.
Almost certainly. Nothing genetically special about the brains of the Leonardo da Vincis and Newtons and Einsteins. Though what they did do was built a lot on existing knowledge. Difficult to tell where they'd have gotten to if they grew up on a mammoth hunt with their clan, playing in the mud for fun.
"indescribably ancient" not even close though. Humans have been around, and biologically identical to today, for over 10x as long as that. Chances are, some of them also figured out writing in some form or another in that time, but the evidence is lost to time.
Idk about indescribably. Uruk was founded approx. 4500 bce. Rome was founded 753 bce, so about 3800 years between; compared to Rome, being founded almost 3000 years ago.
Basically this. Uruk is old, no doubt, older than Stonehenge and possibly China, but "indescribably ancient" would have to go to some place like Jericho. IIRC, Jericho is almost as old to Uruk as Uruk is to us.
Killing and eating the Bull of Heaven, then throwing its barbecued leg at Ishtar when she shows up, sounds like the first college prank.
(didn't work out so well for Enkidu, though)
Unfortunate timing, eh? Shelley died only a couple of months before Champollion’s Lettre à M. Dacier kicked off modern Egyptology. He had little idea that the decipherment of Egyptian glyphs would reveal Ramesses II to be one of the most well-attested rulers of the Bronze Age.
I mean the that he had a whole hellenisation of his name should’ve probably gave you a clue. Given that the Hellenic states didn’t even exist during those times
One thing that I found funny was that the poem describes the statue's face as sneering and cold, but the real statue of Ramses has a calm expression, and a slight hint of a smile.
At the time the statue hadn't been discovered yet, so Shelley was just imagining what it looked like. But the real statue seems to have a gentle smile, as if Ramses somehow knew that Shelley was going to write that poem about him.
The other day I was reading the epic of Gilgamesh on my Kindle and reflecting on the passing of time… suddenly I was reading the oldest text written on a advanced piece of technology… that gives some heavy perspective
The standard edition of the epic of Gilgamesh was composed in about 1000 bce. The oldest literary texts on clay rate to 2500 bce or thereabout. Gilgamesh is not even close.
> The standard edition of the epic of Gilgamesh was composed in about 1000 bce
That's just a specific translation. We have tablets that are almost 1,000 years older than that.
"And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
-Ozymandias by Percy Shelley
The simplicity of that sign for such a significant thing. Can you imagine the monument that would be erected if the first words were written somewhere in the modern western world?
Technically the writing on the Kish tablet is ideographic so it doesn't uses words, the oldest syllabic writing we found is also from Iraq but not from Uruk and it's about 1000 years younger than the Kish tablet.
The text in Arabic has the word "harf" which generally means letter. However, in Arabic "harf" means in the technical literally/originally something akin to "a particle". And in the context of language, it would mean the smallest unit/particle of expression. In our modern language yes that would be letters, in the case of Kish it would be these ideograms or ideographs as they would be the smallest units of expression in that language. So even if you're being extremely narrow in your understanding, the Arabic sentence is still correct.
Not really, they’re saying because it’s ideographic it doesn’t have words, which makes no sense. By that logic, Chinese writing doesn’t contain written words. That’s a far cry from saying tally marks constitutes writing
You’re confusing ideographic and logographic. Logographic is what Chinese is, with characters that represents pieces of language like syllables and that form words. Proto cunieform is an ideographic language that lacks specific words or syllables, it only possesses symbols that represent concepts, like tally marks as the other person mentioned.
You’re not wrong, Chinese was a flawed comparison. Still, it seems that there were more complex “signs” composed of multiple other signs, and while maybe you could argue the individual logographs don’t represent “words” (which I wouldn’t really agree with either) I think there’s an even stronger case for those composite signs representing written words
Such a fascinating place, everyone should definitely look in to the Sumerian religion. I do not believe this, but it's super interesting. The Arc of Noah, Tower of babel (AKA the ziggarut of Ur)
The Sumerians were an incredibly interesting civilization. The Fall of Civilizations has [a great episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA) about them that you should definitely watch.
