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Recent Discovery Contains Oldest Depiction of the Tower of Babel
smitty777 writes "The recent discovery of the Tower of Babel stele by a team of scholars shows what might be the earliest depiction of the ancient Tower of Babel. The stele belongs to Martin Schøyen, who also owns a large number of pictographic and cuneiform tablets, some of the earliest known written documents. The tablet (reconstruction) depicts King Nebuchadnezzar II, under whom Babylon was a cultural leader in astronomy, mathematics, literature and medicine. It's also interesting to note the somewhat recent Slashdot article linking the common ancestry of languages to this area."
The tower comes up to his waist.
The CS equivalent of the tower of Babel original universal language would probably be BAL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Basic_assembly_language
The 360 being the first major unified scientific and business processor, so I guess its most core language would be the first universal language.
There are terminology differences, in that HLASM is the assembler for BAL. So calling it "HLASM" is not entirely correct.
Although Knuth's MIX is more "universal" its not the first and its manufactured not organically grown from its ancestors like BAL.
I would give a pity vote to BASIC, but...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
ToB is a story of humanity's first venture down the road of socialism, where all of humanity fell under the rule of a single dictator. As the story goes, God caused the languages of his people to become 'confused' so that no longer could a single dictator take control of the whole population. The most they could gain control over was those who spoke his language (think Hitler, his influence was limited to those who spoke German, essentially).
That tablet has a glossy black surface and rounded corners
"...and even cylcon symbols by Australia's Aborigines which can be up to 20,000 years old."
... I had no idea BSG was a documentary!
Holy crap
From the other article:
Dear Slashdot editors: Do you know where Babylon and Central/Southern Africa are?
I'd also bet money that the timeline is also completely wrong. Babylon existed a few thousand years ago. The origin of language is much, much older.
is a warning against multiple company outsourcing.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The republitians just want to hand over all our rights to our corporate overlords and let the free market take care of itself.
Never mind that our current system comes from the free market not taking care of itself. And while things are that great right now, they aren't nearly as bad as they were back in the glorious 1880s.
It's funny how much the Tower of Babel looks like every other ziggurat (tell) ever dug up in the Middle East. Oh wait....
When the fuck will people grow up and realize that not every city unearthed with breached walls is Jericho, not every cross dug up is the True Cross, not every Roman spear is the Dolourous Lance, not every Babylonian leader is King Nebuchadnezzar, and not every old cup is the Holy Grail? It's awesome enough that there is an old Babylonian cuneiform tablet without it also fitting into Biblical narrative.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
That was the ancient space elevator of the former advanced civilization as witnessed by some random nomad goat herder
Stonehenge! In ancient times... Hundreds of years before the dawn of history Lived a strange race of people... the Druids No one knows who they were or what they were doing But their legacy remains Hewn into the living rock... Of Stonehenge Stonehenge! Where the demons dwell Where the banshees live and they do live well Stonehenge! Where a man's a man And the children dance to the Pipes of Pan ....
Recent Discovery Contains Oldest Depiction of Cthulu
get this crap out of my slashdot. not news for nerds, and arguably since it includes no geological or archaeological data it is not "stuff that matters."
Good people go to bed earlier.
Snow, cement and ivory young towers
Someone called us Babylon
Those hungry hunters
Tracking down the hours
But where were all your shoulders when we cried
Were the darlings on the sideline
Dreaming up such cherished lies
To whisper in your ear before you die
It's party time for the guys in the tower of Babel
Sodom meet Gomorrah, Cain meet Abel
Have a ball y'all
See the letches crawl
With the call girls under the table
Watch them dig their graves
`Cause Jesus don't save the guys
In the tower of Babel
Just a note that claiming that this is any evidence to back-up the validity of the bible and Torrah. It would be an appeal to antiquity logical fallacy to make that claim.
This is just evidence that the story of the Tower of Babel is a very old story. Nothing more.
Nothing to see here, theists.
If you're ever near a ziggurat, be sure to run if any part of it catches fire. As is widely known, ziggurat smoke causes cancer.
