HN user
Aye. I was at my friend's grandparent's house (he grew up in his grandparents house) as a youth, probably 11 or 12, and his grandfather mentioned he was offered to join the masons by a work buddy. He promptly told us he did not join.
Few are called, even fewer accept the call.
Yes and no. Yes in the sense that there was a formal pattern for learning that developed from 3k bc - end (right around 1800bc) which typically included a combination of math (fractions, pemdas, etc, administrative math, enough so you could make a bill of sale) and writing (which meant learning Sumerian as well as cuneiform), among a few other "administrative" disciplines (like calculating the calendar- the Sumerian calendars often arbitrarily added a month or two whenever they felt like the calendar was too far off, so knowing when and how to add those months was critical to maintaining the cultic schedule. fun for archaeologists later to figure out what month it is..). The essential purpose was to prepare you for a life of administration of some kind, whether in a temple or household.
No in the sense that this kind of education was not available to everyone, and I would imagine the vast majority never learned to write.
Here's more Sumerian tablet jokes:
"If a scribe knows only one line, but his handwriting is good, he is indeed a scribe!"
"A scribe whose hand can follow dictation is indeed a scribe!"
"What kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?"
"In short, machine learning methods are in place, but accessible data is not."
"Finally, one must address the concerns of various commercial stakeholders."
"A few chemical databases of reactions do exist, but these are commercial (e.g., Beilstein/Reaxys [Elsevier], SPRESI [InfoChem], and CAS [ACS]), and even when a license is purchased, the underlying data are accessible only through a narrow, one-query-at-a-time interface, completely stifling the application of powerful artificial intelligence and machine [...]"
This seems like the first point of approach, not the last. Can anyone comment why these data gatekeepers have not made a business model to give programmatic access to nerds?
And if they have financial reasons for not doing so, how will governments sweet talk shareholders into supposedly losing money?
How do you arrive at 10%?
Heidegger, Hitler, and Wittgenstein were all born in 1889
Hitler and Wittgenstein attended the same school even
The Wittgenstein family also had all of their funds invested in America before the outbreak of WW2
IIRC he had started this diet (eating only raw carrots and strawberries) before he founded apple with woz
You have some very detailed reasons why Thucydides would side with the Athenians; I appreciate that.
Finally, if you want to argue that he'd say the Athenian empire was dangerous, I'd need a good reason as to why. Consider how it came into being, as a result of the Persian war.
Thucydides himself would have been very close to the halls of power in the conflict against Persia, if sources are correct that he is related to Miltiades, the Athenian general whom was one of 10 strategoi at Marathon. (how he is related is uncertain; wikipedia seems to suggest his father Olorus also had a daughter (so Thucydides had a sister) who married Miltiades, making Miltiades his brother in law. But this is uncertain; it could very well be that Thucydides father and great grandfather, or uncle etc were named "Olorus". Nonetheless the sources about Thucydides being from a well to do family with interests in mines and being from Thrace are agreed upon)
Thucydides, like many of our learned in the past few thousand years, attempts to present himself as a "just the facts" narrator (a counterpoint to his crazy other, Herodotus, who unabashedly presents the will of the gods, oracular prophecies, dreams, etc all intertwined in a tale seemingly spun by your drunk grandfather). As to your question why he thought the Athenian empire was dangerous... Leo Strauss, who in City+Man noticed that Thucydides has a habit of detailing the aftermath of the Sicilian Expedition in terms of all the "natural destruction" (floods, earthquakes, famines etc) that befell Athens after the Expedition, thought that the timing was not incidental.
but the river is gone too.
The Sumerians were well known to forcibly reposition the local rivers of which there were many in the flood plain. There are probably plenty of areas with long lost boats, areas today that wouldn't appear to having been a river, ever.
There's a whole back story here of the Persian gulf which receded something like 100 miles around the time Sumer disappeared[0]. My theory for this is that population growth in the south created caused an expansion of irrigation/agriculture- and as kings became more willing and able to reposition rivers, they unintentionally created the first major human environmental catastrophe. This is why the Akkadians, to the north of the Mesopotamian flood plain, were the inheritors of Sumerian culture. Cities like Uruk would have much been closer to the coast than they are today, giving southern Sumer (in its heyday) a very similar environment to the Nile river delta pouring into the Mediterranean, with all those cities parked right in the middle of the delta.