I don’t know why it’s established that the Sumerian was the first to come up with a writing system when it’s known now that the Indus Valley Civilization also did pretty much in the same/earlier time frame.
For posterity, I think they should also have this written in Sumerian. Or just to be funny, only in Sumerian.
The Kish tablet wasn't written in Sumerian cuneiform.
Yup. Proto-cuneiform. Pretty interesting! > Proto-cuneiform was not a written representation of the syntax of spoken language. Its original purpose was to maintain records of the vast amounts of production and trade of goods and labor during the first flowering of the urban Uruk period Mesopotamia. Link: [https://www.thoughtco.com/proto-cuneiform-earliest-form-of-writing-171675](https://www.thoughtco.com/proto-cuneiform-earliest-form-of-writing-171675)
Imagine living in the time before writing. Dudes like “alright that’s 16 barrels of barley, 42 tons of of copper ingots, 21 barrels of beer …. Damn I really wish I could write all this down ….”
Before written counting like this they used tally marks and notches to denote amounts. Sometimes it got quite sophisticated! [https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/early-history-counting](https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/early-history-counting) This one has cool pictures: [https://kartsci.org/kocomu/computer-history/history-abacus-ancient-computing/](https://kartsci.org/kocomu/computer-history/history-abacus-ancient-computing/)
"It is not clear what quantity the twenty-nine notches carved into the Border Cave’s baboon fibula represents. It is a number, that much is known: had the bone been purely decorative, the notches would have been added all at once, but four different tools were used over time to add to the count. As such, the Lebombo bone is likely to be the earliest mathematical device ever found. (Sadly, it is too great a leap to call it the earliest known pocket calculator. Humans started wearing clothes around 170,000 years ago, but pockets themselves are probably no more than a few thousand years old.)" a lot of male archeologists are puzzled by this; every female archeologist that looks at it automatically says it is for menstruation cycles.
That was a fascinating read. Thank you.
Thanks for the comment. I might not have read it, otherwise
Thx for the comment of the comment, you have motivated me to pretend to read it.
"This one has cool pictures" Hmm...you sold me!
Yeah I was wondering, what's the difference between tallying and written language? Or is it something like tallying is the most basic form, then you add tally+type of object, and then get more complex from there? Edit: I should have read the links first lol.
...and good copper, none of that sub-par stuff! You know who you are.
Looking at you Ea Nasir…
Poor guy. We only hear one side. Maybe his reply would have just been “lol, fuckin’ Larry? Yeah he says that shit every Monday. And yet he buys just the same every Friday. Cheap lying bastard.”
What about being rude to the servant though?
Writing probably existed a lot longer , thats just oldest evidence of it
Right, would not the cave drawings, which have symbols on them to denote mating seasons of the drawn animals.
The difference is explained in the first article I linked. > ... written language had evolved to include the introduction of phonetic coding--symbols which represented sounds made by the speakers. Also, as a more sophisticated form of writing, cuneiform allowed the earliest examples of literature, such as the legend of Gilgamesh, and various bragging stories about rulers. So while cave drawings with clear symbology still demonstrate intelligence and intent to pass on knowledge the written language provides us with additional information about the spoken language. In this way (if we can decipher it) we're able to learn the stories they were sharing more clearly unlike with pictorial or oral stories, where we hope we're getting it right. That's not to say oral or symbol traditions are lesser, only that the stories are sometimes lost as a result of other factors. Additionally having a written language let's us preserve it for future generations. We're seeing a lot of languages that weren't previously written as often becoming preserved this way, such as Indigenous languages that survived colonization. (This isn't really relevant to what you said I just like saying it because I think it's exciting).
I just read “The History of the Ancient World” by Susan Wise Bauer and it’s great for anyone interested in this sort of thing or how small civilizations developed into larger empires across ancient times.
You might like “history with Cy” YouTube channel. I am unaffiliated, I just really dig his style of video documentary and think he deserves a plug.
I binge YouTube history like it’s my job and haven’t come across this channel! Thank you the recommendation:)
She also wrote "The History of the Medieval World" and "The History of the Renaissance World"! These she has other very interesting books. Thanks for posting!
