I wasn't much interested in 'windblown old sites' until I found a hardcover picture-book in a nearby library: The Past from Above by pilot/photographer George Gerster.
My attitude completely changed after I experienced this collection of 240+ aerial photos from around the world. It put the magnitude and impermanence of human history right in my face. Strong recommend if you've any interest in world history!
4kya is 1500 years after the first Mesopotamian cities we know about arose.
Before the Persian Gulf filled in, ~8kya or another 2500 years back, there could have been cities there, now underwater, downstream from the known ruins. If made of un-fired mud brick, they would have since dissolved.
Sumerian is a language isolate unlike any other neighbor languages and their civilization might have developed in "The Gulf Oasis" (the size of Great Britain) for tens of thousands of years before being flooded around ~8k BC https://www.livescience.com/10340-lost-civilization-existed-...
The hardships of that migration escaping the flood, and the fact multiple tribes had to suddenly co-exist in a crowded area with limited resources probably accelerated development of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, and by extension, civilization.
We don't have any evidence for a sudden ("sodden"?) Noah-style flood. The Persian Gulf filled in over centuries as the oceans rose and swallowed up Doggerland, Sundaland, and Sahul. But it would be hard to keep oral histories consistent with actual drawn-out timelines.
There are suspicions about a Black Sea deluge as the Bosphorus opened and closed, but nothing conclusive.
Similarly, there are hints at a big meteor strike in the Gulf a few thousand years later that could have generated a huge tsunami.
Floods are pretty common on coastlines and near rivers, and easy to confuse with other events as time goes by.
Disclaimer: Not saying this is how any of this happened (people that actually looked into sources and did research have probably considered this).
I always wonder how much exeggaration might be involved. Whether oral or at some point written down. Exeggarating and making things more dramatic seems like something that could easily happen over a timespan of a few hundred/thousand years, couldn't it?
Basically a story of how 'our ancestors' slowly moved from one place to another to another to another as 'the sea kept swallowing up settlements' (as in over 500 years every 30 years or so they had to move a bit) could slowly morph into a catastrophic event, especially if the timeframes are such that these become children's stories. "Your grandma used to live over there. See where the fisher boats are now. That's where your grandma was born. And one day the sea swallowed it.". The fact that it took 10 years of minor floods until there finally was one bad enough to make them actually move gets lost and converted onto a catastrophic event.
That is all absolutely plausible. If each generation, for centuries, could point to where their gradparents had lived, now under water, that could really cement a tradition.
> We don't have any evidence for a sudden ("sodden"?) Noah-style flood.
I think we do have a lot evidence about that. We just haven't observed it during the past 1,000 years. There is one nice small-scale introduction video about this happening in the USA [1], but I remember reading recent scientific papers that talk about it as a world wide event. They put it roughly 12,000 years ago (not 2,000 years ago).
Also the story of the discovered - J. Harlen Bretz - as sad as it is, is quite telling about how unscientific scientists can get. Mainstream geology rejected his ideas mainly because "his theory implied the potential possibilities of a Biblical flood, which the scientific community strongly rejected" [2]. In other words - they have already assumed that things described in the Bible must be nonsense, hence, any facts pointing to the contrary must be interpreted in a different way.
The seas started filling in 20kya, from 200m down. There were periods when the water rose at a rate of a meter in a century, for centuries, which corresponds to the shoreline retreating 20 meters or more, each century, in many places. All that water is still there; we think of it as just part of the ocean now, but there were millions of square miles of dry land all now underwater.
The flood Bretz elucidated, that carved out the Washington State badlands at the beginning of the Younger Dryas period, was catastrophic, scouring thousands of square miles down to bedrock and carving the Columbia River gorge in a matter of weeks, but would not account for flood myths on the opposite side of the world, even though it also signalled an increase in the rate of sea level rise.
There have of course been extraordinarily large tsunamis, too, that would be generate their own stories, and regional floods. It is not hard to see how flood stories woul merge over time.
Thank you.
