This video features:
- Uruk had between 40 000 and 80 000 inhabitants in 2800 BC;
- and the Kings' List includes a female ruler.
- This was discovered in 2013, btw. Anthropologist Guillermo Algaze.
Here's the video, of the type youtube calls a "short":
@mruink
A Shocking Truth About the Ancient Sumerians
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/J8lju2oC9xE
Now, the video ends with a question and offers an answer: Why haven't we heard of this before? The truth is, there are those who want to control the narrative.
The colloquial expression I might use about this is a matter that can be used as fertiliser most of the world and in India, when dried, is also used as fire fuel. I don't want to be too vulgar and spell it out.
First, I'm far from certain that we never heard of any of this before. I hear of this now, nearly 13 years after 2013. Some may have heard of it before Algaze stepped in. In fact, he had written about similar things before, in an article called The Sumerian Takeoff. It's from 2005 and same year it got a critique:
Critique of Guillermo Algaze’s “The Sumerian Takeoff”
2005, Adams, Robert McC.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5m8043vf
I cite the first paragraph after the absstract:
My discomfort with this article is primarily with its didactic, positivistic tone, rather than its ably argued, if somewhat too narrowly focused, contents. We are informed already in the Abstract, on the authority of “economic geographers” without knowledge of the ancient Near Eastern background, that “regional variations in economic activity and population agglomeration are always the result of self-reinforcing processes of resource production, accumulation, exchange, and innovation.” And again, “that emergence of early cities in the southern Mesopotamian alluvium must be understood in terms of, both, the unique ecological conditions that existed across the region during the fourth millennium… and the enduring geographical framework…” (emphases added).
Sounds like Algaze (born in Cuba, working in Chicago, by the way) is himself a man who wants to control the narrative.
But apart from this, there is an omission of a way more obvious reason. Around 100 AD, both Sumerian and Akkadian were extinct languages. Not "dead" in the sense that Classic languages like Latin, Greek or Sanskrit are sometimes called "dead" for lack of native speakers. No, they had been that already in the time of Alexander. But extinct. No one able to study them any more. The study of Cuneiform writing was rebooted from scratch, first by deciphering Old Persian Cuneiform between 1802 and 1836, then by extending the study to Elamite and Akkadian (Babylonian dialect) over the Behistun trilingual, which was partly copied in 1835 as to the Old Persian stuff, but Elamite and Akkadian had to wait till 1847. It was only later than that, that it was discovered that part of the text was missing due to dissolution of the limestone it was carved in, part was missing due to limestone covering it.
In 1938, the inscription became of interest to the Nazi German think tank Ahnenerbe, although research plans were cancelled due to the onset of World War II.
From the Behistun material, copied and published in 1849, one continued to learn Akadian:
By 1851, Hincks and Rawlinson could read 200 Akkadian signs. They were soon joined by two other decipherers: young German-born scholar Julius Oppert, and versatile British Orientalist William Henry Fox Talbot. In 1857, the four men were requested to take part in a famous experiment to test the accuracy of their decipherments. Edwin Norris, the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, gave each of them a copy of a recently discovered inscription from the reign of the Assyrian emperor Tiglath-Pileser I. A jury of experts was impaneled to examine the resulting translations and assess their accuracy. In all essential points, the translations produced by the four scholars were found to be in close agreement with one another. There were, of course, some slight discrepancies. The inexperienced Talbot had made a number of mistakes, and Oppert's translation contained a few doubtful passages which the jury politely ascribed to his unfamiliarity with the English language. But Hincks' and Rawlinson's versions corresponded remarkably closely in many respects. The jury declared itself satisfied, and the decipherment of Akkadian cuneiform was adjudged a fait accompli.
And only then did one start learning Sumerian. This is by the way a reason why Hislop's book The Two Babylons from 1853 is nonsense. Learning an ancient culture in accurate detail takes time. Lorenzo Valla already knew Latin when he started a work of bettering the understanding of ancient Roman culture (he made a work on its coinage, which hadn't been understood, De Asse et partibus eius). He died in 1457. The work of getting to know Ancient Rome and Greece is still not finished. Understanding Old (Classic) Babylon and prior cities like Ur and Uruk, like Nippur and Lagash could only take off after 1851, by then they had far less to go on than Valla had had.
This is the reason why this hasn't been known earlier. Not that someone has been keeping it secret to control the narrative.
As a side note, the carbon date 2800 BC would in my Biblical recalibration calibrate to 1700 BC, around the time when Joseph's pharao Djoser died. Except that for Djoser's burial ship, the date 2800 BC or so is a raw date and is calibrated to 2600 sth, by Uniformitarians, conventional archaeologists, so, this 2800 BC would be a calibrated 2800 BC, earlier than 1700 BC.
As a side note within the side note, I examplify the distance between raw date and calibration in an essay from last year:
As 1950 is 75 years ago, the carbon date BP wouldn't be 500, but 425. However, the raw carbon age for 420 BP seems to correspond to 1460 rather than to 1525, according to the fine calibration.
Raw date is the mathematically accurate deduction from remaining carbon 14, assuming the original content was 100 pmC and that the halflife was 5730 years. Calibration involves taking other age indicators into account, which give a slightly (or in my case, when we go back far enough, radically) different age, and which theoretically can be explained by assuming the original carbon 14 content was slightly (or in my case, when we go back far enough, radically) different.
So, in Joseph's time, presuming he's the one recalled as Imhotep and his pharao was Djoser, or a little earlier, this would be the real time period for this expansion of Uruk, which spoke mainly Sumerian, and the Classic city Babylon, which spoke mainly Akkadian, was founded later. There is no direct continuity of settlement between Nimrod's and Nebuchadnezzar's cities. They are not historically, even if they are theologically, one city. And before you use this as an alibi for saying Hislop was correct about the theology of Göbekli Tepe, which is also geographically distant from Nebuchadnezzar's city, that was not even discovered in his time, it was discovered in 1963 and excavated from 1995.
Anyway, the people who want to control the narrative are less good at keeping secrets than often presumed, and better at insisting on one interpretation (like excluding my Biblical recalibration). Algaze did not rescue facts from dungeons where someone was shutting them up.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Septuagesima LD
1.II.2026
Resources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillermo_Algaze
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decipherment_of_cuneiform
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Schmidt_(archaeologist)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe
Creation vs. Evolution: So, You Think Another Biblical Chronology is Right than Mine? Here is What You Can Do ... for Carbon Dates
dimanche 16 mars 2025 | Publié par Hans Georg Lundahl à 07:17
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2025/03/so-you-think-another-biblical.html
No comments:
Post a Comment