Whenever I look into the history of ancient cities numbers like this boggle my mind, how many thousands of years a city saw culture and life and death only to fade into nothing. I feel like we're lucky to have language be as widespread as it is today because the chances that our lives will be forgotten is at least just a little less likely due to our written record. I just wish we chose media that lasted as long as clay tablets could.
It is particularly poignant with Mesopotamian civilization.
Sargon II was king of Assyria, ruling from 722 BC until death in battle in 702 BC. He almost completely reunified Assyria in the then millennia-old tradition of grand empire-building in the region. His assumed name Sargon was appropriate; Sargon I, Sargon the Great, was the first to have created a unified empire in Mesopotamia, nearly two thousand years earlier. The records of Sargon the Great's exploits were still around to read, and people could still read them. Although he was near-mythical by then, like Gilgamesh. The subsequent wars Sargon II's empire-building led to would effectively destroy the Mesopotamian political-economic system and leave it ripe for external conquest, first by Persians, and then Greeks, effectively bringing that 3000 year old civilization to a whimpering end over the next couple hundred years.
His name was actually more like Sharrukin, or Sarrukin, in the Akkadian language. We call him Sargon II because that is the Greek version of the name recorded in the Bible and transmitted in the Western canon. He is mentioned only once, in passing, in the Book of Isiah. That single passing reference to him as King of Assyria, was everything that was known of him for 2500 years, until the ruins of Dur-Sharrukin, his capital (destroyed during the mentioned wars) were excavated in the 19th century. Only the faintest echoes of the very last stages of Mesopotamia survived through the transmission of Western/Persian/Islamic civilization. Faded memories several generations old, by the time the earliest Greek and Jewish authors started writing things down. Like you say, it's a good thing clay lasts.
Sargon also means "true king," an appropriate name for someone who probably killed his brother to usurp the throne and had plenty of legitimacy problems as a result. Moving the capital of the empire away from Kalhu to the newly-built fortress city of Dur-Sharrukin was in part an attempt to get away from his enemies and surround himself with loyal men. The capital Dur-Sharrukin was not destroyed in war. Rather, Sargon II died in battle and his body was not recovered, which was considered a very bad omen. This halted construction on the city and Sargon's successor, Sennacherib, moved the capitol yet again to Ninevah. It remained lightly used thereafter as an administrative center until it was abandoned at the fall of the empire. Part of the reason why Dur-Sharrukin was such a nice archeological site is because it wasn't destroyed in antiquity, but rather abandoned. (Modern war seems to have destroyed a lot there, how much is unclear.) Also, it was inhabited for about 100 years, so the stratigraphic record was really straightforward.
If you find yourself in Chicago, you can see carved stone reliefs and a lamassu from the palace at Dur-Sharrukin at the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago.
Calls to mind the Shelley poem Ozymandias (about Ramses II):
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
> That single passing reference to him as King of Assyria, was everything that was known of him for 2500 years, until the ruins of Dur-Sharrukin, his capital (destroyed during the mentioned wars) were excavated in the 19th century.
I only have a layman's knowledge of this part of history, but this strikes me as unlikely. Surely something was known of him for some time in other sources, probably hundreds of years at least, before those source were also lost? The loss of knowledge is also second-order: we have lost knowledge of what was known to our predecessors.
Sure, I might have overstated the case a bit. There was scattered used of Akkadian as a written language into Alexander the Great's time; there was possibly some knowledge of that time in Babylon around then.
Still, the end of Mesopotamian records is abrupt. There's a written record from prehistory until the wars of around 700 BC, where the use of writing drops off but doesn't completely stop. But written records in Akkadian, the education of priests and scribes in Akkadian and Sumerian (itself dead for 2000 years by then as a purely liturgical language) basically stops after the fall of Babylon in 539 BC.
I'd note that writing in antiquity was deeply tied to both administration and to religion. The Persians were Zoroastrians; they do not seem to have oppressed, but state support went to Zoroastrianism and not the traditional Mesopotamian cults (and their scribes and schools). They imposed their own administrative structure on the conquered territories. Persian became the written standard, pretty much overnight. Akkadian seems to have ceased to be spoken within a couple generations among the ruling class, and within a few hundred more years it was not only dead but basically forgotten.
