11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey
thehistoryblog.com103 points by speckx 7 hours ago
103 points by speckx 7 hours ago
I've been to Gobeklitepe. Amazing place. What has been dug so far is a small fraction of what's under the surface yet.
These round structures are intriguing. It's thought to be temporary. People came from all directions, built these, stayed for a while, ate a lot of hunted animals, and they buried these structures to never use again. Why? We don't know.
I should visit Karahantepe too. Looks as interesting.
The ancient Sumerians invented cuneiform writing about 5000-5500Y ago.
This is as long before ancient Sumer as ancient Sumer is before us today.
Mind-boggling.
The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years.
Let that sink in!
It is extraordinary to me that they don't get as much clout as they deserve for maintaining human civilization for so long. They literally evolved cryptologically sound techniques for maintaining their history - through fires, floods, calamity and Mother Nature.
We can't even keep our stories straight in the modern era for longer than 8 months.
> The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years.
I know that this is commonly believed, but how could you possibly know?
I recommend everyone watch the documentary First Footprints[0], it is the most wondrous thing I have ever seen.
The simple answer is that some storied reference events that happened that long ago.[1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n6VJ5jq7zY
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/aboriginal-tale-anci...
Thanks. I don't have time to watch the video, but the article still leaves me skeptical. Matching myths to past events seems to me fraught with all the same potential pitfalls as matching them to future events and thence labeling them as prophecies, especially when the event in question is as common as a volcano erupting. But I will admit it's not entirely implausible either.
I also don't have time to watch the video, but am somewhat familiar with the topic. One of the primary themes of the dreamtime stories is about the origins of various landforms: how this hill got here, how this valley got there, etc. They're often quite detailed, because explaining the unique quirks of the landscape is part of the appeal. So, not just a generic "why the valley is here" stories, but specific "why the valley has seven sharp zig-zag kinks in it" kind of stories.
There are a number of such stories which tell about landforms which have been under the ocean for 11,000 years, since the great meltwater pulses raised the ocean at the end of the ice age. Long after the stories were documented by anthropologists -- who thought it was unusual that so much mythology would be concerned with the topography of the seafloor -- sonar was invented, which confirmed that the landforms existed more or less exactly as the stories said.
So personally I think that's pretty hard proof of at least 11,000 years of accurate oral tradition.
> The simple answer is that some storied reference events that happened that long ago.
This is another thing that you can't know.
If there is a match between an inferred geological event and a mythological event, you'd still have to ask "what is the rate of this happening by coincidence?"
And then you'd still have to ask yourself, whether anything is real or a simulation, or a dream of god, etc.
Otherwise history is indeed much guesswork, as we don't have a timemachine and rely on lot's of indirect evidence for everything.
What are some good books or websites where one can read these stories? I am interested in learning more about them.
> the same stories orally for 40,000 years
How is this confirmed without records?
It isn't confirmed but their stories do match some geological and enviromental events going back that far.
Writing seems like it should be far more ancient than we ought to assume. You make some tally marks to count something, show someone else how to read your tallys, now you have a proto writing system. All you need is to iterate more symbols describing more things to scale it out, and this sort of thing seems like it would snowball over time and generations.
Seems like there ought to be countless ancient proto writing systems not just in our species either. I guess most species aren't in situations where storing information like this offers much of a selective advantage. Maybe you can count an animal scent marking out its territory as a sort of proto writing system; it is only somewhat different than the plat map in your city hall.
EDIT: Apparently neanderthals are thought to have used tally marks... (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-did-neanderth...)
The book The Language Puzzle delves into this a bit - even our closest genetic primate cousins appear to lack the physical adaptations in both brain and voice box/mouth to develop verbal language and written language is a step farther, other species show some signs like cetaceans and elephants. There’s a bit of speculation in there that advanced hand tools and language may have been coincident (from archaeological evidence with close time stamps) and that still took a very long time.
they have found tally markers on bones and other objects like that, so yeah you would be correct, i guess it really comes down to what "writing" is i guess?
My first thought was that I'd argue that tally marks are "counting" not "writing"
...but...
if "writing" is the act of conveying ideas through markings then... I guess it is kinda writing.
