Wondering what the actual text really translates to. I have a hard time believing that in 2800 BCE, “Every man wants to write a book,” was really much of a concern, but you never know
I can’t speak to the validity of this particular example, but every society has something that they’re decrying as a sign of weakness, and it changes over time.
We’re all familiar with the denouncement of rock and roll, but at one point reading was seen as a bad thing. People were concerned that it encouraged laziness and distraction from the important things in life.
Every society thinks they’re important enough to witness the end of history.
Here I was having some serious climate change related anxiety, and this post, coupled with another meme I saw (which was Neil Degrasse Tyson saying that “If Humans can geo-engineer other planets, we can certainly do it to our own.”), helped.
I can’t find this exact tablet on Google (it could be AI generated), but this is a meme, the text is made up. The tablet is definitely unrelated.
edit - well shit, duckduckgo got it.
http://blog.hmns.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/cuneiform.png https://blog.hmns.org/2020/06/crazy-for-cuneiform-decoding-ancient-text/
Old Assyrian Trading Colony; Cuneiform tablet; Clay-Tablets-Inscribed – ca. 20th–19th century B.C.
it’s a the Met museum https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/325851 4th picture.
This tablet is of a type used by the Assyrian merchants to track the income and expenses generated by caravan shipments. The cuneiform text, read from left to right, records not only the amount of silver invested in tin and textiles, but also the less commonly traded precious stone lapis lazuli, which was sourced from Afghanistan.
At first, I thought it strange that a lot of these ancient tablets are receipts and bank statements.
Then I thought about how a huge portion of all the paper sitting in our landfills might be exactly that.
At first, I thought it strange that a lot of these ancient tablets are receipts and bank statements.
That’s exactly what writing was invented for, from after the mid fourth millennium bce, the first few hundred years of rudimentary writing are accounting archives and lists of names (gods, jobs). Actual information (royal achievements, how-to, religion) came shortly before the mid third millennium.
Hundreds of years of nothing but bean grain counting.
I like “sees themselves as important enough to be written about or listened to” as an interpretation