> Still, the end of Mesopotamian records is abrupt. There's a written record from prehistory until the wars of around 700 BC, where the use of writing drops off but doesn't completely stop. But written records in Akkadian, the education of priests and scribes in Akkadian and Sumerian (itself dead for 2000 years by then as a purely liturgical language) basically stops after the fall of Babylon in 539 BC.
This probably isn't so much a move away from the use of writing, but a shift away from Akkadian cuneiform on clay tablets to Aramaic on vellum. Clay tablets, even unfired, survive a long time. Vellum doesn't in that climate.
I found these two episodes of the “Fall of civilizations” podcast to be very informative about the Sumerians and Assyrians.
It’s episode 8[1] and 13[2], definitely worth a listen in my opinion.
It really is incredible to think about the age of things like this. The countless generations, countless lives, struggles, cultural changes, fashions, trends.
That city went from the equivalent of the year 0 to the year 3300. Us here in the common era are barely halfway through the life of that city, and look at just how much history we’ve been through. Their history will have been much, much longer, with far more generations of people, but it’s all forgotten, to the point that to us it barely registers.
We have to also keep in mind that 3800 BCE is the founding of Ur, sure--and we have anatomically modern human remains from about 193,000 BCE. Widespread control of fire seems to date to around 125,000 BCE. In that light? 3300 years is a blink.
The span of human existence is marked by an ever increasing derivative in the rate of change. That said, barring cataclysm, I tend to think we've gotten much better (perhaps too much so) at recording things; I doubt our current era will be forgotten so much as categorized and filed away.
What we know about UR is largely due to the large number of clay tablets with writing on them. Those tablets are very durable and while they are degraded by now, many can still be read. Our own writing is mainly recorded on paper that is much, much less durable than clay tablets. More recently most of our writing isn’t even on paper but is stored electronically. It would not take much of a break in our civilization’s continuity for the paper documents to degrade. We have lost several of Shakespeare’s works even though civilization has been continuous since his time and that was only 500 years ago. Our electronic writing might blink out in a matter of hours.
The clay tablets we have from the bronze age themselves seem only preserved by chance. They are found in store rooms in layers of cities that suffered widespread destruction, accidentally firing the clay records. So what we have is kind of sporadic, some letters from one king to another here, a bunch of apparently unremarkable palace economy bookkeeping there, then we tie it together with what we learn from archeology (and most exciting in recent times, from genetics). We also have a lot of stone stelas. But they certainly didn't leave us a well preserved big picture. I imagine future people would see the same story for us: A big stone inscription here, some documents accidentally printed on very high quality stock stored in an accidentally optimal place there, etc.
Another fun glimpse: It has been speculated, based on evidence in the Uluburun shipwreck, that some bronze age societies used a wooden book-like object with wax or clay faces as an easily erasable notepad. Whoever owned that may have thought about it the same way we think about electronic records blinking out. Or maybe they didn't think about the future at all.
Most clay tablets pulled out of the ground are unfired. The act of removing unfired tablets that have been in the ground for so long kicks off some decay, so it used to be common to fire excavated tablets to preserve them. There's modern conservation techniques that remove the need to fire tablets, but those techniques post-date the lawful flow of material culture to western museums, so pretty much everything you'll see is fired. While fires in antiquity might have inadvertantly helped preserve some tablets that might not have otherwise survived, this is hardly the most common case. The talk of fires preserving tablets is mostly used to illustrate the stark difference in durability between records recorded on clay and records recorded on vellum or papyrus.
This fascination with "being remembered" is strange. We shouldn't optimize for being remembered (or being easy to reconstruct archaeologically). We should try to not vanish. If we do vanish, why do we care about being remembered?
Think about the number of civilizations over the last hundred thousand years or so. Most of them are gone and we know very little about them. There are probably a lot that we don't even know existed in the first place. Ignoring the state of the world today, just on the numbers it's likely that this civilization will die and fade like every other.