We can presume with near certainty that there are vast quantities of lost artifacts from lost civilizations of early humans that were crafted from organic matter that have just deteriorated to dust. We say "Stone Age" only because stone artifacts are the only to survive. You can assume there were orders of magnitude more and more sophisticated artifacts and art works made from wood or mud or skins that are just gone forever. It's also entirely possible some of those artifacts contained something akin to written language but whatever it was is long gone.
one of those mind-boggling timeline comparisons I sometimes think about is Cleopatra and the Pyramids. The Giza pyramids were built around ~2600 years _before_ Cleopatra. And she's about 2000 years removed from us today.
So to think that Egyptians and Romans in Cleopatra's era went to visit the Pyramids as a kind of tourist thing from a civilization 2 millennia removed from them is quite astounding.
I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.
> I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.
It's due to the historiography of western civilization that for so long always traced its origins back to Greece (and Cleopatra was, of course, Greek.)
Compare to Mesopotamia, Sumer mentioned by the parent comment. There may be more surviving cuneiform literature than Greek and Latin. The sheer volume is kind of hard to overstate. The Library of Ashurbanipal is a prime find but hardly the only one of its kind: 30,000 tablets including mostly-complete copies of epic poems, histories, dictionaries, and thousands of administrative and personal letters. And there's millions more tablets from thousands of other digs.
And the crates and crates and crates of ordinary shipping receipts, if ever systematically studied, offer the potential to understand their society in ways we never will with classical antiquity.
But most haven't been read. There aren't enough people who know Sumerian and Akkadian (and all the other languages written in cuneiform over its 3000 year history) and how to read cuneiform for the task to translate them all to be completed in our lifetimes.
Stories of Mesopotamia do not always resonate. In fact they are often very alien and inscrutable. It's very hard to grasp the Mesopotamian mind. I'm unsure if this is lack of familiarity or because they really were so different, because in the western tradition they are the canonical Eastern Other, and shrouded with thousands of years of myth and misunderstanding.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the strangeness, I found reading translations of Gilgamesh and Atra-Hasis to be revelatory and hope that my descriptions don't put anyone off. They're worth it. To this day "Babylon" has all sorts of associations, many of them unsavory. Which is rather unfair to them.
The Babylonians had 360 degrees in their circles, 24 hours in their days, and when they looked up at the stars they saw patterns like the Twins (what the Greeks would borrow as Gemini), the Bull of Heaven (Taurus), and the Crawfish (Cancer), the Hebrew month of Tammuz is named after the Sumerian fertility god Dumuzid, and the Mesopotamians leave many other echoes in the later cultures, now that we know to look.
I really hate that I'm even typing these words right now, but wouldn't this be one of the few fields where modern LLMs would potentially provide a real capability that was previously lacking? I'm imagining an LLM might be able to provide rough first pass translations and provide hints about which specific tablets might be most interesting for a human that can't possibly look at them all.
There's inevitably been quite a bit of research in using LLMs to help decipher cuneiform, but it's still at a fairly early stage. Good overview here:
https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/publications/mesopotamia/202...
"Artificial intelligence can therefore provide researchers with a significant support, helping them link together texts that mention the same individual, a geographical site, or a word within a large digitised corpus. But we are still far from machine decipherment of texts."
Why would you hate that you're typing those words? Technology is useful and neutral, and if we have good uses for it like it seems so here, let's do it! :)
because it's a fad-ish response right now.
A decade ago every "omg just use [answer]!" was to suggest blockchain solve your problem.
Every possible problem seemed to have a solution that involved blockchain.
... now that "[answer]" is always "AI".
So I get his sense of cringe... while also acknowledging I had the same thought. We've never been better at pattern matching, pattern identification, OCR, translating across languages... seems like a great use of an LLM.
and imo ive also thought the same thing, but then it does still come down to the amount of people and time it would take to go over those rough translations and pull the wanted info out of it. manpower is lacking in a lot of those fields
I doubt there's much Akkadian and the 14 other languages written in cuneiform over more than 2,000 years. Several of these are language isolates. Its probably not intractable but would require a lot of human labeling and correcting by academics who can read these languages. It would be a fun legacy project for an eccentric billionaire. If I were Bezos, it would be on my todo list.
