Ennigaldi-Nanna lived in the mid 6th c. BCE, she was the daughter of Nabonidus, last king of the Neo-Babylonian empire just before Cyrus steamrolled through the whole place. She was the high priestess of Ur - and the first museum curator in History. Her dad, like many other kings between Sumer and Babylon, went around rebuilding temples that were up to 1500 years old in his time, but he picked up more stuff to bring back home.
Ennigaldi-Nanna built herself a special room with shelves where she lined up objects that were dated between 1400 and 2000 BCE, having them cleaned and restored, and she placed clay tablets next to them to explain what they were, where they came from, who made them. In three languages. In a room open to the public.
It’s believed that she was present on sites when those objects were picked up. Some of those were from Ur, the city of her temple - her position as high priestess in that temple had been abandonned for a few hundred years before her temple was restored (because her dad was a big fan of the Moon god Nanna and this was his main temple for over a thousand years), so she may have just needed to look around and pick a shovel and a good brush. Nabonidus is also considered “the first serious archaeologist”, antiquarian and antique restorer.
Some of the artifacts from Sumer and Babylon that are most famous today, oldest and best preserved, come from that museum. We found a 2500 year old museum, and we put it in a museum.
Is Ennigalda any relation to Inagadda-Davida?
No. That song name comes from one band member trying to say “In
a garden of lifethe garden of Eden” while beinghighdrunk as fuck. Then the name stuck.EDIT: thanks for the correction. While checking, I also saw that he was drunk, not high.
*“In the garden of Eden”
Thanks, now I have a 17 minute song stuck in my head.
Did England put the museum-museum in a museum?
Thats amazing! Do you have any sources or papers on this temple? (I would love to share with my teacher friends!)
Wikipedia is a good start
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennigaldi-Nanna's_museum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennigaldi-Nanna
Then the history of Ur in general is relevant. For instance, an item listed as part of the museum is a statue of Shulgi, who was king of Ur around 2100 BCE and rebuilt the very same temple to Nanna. One of his statues (statuette) served as foundation nail for the rebuilding of the temple - Sumerians rebuilding temples involved digging down to the foundation to find the original foundation marker, and starting over leaving a new foundation marker by the new king, and we know Shulgi used a statuette of himself for several temples he rebuilt (they all look the same but we found several across different temples). I don’t know what specific Shulgi statue Ennigaldi had, but she might have had, for example, a foundation nail recovered when Nabonidus rebuilt the same temple in the same way.
I don’t know off the top of my head where to find a list longer than 3 entries for the items she had, unfortunately, I only find non-specific mentions of tablets, jewelry, carved statues, mace heads, kudurrus. Wikipedia only has a vague few items and says they’re in a museum in Iraq, but Ur was one of the major cities and we have a lot of things from there in good condition. Including statues of Shulgi, and of course tablets and jewelry. Obviously the biggest problem is that a bunch of items landed in private collections for a while after Leonard Woolley dug up the museum, and the tablets that Ennigaldi wrote for them were separated from the items themselves, so we know from the display explanations what sort of items she had, but it’s a lot harder to trace the exact items themselves - but we do have them between private collections and museums.
I don’t know any paper that specifically talks about the museum, beyond Woolley’s original notes. A few books talk about it, but that’s usually less academic (Wikipedia has some links). This article looks like a good write-up.
In 1925, the Woolleys knew they were excavating a Sumerian site that existed in 500 BCE but Ennigaldi’s museum of much older artifacts filled in major historical gaps about an era that had no previous record.
It’s from back when they didn’t know how old Sumer really was (the first major Mesopotamian cities were found when people in the late 19th c. were trying to prove that the Bible was real and was the beginning of time, instead they found Sumer and doubled the length of known civilized History), so imagine finding a museum that existed in a period you thought was the beginning of history, and that museum held pieces that were nearly as ancient to them as the museum was to you… In 3000 years, people believing Trump was the beginning of civilization will dig up the Penn Museum and the Louvre and oh boy.