We know too that southern Sumer was trading heavily with many neighbors, including India, so we can easily imagine they were active in the Persian gulf... and naturally I'd imagine there are plenty of boats stuck in sand deep underground, undisturbed, and loaded with artifacts of trade.
A healthy chunk of the Sumerian texts we have today are training tablets. Scribes would copy these tablets much in the same way we copy sentences today to learn to write today, with more of an emphasis on hand writing. A small sample of the content of these include:
"If a scribe knows only one line, but his handwriting is good, he is indeed a scribe!"
"A scribe whose hand can follow dictation is indeed a scribe!"
"What kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?"
Sumerian really was the Latin of its day; long after southern Mesopotamia succumbed, the northern Mesopotamian civs like Akkadia and Babylon still wrote Sumerian, much in the same way that medieval England still used Latin.
On the topic of Sumerian translations, there is an unsolved mystery about UD.GAL.NUN text. UD.GAL.NUN is the modern name given to it, with UD meaning normal orthography AN, GAL meaning EN, and NUN for LIL. ("text of God?" enlil was the primary deity) This text is found randomly throughout Sumerian texts, sometimes changing context within a sentence; the practice died out within a few hundred years, maybe even 100. It's meaning and why its there is still debated, with some suggestions that it maybe was a scribal code or the first encryption system. From what I know it has not been cracked because there are no "Rosetta Stones"..yet
Source: Jon Taylor, "The First Scribes"
Because there were so few people. The inverse of your question is why did technology seemingly explode beginning around 10k years ago? And the answer to that is simple: the Milankovitch cycles had brought about a warming trend, bringing an abundance of resources.
It is interesting to notice that sedentism and agriculture happened at the same time. The modern theory is that agriculture practice led to sedentism, but at the very least its unclear which came first because the earliest confirmed harvested (ie non wild growing) varieties of grains from the middle east come from approximately the same period as the beginning of this warming.
However, once not only agriculturalism but pastoralism (and even beyond that nomadic pastoralism, and the domestication of the horse) had proven their usefulness to maintaining scaling sedent populations, the populations exploded and naturally, bored human beings with brains and full bellies sit around and think of different ways to do things.
tl;dr: they were unlucky wrt technological innovation
And yet Zizek offers himself as that exact contradiction:
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/zizek-has-a-lot-to...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UOM3C3q7II
Zizek is certainly a madman, being both an atheist christian and a marxist in our day and age
Because of Egyptian inscriptions. If it was only one group, why do Egyptian inscriptions list 5+ groups? Here's the relevant article section:
"The Philistines (known to the Egyptians as the Peleset) were among several groups listed as the Sea Peoples by the Egyptians. The other Sea Peoples were the Tjekker, the Shekelesh, the Ekwesh, the Shardana, the Danuna, and the Weshesh. An inscription on the tomb of Ramses III reads:
“The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms, from Khatte, Qode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya on, being cut off at [one time]. A camp [was set up] in one place in Amurru. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared before them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjekker, Shekelesh, Danuna, and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting.”
Arzawa is in western Anatolia, Khatte is the Hittite realm in central Anatolia, Qode is Cilicia in modern southeastern Turkey, Carchemish was a city on the banks of the Euphrates River, Amurru was an Egyptian vassal in northern Lebanon and coastal Syria, and Alashiya is Cyprus. The Danuna are the Greek tribe of Danaans referenced by Homer in “The Iliad”. The ruins of the Hittite capital of Hattusa have been excavated, and the destruction of the city was between 1190 and 1180 BC. In the same decade, the city of Troy was destroyed as well, likely in what is remembered as the Trojan War.
The identity of the other groups is less certain. The Mycenaean Greeks are known to have had contact with the EEF peoples of Sardinia - the Nuragics - from pottery finds. The etymology of Sardinia’s name is unknown, but the the name predates the arrival of the Phoenicians. The Shardana referenced by the Egyptians as being among the Sea Peoples may be Sardinians, Nuragics recruited by Mycenaean Greek sailors for campaigns of plunder and conquest. The Sardinians certainly knew of the wealth of the east - their copper, valuable in the Bronze Age as one of the ingredients for bronze, originated from Cyprus.