> the Hebrew month of Tammuz is named after the Sumerian fertility god Dumuzid
There are more direct connections. The Greek god Adonis, Aphrodite's consort, is the near Eastern god Tammuz, with the same mythology and worship rites. (And his name reflects that; it's the Semitic title "lord", cognate with Hebrew adonai.)
> There aren't enough people who know Sumerian and Akkadian
one LLM is enough!
I'm really (honestly) waiting for the day when an LLM gets into the Akkadian and Sumerian texts and starts revealing extremely mind-blowing details to the world.
I truly believe we might one day, soon hopefully, see an LLM making observations about our history which blow open the horizon of humanities future.
Imagine, if you will, some of the secrets buried in these texts, revealing to us all just how it all began, and where things are headed.
In the grand context of galactic-scale civilizations, we might be in for some surprises ..
I’m not entirely sure why you’re downvoted. Though I don’t expect “ancient aliens” or anything of the sort, translating from A to B is literally what LLMs were invented for.
They’d be very, very good at reading, discerning, summarizing, etc, vast quantities of text like this.
They'd also be very good at halluzinating the most fascinating stories together. Unlike a for a coding agent with reproducible tests, it is hard for a history bot to verify it's finding.
There was still a wooly mammoth population on Wrangel Island in the Artic when the pyramids were built. They didn't go extinct until several hundred years later.
https://www.theglobalwow.com/mammoths-alive-during-pyramids/
There were archeologists in ancient Egypt studying ancient(er?) Egypt.
>I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.
Shakespeare wrote a play about her and Elizabeth Taylor played her in a movie. The effect of modern media is 99% of the reason why Cleopatra feels more "contemporary" than, say, Hatshepsut (for whom plenty of artifacts exist) or even Nefertiti.
Cleopatra was a contemporary of Julius Caesar, and played a major role in his biography. (Which is why Plutarch wrote about her, which is why Shakespeare wrote about her, which is why 20th Century Fox made the film about her.) Julius Caesar is... a big name... in the West. Call that "the effect of media" if you like, but it's a thing.
Hatshepsut and Nefertiti lived respectively 1400 and 1300 years before Cleopatra, and about 700 years before even the founding of Rome. I'm no expert, but seems to me that those two names completely disappeared from the historical record between say 1000 BC and AD 1800, and were rescued from obscurity only by 19th-century archaeologists.
+1, I think the real reason that Cleopatra is still living in our common culture is mostly because of her association with Julius and Marcus Antonius, as well as of course proximity to Augustus.
I don't think Sharespeare would have mentioned her had she not figured prominently in the lives of main figures during the fall of the Republic.
Not sure what is mind boggling. The homo sapiens exists in the _current_ form ( physiologically and brain size, etc ) since at least 250k years. about 50k year ago abstract art was already in vogue.
nitpicking: Sumerians were the oldest civilization to have been found using cuneiform or scripted writing. The actual civilization to have truly invented writing is not known.
In a recent Irving Finkel interview he talks about Gulbekle Tepe and the proto-writing that was way older then even Sumerian.
The aesthetics of this sculpture look very similar to the Moai on Rapa Nui (Easter Island).
I read that as "man riding turkey", but why would he wear a leopard, Brain? Narf.
> Since systematic excavations began in 2019, a number of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figural sculptures have been found at Karahan Tepe, often in unusual combinations. Several examples of a human carrying a leopard on his back. The leopards in these sculptures are not slung on the man’s back as if he had killed them in the hunt or tamed them enough to carry them, but rather are depicted snarling, with teeth bared, very much alive and very much unfriendly.
Interesting that "you've got a monkey on your back" is a commonly-used expression in English. I could imagine these people saying the exact same thing, with "leopard" substituted in.
"Bro, I gotta get this leopard off my back..."
>> Less than 12 miles away from Karahan Tepe, a high relief of a man gripping his phallus flanked by two roaring/biting leopards carved into the stone is the earliest narrative scene ever discovered.
