The idea that a list of kings from 4000 years ago would encodé global climate events for over 240.000 years is completely ludicrous. Astrology has a better grounding on reality than this idea.
And the fact that all lengths are multiple of 600, is even more telling knowing that they counted in base 60
huurtehoog 18 hours ago [-]
Most likely explanation is we're misreading some antique number system. Our interpretation of Sumerian numbering is tentative at best. The major indicator for accuracy was that early on a few different scholars converged on the same translation for the same tablets so we trust we got it right.
The mathematical and astronomical tablet texts we have of Mesopotamia, where we understand the numbering very well, are much later, in Babylonian Akkadian from the 5th century BCE.
Could be a simple misunderstanding as interpreting something that was intended to be metaphorically read as "quite a long time". Like myriad - literal translations might yield Chinese historical texts claiming unlikely numbers in multiples of 10.000 when the author might have intended to say just "very, very large number, beyond what we have seen around here in living memory".
yorwba 16 hours ago [-]
There is a table of squares from ≈2500 BC https://cdli.earth/artifacts/10678 that predates the earliest known copies of the Sumerian King List by a few centuries. With completely wrong values for the numerals, the math wouldn't add up: https://saalck.pressbooks.pub/mathhistory/chapter/vat-12593/ And many later kings on the list, in particular ones where we have independent evidence from inscriptions produced during their reigns, ruled for much more reasonable periods of a few years to a few decades. It's only the earlier kings that have ridiculous numbers. And at one point the list produces a subtotal of "24510 years, 3 months, and 3 1/2 days" for the 23 kings of the first dynasty of Kish, so the durations are hardly meant to be just some vague large number. (The half-day is contributed by En-tarah-ana, for unclear reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En-tarah-ana )
huurtehoog 13 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry I expressed myself a bit poorly. I don't mean to say we don't know how to read the numbers. I mean we might be reading as a literal numeral something that was meant to be read in a slightly or completely different way.
There's always the possibility that it is just some mythology without deeper meaning, that it represents garbled memories from pre-literary times. It might be encoding something we don't understand or just collectively misremembered stories or even just gibberish that came to be seen as significant purely by tradition or repetition.
We don't really know all that much about these peoples who lived at the early stages of our current post glacial stage of human society. We have a lot of data, to be sure, but very little in the way of a coherent interpretation for it all. In fact, the vast majority of the cuneiform tablets that have been digged up haven't even been examined properly yet, as in transcribed, translated and analyzed.
We have a few glimpses of the culture of Sumerian and some of it is this odd lists of names and numbers. I mean, even calling them "kings" is anachronistically projecting a very recent concept of Medieval Europe into a past at least 3 times as distant from as as the very earliest tribal leaders that came to be termed 'kings'. One common title used translated as 'king' (I am not sure it is written in these name lists) is lu-gal. It means 'big man', or magnate.
Hell, Sumerian is a language isolate. We interpret it largely based on context from later vocabulary borrowed by Semitic languages such as Akkadian and more recent descendants in Assyrian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic and so on... Studying ancient Sumer and ancient Egypt is very very close to studying alien societies. We share very little with them other then happening to inhabit the same planet. We only understand Egyptian writing because some stone inscription had the same text in common late antiquity Greek, and ancient Egyptian written in hieroglyphics, and a script believed to be its more 'cursive' form.
card_zero 16 hours ago [-]
I'm reminded of the hundred or so fictional kings of Britain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legendary_kings_of_Bri... including King Lear. They didn't exist, but they all had normal lifespans. I'm uncertain to what extent they were ever sincerely believed to exist.
jcranmer 14 hours ago [-]
> And at one point the list produces a subtotal of "24510 years, 3 months, and 3 1/2 days" for the 23 kings of the first dynasty of Kish, so the durations are hardly meant to be just some vague large number.
Note that the odd precision is due to just a single entry. Remove that entry, and pretty much all of the old entries are either perfect squares or nicely round numbers in their numeral system.
TSiege 16 hours ago [-]
The most likely explanation is that we are treating the list too literally. This list is at least 4000 years old and we do not have the cultural context to understand what it's intent was
huurtehoog 14 hours ago [-]
Yes this is a more concise and less informative version of what I said. I thought my perspective would be interesting since I held 4000 year old tablets in my hands and studied with Assyriologists at the top of the field but what do I know?
