11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey(thehistoryblog.com) |
11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey(thehistoryblog.com) |
This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today.
Mind-boggling.
Let that sink in!
It is extraordinary to me that they don't get as much clout as they deserve for maintaining human civilization for so long. They literally evolved cryptologically sound techniques for maintaining their history - through fires, floods, calamity and Mother Nature.
We can't even keep our stories straight in the modern era for longer than 8 months.
I know that this is commonly believed, but how could you possibly know?
How is this confirmed without records?
The San have been around for over 100,000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_peoples
Seems like there ought to be countless ancient proto writing systems not just in our species either. I guess most species aren't in situations where storing information like this offers much of a selective advantage. Maybe you can count an animal scent marking out its territory as a sort of proto writing system; it is only somewhat different than the plat map in your city hall.
EDIT: Apparently neanderthals are thought to have used tally marks... (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-did-neanderth...)
So to think that Egyptians and Romans in Cleopatra's era went to visit the Pyramids as a kind of tourist thing from a civilization 2 millennia removed from them is quite astounding.
I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.
It's due to the historiography of western civilization that for so long always traced its origins back to Greece (and Cleopatra was, of course, Greek.)
Compare to Mesopotamia, Sumer mentioned by the parent comment. There may be more surviving cuneiform literature than Greek and Latin. The sheer volume is kind of hard to overstate. The Library of Ashurbanipal is a prime find but hardly the only one of its kind: 30,000 tablets including mostly-complete copies of epic poems, histories, dictionaries, and thousands of administrative and personal letters. And there's millions more tablets from thousands of other digs.
And the crates and crates and crates of ordinary shipping receipts, if ever systematically studied, offer the potential to understand their society in ways we never will with classical antiquity.
But most haven't been read. There aren't enough people who know Sumerian and Akkadian (and all the other languages written in cuneiform over its 3000 year history) and how to read cuneiform for the task to translate them all to be completed in our lifetimes.
Stories of Mesopotamia do not always resonate. In fact they are often very alien and inscrutable. It's very hard to grasp the Mesopotamian mind. I'm unsure if this is lack of familiarity or because they really were so different, because in the western tradition they are the canonical Eastern Other, and shrouded with thousands of years of myth and misunderstanding.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the strangeness, I found reading translations of Gilgamesh and Atra-Hasis to be revelatory and hope that my descriptions don't put anyone off. They're worth it. To this day "Babylon" has all sorts of associations, many of them unsavory. Which is rather unfair to them.
The Babylonians had 360 degrees in their circles, 24 hours in their days, and when they looked up at the stars they saw patterns like the Twins (what the Greeks would borrow as Gemini), the Bull of Heaven (Taurus), and the Crawfish (Cancer), the Hebrew month of Tammuz is named after the Sumerian fertility god Dumuzid, and the Mesopotamians leave many other echoes in the later cultures, now that we know to look.
https://www.theglobalwow.com/mammoths-alive-during-pyramids/
Shakespeare wrote a play about her and Elizabeth Taylor played her in a movie. The effect of modern media is 99% of the reason why Cleopatra feels more "contemporary" than, say, Hatshepsut (for whom plenty of artifacts exist) or even Nefertiti.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#/media/File:...
the modern people who first looked at it thought it was just a graveyard with stone markers on the graves
then someone dug down much further and those stone markers were several meters high
These round structures are intriguing. It's thought to be temporary. People came from all directions, built these, stayed for a while, ate a lot of hunted animals, and they buried these structures to never use again. Why? We don't know.
I should visit Karahantepe too. Looks as interesting.
So, er, what is the um narrative conveyed by this scene?
https://arkeonews.net/a-unique-11000-year-old-statue-of-a-hu...
Interesting that "you've got a monkey on your back" is a commonly-used expression in English. I could imagine these people saying the exact same thing, with "leopard" substituted in.
"Bro, I gotta get this leopard off my back..."
The old joke about what they call a chicken fucker in Oklahoma comes to mind here except I think those pre-Turks were cavorting with leopards.
he might be standing and holding it, but that's a nice find
EXT DAYTIME - SUNNY
An athletic man wearing a thin leather tunic crouches behind a leopard, facing the camera.
“Hi, I’m Mörêk, welcome to Jackass!”