I’m always on the hunt for good archeology TV. The Netflix show ‘ Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb’ was great and good for kids too. Much of Time Team was as well.
not really, just falling into wikipedia & youtube rabbit hole, just found out that the biblical 'Cain & Abel' story could be an echo of earlier Sumerian myth of the Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzid, or even earlier one of the god Enlil "choosing the Farmer", and generally goes back to the pre-historic agriculture revolution which divided the settled farmer and the wandering hunter-gatherer
most famous is flood story and creation myth which have big similarity with the bible. also Habiru/afiru people have been theorized to be ancient Hebrew. also big parallax between Baal and the bible god and many traditions that were common all over the ancient near east, as well as myths.
This comes to us via the epic of Gilgamesh[0], perhaps written around 2100 BCE.
Small extract:
“ Ea commanded Utnapishtim to demolish his house and build a boat, regardless of the cost, to keep living beings alive.
The boat must have equal dimensions with corresponding width and length and be covered over like Apsu boats.”
There is an excellent in our time episode which covers this epic, the Sumerian language and translation which I found one of the most interesting episodes they have made [1].
Dilmun[0] a ancient city contemporary to Akkadian culture in todays Bahrain was the place where that Utnapishtim was set to live forever and other similarities in mythology with Garden of Edan, although it was a great culture by itself.
Cedar Forest [1] in Lebanon was a sacred place in the ancient world and had big appearance in Gilgamesh story. the forest was famous for its premium tress to build temples in some of the cultures around and the most famous one was the legendry the temple of Solomon.
also Ugarit was a city where many interesting texts were found with huge similarity for later bible story
Nice rabbit hole. To add to this, pretty much all pre-exodus biblical stories and myths have parallels in Mesopotamian myths, likely having originated there.
on YouTube 3 channels I really recommend : history with CY - very easy to follow animated videos and great narration , Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages - have everything and good quality, also talk about mythology. World of Antiquity - most scientific vibe
Wondrium (formerly the Great Courses) has many excellent related series. Academic but very watchable. Like a 20 lecture series on the history of Jerusalem. I particularly liked their series on the Etruscans: https://www.wondrium.com/the-mysterious-etruscans
Really recommended, and does not have much of the epic/religious vibe
documentaries on the history of Israel often have. Also note that it stops at the Ottoman empire so does not get into the history of the state of Israel.
(The title is from Genesis 1:2.
It roughly translates to 'and then the earth was chaos')
Not the person you replied to, but as someone with very similar tastes, there’s a Time Team spinoff called “Extreme Archaeology” that’s pretty good, and some BBC specials with “Lost Kingdoms of [Region]” titles that I found scratched the same itch.
Recently I've been really enjoying "Unearthed" on Discovery Plus (I think originally Science channel). It's hit or miss depending on the episode, but the good episodes are really good.
I remember learning that cuneiform isn't an alphabet and doesn't have characters, but rather characters to write syllables so it could be used to spell English or Chinese.
Its more complicated then that. for example Akkadian is a language that used the Sumerian cuneiform. the way they used it was divided into two. Sumerian was written in a simple way that in which every word have unique symbol. the first advancement in written happened with the second written language Akkadian as so: first, because of many words in Sumerian had only 1 consonant the Akkadians used the symbol of that word to represent 1 consonant. let say the world Ki in Sumerian meant a star and had a symbol * you can use that symbol in you language to write *d and read it "kid" (but you also need a sign for d, I don't have real example). second the used complete Sumerian symbols but read them in Akkadian like Korean used Chinese symbols until 1500. this got evolved until the Assyrian which used old Akkadian system and the new (normal) alphabet system that was invented by the Phoenician long time after.
Japanese is a better example than Korean. Hanzi/Kanji are Chinese ideographic characters adopted by Japan and still used today. But Chinese is an 'analytic' language that uses grammatical words instead of conjugation (much like most of English). Japanese words have significant and complex morphology depending on the grammatical context, and Chinese characters aren't well suited for writing that.
Ideographs aren't great for languages where the same word is written differently depending on the tense, case, person, etc (like English '-ed' for past tense; 'is' vs 'was'). They're good when you have a distinct word for expressing those things (like English 'will' for future tense).