SauciestGNU 11 hours ago [-]
So funny thing, I just learned about the king list yesterday. The king list was compiled during the Akkadian restoration of Sumer. It is believed that the king list was compiled in order to provide a through line from ancient Sumerian rulers to the (at the time) contemporary Akkadian-origin king.
huurtehoog 7 hours ago [-]
The oldest 'sumerian king list' tablets found date from the Sumerian 'restoration' after Akkad, not 'Akkadian restoration'
From what we gather, around 2300/2200 BCE the very first territorial empire known, the Akkadian empire rose and then fell. There's a great book about it called "The Age of Agade". Enheduanna, thought to be a daughter of one of the Akkadian rulers, is one of the oldest authors known! She is thought to have authored some poetry we've found from back then. After the Akkadian territorial polity fell, southern Mesopotamia fragmented into city states and that is when these 'king list' tablets are thought to date from.
cineticdaffodil 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nlehuen 21 hours ago [-]
While they were at it they should have explored whether those kings were actually the cause of those global climate events. You never know, with enough slicing, dicing and p-hacking you can get interesting conclusions :)
lukan 17 hours ago [-]
I don't think the auhor belived the hypothesis, but this was just a fun experiment with data.
cineticdaffodil 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dented42 21 hours ago [-]
Who cares if it’s ludicrous? It’s a fun idea!
readthenotes1 17 hours ago [-]
That it's ludicrous makes the effort more interesting!
dgellow 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
pestatije 22 hours ago [-]
current kings live very long lives due to the stability in their environment... not what used to happen in the middle ages for instance
> And the fact that all lengths are multiple of 600
I know this must somehow explain the giant numbers but I'm still not sure how precisely.
Counting in base 60 would make for much smaller numbers, no ?
For example, the number 16 in base 2 is 1111. but in base 10 it is 16. Ergo smaller base, larger number, and vice versa.
So did you mean to say they counted in units that are made of 1/600 of our solar years?
I think that would make more sense, putting their reigns between 31-72 years of our counting.
rhdunn 18 hours ago [-]
The reasoning is that 600 is 60x10 which is conflating base 60 and base 10 numbering systems. You would expect something like 3600 (60x60), or even (given things like our units of time) 720 (60x12). The latter is because 12 is a factor of 60 and is easier to work with in that number system/base.
TSiege 16 hours ago [-]
If this was the case why do the kings that come after this on the list have normal human reigns?
bell-cot 19 hours ago [-]
Not to nibble at your point, but 16 is 10000 in base 2. 1111 is 15.
Laurel1234 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
animan 1 days ago [-]
This was fun to read! I wish there was a no tech version of hackers news for this type of content only
magneticnorth 1 days ago [-]
> I wish there was a no tech version of hackers news for this type of content only
I used to think the same thing, but I've come to appreciate exposure to highly-technical content (outside my wheelhouse) that also "gratifies ones intellectual curiosity." I don't necessarily deeply care about the merits of GUIs and TUIs, but once it's pointed out, I can see the importance of being keyboard driven (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479837). And I find it valuable fairly often to have a passing familiarity with the fact that something like this is being discussed by intellectuals in the tech space.
For smart, curious people, exposure is valuable even if you don't have the time to understand something very well.
steveBK123 1 days ago [-]
To be more specific, I think most of us would like to have a "not the current tech thing" page. So a front page that isn't 50-90% LLM content in 2026. In 2020 that would be crypto. Etc
Krssst 1 days ago [-]
https://www.unslop.news/ has been a breeze of fresh air to avoid all the LLM news. I don't care so much about them but there's so much LLM-adjacent content that it requires actual effort to find the non-LLM stuff.
otherayden 16 hours ago [-]
Thank you for recommending this to new people! I'm the developer :)
steveBK123 16 hours ago [-]
this is great, thank you
krapp 1 days ago [-]
From what I've observed (from the complaints people make about what is and isn't "HN worthy") most people who voice an opinion would prefer HN only have technical stories. It's common enough that it's explicitly called out in the guidelines: (On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.)
