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Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?
- tehnoslow 19d agoInteresting 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.
- Certhas 18d agoFeels like mostly LLM work...
- mjd 19d agoShort answer: no. Interesting nevertheless.
- alephnerd 19d agoHonestly would love to deep dive into Sumerian literature. Sadly much of it is still untranslated or in the annals of UChicago.
- krzs9 19d agoI can certainly recommend : 1. The Literature of Ancient Sumer - Jeremy Black. It is a quite substantial anthology, has myths, hymns, laments, royal praise poetry, proverbs, literary debates, etc. 2. Myths from Mesopotamia - Stephanie Dalley. I bought this for Gilgamesh, loved the rest of it too. One of my most treasured books. 3. Weavers, Scribes, and Kings - Amanda Podany. Not Sumerian literature, but my favorite comprehensive history book covering all of Mesopotamian history. I mention this particularly because all the literature we do have came to us through scribes, and this book gets into whatever we can know about their internal lives really well. Reading about their tutoring and how they learnt to write, what we can deduce about how their lessons were structured - fascinating stuff. For such an ancient civilization, it is astounding how much we do have and how closely we can meet them. [1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-literature-of-ancient-sumer-9780199296330?cc=us&lang=en& https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-literature-of-an... [2] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/myths-from-mesopotamia-9780199538362?cc=us&lang=en& https://global.oup.com/academic/product/myths-from-mesopotam... [3] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/weavers-scribes-and-kings-9780190059040?cc=us&lang=en& https://global.oup.com/academic/product/weavers-scribes-and-...
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- animan 19d agoThis was fun to read! I wish there was a no tech version of hackers news for this type of content only
- magneticnorth 19d ago> 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 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.
- steveBK123 19d agoTo be more specific, I think most of us would like to have a "not the current tech thing" page. So a front page that isn't 50-90% LLM content in 2026. In 2020 that would be crypto. Etc
- krapp 19d agoFrom what I've observed (from the complaints people make about what is and isn't "HN worthy") most people who voice an opinion would prefer HN only have technical stories. It's common enough that it's explicitly called out in the guidelines: (On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.) This is a forum run by a Silicon Valley startup incubator. Unfortunately tech stories and whatever the current tech thing is will always dominate. And HN's design ethos of "no silos" means everyone has to see all of that content, and it will always push everything else down, especially anything non-technical (unless the mods force it up, which they can and sometimes do.) The only way to get what you want (I do think it's an interesting idea and I'd like to see it) would be to start another forum entirely or else build a third party client to filter out all of the AI slop. Such stories will always be diamonds in the rough here.
- quickthrowman 19d agoI 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.
- mapontosevenths 19d agoMaybe they just transposed a few digits? It happens. Somebody should try swapping them in and see if the pattern fits better.
- mapontosevenths 19d agoI ran it through the provided program and the alignment was worse if anything.
- jcranmer 19d agoThe Sumerians used a sexagesimal notation system; the two lengths would be 5.10.0 and 5.50.0 (which together add up to 11.0.0, FWIW), while all of the other king lengths are 8.0.0, 10.0.0, or 12.0.0.
- mapontosevenths 19d agoYeah. I had Fable run through every version of it I could think of and it explained the numbering system was the root of everything being divisible by 60. I did find a pattern though. If you look at ALL the kings, rather than just those 8 it becomes obvious. The recent numbers are realistic and drift further apart, becoming less and less accurate, the further back you go. Interestingly it also compared some other clay tablets and they were close. So it seems that they were probably written down based on a verbal history that had already drifted wildly well before it was written down .
- quuxplusone 19d ago> 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).
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- aaron695 19d ago[dead]
- SurviveTheJive 19d agoYou can’t discuss kings without discussing the rich history of Europe with thousands of years of oral and written history long predating the Sumerians and even the ancient Proto Indo-European peoples to which European language and culture is often erroneously attributed. The dark ages were anything but dark. Ancient Europe was anything but primitive. And yet it’s so rarely discussed in the mainstream.
- pavel_lishin 19d agoCan you give us a few pointers or links?