Given the choice, would you rather your civilization be understood to people in the future, or would you leave as little as possible behind and leave future historians with only guesses?
> we should try to not vanish
If this civilization survives for the next few thousand years, the work of the preservationists will end up in a museum to early Earth civilization. If not, then the preserved work will end up in a museum to early Earth civilization, but run by aliens or something.
The need to be remembered is more of a philosophical argument, but I think it's just part of the human condition. It's why we pass our names to our children, why we tell stories. Thousands of years after the fact, almost everyone on the planet knows the names of at least some of the great conquerors of antiquity. Just about anyone you meet could probably tell you at least one story about Alexander the Great, or Genghis Khan, or Julius Caesar.
As a wildly successful civilization, the need to be remembered for that success is strong. Maybe just for vanity, but maybe future generations can learn from our stories as well. If our civilization does fall and we are not remembered, what happens next? Would we have another Dark Age? If the remnants of our civilization can still use the knowledge we've accumulated, would that help them rebuild?
It's really an unknowable question. The only thing we can be sure about is that it costs us relatively very, very little to preserve our records. If that effort is wasted, then so be it, but not putting in the effort would probably be bad in almost all situations, depending on your perspective.
We will all die, and this time will pass - this is completely inevitable. There is no way to not vanish, the closest you can come is being remembered.
Our civilization may well continue and prosper for a thousand years more, but unless we care about being remembered, they will have no idea what Pink Floyd, or Harry Potter, or A Hundred Years of Solitude, or an iPhone, or Linux, or anything else you consider important of our time were/was. Just like we have almost no idea about the pop culture or songs of people living in, say, the area of Berlin in the year 1022 was.
> Just like we have almost no idea about the pop culture or songs of people living in, say, the area of Berlin in the year 1022 was.
We can listen to the music of Hildegard of Bingen, who lived a little after that time in another part of Germany. It's not folk music, sure, but that's still pretty cool.
It's OK to say "being remembered doesn't matter", I was only pointing out that the alternatives are "being remembered" or "being forgotten" - and both are fine. There is no third option, though, "not vanishing".
Why bar cataclysm? The fragility of our current electronic systems subject us to particular recording weaknesses that previous generations did not have.
An interesting thing about cuneiform is that a lot of it is just receipts.
Those weren't intended to be kept around, but fires happen in cities, whether from a sacking or just back luck, and sometimes this would be hot enough to fire the clay.
In conclusion, the future will have just an enormous amount of coroplast political signs to fish out of landfills and decode, along with the ingredients on aluminium cans.
Because we have a lot more of them, spread out in a lot more places, and we invest in their upkeep. Writings from Minoan Crete were...in Crete. They weren't then duplicated thousands of miles. The societal investment in data storage and redundancy isn't going away tomorrow under any reasonable circumstances; as just one example, Amazon S3 going down with full data loss would be necessitate something close to a catastrophe by itself, and it's pretty unlikely that there won't be continuance going forward for most of our major data repositories--again, barring civilization-denting or -destroying cataclysm.
The "particular recording weaknesses" of the past were air, fire, and invaders. All still exist, but our recordings are generally more proofed against them than in the past. I tend to think that at a societal level, data preservation is on such a serious upward trajectory that categorization in order to begin to find meaning will be the greater challenge for future anthropologists.
It's very hard to say whether electronic data preservation will resist going further. Technologies change and data formats are lost and forgotten. People make breaking changes and those who can't or won't adapt will lose their data.
Lots of data will also be lost to encryption - still stored on some tape, but with no one alive to remember who may have owned the keys, where they may be stored, and what formats everything is.
I would bet that a vast amount of the data stored today in S3 that will never be read again - either because it will be forgotten or actually deleted by Amazon (people stop paying their bills, companies go bankrupt).
Not to mention, we already know of things like the source code of 10-20 year old games that people still play having been entirely lost.
On the other hand, there were far fewer people who lived through it. From 3000 BC to 500 BC the global population went from 14 million to 100 million. Today there are just short of 8,000 million people, i.e. 80-570x as many. On the day Ur was founded, there were fewer people living on the entire planet than there are living in some modern cities. So in terms of the number of human stories being told, we are racing past the ancients at hundreds of times the rate. We have far more history per second than they do.