This is a forum run by a Silicon Valley startup incubator. Unfortunately tech stories and whatever the current tech thing is will always dominate. And HN's design ethos of "no silos" means everyone has to see all of that content, and it will always push everything else down, especially anything non-technical (unless the mods force it up, which they can and sometimes do.)
The only way to get what you want (I do think it's an interesting idea and I'd like to see it) would be to start another forum entirely or else build a third party client to filter out all of the AI slop. Such stories will always be diamonds in the rough here.
ksymph 1 days ago [-]
I believe the parent comment was wishing for a separate site for non-tech topics because they want to see more, not less.
vasco 22 hours ago [-]
> discussed by intellectuals in the tech space
Not to burst your bubble but registrations are open to the public here on HN.
mdp2021 22 hours ago [-]
> fun ... a no tech version
Which means, surely, "no tech" and "no current impactful world". You would lose that sight from a community largely trained on hard facts ("works/doesnotwork") and creation, invention, management, on real grounds.
"Intellectual curiosity" as a "bubble", as an escape into a closed reality, is not a good thing. "Oh, the colours of nature in its taxologies!". And meanwhile maybe the world that is allowing you that intellectual growth is eroded.
Just skim through the submissions and pick your thing, obviously.
dotancohen 18 hours ago [-]
The community, not the articles, is where I feel /. had value, and where HN has value. Another site with more-relevant-to-me articles but a different community would provide me far less value.
It is precisely the hard tech articles and focus that keeps the valuable community on HN.
yorwba 20 hours ago [-]
There's no shortage of sources seeking to deliver the most important news as quickly as possible. It's the niche stuff that few people care about that requires effort to seek out.
krapp 15 hours ago [-]
Go one level up and you're talking about HN as it is echewing anything "political" for the same reason (politics is mainstream and doesn't satisfy intellectual curiosity.) But it isn't any more grounded in "reality" to discuss the taxonomy of programming languages than birds or Sumerian kings. All of it is an escape from reality. None of it is discussing children getting blown up in Gaza, or famine in Sudan, or what have you.
mtklein 1 days ago [-]
That's kind of what reddit used to feel like when it was brand new. Can you believe it?
CalRobert 1 days ago [-]
Bubbles.town is sorta there, but there’s a lot of fluff
tehnoslow 1 days ago [-]
Interesting breakdown. The author clearly put in the work to test this theory. I like that he's not trying to force the data to fit the result but instead explains why even apparent matches could just be coincidental.
Certhas 15 hours ago [-]
Feels like mostly LLM work...
rrr_oh_man 20 hours ago [-]
> No hype. No theory far away from practice. Just what works in production and what doesn't.
Together with the out-of-the-box no effort AI slop design it's an immediate turn off.
mjd 1 days ago [-]
Short answer: no.
Interesting nevertheless.
alephnerd 1 days ago [-]
Honestly would love to deep dive into Sumerian literature. Sadly much of it is still untranslated or in the annals of UChicago.
krzs9 1 days ago [-]
I can certainly recommend :
1. The Literature of Ancient Sumer - Jeremy Black. It is a quite substantial anthology, has myths, hymns, laments, royal praise poetry, proverbs, literary debates, etc.
2. Myths from Mesopotamia - Stephanie Dalley. I bought this for Gilgamesh, loved the rest of it too. One of my most treasured books.
3. Weavers, Scribes, and Kings - Amanda Podany. Not Sumerian literature, but my favorite comprehensive history book covering all of Mesopotamian history. I mention this particularly because all the literature we do have came to us through scribes, and this book gets into whatever we can know about their internal lives really well. Reading about their tutoring and how they learnt to write, what we can deduce about how their lessons were structured - fascinating stuff.
For such an ancient civilization, it is astounding how much we do have and how closely we can meet them.
> One speculative interpretation treats these numbers as a distorted memory of prehistory. Under this hypothesis, the reign boundaries encode real climate shifts...
"One theory" implies that someone somewhere has ever claimed this. But has anyone? TFA gives no source for the claim, AFAICT (although I skimmed a bit).
1 days ago [-]
TSiege 15 hours ago [-]
This is pseudoscientific AI slop. Pangram is scoring it as 100% AI written. Modern humans originated 300kya, so the idea that oral to written culture could date back 240k years is absurd.
