Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Genuine question: what math did I need to take to understand any of thisby ncgl
- 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?by mannanj
- I think the 3600 is a year in modern terms. So big reigns is unplausible. The rapid successions give a picture of the instability of that period, in line with Noah's description of the era.by fithisux
- 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.
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...
by TSiege - …if you actually looked at the article, you would have seen that the answer was a resounding “no”.by mcphage
- 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.by metalman
- Short answer: no.
Interesting nevertheless.
by mjd - Honestly would love to deep dive into Sumerian literature. Sadly much of it is still untranslated or in the annals of UChicago.by alephnerd
- > 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).
by quuxplusone - > No hype. No theory far away from practice. Just what works in production and what doesn't.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
by rrr_oh_man - Related how? I don't see this in the articleby ShinyLeftPad
- This was fun to read! I wish there was a no tech version of hackers news for this type of content onlyby animan
- Bubbles.town is sorta there, but there’s a lot of fluffby CalRobert
- > 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.
by mdp2021 - That's kind of what reddit used to feel like when it was brand new. Can you believe it?by mtklein
- > 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.
- 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.by tehnoslow
- Feels like mostly LLM work...by Certhas
- 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.
- Maybe they just transposed a few digits? It happens. Somebody should try swapping them in and see if the pattern fits better.
- 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).by card_zero
- 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
by poulpy123 - current kings live very long lives due to the stability in their environment... not what used to happen in the middle ages for instanceby pestatije
- Reality is stranger than fiction.by MachineMan
- Base SIXTY?by trencedamp
- Who cares if it’s ludicrous? It’s a fun idea!by dented42
- I don't think the auhor belived the hypothesis, but this was just a fun experiment with data.by lukan
- 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 :)by nlehuen
- 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".
by huurtehoog