Yeah, from a back-of-the-envelope calculation less that 10 million people lived in Ur over those 3300 years, possibly less than 1 million. More people than that live in a single city like New York today, and they arguably have access to a wider variety of experiences than the citizens of Ur had over all of the 3300 years taken together.
The strange thing is that many backwater towns have more inhabitants than Ur and the sibling cities. And yet, nobody expects significant cultural innovation to be made in those places.
To be fair, you have to remember as far as cultural changes, trends etc. is concerned the life for the entire period was pretty static by modern standards. The notion of progress, and especially the widespread expectation that things will get better / there will be progress, is at most 200 years old.
"We"'ve been through exactly as much history as Ur. History didn't begin in year 1 CE.
Even if you mean "Western civilization's heritage", that stretches back checks Wikipedia 5000 years through still-occupied Athens. "We" beat Ur handily.
Fall of Civilizations is absolutely amazing stuff, I double recommend it. It has an episode that covers this specific topic as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA
I can share that feeling. However, more than the thought of passing on what is ours, what such a chronological fact inspires in me is the awe of realizing that a city like this represents a history within history. And like that there are many more.
> the chances that our lives will be forgotten is at least just a little less likely due to our written record.
I’d be cautious to not underestimate the effects of dilution due to the sheer growing size of that written record. Given enough time, almost everyone will be effectively forgotten, like a drop of ink in the ocean.
As you rightly pointed out our reords will be forgotten much more quickly because clay tablets and animal hides can last for centuries.
None of our currently employed methods would last nearly as long.
A counterpoint is that verifiably-perfect duplication of data (and non-invasive integrity checking of backups) with our current methods is orders-of-magnitude easier than older ones. Sure, any _particular_ modern-day record has a shorter shelf-life than a clay tablet - but the lifespan of "a piece of information recorded and actively upkept on digital media" is much longer.
Swings and roundabouts. One approach lasts longer in a state of passive neglect, the other lasts longer in a state of active upkeep. As the meme says: it depends.
Hard disks can park themselves with an immediate power cut, whether that corrupts the filesystem is mostly about the filesystem but it's been decades since a head crash was a realistic possibility. SSDs even more so.
Contrary to your, frankly rather odd, assertion about digital media, they do not need power to store data. I did think tapes, DVDs, and USB thumb drives were common knowledge.
A Carrington event is probably not a big deal these days, but let's pretend all the transformers blow, and the grid is down so badly that rural parts of North America don't get it back for two years.
Data loss? Minimal. Any radiation which could get inside a hard drive or SSD and fry it, would kill us all, that's like a gamma ray burst. Some corruption from power spikes maybe, but for the most part, fuses and breakers work.
Most of the media we use today is only good for a handful of decades at absolute most. If you want something to last more than a century, you're looking at slightly exotic archival gade blu-rays, or something even more exotic like laser etched quartz or whatever.
Hard drives are a non-starter. Mechanical drives have the obvious mechanical issues, and over long term can develop bitrot. SSDs store bits as static charges which slowly deplete. Magnetic tapes seem to be the best option, but require climate control to last for more than a decade or so.
We don't really have any good way to store digital data unpowered for long periods of time. The best right now is just duplicating it across multiple types of media and replacing each as it fails, which requires active attention and functional infrastructure.
> The best right now is just duplicating it across multiple types of media and replacing each as it fails, which requires active attention and functional infrastructure.
Yes, that was what I initially claimed. No-one's claiming that digital media can be copied without power, no-one's claiming that a single digital storage artifact has a longer lifespan than (e.g.) a clay tablet. You appear to be arguing for a position ("sophisticated digital media storage artifacts have an individual shorter shelf-life than rudimentary ones") that no-one is arguing against.
I 100% agree that electronic records require active upkeep. I am not arguing, nor have I ever argued, that they can outlast a discontinuity of civilization. If your threat model is addressing that risk, then electronic media is a poor solution. If your threat model instead wants to preserve huge quantity of information in an easily accessible format and you can assume the continued availability of electricity and maintenance, electronic media (with active upkeep) is a better option than durable physical record-keeping.