Checking to see if these dates correspond to climatic events only makes sense if the texts imply that. However, this list does not mention climatic events for these kings records. The only climatic event it does mention is the great flood which in their chronology comes after these lists of kings. So why would these writers use dates to some past events and leave out that context? I don't see any scholarly articles suggesting this. Googling for it only brings up this article. It comes across to me as ploy for self promotion rather than anything of value to prehistory.
…if you actually looked at the article, you would have seen that the answer was a resounding “no”.
quickthrowman 1 days ago [-]
I wonder why the Sumerians deviated on the last two lengths from the rule they had on the first six. The first six reign lengths (and the total sum of all eight reign lengths) are all n * 60 * 60, where n is an integer. The last two are not, but they could’ve been. If instead you use 18000 years and 21600 years instead of 18600 and 21000, they fit the same formula as the other numbers and the sum remains the same. They used base 60, and apparently got a kick out of multiplying 60 by itself and another integer.
I noticed the deviation because there are mechanical watch movements that run at 18000 and 21600 beats per hour.
card_zero 24 hours ago [-]
The next 28 kings after the flood all have unfeasibly long reigns too. Then there's some believable ones, but even much later on there's Hadanish (360 years, 6*60) and Lugal-kinishe-dudu (120 years, 2*60).
defrost 24 hours ago [-]
There's a lot to 'guess' with very old text with uncertain translation and no longer spoken or written original forms.
Are these individual human kings, or dynastic reigns, such as the Tudors, Windsors, etc.
card_zero 23 hours ago [-]
They seem to be accompanied by commentary like "son of" or "the fisherman", or nicknames that apply to individuals. Dumuzid "the shepherd", 36,000 years. Kug-Bau, "the woman tavern-keeper, who made firm the foundations of Kish" reigned for 100 years, which is just possible but pretty good going. You have to wonder at what point in her ~120 year life she did her tavern-keeping. Perhaps while ruling?
So, OK, maybe it really means "Kug-Bau, the woman tavern-keeper, and her descendents, not mentioned here".
mapontosevenths 1 days ago [-]
Maybe they just transposed a few digits? It happens. Somebody should try swapping them in and see if the pattern fits better.
jcranmer 1 days ago [-]
The Sumerians used a sexagesimal notation system; the two lengths would be 5.10.0 and 5.50.0 (which together add up to 11.0.0, FWIW), while all of the other king lengths are 8.0.0, 10.0.0, or 12.0.0.
yorwba 20 hours ago [-]
The Weld-Blundell Prism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weld-Blundell_Prism doesn't use positional notation, so 5.50.0 is expressed as 𒐧𒐢 (five 3600, five 600) and 5.10.0 is expressed as 𒐧𒐞 (five 3600, one 600). (Lines 27-35, each number appearing twice separated by a line with 𒁹𒈗 (one king), if you want to follow along.)
shiandow 19 hours ago [-]
This is besides the point, but you do have to marvel at the technology it took to make this comment render just fine in HN.
mapontosevenths 1 days ago [-]
Yeah. I had Fable run through every version of it I could think of and it explained the numbering system was the root of everything being divisible by 60.
I did find a pattern though. If you look at ALL the kings, rather than just those 8 it becomes obvious. The recent numbers are realistic and drift further apart, becoming less and less accurate, the further back you go.
Interestingly it also compared some other clay tablets and they were close. So it seems that they were probably written down based on a verbal history that had already drifted wildly well before it was written down .
axpy906 17 hours ago [-]
Thinking that it was just a one off claim in a single text was my initial suspicion here, as someone who knows nothing about the subject.
If it’s repeated across other “texts” (didn’t they use clay tablets?) then so much for that.
mapontosevenths 15 hours ago [-]
Yep. I only learned about it last night, but there are many of these king tablets. They mostly agree with each other within a margin, which is interesting. So the scribes were getting it right, but whatever came before clay tablets (oral history probably) had already goofed it up.
Also, one of those early kings was also literally a well known god. So it's possible they were just saying "Before the flood Gods ruled on earth", and we've since forgotten most of those gods.
"For example, the symbols for 1 and 60 are identical."
mapontosevenths 1 days ago [-]
I ran it through the provided program and the alignment was worse if anything.