Similarly, the name of the Shekelesh may refer to the aforementioned Sicanians in Sicily. Alternatively, it could refer to the Italic-speaking Sicels (relatives of the Romans) who invaded southern Italy and Sicily in the late 13th or early 12th century during a massive drought in their home, the Po River Basin of northern Italy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples#Primary_documentar...
Well said
Well written article considering the very diverse time frames and sources.
"Around 3000 BC, a group of savage tribes now known as the Indo-Europeans invaded Europe from eastern Ukraine and southern Russia, destroying the EEF civilizations east of the Rhine in at most two centuries. Not content with their new lands, the Indo-Europeans learned how to build boats and launched a new wave of bloody conquests 350-600 years later."
"Two branches of the second Indo-European wave play a role in this story. The first was was the early Greeks themselves, who arrived in northern Greece (Macedonia and Thessaly) at the end of the 3rd millennium BC."
"Ancient DNA finds from the Elati-Logkas site in western Macedonia confirm the identity of the invaders. The earliest known Greeks are found in this site, and despite several centuries of time separating them from the initial conquest, they were quite distinctive from their predecessors. About 2/5ths of their ancestry came from the original Indo-Europeans. Even more of their ancestry came from the subjects of the Indo-Europeans further north, who by the time of the invasion had mixed considerably with their conquerors."
"Thucydides writes that the Greeks of the centuries before the Trojan War had no conception of national identity. Instead, they identified with their tribes, some of them named in Homer’s epic poem “The Iliad”."
A common theme of steppe peoples- settled tribes identify with lands; nomads identify with cultures.
This source identifies the sea peoples as a mixture of middle eastern groups, using the Egyptian inscription on Ramses III tomb as a reference. Western Anatolia, Hittite (central Anatolia), Cilicia (modern southeastern Turkey), Carchemish (city on the banks of the Euphrates River), Amurru (Egyptian vassal in northern Lebanon and coastal Syria), and Alashiya (Cyprus). The Danuna are the Greek tribe of Danaans, among the groups (and some others whose identity is uncertain) that the Egyptians claimed were aligned as "Sea Peoples".
The identity of the Sea People is a very important group to know because they were a major force in the Bronze Age Collapse; a collapse which set the stage for the rise of the Phoenicians, and 500 years later the Greeks.
This article is confusing however, because it asserts that the Sea Peoples were Greek: "Alexander’s destructive path down the Levantine coast was not unprecedented, even among Greeks. Over 800 years before, other Greeks had laid waste to the Levant, known only to their adversaries as the mysterious “Sea Peoples”."
Yet as also quoted this article reads the Egyptian burial inscription of Ramses III as a conglomerate of Middle Eastern peoples- not Greek (except for Danaan).
This chart from wiki is beautifully done and shows the evidence we have for the movements of peoples quite well, and might help explain the identity of the Sea Peoples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse#/medi...
Notably, we see the black arrow (Proto-Indo-European/steppe/PIE peoples probably) pressing into Anatolia/Hattusa. Were these the same people rolling through the Greeks? Was it the pressure of these forces that forced the Sea Peoples to attack Egypt (because they lost access to safe coastlines for trade)? Did Phoenicia know this was going to happen, and made an alliance that history has long since lost?
Here's the overall effect the Bronze Age Collapse had, from wiki: "The palace economy of Mycenaean Greece, the Aegean region and Anatolia that characterized the Late Bronze Age disintegrated, transforming into the small isolated village cultures of the Greek Dark Ages. The Hittite Empire of Anatolia and the Levant collapsed, while states such as the Middle Assyrian Empire in Mesopotamia and the New Kingdom of Egypt survived but were considerably weakened. Conversely, some peoples such as the Phoenicians enjoyed increased autonomy and power with the waning military presence of Egypt and Assyria in the Levant."
Well summarized; the only certain winner here was Phoenicia. Thus, one would assume that if anyone wanted the Bronze Age Collapse, it was Phoenicia. A waning Egypt and Assyria meant stronger profits for long distance traders.
