Smh, kids today, thinking new media is good
2d 17h ago by piefed.social/u/PugJesus in historymemes@piefed.social from media.piefed.social
The good ones are hidden in dusty libraries. The great ones are hidden in lost temples and underground labyrinths full of angry animals and rusty traps.
Honestly every time I see cuneiform I wonder how the fuck someone figured out how to read this shit.
It remained in use into the first century BCE, and also we found a giant trilingual inscription at Mt. Behistun. We did misread Sumerian as Akkadian for a while before we figured out it was a whole other language.
I mean, are our chicken scratches that different from their arrows and dots? They're symbols that represent other ideas. Seems fairly straightforward to me.
Our phoenician method is wayyyy more legible than cuneiform. They have super complex rules that like later stuff and lines can change the meaning of previous scribbles.
I love cuneiform though. It's just so pretty.
It was then that the cupbearer of Ezina's wine-house, Sargon, lay down not to sleep, but lay down to dream. In the dream, holy Inana drowned Ur-Zababa in a river of blood. The sleeping Sargon groaned and gnawed the ground. When King Ur-Zababa heard about this groaning, he was brought into the king's holy presence, Sargon was brought into the presence of Ur-Zababa (who said:) "Cupbearer, was a dream revealed to you in the night?" Sargon answered his king: "My king, this is my dream, which I will tell you about: There was a young woman who was as high as the heavens and as broad as the earth. She was firmly set as the base of a wall. For me, she drowned you in a great river, a river of blood."
Is that from the particular tablet in the picture or is it unrelated?
Very likely unrelated. I went looking for the lament of Ur then I remembered a passage from a dream that I thought I remembered Sargon hving and found this while looking for that.
I like your dream.
I read the Epic of Gilgamesh. Im sure it was really great at the time. But I have to say, storytelling overall as an art form in various media formats has definitely gotten better with time.
Easy for you to complain about ancient texts lacking in the epic prose department when YOU DON'T HAVE TO CHISEL SHIT INTO A FUCKING STONE.
These tales were told through oral repetition and song for thousands of years before they were written down.
Even the Sumerians say so, in the texts, that what is being told happened a very long time ago even for them.
Bet lots got lost in translation there, between speech and cuneiform.
It's a pretty good story tho ngl.
I like the Enuma Elish better. It feels like it's talking about... Kind of the genesis of society, of different... Tribes or kingdoms, their geneaology and how it all came to the conflict that birthed civilization.
I have my own theories that it is actually based in historical fact (though embellished, still true like the Iliad and the Trojan war), there are things in there that sound much too practical and pedestrian to be made up- because it's not interesting enough for fiction.
They start getting good pretty much immediately which means that no, you haven't read them.
If libraries sorted their books chronologically.
Those are probably tax records ...