1 days ago [-]
mannanj 15 hours ago [-]
The one piece anime has an interesting theory about the floods and kings. Anyone considered what it might say about history and the hypotheses in this article?
metalman 16 hours ago [-]
No, the kings list cant allign with anything but it's self and functioned as an internal cultural reference for the scribes, librarians, archivists, teachers, students, general beurocratic functionaries ,military and business, and was all in all an "about button" incorporated into a branded identity.
They were aware of climate and weather changes and did everything they could through civil engineering mega projects and systems for food gathering,storage and distrubution to mitigate the varios ways that drought, disease, flooding, war, locusts, etc could destroy any single harvest in the field.
They were also very fond of beer and partying ,wily business dealings, science and magic so trying to fit our current crisis into there mythologyis a bit lame.
rushabh 19 hours ago [-]
The whole article seems like AI generated slop.
TSiege 15 hours ago [-]
Yes Pangram rated it as 100% AI written
audelesa 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
aaron695 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
jendfkgk 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
shevy-java 19 hours ago [-]
> One speculative interpretation treats these numbers as a distorted memory of prehistory.
Well ... some factors are recurring, e. g. energy coming from the sun. So downwards pattern will be created due to that. But many things are rather hard to predict, magnetic changes, eruptions on the sun and even local climate. Antarctica was not always covered in ice, that started at around 34 million years ago, give or take - as one example. Or, as a much more profound case: dinosaurs ruling the lands, then a meteorite induced climate change and dinosaurs went extinct. That would be hard to predict (you can of course calculate trajectories, but what I mean is if you look at Earth as an isolated system only, then it is hard to predict).
I think the "xyz human list" aligns with "paleoclimate events" does not work that well. You don't need a human list to help "align" anything with recurring patterns. Geology isn't based on fantasy events but on specific factors that can be calculated with some extent of certainty; perhaps not 100% (weather remains hard to predict today for some n days in the future) but to a high percentage degree.
To use that human list to then predict the future, makes little to no sense. It makes no real sense. Measuring current data points is much better than some random human-made list ages ago. It seems the author is desperate in wanting to make such an analogy.
SurviveTheJive 1 days ago [-]
You can’t discuss kings without discussing the rich history of Europe with thousands of years of oral and written history long predating the Sumerians and even the ancient Proto Indo-European peoples to which European language and culture is often erroneously attributed.
The dark ages were anything but dark.
Ancient Europe was anything but primitive.
And yet it’s so rarely discussed in the mainstream.
jfengel 1 days ago [-]
The "dark ages" were also thousands of years after the Sumerians. Even the Greek Dark Age postdates Sumer by a millennium.
So you're not really filling me with confidence about your idea here. Perhaps you can provide some sort of evidence?
20 hours ago [-]
dgellow 19 hours ago [-]
> The dark ages were anything but dark
The period is only called dark age in English for what it’s worth, that should make it pretty obvious it’s not a universal understanding of that era
gverrilla 14 hours ago [-]
AFAIK it's called Middle Ages. "Dark ages" is a nickname, it exists in Portuguese too, at least, and yes it reflects obsolete notions about that moment in history.
Some people also interpret some symbols on mammoth tusks going back 50k years as writing but that's a stretch IMO.
stodor89 1 days ago [-]
Interpreting Vinca symbols as a full-blown writing system is also widely considered a stretch.
dismalaf 21 hours ago [-]
Are you talking alphabet or just writing system?
It's clear by the number of symbols it's a writing system of sorts (proto-writing). It could definitely be pictograms (probably IMO), but then again, cuneiform, hieroglyphics and Chinese writing all started as pictograms as well.
mcphage 1 days ago [-]
> and even the ancient Proto Indo-European peoples to which European language … is often erroneously attributed
Would you mind being a little clearer about what it is you’re saying here?
Rendered at 05:24:48 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
And the fact that all lengths are multiple of 600, is even more telling knowing that they counted in base 60
The mathematical and astronomical tablet texts we have of Mesopotamia, where we understand the numbering very well, are much later, in Babylonian Akkadian from the 5th century BCE.