Mörêk leaps forward and grabs onto the leopard, the leopard takes off running while Mörêk lets out a whoop and the opening bars of Corona start playing.
He could be trying to protect his junk from the leopards, or taunting the leopards by jerking at them. So many options. The past was just as juvenile and perverse as modernity.
I’m certainly not an expert but he’s holding his stomach in one hand, giving himself a good tug with the other and looks somewhere between scared and confused. The leopard on the left is all smiles.
There’s another dude standing a few figures away with his back turned to old tug-a-lug. He’s holding something and looks kind of ashamed though I could be reading that into the image since it’s not really well carved… Tug-a-lug is the best carved of all and must be the centrepiece of the story.
If this is another great flood narrative, I sure prefer the Hebrew great flood story.
Something came along and compelled these people to abandon the site or they were killed off by a different group. Very interesting anyway why a group would put so much effort into constructing these sites without the sites being places where they lived. I think I read somewhere that there is no evidence to suggest that anyone ever lived there. They were places where people gathered. I could be wrong though.
See his 2.6 meter statue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe#/media/File:Karah...
https://www.aboriginalculture.com.au/aboriginal-religion/
There are plenty of other places to start the journey but those will get you on the path.
...but...
if "writing" is the act of conveying ideas through markings then... I guess it is kinda writing.
The first scavengers or predators on the scene will evaluate your condition and attack the softer parts of your body. That includes your anus and genital area, your stomach/gut area, your eyes and neck. It is in your best interest to cover those areas as best as possible. Those animals will try to create injuries that are serious enough that you will not survive so they go for the soft parts.
Buzzards are known to start at the anus/genital area and move into the gut area. when they are cleaning a carcass. Same with larger prey animals. Use your resources and energy to protect the soft parts and you will improve your chances of survival. Duck and cover by assuming a fetal position can work if you can maneuver your backside into a sheltered position where it is less accessible. Cover your ass in other words. When fighting back you should remain facing the threat with your rear covered.
Hatshepsut and Nefertiti lived respectively 1400 and 1300 years before Cleopatra, and about 700 years before even the founding of Rome. I'm no expert, but seems to me that those two names completely disappeared from the historical record between say 1000 BC and AD 1800, and were rescued from obscurity only by 19th-century archaeologists.
I don't think Sharespeare would have mentioned her had she not figured prominently in the lives of main figures during the fall of the Republic.
Perhaps an image of a God or a King.
The leopard-obsessed bunch showed up later and started drawing leopard graffiti around putting in far less effort.
That in itself could represent an invasion but it could also represent young people these days or even aligned additions to the King’s biography for reference.
A few years later, before the cat/pecker group could complete their service yourself station, the stronger group herded them out of the area forcing them on the road to new lands, new experiences and opportunities for personal growth - of the whole body instead of just parts.
And now you know why I am not much of an archaeologist. I get a little tired of every polished rock being something someone worshiped though it looks like for these people that probably fits.
The formation of islands, the kinds of animals that used to be found there, the movement of lakes, the lowering and raising of the oceans - these are all confirmed, recorded events.
The claims are confirmed.
Maybe the ones who built this site went to the Spanish/French border and are the ancestors of the Basques, who have a unique language. I'm not the guy to answer that question.
If I wanted to identify this group's descendants among modern people I would look for people who have a deep connection to cats like the ones depicted in their monuments.
And now you know why I am not much of an archaeologist. I get a little tired of every polished rock being something someone worshiped though it looks like for these people that probably fits.
Technically, everyone could be descended from their closely related neighbors who got sick of the cat people, rather than from the cat people themselves, though.
The simple answer is that some storied reference events that happened that long ago.[1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n6VJ5jq7zY
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/aboriginal-tale-anci...
There are a number of such stories which tell about landforms which have been under the ocean for 11,000 years, since the great meltwater pulses raised the ocean at the end of the ice age. Long after the stories were documented by anthropologists -- who thought it was unusual that so much mythology would be concerned with the topography of the seafloor -- sonar was invented, which confirmed that the landforms existed more or less exactly as the stories said.
So personally I think that's pretty hard proof of at least 11,000 years of accurate oral tradition.