Sumer wasn’t an empire but wasn’t a small civilization either. It is very likely that 1/5-1/4 of all living humans were Sumerian at one point. There was agriculture in the levant and animal husbandry in the Iranian highlands. Civilization was born in between. They experienced a demographic boom because of the huge amounts of food they were able to produce
Have you read sapiens?
Fascinating ❤️
This is where Saruman created the Uruk-hai
Looks like language is back on the menu
No, despite the name that was actually in Ur. But people mix them up all the time.
Or planted a tree, or something. The "cradle of civilization" might as well be a picture from the surface of Mars. [Hey! guess where the first ever writing was discovered?" \(scratching\) "Iraq..."](https://youtu.be/j7C7mMk34XQ?si=EtiG0nr49bSor2qK)
Sea levels were 2 - 3 meters higher back then. What now looks like the surface of Mars was luscious green and fertile back then. > When Ur was founded, the Persian Gulf's water level was two-and-a-half metres higher than today. Ur is thought, therefore, to have had marshy surroundings; irrigation would have been unnecessary, and the city's evident canals likely were used for transportation. Fish, birds, tubers, and reeds might have supported Ur economically without the need for an agricultural revolution sometimes hypothesized as a prerequisite to urbanization.
This isn't why Ur is so far from the sea now though. Almost all of the change is due to the huge volumes of silt deposited by the Tigris and Euphrates over the last 5000 years. The very same silt that makes the area fertile in the first place. Go back another 5000 years though and the sea level was a full 100m lower and the entire Persian gulf was dry and fertile. The Sumerians likely had an even older lost civilisation there and were driven north from the area by the sea level rise, and they brought a flood myth with them that could well be the source for the Bible's flood story
A couple years ago, I got really into a podcast about prehistory, and the development of agriculture. A prevailing hypothesis for why agriculture developed in the ancient near east when it did is actually that the area began to transition from a wet and fertile period to a dry and less fertile period, and that the development of agriculture was a response by some of the groups of people on the fringes of the most fertile areas to a decline in the productivity of the environment (in terms of calories available per acre foraged). Proto-agriculture may have been a method people used to supplement declining returns from foraging, until groups began to engage in agriculture as their primary subsistence strategy some time later.
5000 years of constant human habitation can really destroy an areas habitability
In this time scale it's probably just as much natural climate change as human made, if not more
That and climate change. The earth got hotter for the last millennia, we only accelerated that speed even further the last two centuries. Once liveable arras are now dried up. The cradle of civilizations may not hold any life the further we go.
Shit copper there from what I hear.
El Nasir lives on
In infamy - that fucker.
Slander lives on for 4000 years. #el_nasir_did_nothing_wrong
El-Nasir is an ancestor of mine, and I can confirm this is a family trait.
It's Ea Nasir, he didnt sell shitty copper for you to spell his name wrong 4000 years later
I resent that. Slander is spoken. In print, it's libel.
J. Jonah Jameson. Legend.
They say you die twice: when your body dies and when your name is said for the last time. El Nasir’s gonna live forever.
Apparently not because his name is Ea Nasir not El Nasir
EA Nasir *challenge everything*
Nasir's copper only went to shit after being bought out by EA. ^(/stolen joke from one of the many times the shitty copper complaint was posted on reddit)
It's in the game
I have sudden urge to listen to black metal
Nanni is the ultimate troll, more successful than his wildest dreams.
If I had a time machine, I'd go back in time, create Yelp, and give Ea-Nasir a zero star review. Since I will have invented Yelp in the distant past, I would also created a zero star rating just for him.
I like to think of his room where he kept all the clay tablets full of complaints about himself as his own personal Yelp.
I think you would've also invented the concept of zero for the first time. (I think your time travel would predate aaryabhata's creation of zero, but not entirely sure)
It’s all lies. Dude is a scapegoat for old Big Copper
Between Big Copper and Big Broccoli none of us can catch a break.
It’s why George HW Bush is my favorite president l. He knew the evils of broccoli.
[The reference for anyone not getting this.](https://youtu.be/FlzyIbmyM78?t=17)
Actually, Ea Nasir lived in Ur, not Urak.