The Hiragana syllabus was developed to write the grammatical parts of words. It was developed by taking existing Chinese characters, just like you described with Akkadian, and simplifying them to make them easier to write. Many Japanese words will contain a mix of writing systems, with the root of the word written in ideographic Kanji and the grammatical conjugation written in syllabaric Hiragana.
And there's also Katakana which is a syllabus of even further simplified characters derived from Hiragana, which is used for writing loan words not derived from either Chinese or Japanese.
It's of course a bit more complicated and messy than just what I described, but that's the gist of it.
It has been a very long time since Chinese was anything other than a complicated syllabary. Amusingly, most literate Chinese do not recognize it, because of complicated rules for which of several characters for each of the ~1200 syllables may be used to spell each word; and the huge overload of homonyms sometimes depend on such a rule to help disambiguate.
Most also imagine that non-Mandarin Chinese languages are just dialects of Mandarin with "pronunciation differences", not full-fledged languages. They read texts written by, e.g, Shanghai speakers, and do not realize that the text written has been translated to Mandarin. Most people speaking another such Chinese language are not literate in that language, and rely on written Mandarin, translating as they go. This happens even on nominally "local-dialect" forums.
Of course all this has deep political implications, so is not safe to discuss there.
My limited understanding is that the reality is muddier than them being full fledged languages that originated independently and share only a common written language. That is a Western overused trope.
Cantonese seems more a hybrid language akin to English in that it is a blend of Tang Chinese during a migration of Chinese from further north and the language(s) of people already living in that area.
The Cantonese description of the entire Chinese ethnic group is literally the Tang people. It applies to all of what is considered subgroups including Teochew, Taisan, Hakka, etc...
Cantonese definitely shares similar pronunciations for certain basic words with other Chinese dialects/languages.
Also, Cantonese is just one language in the area. There are other dialects that preserve Tang Chinese pronunciation more clearly and are closer to Mandarin. My Chinese surname in my dialect sounds exactly like it would in Mandarin but not in Cantonese.
Supposedly Cantonese is actually closer to Tang Chinese than Mandarin because operas/poems from Tang times still rhymne in Cantonese but not Mandarin. This is supposedly due to language drift rather than them not sharing some common ancestry.
Think more of the Norman invasion and how German (proto Viet and who knows what else) merged with French (Tang Chinese) to create English... and then suppose England and France would periodically merge and separate instead of splitting apart decisively after the Hundreds Year War.
Thus Cantonese and the other similar languages are definitely full fledged but there is also some shared ancestry with Mandarin. Also there is a long, long history of a common written language.
People may wish to highlight one aspect or another. Is it English or French if the histories are much more intertwined? Does that question even make sense or is asking that question mostly political?
Someone else may have more knowledge of origins of other Chinese dialects/languages.
Nobody claims Chinese languages are isolates. French, Italian, Romanian, and Spanish have obvious similarities and an obvious common progenitor, but are not "dialects of Latin". German, Latin, Persian and Greek hardly resemble one another, but all trace to proto-Indo-European.
Similarly, there is a Sinitic family of languages. But they are as different from one another as any collection of languages that have evolved away from one another, and mixed with other families, over millennia.
It is common for Chinese to believe they can read texts from 2000 years ago because they recognize the signs, but what they think it says has at best a tenuous relationship with what was written.
There are obvious differences and now the trope about reading old text.
1. Cantonese recognizes the Chinese as a common people and have a word for it. The word isn’t just used historically but is used to this day. The French don’t see the Italians as fellow Latins much less call them that.
2. There is a continuous use of a single written language. It isn’t about reading text from 2000 years ago. It is communication even within a subgroup using the same written language. One job people had not so long ago was to write letters for those who were illiterate to communicate with family and others far away. My grandmother did that.
Sinitic influenced cultures invented their own scripts: Japanese hiragawa, Korean Hangul, Tibet has had its own script. Vietnamese may be the closest, having adopted their own recently.
The French use the French written language to communicate with each other. The Germans use the German written language to communicate with each other.