Could be a simple misunderstanding as interpreting something that was intended to be metaphorically read as "quite a long time". Like myriad - literal translations might yield Chinese historical texts claiming unlikely numbers in multiples of 10.000 when the author might have intended to say just "very, very large number, beyond what we have seen around here in living memory".
There's always the possibility that it is just some mythology without deeper meaning, that it represents garbled memories from pre-literary times. It might be encoding something we don't understand or just collectively misremembered stories or even just gibberish that came to be seen as significant purely by tradition or repetition.
We don't really know all that much about these peoples who lived at the early stages of our current post glacial stage of human society. We have a lot of data, to be sure, but very little in the way of a coherent interpretation for it all. In fact, the vast majority of the cuneiform tablets that have been digged up haven't even been examined properly yet, as in transcribed, translated and analyzed.
We have a few glimpses of the culture of Sumerian and some of it is this odd lists of names and numbers. I mean, even calling them "kings" is anachronistically projecting a very recent concept of Medieval Europe into a past at least 3 times as distant from as as the very earliest tribal leaders that came to be termed 'kings'. One common title used translated as 'king' (I am not sure it is written in these name lists) is lu-gal. It means 'big man', or magnate.
Hell, Sumerian is a language isolate. We interpret it largely based on context from later vocabulary borrowed by Semitic languages such as Akkadian and more recent descendants in Assyrian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic and so on... Studying ancient Sumer and ancient Egypt is very very close to studying alien societies. We share very little with them other then happening to inhabit the same planet. We only understand Egyptian writing because some stone inscription had the same text in common late antiquity Greek, and ancient Egyptian written in hieroglyphics, and a script believed to be its more 'cursive' form.
Note that the odd precision is due to just a single entry. Remove that entry, and pretty much all of the old entries are either perfect squares or nicely round numbers in their numeral system.
From what we gather, around 2300/2200 BCE the very first territorial empire known, the Akkadian empire rose and then fell. There's a great book about it called "The Age of Agade". Enheduanna, thought to be a daughter of one of the Akkadian rulers, is one of the oldest authors known! She is thought to have authored some poetry we've found from back then. After the Akkadian territorial polity fell, southern Mesopotamia fragmented into city states and that is when these 'king list' tablets are thought to date from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II
I know this must somehow explain the giant numbers but I'm still not sure how precisely.
Counting in base 60 would make for much smaller numbers, no ?
For example, the number 16 in base 2 is 1111. but in base 10 it is 16. Ergo smaller base, larger number, and vice versa.
So did you mean to say they counted in units that are made of 1/600 of our solar years? I think that would make more sense, putting their reigns between 31-72 years of our counting.
I used to think the same thing, but I've come to appreciate exposure to highly-technical content (outside my wheelhouse) that also "gratifies ones intellectual curiosity." I don't necessarily deeply care about the merits of GUIs and TUIs, but once it's pointed out, I can see the importance of being keyboard driven (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479837). And I find it valuable fairly often to have a passing familiarity with the fact that something like this is being discussed by intellectuals in the tech space.
For smart, curious people, exposure is valuable even if you don't have the time to understand something very well.
This is a forum run by a Silicon Valley startup incubator. Unfortunately tech stories and whatever the current tech thing is will always dominate. And HN's design ethos of "no silos" means everyone has to see all of that content, and it will always push everything else down, especially anything non-technical (unless the mods force it up, which they can and sometimes do.)
The only way to get what you want (I do think it's an interesting idea and I'd like to see it) would be to start another forum entirely or else build a third party client to filter out all of the AI slop. Such stories will always be diamonds in the rough here.
Not to burst your bubble but registrations are open to the public here on HN.
Which means, surely, "no tech" and "no current impactful world". You would lose that sight from a community largely trained on hard facts ("works/doesnotwork") and creation, invention, management, on real grounds.
"Intellectual curiosity" as a "bubble", as an escape into a closed reality, is not a good thing. "Oh, the colours of nature in its taxologies!". And meanwhile maybe the world that is allowing you that intellectual growth is eroded.
Just skim through the submissions and pick your thing, obviously.
It is precisely the hard tech articles and focus that keeps the valuable community on HN.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Together with the out-of-the-box no effort AI slop design it's an immediate turn off.