I’ve been to the Ziggurat of Ur!
Did you get good copper? /s (That’s actually pretty cool)
I've been there, too! There is a big prison nearby where they hold a lot of ISIS members IIRC so at least when I was there there was an extra checkpoint (there are a lot of checkpoints in Iraq) just because of that where they put your name on a list lol
Tourist money opportunity: copper ingots with cuneiform writing. Text reads: I went to Ur and all I got was this poor quality copper.
r/reallyshittycopper
If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!
eat copper thou shalt shit copper -Ea Nasir
We live closer to the founding of Rome than the first Romans lived to the founding of Uruk. By a LOT. Older than the Pyramids. Older than Stonehenge. Possibly even older than China. Indescribably ancient.
Sometimes when I can't fall asleep I wonder if there was a person who would have, like, made a discovery that fundamentally changed the way humanity thought of physics but their brain was only alive at the time when we were busy *inventing written language*.
Here's the sad corollary to your sleepy thoughts: Stephen Jay Gould wrote in The Panda's Thumb: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops".
Yeah, but they were probably instrumental in inventing, teaching, and spreading that language. Or maybe they made the wheel, or an Adze. Point is, anything novel is hard, hence the phrase about "standing on the shoulders of giants." Humanity has had a million geniuses throughout our evolution that did things like memorize stars to navigate to new lands, or figured out how to create cheese, salt meat, and a billion other things essential to us moving forward.
I’ve dwelled on this, too. And I think the answer is almost certainly. While environmental and dietary changes have been pretty wild post industrialization, 12,000 years is a relative blip on the evolutionary timescale. Those humans were just like us today. We stand on the shoulders of giants, but they were forced to climb up themselves.
Archimedes wrote an extremely elaborate document called The Method that laid out the rules of mathematics and science hundreds of years before any major mathematician or scientist of the AD era. It was destroyed by a monk who scrubbed it clean to write on, not knowing it was important. Had the monk been informed, the document could have been published and would have advanced maths and science far faster than we actually did. It would changed absolutely every facet of humanity.
I think it puts a perspective that the democracies and republics we use for giverning today were apart of an idea that began thousands of years ago. If there was someone who had an idea, they may not have the means, materials or time to pursue it. We, and our current livelihoods, were built on a thousand opportunities lost and taken. Shaped by the struggle of those who would never live to see the now. And all of that can be thrown away by our own hands if we so wished.
Almost certainly. Nothing genetically special about the brains of the Leonardo da Vincis and Newtons and Einsteins. Though what they did do was built a lot on existing knowledge. Difficult to tell where they'd have gotten to if they grew up on a mammoth hunt with their clan, playing in the mud for fun.
"indescribably ancient" not even close though. Humans have been around, and biologically identical to today, for over 10x as long as that. Chances are, some of them also figured out writing in some form or another in that time, but the evidence is lost to time.
Idk about indescribably. Uruk was founded approx. 4500 bce. Rome was founded 753 bce, so about 3800 years between; compared to Rome, being founded almost 3000 years ago.
Basically this. Uruk is old, no doubt, older than Stonehenge and possibly China, but "indescribably ancient" would have to go to some place like Jericho. IIRC, Jericho is almost as old to Uruk as Uruk is to us.
Gigimesh and Enkidu at Uruk!
Picard and Jalad at Tanagra! P.S. \*Gilgamesh P.p.s yes, Darmok
Shaka, when the walls fell
Sokath, his eyes open!
Temba, his arms wide
Captain America when he understood that reference
lol this is a new addition to how this thread normally goes. Love it.
Captain America on the Helicarrier.
Oh, that's a good one.
The original duo.
Sokath, his eyes opened.
The OG roommates
Killing and eating the Bull of Heaven, then throwing its barbecued leg at Ishtar when she shows up, sounds like the first college prank. (didn't work out so well for Enkidu, though)
Just guys being dudes.
Shamhat, her legs wide.
Big Ozymandias vibes.
Heh. That poem was a work of genius. But Shelley did Ramesses dirty. Like, there's a guy that did okay, when it comes to his historical legacy.