I was (and still am) just pointing out that different "solutions" apply to different problems. There _is no_ single "problem in this context" - I agree that one of the solutions is ill-suited to the problem you're choosing to highlight, while maintaining that it is well-suited to another problem.
At the Corning Museum of Glass, there's a display where the time series of populations of global cities have been rendered into glass, hanging vertically with time going upward.
Surely, out of the billions of books that exist in the world right now, some will survive 5000 years. The Library of Congress is archiving many (but no longer all) tweets [1] and web pages. The British Library is similarly archiving tweets, podcasts, etc. The Internet Archive idem ditto, and many national libraries throughout the world are doing the same. If even a tiny fraction of that survives the next 10,000 years, there'll be much more remaining of the 21st century than of the 35th century BC.
Ok, but we don't know which kind of catastrophic event will wipe us out this time. So we can't know in advance which kind of media will survive best. Replication across many mediums seems the best approach, but it doesn't give us certainty.
Curious how the longevity will turn out for projects like Internet Archive's Wayback machine and Wikipedia. I know the latter can be downloaded to a reasonably sized USB key, and storage will continue to get more dense / cheaper. How long will the populace keep maintaining such works? If civilization breaks down will individuals keep copies propagating faster than media rots out? (Like how ancient myths were kept alive through storytelling)
Another interesting point is that the city of Ur had a harbour, which connected it directly to shipping routes with India [1] and Bahrain [2]. The shipping connection with India meant that Ur was able to import a funny blue-coloured stone from Afghanistan, called Lapis Lazuli [3].
Nowadays, Ur isn't even close to the sea, but appears to be about 200 km inland. That is what 2,5 thousand years of silt build-up will do...
The sea level today is higher than it would have been at it's founding. There was a big gulf covering much of southern Iraq back then, but it was filled in by alluvial deposition over the past few thousand years, forming the modern Shatt al-Arab delta.
Treating sea level as a global constant for practical purposes, this is what the graph looks like of recent sea level compared to modern times [1]. As you can see, sea level has largely risen since the last glacial maximum.
But thousands of years ago, the dirt that makes up southern Iraq simply wasn't there yet. Since there wasn't any dirt "displacing" the Persian gulf, it extended far inland from the present extent [2]. Over the intervening years, the Tigris and Euphrates transported all of that eroded sediment down from the highlands of Turkey and Iran, pushing the gulf out and forming a vast river delta where it used to be. That river delta has in turn dried up and shriveled in various ways over time, as the region became more arid and complicated hydrological things I'm not remotely qualified to talk about happened.
To put it another way, you can think of the gulf as a vast valley, with cities like Ur dotted along the ridgelines of the valley. What's happened is that the alluvial deposition from the rivers has simply filled in the bottom of the "valley".
This is actually how mesopotamia as a whole was formed geologically. The actual rock of the continental shelf is being squeezed between the Arabian and Eurasian plates and it buckled downwards in Iraq, forming a huge, flattish valley called a foreland basin. Erosion from the tectonic margins filled it in over time.
My all-time favourite podcast episode [0] is on the Sumerians in the Fall of Civilisations series [1]. As a STEM-focused SWE, I can't overstate how captivating it was for me. The podcast's narrative style brings history alive, deeply humanising the epic scale of the accomplishments, greed and suffering of our past.
I actually live close to here, and trek out occasionally to show friends the ziggurat. There's some live excavation going on sponsored by the UN, but what's wild is that every random rock in the area that you kick over has Sumerian writing on it.
it's fine, there's hordes of youtubers roaming through. I'm a foreigner living in Karbala that's fluent in Iraqi Arabic, so I'm typically not in those circles. Visa on arrival for p9 + eu countries though.
I've been fascinated by Sumerian culture lately, it must be awesome to have such close access to Ur. It's amazing how many artifacts are still not translated and for how much such a culture was forgotten.