Another question I've had about the Bronze Age Collapse is why the Sea Peoples fought on both sides of the Egyptian empire. I don't see the strategic value in doing this, and from what I remember the battles fought on the Western Egyptian border were years apart from the North-Eastern battles. Were fleeing Greeks pressing into Northern Africa, causing local tribes to attack Egypt?
Wow! This is really cool! Is the entire nutrient cycle automated, or are there some parts which have to be manually done after the initial germination for foodstuffs? Are there machine learning algorithms which learn from the nutrient and water inputs and quality of the batch (by lb, shape, taste, etc) adjust and try to get higher quality with each batch?
Also really well documented.
If you aren't using stablecoins then you are paying with volatile assets. If the assets are more volatile than usd, and if the cost of said volatility is greater than potential savings with transaction fees, then you will end up paying more to transact values between individuals to get...? Security? Speed?
Stablecoins at least in the States are awaiting proper regulation. Without proper regulations you should not be using stablecoins, because once regulations are declared they will most likely pick a few leading horses to carry the standard and murder off the rest.
That said any current existing software which allows transactions with stablecoins is built upon shaky and uncertain ground. Best to wait.
If I'm not mistaken, the source for Columbus visiting Iceland was by his son Ferdinand (who said his dad left notes laying around and his son figured out he was talking about Iceland) in his biography of his father, written in Spanish, the original of which is lost; Italian copies were made, which was then translated into English as well. I don't know if "Columbus claimed" is the right way to phrase this. Ruddock [1] covers this topic well and also asks pretty pointed questions about the source today, why it exaggerates so much, etc.
Columbus made a voyage to Bristol in the UK and certainly came across merchants who had travelled in the northern reaches, Iceland in particular. It is suggested that he did indeed travel to Iceland although the source we have for it is quite a few degrees removed from Columbus claiming it.
The Vikings/Norsemen had already spread awareness of Vinland to monks in Iceland, as the sagas regarding Vinland were written down about 100 years before Columbus visited Bristol. Did Columbus or other merchants in the North hear of these sagas? Did they come into contact with the written versions of these sagas?
Italian merchants had a serious incentive to find alternative trading routes.
There is a deeper question of why a man would go on a theoretically suicidal voyage, and on top of that, be funded by royalty to do so. Believing in your miscalculations is courageous I suppose, but its your life at stake; would a pious man be willing to kill himself chasing possible alternative geographic calculations?
Real problem and solutions: - energy -> Need hydro or nuclear. Everything else is just marketing bullshit.
Agree in general, yet from what i've read most of the worlds hydro (read: river) resources are already being tapped extensively. Although hydro makes up a healthy chunk today, can it expand and grow along with our increasing energy demands when we've already tapped the largest rivers? I am curious if you have sources that show hydro can grow.
I recall reading this counter to hydro in a Smil book (Growth I believe) although I will have to double check which one.
this 100%
1 hour each morning when your mind is the sharpest and most ready is so much more valuable to me than 3 hours late at night when i am tired from the work of the day
This is a rideshare capital vs opponent capital legal battle. Any claims to doing this for the drivers is absurd; different drivers want different things, and for that, you would have to design an environment whereby a driver can be either freelance or employee. Some drivers want the flexibility, and genuinely like the way the system works today. Some want security, a guaranteed hourly wage, as they need a consistent income. Some want healthcare, etc. The legal straightjacket is convenient for tax purposes but little else.
The idea that a driver can only be one or the other is of course the capitalists convenience. Having the law back them up is the goal of the shareholder- hence this war- but the claims that drivers want it one way or the other is silly.
As to the claim that it has to be one way or the other because of the legal environment (taxes etc) and the rigidity in work classifications, then a different bureaucracy is in order, a conversation which is conveniently ignored in this public debate.
>In those cases were I dealt with the origins of "Europe" I started even earlier than the Sumerians: with the end of the last ice age.
I applaud your breadth. The vast majority of instructors I've had prefer not noticing the broad trends that cultivated the soil for its people to prosper.
> In view of this, is the distinction between history and prehistory still appropriate?
Great question- I'd say we do it for historical purposes!
>If Greek culture travelled both towards the West and towards the East should we not put more emphasis on the Greeks as something that unites Europe, Africa and Asia instead of claiming them primarily for Europe or a Western world?