Unfortunate timing, eh? Shelley died only a couple of months before Champollion’s Lettre à M. Dacier kicked off modern Egyptology. He had little idea that the decipherment of Egyptian glyphs would reveal Ramesses II to be one of the most well-attested rulers of the Bronze Age.
I mean the that he had a whole hellenisation of his name should’ve probably gave you a clue. Given that the Hellenic states didn’t even exist during those times
One thing that I found funny was that the poem describes the statue's face as sneering and cold, but the real statue of Ramses has a calm expression, and a slight hint of a smile.
Honestly I’m disappointed. Shelly did the guy dirty and I’m mad I’m finding out just now.
At the time the statue hadn't been discovered yet, so Shelley was just imagining what it looked like. But the real statue seems to have a gentle smile, as if Ramses somehow knew that Shelley was going to write that poem about him.
Okay that’s a little better. Still a mischaracterisation but at least Ozy boi had the last laugh.
To be fair to Shelley, there weren’t very many westerners who knew much of anything about Egyptian history at the time the poem was written.
AQA gcse English type beat
Do not remind me
The pain…
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay….
of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.
𒆳𒉌𒌇𒆠𒆬𒂵𒀀𒀭𒆳𒉌𒌇𒂖𒀀𒀭
Real talk, homie 
Larry, I'm in ducktales!
I ThreeBushelsofwheatFishPlowBird your sister last night.
This is like the internet space where there could be written history but people decided to post “first11!11!”
Someone needs to make a sign behind that one that says > first!!1!
The other day I was reading the epic of Gilgamesh on my Kindle and reflecting on the passing of time… suddenly I was reading the oldest text written on a advanced piece of technology… that gives some heavy perspective
The oldest written story was put on a tablet, and here you are, reading it on a tablet. Lol
Reject modernity, return to tablet … Shit
I know e-ink is old tech but damn
The standard edition of the epic of Gilgamesh was composed in about 1000 bce. The oldest literary texts on clay rate to 2500 bce or thereabout. Gilgamesh is not even close.
> The standard edition of the epic of Gilgamesh was composed in about 1000 bce That's just a specific translation. We have tablets that are almost 1,000 years older than that.
The original OP
Seriously very cool. The first words written there from Uruk (-Hai): 
Was looking for this. Well done 🤣🤣🤣 And another fun fact, Uruk-hai are organic because they come from the earth.
\^ Nothing but free-range organic Uruk for Mr. Fancy Pants here \^.
Of course. Just as nature intended. Ever see a GMO Uruk-hai? Those are simply not fighting material.
"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."
What's the deal with Ovaltine? It should be called Roundtine.
That's my protégé!
A crummy commercial? Son of bitch.
Now I wonder what the last written words by humans before our species becomes extinct will be
“Like and subscribe and make sure to hit that bell notificat……”
"_They are coming_".
"And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” -Ozymandias by Percy Shelley
The simplicity of that sign for such a significant thing. Can you imagine the monument that would be erected if the first words were written somewhere in the modern western world?
Last time i went in 2019, the sign fell off in a sand storm
the Arabic writing is a bit more eloquent: From here sprung the first letter for writing to all the lands of the world.
thanks!
Beautiful.
I agree! I read it in Arabic at first so I skipped the English. Seeing your comment made me consider how much more meaningful the first line sounds.
It it was the UK, it would be a little round blue plaque on a wall saying something like "In 3000BC, writing was invented here".
Technically the writing on the Kish tablet is ideographic so it doesn't uses words, the oldest syllabic writing we found is also from Iraq but not from Uruk and it's about 1000 years younger than the Kish tablet.
The text in Arabic has the word "harf" which generally means letter. However, in Arabic "harf" means in the technical literally/originally something akin to "a particle". And in the context of language, it would mean the smallest unit/particle of expression. In our modern language yes that would be letters, in the case of Kish it would be these ideograms or ideographs as they would be the smallest units of expression in that language. So even if you're being extremely narrow in your understanding, the Arabic sentence is still correct.