3. Furthermore, there are continued common cultural traditions expressed in that language (classics) and practiced to this day (Chinese New Year, tomb sweeping festival, moon festival, etc…)
4. Whereas other people’s recognize some of those traditions as coming from China (Art of War) and as coming from another group, the Chinese have always seen them as their own.
This is the case with both people speaking Mandarin as well as Cantonese. My high school classmate would read the Art of War. He spoke Mandarin. My grandfather many decades earlier would read Chinese classics. He spoke what is often called a dialect of Cantonese. Both felt that it was a core part of their cultural inheritance.
The English celebrate Newton as their own. Some French may think highly of him but they don’t recognize him as French.
5. There is this misconception that China was a bunch of disconnected cultural groups till recently. That wasn’t the case. My grandfather from southern Chinese went to a university in Beijing. This was roughly 100 years ago.
I wonder how the various imperial ages of China controlled their empire? I wonder what written language the imperial exam system was in?
6. Also, group affinity in China is far more granular than you think. It isn’t first Cantonese vs Beijing. It is first what is your ancestral village.
You seem to want to look at the distinctions but don’t want to look at the common identity. Whether someone sees another as part of the group or not, these groups have a lot of shared and continuing culture. There are definitely groups in China that don’t have this share this common culture but that is to ignore the many that do. The reality doesn’t seem so clear cut to me.
I don’t know much about the other subgroups in China beyond the several I grew up with and encountered. Perhaps they are different but it would be far more enlightening to hear from people actually from those areas. It would be doubly interesting to hear of the perspectives of their grandparents.
Obviously all of central China share a common cultural heritage as parts of a series of ancient empires, similarly as southern Europe was dominated by the Roman republic and later empire.
It is not a good to compare the Roman Empire to something that ended in 1912, just 2 years before WW1. Hahahaha. Later empires and their languages: Austrian German vs German. Perhaps something more far ranging: Ukrainian vs Russian. Not Polish since it doesn’t share an alphabet. But maybe Polish in spoken form.
If you want to bring Germanic and Slavic language families into the picture, they are more proto-Indo-European language families, none mutually comprehensible despite common roots. We can also mention the numerous offshoots of Sanskrit in India, chiefly Hindi today, but with many others in use, likewise traced back to proto-Indo-European. (Thus the "Indo" part of the name.)
We can talk about Chinese political unity up into the modern era, but the shared cultural legacy goes back to the classical period, mediated by traditional literature originating in 14th century. Mandarin has long been the language of imperial administration, and has exerted a regularizing influence on local languages without displacing them. Still, it is certainly a very different language from that used to administer empires many centuries ago, despite relying on a common written syllabary. Meanings drift.
The original topic was how people who speak only Mandarin are taught that other Sinitic languages are "just dialects", and are misled by seeing users of these other languages writing in Mandarin, translating as they go; and not understanding the depth of translation involved. This confusion between translation and mere transcription does not seem to occur outside China. The current government prefers the confusion, probably to help enforce a belief in more unity than exists.
The number of symbols a syllabary would have to have to represent all the syllables of Sumerian (and Akkadian and Babylonian and whatnot) and both English and Chinese is monstrous. English has syllables like "strengths". Chinese has four tones.
I wish people could stop spreading lies about writing systems; giving 3 false information in a single sentence is quite a feat. Of course cuneiform writing is a set of characters, a lot of which being encoded in Unicode starting at U+12000 codepoint. One character doesn't equate a syllable, some even are unpronunced (determiners), and the phonology of Sumerian make its a poor way for its writing system to transcribe English.
My comment isn't unpolite in any way. On the other hand your patronizing comment is rude, so it would be good you start applying to yourself what you are preaching.
My attitude completely changed after I experienced this collection of 240+ aerial photos from around the world. It put the magnitude and impermanence of human history right in my face. Strong recommend if you've any interest in world history!
Wikipedia nearby libraries: [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources?isbn=08923... ]
Can be borrowed from Internet Library. [ https://archive.org/details/pastfromaboveaer0000gers/page/n4... ]
2005 (expensive) hardcover, 2007 paperback. Goodreads reviews [ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/576680.The_Past_from_Abo... ]