This is a world I know little of, the connections between Greece and Asia. You've piqued my interest in the subject; any good reads that deal with it?
>These are words that you can imagine coming out of the mouth of a figure like Lincoln or FDR. Pericles reaches into many of the same ideals we still venerate today. I've never seen anything chiseled into some Egyptian obelisk or scrawled onto a Sumerian tablet that feels so, well, familiar, so recognizable, so modern.
Absolutely, well said.
>We simply don’t have a lot of records about ancient Egyptian scholarship before the Hellenistic period.
Agreed. As robbiep mentioned, this is probably because of Alexander in general.
>The period of time where Egypt produced many scholars who we still know by name, and their works and how influential they are, was in the Hellenistic period during which they essentially were culturally Greek.
It is interesting to me, how as soon as the Greeks came on to the scene, this process of identifying thought with individuals (the Socratic method, Platonic dialogues, Pythagorean theorem etc) becomes the standard in the West. I personally believe that this is one of the great achievements of Greece, but at the same time, it has blinded us to the ways that civs tended to create and maintain knowledge in a much more communal process.
>If you looked at really ancient Egypt you would not find much that could be extrapolated to the “Western civilization” compared to the Greeks.
I agree in general it is easier to relate to the Greeks. I suppose I tend to find very deep civilizational roots from the period 6K~ BCE to about 2k~ BCE, an era which included the rise of the first mega civs like Egypt and Sumer among others. Its the broad outlines that fascinate me; mass religions, class structures, very long distance trade, massive monuments and urban environs, etc. I suppose I tend to see much in common in the broad outlines. (and for me, broad outlines always have a greater impact than any Homerian epic)
the breadth and detail of history makes generalisations such as ‘western history begins with the Greeks’ a more palatable launchpad for consumption than breaking down the nuance that inevitably unfolds on more profound study
Absolutely. Your comment on Alexander is correct. It doesn't explain why we still do not teach pre Greek/Roman as a foundation. Yes Alexander encouraged the severing of cultural-historical links; today we can look for and around that, as we know a lot about the pre Greek/Roman civs, and they were arguably more important for setting the civilizational foundations upon which more fortunate individuals copied from.
I guess I wish the launchpad was "begin with the Sumerians".
Thanks for posting this!
Fitting that Diodorus should post this to hn.
"So far, archaeologists have explored less than five percent of the ancient city." So still much more to come.
The story of Heraklion is a great example of climate change and its impacts on human civilization.
The other story of Heraklion is its great multiculturalism; it exhibits both Greek and Egyptian influences. I am always fascinated when I hear other nerds describe the process of learning Western history as "begin with the Greeks." And we often base Western civilization upon Greek thought, Roman law. At the same time, I am reminded of the story of Thales who supposedly learned his mathematical talents from Egypt. The interconnection between the two worlds seems obvious to me today, and I often wonder the reasons Westerners usually begin (and, for some, end) with the Greeks.
Hopefully Heraklion/Thonis can teach us more about the interrelations between Greece and Egypt; not only how they traded, but who they sat in between, how long this city had been here, did the Sea-Peoples (Phoenicians if you ask me) trade here, and were the populations of Greece and Egypt far closer in cultural heritage than we acknowledge today.
This problem will not go away unless we change our food production methods.
This is a global challenge. While it might centralize in specific regions, food production destabilization in one region affects others obviously.
Today, we have technology that can replace soil based farming. Aero/hydro farming is already here; I purchased strawberries from my local grocery store just the other day, and they tasted great.[1] There are other, far larger B-corp certified solutions such as [2]. The economics of it still has to be figured out in some cases, yet if we invested and developed in this technology it would be far healthier for our environment in general, I believe.
1: https://www.plan-berries.com/ 2: https://www.aerofarms.com/farms/
Really exciting.
In my dreams, humanity colonizes Venus much more readily than Mars, because Venus has much more energy to tap into, has a much stronger atmosphere, and at the closest point in orbits, Venus is far closer.
I envision Bespin-like floating cities, high above the ground, with long geothermal tendrils, designed to withstand the extreme atmospheric conditions, and convert heat energy into electrical energy.
Maybe, just maybe, these missions will inspire new research in the possibility of human habitats based in the high atmosphere.