- dismalaf 19d agoNot the OP but there's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin%C4%8Da_symbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin%C4%8Da_symbols Some people also interpret some symbols on mammoth tusks going back 50k years as writing but that's a stretch IMO.
- stodor89 19d agoInterpreting Vinca symbols as a full-blown writing system is also widely considered a stretch.
- dismalaf 19d agoAre you talking alphabet or just writing system? It's clear by the number of symbols it's a writing system of sorts (proto-writing). It could definitely be pictograms (probably IMO), but then again, cuneiform, hieroglyphics and Chinese writing all started as pictograms as well.
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- jfengel 19d agoThe "dark ages" were also thousands of years after the Sumerians. Even the Greek Dark Age postdates Sumer by a millennium. So you're not really filling me with confidence about your idea here. Perhaps you can provide some sort of evidence?
- jendfkgk 19d ago[dead]
- poulpy123 19d agoThe 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
- jdthedisciple 19d ago> And the fact that all lengths are multiple of 600 I know this must somehow explain the giant numbers but I'm still not sure how precisely. Counting in base 60 would make for much smaller numbers, no ? For example, the number 16 in base 2 is 1111. but in base 10 it is 16. Ergo smaller base, larger number, and vice versa. So did you mean to say they counted in units that are made of 1/600 of our solar years? I think that would make more sense, putting their reigns between 31-72 years of our counting.
- TSiege 18d agoIf this was the case why do the kings that come after this on the list have normal human reigns?
- Laurel1234 19d ago[dead]
- bell-cot 19d agoNot to nibble at your point, but 16 is 10000 in base 2. 1111 is 15.
- rhdunn 19d agoThe reasoning is that 600 is 60x10 which is conflating base 60 and base 10 numbering systems. You would expect something like 3600 (60x60), or even (given things like our units of time) 720 (60x12). The latter is because 12 is a factor of 60 and is easier to work with in that number system/base.
- MachineMan 19d agoReality is stranger than fiction.
- audelesa 19d ago[dead]
- rrr_oh_man 19d ago> No hype. No theory far away from practice. Just what works in production and what doesn't. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
- ShinyLeftPad 19d agoRelated how? I don't see this in the article
- rrr_oh_man 18d ago> https://www.vectorian.be/about/ https://www.vectorian.be/about/ Together with the out-of-the-box no effort AI slop design it's an immediate turn off.
- shevy-java 19d ago> One speculative interpretation treats these numbers as a distorted memory of prehistory. Well ... some factors are recurring, e. g. energy coming from the sun. So downwards pattern will be created due to that. But many things are rather hard to predict, magnetic changes, eruptions on the sun and even local climate. Antarctica was not always covered in ice, that started at around 34 million years ago, give or take - as one example. Or, as a much more profound case: dinosaurs ruling the lands, then a meteorite induced climate change and dinosaurs went extinct. That would be hard to predict (you can of course calculate trajectories, but what I mean is if you look at Earth as an isolated system only, then it is hard to predict). I think the "xyz human list" aligns with "paleoclimate events" does not work that well. You don't need a human list to help "align" anything with recurring patterns. Geology isn't based on fantasy events but on specific factors that can be calculated with some extent of certainty; perhaps not 100% (weather remains hard to predict today for some n days in the future) but to a high percentage degree. To use that human list to then predict the future, makes little to no sense. It makes no real sense. Measuring current data points is much better than some random human-made list ages ago. It seems the author is desperate in wanting to make such an analogy.
- rushabh 19d agoThe whole article seems like AI generated slop.
- TSiege 18d agoYes Pangram rated it as 100% AI written
- metalman 18d agoNo, 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.
- TSiege 18d agoThis 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%80%9339:_Before_the_flood 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-ancient-volcano-oldest-story-ever-told https://www.science.org/content/article/aboriginal-tale-anci...
- mcphage 18d ago…if you actually looked at the article, you would have seen that the answer was a resounding “no”.
- mannanj 18d agoThe 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?
- fithisux 18d agoI 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.
- ncgl 16d agoGenuine question: what math did I need to take to understand any of this