Thank you!!
Human history is nuts because humans were around for so long before we ever figured out how to write things down. We had agriculture before language!
And you know tons of people tried to create languages, but they were just surrounded by mother fuckers who were like “look at this bitch, over here with his stick poking the ground. Hey, stick boy! Stop fucking around! Your pictures aren’t important! Grug’s already the best painting! You see his mammoth? Fucking stick boy.”
And then we have the Epic of Gilgamesh, a 6,000 year old story that reminisces about times long past.
… and Dinosaurs ruled the earth for about 165 million years and even that is only 3% of the time our planet has been around.
Modern man, including the writers of Gilgamesh, are but a fleeting speck on the history of life on this planet.
Don’t think we well last as long as the dinosaurs.
Things aren’t looking good for us
I think its interesting that we are also very biased towards long lasting societies, because they leave more stuff for us to study, and literate ones, because they can tell us with their own words what events there were. We still dont have a complete picture of the battle of Cannae, one of the consequential in all of history, whose effects we are still living with. Writing was only invented 4500ish years ago, and humans are as a species are way way older.
Its fucked up to think about Catal Hayuk, or Utsie.
It’s also interesting how short these time frames actually are. 2000 years are just 80 generations.
All but the most important bullet points of history from that time is wiped out.
And our intuitive understanding “how the past was” is just from maybe 4-5 generations ago.
The past is a vast place and we only ever scratch the very surface of it.
No one even really knows what their great grandparents were like, unless they were famous or something. I have no idea who my great, great grandfather even was. It stops in 1872
Aren’t great grandparents the parents of your grandparents? I knew them, and a lot of people did know theirs. Mine were nice people.
What about your great, great grandparents then? Do you know what they were like?
True, depends on the age when everyone got kids. But the point of the person you replied to still stands: You know the people you met, you might know one or the other story of the people they met, but then it stops.
One of my great grandparents is still alive. They told me a handful of stories from their parents and grandparents. That’s it. There’s no history beyond a few birth and marriage certificates from beyond that.
And now there is an overwhelming amount of information, as long as someone keeps rotating in fresh hard drives and replacing the dead ones
Kinda, ish, not really though.
In theory, all that data exists, but huge amounts of it are lost already. There was an indoor pool/waterpark thing that we often went to as kids and it was shut down about 25 years ago.
I tried finding pictures of that, and the only picture I could find was from when it was torn down. There are no (publically available) fotos of that thing being in operation, and 25 years is not a long time.
My wife’s grandpa died a while ago and I helped going through his PC to sort what to keep. It was a huge mess and we ended up grabbing a few things that looked relevant, put them onto a hard drive and that on a shelf in my wife’s parents’ house. And it will likely remain there without anyone looking into it until my wife’s parents die, and then it will get tossed out too.
We had long-term shelf-stable data storage for centuries, and still when someone dies we usually throw out their old diaries and photo albums, maybe keeping a handful of pictures. And even if there’s a horder in the family who keeps all that, most people end up with dozens or hundreds of descendants over a few generations and one of these descendants ends up with the data. To all others this data is all but lost.
But it’s not only that: the number of ancestors you have grows exponentially with each generation you go back. It’s easy to keep 4 grandparents straight in mind. 8 great grand parents are also not that hard. 16 great great grandparents that you have likely never met become more difficult. 32 great great grandparents are a lot, and it only gets worse from here. There’s only so much mental capacity a human has, so remembering more than just names and dates for everyone a few generations back is all but impossible.
So what we will see in the future is just that there will be more data rotting away until it’s thrown out. Cloud services are already starting to go back on their “we store stuff until eternity”-policies.
Also crazy is that the thing that brought down the Old Kingdom around 2180 BCE, after nearly a millennia in power, was a megadrought thanks to a climatic change. It took them about 140 years to reboot things into the Middle Kingdom.