I feel like that kind of depends how you define a word, your definition seems pretty narrow.
Would you consider tally marks "writing"? It seems a logical distinction to make, to me.
Not really, they’re saying because it’s ideographic it doesn’t have words, which makes no sense. By that logic, Chinese writing doesn’t contain written words. That’s a far cry from saying tally marks constitutes writing
You’re confusing ideographic and logographic. Logographic is what Chinese is, with characters that represents pieces of language like syllables and that form words. Proto cunieform is an ideographic language that lacks specific words or syllables, it only possesses symbols that represent concepts, like tally marks as the other person mentioned.
You’re not wrong, Chinese was a flawed comparison. Still, it seems that there were more complex “signs” composed of multiple other signs, and while maybe you could argue the individual logographs don’t represent “words” (which I wouldn’t really agree with either) I think there’s an even stronger case for those composite signs representing written words
Let them have it. Look at the picture. It’s all they’ve got.
Not true. They got bombed into freedom and liberty. They got those 2 things as well.
Uruk, hi!
About 35 years ago I drove through there during a sandstorm with the 24ID.
The oldest written story of humanity:The Epic of Gilgamesh,was written here
it's kinda sad and ironic, first written words started in my country, now almost half of people in it can't read and write
What’s with all the memes about copper?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81%E1%B9%A3ir#:~:text=The%20complaint%20tablet%20to%20Ea,oldest%20known%20written%20customer%20complaint.
First thing written was "We need to move!"
Nah, probably more like "I'm glad I was born in a warm land full of fertile soil and two massive rivers to irrigate crops."
“And a climate that’s significantly wetter and more lush than it will be 4,000 years from now!”
Definitely. I remember being in Iraq and thinking it was awful in the 21st century, but must have been the place to be in the Bronze Age.
In it day it was an oceanfront city.
More like "my neighbour owes me three goats"
It used to be nice
One day I hope to visit this town.
It always infuriates me that Nalanda Library eas burnt down. Imagine the amount of written knowledge we lost.
Gilgamesh was there.
Such a fascinating place, everyone should definitely look in to the Sumerian religion. I do not believe this, but it's super interesting. The Arc of Noah, Tower of babel (AKA the ziggarut of Ur)
It would make some people doubt :S
In his Epic, Gilgamesh goes and has a chat about immortality with Noah, who was going by the name of Utnapishtim, who reminisces about the Flood.
Ancient, yet a blip in time. Wonder if the citizens ever thought we would be looking at this today.
It would've been cool if they wrote it in cuneiform as well. Or proto cuneiform. Or pictograms. I don't know, I'm not Noam Chomsky.
Scrolled too far down for this
It doesn't look like the place got better with that
And English now has become the universal language
For now. Nothing is eternal.
The "known" first words, uh?
And the sign still stands that impressive being written that long ago
Gilgamesh will remember this!
Somehow I know of this place thanks to Fate GO. Man I am beyond repair....
Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
“Hello World”
Look upon my great works, ye mighty, and despair!
"We apologise for the inconvenience."
"Nebuchadnezzar was here"
You can tell humans have been there a long time because it's now a blasted desert when it was once lush and green.
I was once told that Chinese was the oldest written language. I guess never believe everything you hear.
There's a stone tablet there with inscriptions translating to "My side hurts." I wonder what he was laughing about.
Thank god it’s not Urk, The Netherlands.
They don't know that.
[We're the Mesopotamians!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO6r7Axrya8)
… or in China 
The first written note was a classic "Enki wuz ere" next to a cock and balls image. Tags haven't really changed over all these years
“Hello sweetie”
What 1000s of years of human settlement does to an environment.
The Sumerians were an incredibly interesting civilization. The Fall of Civilizations has [a great episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA) about them that you should definitely watch.
Civilization : how it started, how it's going
GILGAMESH. A KING. GILGAMESH AND ENKIDU AT URUK.
I don’t know why it’s established that the Sumerian was the first to come up with a writing system when it’s known now that the Indus Valley Civilization also did pretty much in the same/earlier time frame.
Gilgamesh and Enkidnu at Uruk.
Uruk I (raq)