Interesting nevertheless.
1. The Literature of Ancient Sumer - Jeremy Black. It is a quite substantial anthology, has myths, hymns, laments, royal praise poetry, proverbs, literary debates, etc.
2. Myths from Mesopotamia - Stephanie Dalley. I bought this for Gilgamesh, loved the rest of it too. One of my most treasured books.
3. Weavers, Scribes, and Kings - Amanda Podany. Not Sumerian literature, but my favorite comprehensive history book covering all of Mesopotamian history. I mention this particularly because all the literature we do have came to us through scribes, and this book gets into whatever we can know about their internal lives really well. Reading about their tutoring and how they learnt to write, what we can deduce about how their lessons were structured - fascinating stuff.
For such an ancient civilization, it is astounding how much we do have and how closely we can meet them.
[1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-literature-of-an...
[2] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/myths-from-mesopotam...
[3] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/weavers-scribes-and-...
Feedback welcome
"One theory" implies that someone somewhere has ever claimed this. But has anyone? TFA gives no source for the claim, AFAICT (although I skimmed a bit).
Checking to see if these dates correspond to climatic events only makes sense if the texts imply that. However, this list does not mention climatic events for these kings records. The only climatic event it does mention is the great flood which in their chronology comes after these lists of kings. So why would these writers use dates to some past events and leave out that context? I don't see any scholarly articles suggesting this. Googling for it only brings up this article. It comes across to me as ploy for self promotion rather than anything of value to prehistory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_King_List#Lines_1%E2%...
For a real example of a possible ancient human record of an actual event aboriginal australians have oral histories of a volcanic eruption 37kya.
https://www.science.org/content/article/aboriginal-tale-anci...
I noticed the deviation because there are mechanical watch movements that run at 18000 and 21600 beats per hour.
Are these individual human kings, or dynastic reigns, such as the Tudors, Windsors, etc.
So, OK, maybe it really means "Kug-Bau, the woman tavern-keeper, and her descendents, not mentioned here".
I did find a pattern though. If you look at ALL the kings, rather than just those 8 it becomes obvious. The recent numbers are realistic and drift further apart, becoming less and less accurate, the further back you go.
Interestingly it also compared some other clay tablets and they were close. So it seems that they were probably written down based on a verbal history that had already drifted wildly well before it was written down .
Also, one of those early kings was also literally a well known god. So it's possible they were just saying "Before the flood Gods ruled on earth", and we've since forgotten most of those gods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal#Babylonian_mathema...
"For example, the symbols for 1 and 60 are identical."
Well ... some factors are recurring, e. g. energy coming from the sun. So downwards pattern will be created due to that. But many things are rather hard to predict, magnetic changes, eruptions on the sun and even local climate. Antarctica was not always covered in ice, that started at around 34 million years ago, give or take - as one example. Or, as a much more profound case: dinosaurs ruling the lands, then a meteorite induced climate change and dinosaurs went extinct. That would be hard to predict (you can of course calculate trajectories, but what I mean is if you look at Earth as an isolated system only, then it is hard to predict).
I think the "xyz human list" aligns with "paleoclimate events" does not work that well. You don't need a human list to help "align" anything with recurring patterns. Geology isn't based on fantasy events but on specific factors that can be calculated with some extent of certainty; perhaps not 100% (weather remains hard to predict today for some n days in the future) but to a high percentage degree.
To use that human list to then predict the future, makes little to no sense. It makes no real sense. Measuring current data points is much better than some random human-made list ages ago. It seems the author is desperate in wanting to make such an analogy.
The dark ages were anything but dark.
Ancient Europe was anything but primitive.
And yet it’s so rarely discussed in the mainstream.
So you're not really filling me with confidence about your idea here. Perhaps you can provide some sort of evidence?
The period is only called dark age in English for what it’s worth, that should make it pretty obvious it’s not a universal understanding of that era
Some people also interpret some symbols on mammoth tusks going back 50k years as writing but that's a stretch IMO.
It's clear by the number of symbols it's a writing system of sorts (proto-writing). It could definitely be pictograms (probably IMO), but then again, cuneiform, hieroglyphics and Chinese writing all started as pictograms as well.
Would you mind being a little clearer about what it is you’re saying here?