Not an Egyptologist, but I was actually just talking with a friend (when discussing the loss of information in societies) about ~1500 BCE Pharaohs having to run archeological expeditions to figure out whose tomb was whose to pay the proper respects.
I remember a Hardcore History episode where he talks about how in the time of the Assyrian empire, it was known even then that the world was ancient, filled with individual civilisations that saw themselves as the centre of the world and would marvel at the ignorance of being lumped in together with equally self-possessed civilisations by the historians who write of them only in passing with incomplete sources.
I might have a bit of that wrong, I just woke up and it’s been almost a decade since I listened to it. But the part that stuck with me was the idea that even to people we see as deeply ancient, they too had an apprehension that human history is no spring chicken.
And yet, compared with the span of time claimed by the ages of the dinosaurs, humanity has barely existed long enough to clear its throat and introduce itself. And in that time we have been imperiled very often.
I was intrigued to hear that the Toba catastrophe hypothesis may be discredited. I enjoy the idea that 200,000 years ago we may have had as few as 10,000 individuals. It must have been a peaceful time…
Ah ty for the reminder, I’m surely a few episodes behind on Hardcore History. Also, <3 your name
(•ө•)♡
The oldest recorded song in history starts with “in those ancient times”. Tale of Gilgamesh IIRC
A few poems written in Sumerian times, around 2100 BCE, have this starting line or similar (in those far remote times, in those days when heaven and earth were created…). The instructions of Shuruppak, Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld (not actually part of the compiled Epic), Enki and Ninmah, the Flood part of the Gilgamesh Epic…
Myths always take place back a long time ago.
Oddly enough it was actually a mistranslated copy of Jerusalem as the rest of the stone said “walk upon England’s mountain green”
I wonder if they were referring to the protoindoeuropeans, who just slowly wandered the earth spreading their language
No, those texts are about the time of the building of their own cities and civilization. The older big Sumerian cities are dated back between like 6000 and 3000 BCE (with Eridu around 5500 BCE). That’s what the faraway days are.
The instructions of Shuruppak, the oldest known example of that line, is dated about 2600 BCE give or take, and it’s talking about the city of Shuruppak and a king teaching his son Ziusudra. Ziusudra is later named as the Flood survivor in the Gilgamesh texts starting 2100 BCE, and the Flood in question is believed to point to one particular flood that destroyed Shuruppak around 2900 BCE (it got better).
The Sumerians of the Ur III period who wrote those texts (at least put them in writing from a probable older oral tradition) perfectly knew their civilization was old AF, more than a thousand years. The use of Ziusudra / Utnapishtim in the Flood narrative of Gilgamesh almost definitely points to the Instructions of Shuruppak, a text the later Sumerians and Babylonians also made copies of, being the specific “wisdom from the time before the Flood” that Gilgamesh brings back from meeting the guy. Like, they’re saying Gilgamesh is the reason they all got copies of what Ziusudra’s dad told him about how to make a city right - because Ziusudra repeated to Gilgamesh what his dad taught him (just before his city was wiped by the gods). It’s also probably an explanation on why that specific line, “in those days, in those faraway days”, is repeated in Gilgamesh, because it’s in the Instructions. The “death of Gilgamesh” poem goes like this
you reached Zi-ud-sura in his dwelling place. Having brought down to the Land the divine powers of Sumer, which at that time were forgotten forever, the orders, and the rituals
And as a bonus, the Shuruppak flood would be around 2900, Gilgamesh would have lived around 2700, and the oldest copy of the Instructions is from around 2600, so even that timeline matches in their reconstruction if we imagine they figured that out correctly (or more realistically, Shuruppak was rebuilt after the flood destroyed it and that’s when they wrote it themselves).
Proto Indo Europeans have no connection to them, no genetic, geographical, or cultural connection. They are probably a bit later than the older Sumerian cities, even.
Could “It’s also probably an explanation on why that specific line, “in those days, in those faraway days”, is repeated in Gilgamesh” also be a form of thought rhyme?