So, er, what is the um narrative conveyed by this scene?
It’s a cautionary tale: man who jerks his meat in the woods risks getting eaten by leopards.
Man gripping his phallus was a popular character in Karahan Tepe in the old times.
See his 2.6 meter statue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe#/media/File:Karah...
Depends on the nature of the grip.
He could be trying to protect his junk from the leopards, or taunting the leopards by jerking at them. So many options. The past was just as juvenile and perverse as modernity.
Given that they went to considerable effort to carve it in stone as part of a temple complex, it was likely neither juvenile nor perverse
I think you underestimate the amount of effort people are willing to put in to being juvenile or perverse.
This is most likely the explanation. Apex predators will often try to kill the seed of an enemy by tearing off their junk. It's much less dangerous than trying to kill the enemy, and it serves the same purpose of ending their genetic line.
If you find yourself weak and near death out in the wilderness but in a situation where you know there is hope for rescue and you must try to avoid being eaten by the wild animals there is one thing to remember about how wild animals exploit vulnerabilities.
The first scavengers or predators on the scene will evaluate your condition and attack the softer parts of your body. That includes your anus and genital area, your stomach/gut area, your eyes and neck. It is in your best interest to cover those areas as best as possible. Those animals will try to create injuries that are serious enough that you will not survive so they go for the soft parts.
Buzzards are known to start at the anus/genital area and move into the gut area. when they are cleaning a carcass. Same with larger prey animals. Use your resources and energy to protect the soft parts and you will improve your chances of survival. Duck and cover by assuming a fetal position can work if you can maneuver your backside into a sheltered position where it is less accessible. Cover your ass in other words. When fighting back you should remain facing the threat with your rear covered.
What?? The predator is after a meal, not up for doing harm for harm's sake.
There are pictures available.
I’m certainly not an expert but he’s holding his stomach in one hand, giving himself a good tug with the other and looks somewhere between scared and confused. The leopard on the left is all smiles.
There’s another dude standing a few figures away with his back turned to old tug-a-lug. He’s holding something and looks kind of ashamed though I could be reading that into the image since it’s not really well carved… Tug-a-lug is the best carved of all and must be the centrepiece of the story.
If this is another great flood narrative, I sure prefer the Hebrew great flood story.
After looking at the 3D relief of the guy with his pecker in his hand I feel like this was carved in the period immediately preceding the abandonment of the site in pre-history. I base that on the definition of the outlines of the leopards. It appears that initial work had started on giving each of them a 3D view as they are cut in along the margins of the belly and back. Maybe the entire panel would've been a 3D relief had the people been around to complete it.
Something came along and compelled these people to abandon the site or they were killed off by a different group. Very interesting anyway why a group would put so much effort into constructing these sites without the sites being places where they lived. I think I read somewhere that there is no evidence to suggest that anyone ever lived there. They were places where people gathered. I could be wrong though.
I don't think he's sitting on the leopard.
What a downgrade. We were riding leopards back then!
And leopards were riding humans. Image on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe
I'm not sure I would call that riding. With all the poses I suspect this was some odd-ball cult practice. I'm sure the archaeologist who had to polish that knob on that anthropomorphic figure in that one panel #3 has some good stories. Probably significant that its the smoothest part of that figure.
The old joke about what they call a chicken fucker in Oklahoma comes to mind here except I think those pre-Turks were cavorting with leopards.
mmmmhm, riding?
Potbelly Hill in Turkey dates back to 10,000BCE and it is an amazing story
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#/media/File:...
the modern people who first looked at it thought it was just a graveyard with stone markers on the graves
then someone dug down much further and those stone markers were several meters high
Disappointing that it only has a single low-resolution picture which mostly obscures the leopard.
"riding" and "leopard" are doing a lot of work here
he might be standing and holding it, but that's a nice find
I spent so much time looking at it, how do they see a leopard there?
They have this standard icon for leopard. That's an example of it. It's like our Mickey Mouse isn't exactly anatomically correct either.
"Hold my..." checks notes, yeah it's a couple thousand years earlier and near enough "...beer and watch this!"
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