Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• 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
• > 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
• This was fun to read! I wish there was a no tech version of hackers news for this type of content only
  by animan
• 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
• 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.

  by quickthrowman
• 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