  >The line in the chronicle stating, "Uruk was defeated," may refer to a military conquest, but could as easily mean that it lost its position of leadership

Interesting (but not surprising?) that semantic drift has been with us since the beginning of language.

A word that once meant "succeeded in time" can shift in usage over a few scant generations (and motivated, "my side winning is as inevitable as the passage of time" rhetoric) to eventually become a synonym with "defeated in battle."

▲ gwerbin 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The coolest thing about studying very ancient history is the realization that you are starting both at a new beginning and also deeply in medias res.

You are right there at the beginning of cities and written language and entities recognizable as "governments" and record-keeping and all sorts of other things.

And yet you are millennia removed from the first large-scale organized societies, towns, building projects, non-nomadic agricultural practices, arts such as painting pottery, poetry/storytelling, language itself, and societal tropes and stereotypes and concepts -- concepts such as "greed" or "happiness", as well as social structures such as rulers and slaves and merchants and everyone in between.

What a strange time it must have been: writing was new technology at the time, and yet people were very much the same as they had already been for thousands of years prior, and of course are much the same as they are today. Add to it the substantial climactic and geographical changes that have occurred in the millennia since then, and the combined result is both uncannily familiar and extremely alien.

It's also fascinating to consider what changed and didn't change in the intervening thousands of years, and at different rates and in different directions in various parts of the world. Ancient Sumer would have been just as alien to a citizen of Roman or Sassanian Mesopotamia as the Meosopotamia of classical antiquity would be to someone living there today.

▲ Bluestein a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Indeed. I mean, the Mother of all Drifts comes with the entire logographic system shifting to accommodate more and more meanings, and abstract concepts ...

... enough to support a flourishing civilization (several) over thousands of years.-

Also, the parallels with today (power, war, "leadership" ...), "our highways are covered with weed and no wine nor syrup flows forth ..." are considerable.-

▲ wl 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Cuneiform is mostly phonetic. Semantic drift didn't come from writing.

▲ Bluestein 21 hours ago | parent [-]

I do believe later use of cuneiform by Akkadians was indeed sylabic/phonographic.-

▲ adrian_b 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The Akkadians used cuneiforms much like Japanese use kanji (Chinese characters).

This means that the Akkadians could read a sign either with an approximation of how Sumerians had pronounced it or with the pronunciation of an Akkadian word that was a translation of the meaning of the original Sumerian word. Some signs did not correspond to the syllables that were pronounced, but they specified a class of things to which the word to which they were attached belonged.

Like in many other writing systems, the most ancient cuneiform signs were ideograms, which symbolized various things, like emojis now. Because at that time they had no phonetic meaning, we do not know which was the language of the writers, i.e. if it was Sumerian or some other language that may have been spoken in those places before Sumerian.

However, it is impossible to have a complete writing systems only with ideograms, where "complete" means that it can be used to write anything that you can communicate by speech.

So many centuries later, some of the signs that were used initially to designate a thing began to be used for any other thing that was pronounced in the same way, and eventually most signs were used to write syllables and the cuneiform writing system became a complete writing system. At the time when this transition from ideograms to phonograms happened, the language of the writers was Sumerian and the writing system became a mixture of syllabic signs and determinative signs.

As I mentioned above, after the Akkadians began to use the cuneiform signs they had their way to pronounce them. Because, like for Japanese texts, there are many alternatives for pronouncing the cuneiform signs, the correct deciphering of such texts is not easy.

▲ wl 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm referring to Sumerian, too.

Sure, there's accountancy and protowriting like

  𒇻               𒐚
  sheep            six
  (pictogram of
  a sheep butt)

where it can be read entirely ideographically. Yes, there are ideograms and determinatives that are ideographic. But when you're building noun phrases and conjugating verbs, that's phonetic.

▲

Bluestein 18 hours ago | parent [-]

> 𒇻 (pictogram of a sheep butt)

Is this like the OG, millenary Goatse? (I mean, of all the things they could have picked to signify the poor thing ...)

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wl 17 hours ago | parent [-]

The butt is the most distinctive part of the breed of sheep kept in ancient Mesopotamia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat-tailed_sheep

	▲	Bluestein 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is the mother of all TILs.-

▲ schiffern a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Certainly. Meet the new humanity, same as the old humanity...