Sure, using the same lines multiple times makes it easier to remember, and the line is found in more than one text. I just mean there’s a pattern of coincidences, and Gilgamesh bringing back wisdom from “before the Flood” that was lost from the same person that received those instructions is a big one. It’s surely somewhere between “the same people wrote both texts and simply reused similar lines between them for style” and “multiple texts reference each other like they’re building a big ancient MCU where you need to watch the backlog of 20 previous movies to fully understand the last Avengers: Gilgameshday”.
Because they totally did that a lot. Poems pick up straight from the end of other poems. Hell, specifically for the Sumerian ones, they didn’t know how to start a story so a lot of them begin with: " so you know, the wind god split the mountain of heaven and earth, that was cool. Anyway, Enmerkar once…" and another text starts with “after heaven and earth were separated, Kur abducted Inanna. So anyway, here’s Lugalbanda’s story…” followed by “Kur is now defeated so it’s all good. Now, about the Anzu bird…” and we have a near complete Sumerian Genesis likethat.
Why would Akkadian or semite myths speak about a people that not only isn’t theirs, but also unknown?
that’s a trap question and you know it!
(because I thought they shared the same ancestor, but apparently they don’t – there, ya happy now?)
Sorry, I didn’t mean to come across this way. I didn’t think you thought Akkadians or Sumerians were Indo-European peoples. Indeed, your idea makes more sense now.
My understanding was that you thought a people could have myths centered on another people. I also didn’t understand how thought possible to tell stories about an unknown people. No point in arguing over this now, since it’s all clear now.
(I wanna fight some more!)
But yeah I didnt realise this was history memes, and that people do practice and correct knowledge here haha
I’ve read that their governance was geared towards stability, not growth or disruption. It helps with keeping things going for a long time.
I’ve read that their governance was geared towards stability, not growth or disruption. It helps with keeping things going for a long time.
I’m confused. How could their leaders earn a big enough quarterly bonus to blow on cocaine?
Edit: This might be something modern government models could adapt and use, to everyone’s benefit… If we can just crack the cocaine challenges with it.
I think I’m joking, except I can’t stop thinking about how a universal basic cocaine subsidy might actually be what is needed to convince a bunch of problematic leaders to retire…
I suspect it’s unbridled psychopathic greed that’s the problem.
That still doesn’t answer whether a universal basic cocaine subsidy would solve the problem.
Cocaine is actually quite cheap to make…
?
I mean, maybe - but its not hard to focus on stability instead of growth when you’re the only game in town.
They did pretty damned well against the Hittites and Lybians, Egypt only really started to struggle when the bronze age collapse happened. Frankly speaking when you are durable enough to weather an apocalypse you are doing pretty good, the only other ones I can think of that pulled the same was the Assyrians who I’m pretty sure are gonna outlast every other culture at this rate.
Want yet another fun fact? All the most famous egyptian pyramids were built in a span of 100 years or so.
They blew their retirement savings and their heirs couldn’t afford to build more!
Pyramid building was serious society-stabilizing policy, not government-breaking waste.
Fashion is ephemeral by nature.
Being in the same place doesn’t make it the same civilisation. Cleopatra was more similar to the ancient Greeks than the ancient Egyptians
An unbroken span of time with the same name and identity makes it the same civilization. It isn’t like countries stopped being themselves due to an industrial revolution.
The ruling class in Egypt spoke Greek in Cleopatra’s time
That’s a very particular and odd view of what a civilisation is. By this logic, there are no inheritors to ancient Egypt at all since even the current inhabitants speak Arabic and not ancient Egyptian. In fact, Ancient Egyptian had already developed into Demotic Egyptian by the time of Cleopatra, and Demotic in itself was heavily influenced by Aramaic and, you guessed it, Greek. It’s fairly common for language to develop and change throughout the history of old civilisations, and in that process, be influenced by the major civilisations of the time. Cleopatra speaking Greek doesn’t make her not Egyptian, it just means that the Greeks were the dominant civilisation in her region during her lifetime. A thousad years later she’d be speaking Arabic, which still wouldn’t make her not Egyptian.