“Prophecies” is a very euro-centric way to dismiss the subject. Indeed, there is encoding for you to be discovered, which has been rigorously demonstrated.
Dig deeper.
TLDR: the story is about a constellation that is seven sisters, but one is hiding; and that constellation does indeed have seven stars, but one hasn't been visible for 100k years.
This is another thing that you can't know.
If there is a match between an inferred geological event and a mythological event, you'd still have to ask "what is the rate of this happening by coincidence?"
There is no coincidence - the song lines record real geological events, such as the lowering of the oceans, the formations of islands, the drying up of lakes - on an ancient timeline - all of which are verified in the geological record.
Please, do not lean so hard on the petard of treating this subject as one of methods and coincidence.
These are real cultural artifacts, which encode real events.
Otherwise history is indeed much guesswork, as we don't have a timemachine and rely on lot's of indirect evidence for everything.
If that can happen, it's not so surprising a story can last 20-30000 years either - especially not if there's not much else making a similar impression to tell stories about.
The one I know of by way of personal experience (heard the songs, been there many times) is the tale of the creation of Wadjemup (Rottnest Island) ...
I don’t have references handy at the moment - I leave it up to you as an exercise to go on a course of interesting discovery - because there are some very fascinating papers for you to read, if you maintain the interest in the subject. The treatise on the potential crypto mechanisms (kinship system in a multi-lingual environment) is extremely fascinating, if I get a chance to find the references in a few days or so I’ll try to follow up … but anyway, do go do your own search, it is worth the journey.
Why is the dismissive non-curious comment not getting down voted?
Am I in denial about whether the curios community still exists here?
To recognize the topic on hand... When a native community shares an oral tradition that accurately describes something that's been under water for 12+ thousand years despite not having the technology to map the sea floor that's pretty strong evidence in the accuracy of their ability to persist accuracy through oral tradition.
Parent is entirely valid in encouraging curiosity in this subject to anyone who is dismissive of it.
The total amount of evidence for the second half of your claim is zero, and you should realize that.
It's something people want to believe, but it's not something there is any reason to believe.
There are more direct connections. The Greek god Adonis, Aphrodite's consort, is the near Eastern god Tammuz, with the same mythology and worship rites. (And his name reflects that; it's the Semitic title "lord", cognate with Hebrew adonai.)
https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/publications/mesopotamia/202...
"Artificial intelligence can therefore provide researchers with a significant support, helping them link together texts that mention the same individual, a geographical site, or a word within a large digitised corpus. But we are still far from machine decipherment of texts."
A decade ago every "omg just use [answer]!" was to suggest blockchain solve your problem.
Every possible problem seemed to have a solution that involved blockchain.
... now that "[answer]" is always "AI".
So I get his sense of cringe... while also acknowledging I had the same thought. We've never been better at pattern matching, pattern identification, OCR, translating across languages... seems like a great use of an LLM.
one LLM is enough!
I truly believe we might one day, soon hopefully, see an LLM making observations about our history which blow open the horizon of humanities future.
Imagine, if you will, some of the secrets buried in these texts, revealing to us all just how it all began, and where things are headed.
In the grand context of galactic-scale civilizations, we might be in for some surprises ..
They’d be very, very good at reading, discerning, summarizing, etc, vast quantities of text like this.
We do have methods of proving these stories - we can dig trenches and see the history as it was described, in the land itself.
Please, do not dismiss this on the basis of some authoritarian postulates about not having developed your own cultures time machines. Song lines literally are a verifiable time record.
I hope for example, that I live long enough to get an understanding of Rongorongo .. imagine the tales - or otherwise mundane details - we may some day extract from these immensely interesting human mysteries ..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo
Disclaimer: I’m also a fan of Protong and would love to see LLM also look for a prototype tongue along a similar framework of artistic interpretation … without Szukalski’s baggage, of course …
Do you know their language? Can you rule out missunderstanding, misstranslation or plain fraud?
I cannot, so I fail to understand the absolute direct proof here. Do you have a researcher btw. who says there is absolute proof for this?
I doubt it, I rather think their language is along the lines of: "those findings indicate that ..".
"The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years."
And especially for this claim of yours, citing from the one given link:
"Eruption 37,000 years ago may have sparked a legend about four giants"
Notice the "may"?
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