>The line in the chronicle stating, "Uruk was defeated," may refer to a military conquest, but could as easily mean that it lost its position of leadership
Interesting (but not surprising?) that semantic drift has been with us since the beginning of language.
A word that once meant "succeeded in time" can shift in usage over a few scant generations (and motivated, "my side winning is as inevitable as the passage of time" rhetoric) to eventually become a synonym with "defeated in battle."
Indeed. I mean, the Mother of all Drifts comes with the entire logographic system shifting to accommodate more and more meanings, and abstract concepts ...
... enough to support a flourishing civilization (several) over thousands of years.-
Also, the parallels with today (power, war, "leadership" ...), "our highways are covered with weed and no wine nor syrup flows forth ..." are considerable.-
The Akkadians used cuneiforms much like Japanese use kanji (Chinese characters).
This means that the Akkadians could read a sign either with an approximation of how Sumerians had pronounced it or with the pronunciation of an Akkadian word that was a translation of the meaning of the original Sumerian word. Some signs did not correspond to the syllables that were pronounced, but they specified a class of things to which the word to which they were attached belonged.
Like in many other writing systems, the most ancient cuneiform signs were ideograms, which symbolized various things, like emojis now. Because at that time they had no phonetic meaning, we do not know which was the language of the writers, i.e. if it was Sumerian or some other language that may have been spoken in those places before Sumerian.
However, it is impossible to have a complete writing systems only with ideograms, where "complete" means that it can be used to write anything that you can communicate by speech.
So many centuries later, some of the signs that were used initially to designate a thing began to be used for any other thing that was pronounced in the same way, and eventually most signs were used to write syllables and the cuneiform writing system became a complete writing system. At the time when this transition from ideograms to phonograms happened, the language of the writers was Sumerian and the writing system became a mixture of syllabic signs and determinative signs.
As I mentioned above, after the Akkadians began to use the cuneiform signs they had their way to pronounce them. Because, like for Japanese texts, there are many alternatives for pronouncing the cuneiform signs, the correct deciphering of such texts is not easy.
There is too much waiting to be excavated, discovered... Eridu sits as if it never existed, abandoned, buried. So many answers around us, unseen, mostly buried.
What particularly irks my mind is Ayanis Kalesi, and more specifically, the stonework over 20 meters beneath Lake Van discovered by Tawson Ceylon. Elaborate stonework, that deep, and our trusty gatekeepers say it's a medieval Urartian fortress. And yet, if we notice, on the land portion, this so called castle has lower layers that do not match Urartian stonework. But 24 meters beneath Lake Van? A rosette carved into the block?
We are finding many smaller sites around Gobekli Tepe and elsewhere... We've found stone mounds beneath the Baltic sea. Then there's Dwarka and the Gulf of Khambhat! And we do have more than a piece of wood to work with, but we dwell on it still.
I really wish we would get collectively obsessed with this all and impel more work. I look at Ukraine, Iran, other potential conflagrations, with whispers of nuclear... exceptions?, economic disintegration etc, and I fear, another setback. Even in 2026, there is so much to discover.
A word that once meant "succeeded in time" can shift in usage over a few scant generations (and motivated, "my side winning is as inevitable as the passage of time" rhetoric) to eventually become a synonym with "defeated in battle."
Indeed. I mean, the Mother of all Drifts comes with the entire logographic system shifting to accommodate more and more meanings, and abstract concepts ...
... enough to support a flourishing civilization (several) over thousands of years.-
Also, the parallels with today (power, war, "leadership" ...), "our highways are covered with weed and no wine nor syrup flows forth ..." are considerable.-
Cuneiform is mostly phonetic. Semantic drift didn't come from writing.
I do believe later use of cuneiform by Akkadians was indeed sylabic/phonographic.-
The Akkadians used cuneiforms much like Japanese use kanji (Chinese characters).
This means that the Akkadians could read a sign either with an approximation of how Sumerians had pronounced it or with the pronunciation of an Akkadian word that was a translation of the meaning of the original Sumerian word. Some signs did not correspond to the syllables that were pronounced, but they specified a class of things to which the word to which they were attached belonged.
Like in many other writing systems, the most ancient cuneiform signs were ideograms, which symbolized various things, like emojis now. Because at that time they had no phonetic meaning, we do not know which was the language of the writers, i.e. if it was Sumerian or some other language that may have been spoken in those places before Sumerian.
However, it is impossible to have a complete writing systems only with ideograms, where "complete" means that it can be used to write anything that you can communicate by speech.
So many centuries later, some of the signs that were used initially to designate a thing began to be used for any other thing that was pronounced in the same way, and eventually most signs were used to write syllables and the cuneiform writing system became a complete writing system. At the time when this transition from ideograms to phonograms happened, the language of the writers was Sumerian and the writing system became a mixture of syllabic signs and determinative signs.
As I mentioned above, after the Akkadians began to use the cuneiform signs they had their way to pronounce them. Because, like for Japanese texts, there are many alternatives for pronouncing the cuneiform signs, the correct deciphering of such texts is not easy.
Certainly. Meet the new humanity, same as the old humanity...
There is too much waiting to be excavated, discovered... Eridu sits as if it never existed, abandoned, buried. So many answers around us, unseen, mostly buried.
What particularly irks my mind is Ayanis Kalesi, and more specifically, the stonework over 20 meters beneath Lake Van discovered by Tawson Ceylon. Elaborate stonework, that deep, and our trusty gatekeepers say it's a medieval Urartian fortress. And yet, if we notice, on the land portion, this so called castle has lower layers that do not match Urartian stonework. But 24 meters beneath Lake Van? A rosette carved into the block?
We are finding many smaller sites around Gobekli Tepe and elsewhere... We've found stone mounds beneath the Baltic sea. Then there's Dwarka and the Gulf of Khambhat! And we do have more than a piece of wood to work with, but we dwell on it still.
I really wish we would get collectively obsessed with this all and impel more work. I look at Ukraine, Iran, other potential conflagrations, with whispers of nuclear... exceptions?, economic disintegration etc, and I fear, another setback. Even in 2026, there is so much to discover.
> really wish we would get collectively obsessed with this
Idem. Spot on.-
Sadly that takes a (global) level of stability that we are well outside of nowadays.-
Not to mention how - peculiarly - these sites tend to be around hotspots themselves?