this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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The Internet in Ancient Times

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Welcome to the stone age... or the bronze age... or the iron age... heck, anything with an 'age' is welcome, except our modern age or any ages to come.

This is about what the internet was like thousands of years ago back when it all started. Like when Darius the Great hired mercenaries via Craigslist or when Egypt invented emojis.

CODE OF LAWS

1 - Be civil. No name calling, no fighting, keep your flint hand axes inside your leather pouches at all times.

2 - Keep the AI stuff to a minimum. It gets annoying and old fashioned memes are more fun for everyone.

3 - None of this newfangled modern 21st century nonsense. We don't even know what "21st century" means.

4 - No porn/explicit content. The king is sensitive about these things.

5 - No lemmy.world TOS violations will be tolerated. So there.

6 - There is no ~~rule~~ law 6.

Laws of justice which Hammurabi, the wise king, established. A righteous law, and pious statute did he teach the land. Hammurabi, the protecting king am I. I have not withdrawn myself from the men, whom Bel gave to me, the rule over whom Marduk gave to me, I was not negligent, but I made them a peaceful abiding-place. I expounded all great difficulties, I made the light shine upon them. With the mighty weapons which Zamama and Ishtar entrusted to me, with the keen vision with which Ea endowed me, with the wisdom that Marduk gave me, I have uprooted the enemy above and below (in north and south), subdued the earth, brought prosperity to the land, guaranteed security to the inhabitants in their homes; a disturber was not permitted. The great gods have called me, I am the salvation-bearing shepherd, whose staff is straight, the good shadow that is spread over my city; on my breast I cherish the inhabitants of the land of Sumer and Akkad; in my shelter I have let them repose in peace; in my deep wisdom have I enclosed them. That the strong might not injure the weak, in order to protect the widows and orphans, I have in Babylon the city where Anu and Bel raise high their head, in E-Sagil, the Temple, whose foundations stand firm as heaven and earth, in order to bespeak justice in the land, to settle all disputes, and heal all injuries, set up these my precious words, written upon my memorial stone, before the image of me, as king of righteousness.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Socrates totally agrees.

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

Stupid kids.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

It's to prevent the adults who just entered the room from seeing them 'rise'

[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 months ago (2 children)

If you think about it, their world really did end. When was the last time you heard of an Assyrian?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

It's been shortened to ass. There's still a lot of them around...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Go to Turlock, CA.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago (2 children)

"Every man wants to write a tablet."
Also complaining about the beer that kids are drinking nowadays, back in his day beer was unfiltered, had MORE muddy sediment, now THAT was real beer, etcetera etcetera...

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

Back in my day, we had to CHEW beer.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

Every man wants to write a tablet.

I dunno. I think the quote carries more dissonance, and therefore more meaning, if the author was busily pressing their thoughts into clay while the younger crowd was using this new-fangled papyrus stuff. That said, I have no idea how to translate the tablet shown in the photo.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There is no evidence that we can actually geo-engineer any planet though

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Well... we have one example that we can.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

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.

https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-cuneiform-tablet-clay-old-assyrian-trading-colony-middle-bronze-age-118099278.html

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I like “sees themselves as important enough to be written about or listened to” as an interpretation

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

And today, everyone with a half baked opinion wants to start a podcast.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago (1 children)

But Assyria didn't exist in 2800 BC? Assur was founded in 2600 BC

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah and I'm sure they didn't have tablets back then...