Yeah no shit there are no inheritors of ancient Egypt who the fuck nowadays shares Egyptian culture? No one is building pyramids, writing in hiroglyphs or talking the language. You gonna tell me Italy is the roman empire next?
I know it’s sometimes hard for Aussies to imagine history beyond 300 years back as being relevant to your national identity. But that’s just because it’d make you face the fact that your nation is built upon the ruins of a civilisation you feel zero connection to, because of you know, you being colonial settlers and them being the indigenous people you tried (and still try) to eradicate. In Egypt, and indeed in Italy, Greece, Iran, China, India and so on, people don’t viscerally hate what came before them wanting to just forget them. They do often feel as the inheritors of those ancient civilizations, and have incorporated them into their own national identity. So yes, Italians do feel like the inheritors to the ancient Romans, just ask an Italian.
I know it’s sometimes hard for Aussies to imagine history beyond 300 years back as being relevant to your national identity.
also shut the fuck up you smug fuckhead
So yes, Italians do feel like the inheritors to the ancient Romans, just ask an Italian.
That doesn’t mean they are. Continuity of geopolitical narrative is mostly stupid. In the era of nationalism (post-Napoleonic France) geopolitical narrative is 100% jingoistic propaganda: those impulses are 100% recuperated by the State.
By this logic, there are no inheritors to ancient Egypt at all since even the current inhabitants speak Arabic and not ancient Egyptian.
That’s actually very coherent, or more coherent than the idiotic notion that because people live in the same place, they are connected genetically, culturally, linguistically, or politically.
You’re discovering the complexities of comparing geopolitical strata across time and space. Don’t disrespect it. Just because you have feelings about an essential “egyptian” storyline doesn’t mean those feelings are valid. Shut up. Thanks.
Wow, an American backing up the Aussie’s settler colonial understanding of national identity. What a shock that a member of the other major anglo settler colonial entity that hates the indigenous people of its land would feel this way. You are the anomaly, the rest of the world doesn’t distance itself from the history of the people who have lived there over the years. Understandable that you can’t relate though, your whole society has been based on the extermination of those people. So it’d be difficult to claim their history as your own or even feel a positive connection to it. That’s not the case for much of the rest of the world though.
Yeah Europeans would never have a colonial history
Your an Aussie, calling yourself a European. That’s how your society is different. Other people generally consider themselves to belong to the countries they inhabit, not be from another continent entirely. But the anglo settler colonial nations still call themselves European.
In America we’re Roman because our nazis still do a particular salute
I mean, early 19th century Russian nobility spoke more French than Russian, does that mean they suddenly were another civilization?
Ehhh my comments was meant to point out that Egypt was far from an “unbroken span of time with the same name and identity.” The region was conquered multiple times with numerous fractures and centralisations happening. Cleopatra didn’t feel a need to construct a pyramid tomb for herself for example, that culture has died off and been replaced .
That’s fair, I understand your point, that particular comment just felt too specific when compared to what is being argued.
A lot of people in Europe speak languages that have a lot of latin words, so is the EU the same thing as the Roman Empire?
We are talking about a people living in a region having various civilizations over thousands of years so I think it’s a better comparison.
That identity was gone by Cleopatra’s time. By a couple of centuries.
What actually doesn’t change the numbers a lot. In fact, it changes them less than the rounding the OP did. But there were a couple of other deep changes like that.
Yes. Ramses II’s son “found in Thebes” (Khaemweset) was known and recorded for his passion in archeological study and restoration, and has been called the “first Egyptologist.”
Sumeria Jones.
What’s his job during winter?
College professor. 90% of all archeology is done in your local papyrus repository.
This is true for all ancient civilisations though. Maya, Sumer, India, China. All had ancient and ancient ancient.
Confirm what, exactly?