Can you tell a little more about those random rocks? Is nobody gathering them up and cataloguing them? Why is the UN excavating when there are artefacts lying there on the surface?
Famously, Abraham, the grandfather of the man Israel, was from “Ur of the Chaldees” according to the Bible. Ur is very possibly the same place as Ur of the Chaldees (Wikipedia calls it “the current scholarly consensus” although I don’t know enough archaeology to confirm that).
On Wikipedia, there are nine places called New York outside of New York state.
It's pretty easy to imagine someone getting confused if you told them you're from New York Texas now, I wouldn't expect someone millennia from now to know for sure.
If you're coming from New York, Texas to some village in Romania and founding a religion here, they may well misunderstand which speicifc city you mean, and believe (and write down) that you're coming from the much more famous NYC.
> New York, Texas to some village in Romania and founding a religion here
The worst thing is I could very well see this happening. Some gent starts getting visions, then a few weeks later he's entitled to time with everyone's wife. Then he fails a tax audit and the same day gets a vision to leave America and begin a global mission.
It doesn’t sound that conclusive on the Wikipedia page:
> Ur is possibly the city of Ur Kasdim mentioned in the Book of Genesis as the birthplace of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim patriarch Abraham (Ibrahim in Arabic), traditionally believed to have lived some time in the 2nd millennium BC. There are however conflicting traditions and scholarly opinions identifying Ur Kasdim with the sites of Şanlıurfa, Urkesh, Urartu or Kutha. [etc.]
It's almost certainly the same place. Ur existed through many empires (Sumerian, Old Babylonian, Chaldean, etc...) and the era that the Torah was written in is most likely when southern Mesopotamia was known as "Chaldea" (ie. Of the "Chaldees").
I've been reading "I Sumeri" by Pettinato and he says that it's very probable that they are both the same city. However I too am not an expert in this field
The "Standard of Ur" mosaic is beautiful. Made almost five thousand years ago. Unfathomable length of time, and yet, the images are somehow relatable - workers, vehicles, musicians, dancers, cows, horses, armies..
> [The mosaic is] from the royal tombs of Ur, is made of red limestone, bitumen, lapis lazuli, and shell. The "peace" side shows comfort, music, and prosperity. The "war" side of the Standard of Ur shows the king, his armies, and chariots trampling on enemies.
This is fascinating to think about how long Ur lasted, I suspect more due to the constancy of forces at work than any kingly/priestly/technical virtues or statecraft.
Their clay writings are like the proverbial big lamp-post directing our attention to what we can see. Most of Ur's records report details of a system of work and taxation/distribution, with workers paid in beer. The usual scaling of size/wealth lead to some dominating others, with corresponding religions and stories to buttress their authority. Typical to our minds.
Long before Ur was Eridu [1], from ~5,000 to ~600 (episodically). Founded by a god of sweet underground water at the confluence of salt marsh and grassland, water sharing seems to have lead to peace between shepherds, fishermen, and farmers from three different cultures - diversity leading to enduring resilience. Temples seemed to be market places, where trade could proceed in peace, protected by that god.
Ur and the Sumerian cities had many of the same features as Eridu, but stories there tell of increased consolidation and militarization, first to keep out the dangerous mountain wanderers/hunters who (gasp!) had no homes, and next to maintain their assets against neighboring cities who might have designs on them. Any actual threats were amplified by fear- and war-mongering military class competing with the priestly class for control over production and distribution.
Society to us is largely variations on these protection rackets, of the have's fearing those who have nothing to lose. Perhaps Eridu was saved from that by lack of neighbors or marauders, if their sheer numbers dissuaded any small band who ventured near. I wonder if there's any undiscovered line of evidence that could help.
Related, because I just happened to listen to a audiobook version of it:
The Gilgamesh Epos, a mythic tale about an old Sumerian King. One of the oldest books in human history. Interesting to dive into the mindset of the time. To see what is different - and what is pretty much the same ..
(the german audiobook from Klaus Buhlert is fantastic)
It's a fun game, I made a very basic physical copy a few years ago. Instead of dice, which I wasn't able to find a source for, I created a spinner with the same probabilities.