*Ducks*
Discussion System prefs link: http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm
In case this is still puzzling anyone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vbd3E6tK2U
This is a good example of the infotainment Discovery and all of its subsidiaries have used to replace what was once great, informative programming. Remember the long, droll documentaries you used to watch on the History Channel that were fascinating, somewhat layered, and informative? That all changed the day David M. Zaslav (former head of NBC, http://corporate.discovery.com/leadership/david-zaslav/) took the helm in 2007. Since then the organization has worked tooth and nail to dissolve its reputation as a place to learn something by replacing any programming focused on science, history, or biology with Big Log Muckers, UFO specials, End-of-the-World simulations, When Animals Attack and anything that can go out on a limb to find scientific proof for Biblical anecdotes. It follows the logic that those who are watching television are uneducated and then offers the lowest common demoninator in order to lull larger audiences. What a blight that man's leadership is.
Glad I could help.
No, the tablet does not say "Tower of Babel."
It says, "THE HOUSE, THE FOUNDATION OF HEAVEN AND EARTH, ZIGGURAT IN BABYLON."
There is also no linguistic connection between the tower of "balal" (Hebrew) and the ziggaurat of "babili" (Akkadian).
surely they meant nimrod?
There is a misconception that is common in some groups that click consonants can't have developed from ordinary pulmonic consonants and therefore must have been in the protolanguage. However, one path is hypothesized that clicks can develop from ejectives.
so we need you to be a sanitation engineer
If there's a glut of surgeons to the point where hospitals aren't likely to be hiring more, a freshman advisor diverting someone from pre-med to mechanical engineering might not be so unthinkable.
There's a difference between a sanitation technician and a sanitation engineer. A tech drives the garbage truck. A sanitation engineer designs a container and lifting mechanism that work together to collect more waste with a given amount of labor and fuel. There are probably plenty of graduates of the mechanical engineering program at my alma mater who went on to build better garbage trucks.
You can see the site of the tower (it has been leveled) from Google Maps: http://g.co/maps/bsd5u
hard to tell after that garden story
Satan's message was (and continues to be) "God does not want what is best for you." In Eden, Satan spoke through a snake and claimed to Eve that her creator was holding back the knowledge of good and evil because God allegedly did not want what was best for her.
FTFA: "Until now our knowledge of the Tower of Babel has been based on the account in Genesis 11:1-9, and of Herodot: The Histories I:178 - 182, with the measurement of the first 2 steps, and a Seleucid tablet of 229 BC (Louvre AO 6555), giving the sizes of the steps."
This is not entirely true, the Irish genealogies of Milesius (corroborated by disparate genealogies throughout Europe) also attest to the Tower of Babel and its peoples.
The Tower of Babel story occurs in the Irish & European genealogies with the namesake of the Phoenicians, Fenius Farsa, and his son Niul the Linguist.
These genealogies diverge at nearly every generation & they corroborate independently across countries & cultures. They're are among the most valuable documentary evidence we have of ancient world history (more so than the bible).
See, e.g., http://books.google.com/books?id=h5MNAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA8.
The story among the Irish also corroborates the Slashdot story about the common source of languages (and, yes, the genealogies pre-date the arrival of Semitic biblical texts to Ireland [if the bible is Semitic, these records are Japhetic]).
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
A Biblical related story? It's just fap material for the anti-Christian crowd to pounce on like a vulture to roadkill, they just love tearing anything and everything apart, especially when they have no evidence, and they love to talk about no evidence, how they love to cling to that!
I'm sure these are the same people who loved Pulp Fiction when the dark character bastardized scripture, the same people who love saw movies and other anti-human movies where people are tortured.
Good old Anti-Christians, you can always depend on them to be more vocal than a good number of Christians, because their lack of belief fills their void and becomes a belief they spread almost as wide as the JW. I'm shocked they don't go door to door with their anti-Christian crusades.
New flash: ;-)
A new discovery was made finding that an Ancient society referenced something we've heard about in our mythology. Could this mean the myth is true??
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
A /. article about the Tower of Babel and not ONE reference to Doom and the Cyberdemon (E2M8)?
Turn in your geek cards. Now.
They weren't compiled, they were made up. If you believe that, then you must believe the 8th century genealogies that claim the kings of Wessex were descended from Odin.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If there are too many brain surgeons, the wages of a brain surgeon get driven below the cost of medical malpractice insurance. Then what would the friend do once he finds that the vocation he desperately wanted to join is not enough to support him and his family? It would be irresponsible to specialize in a skill that can't be used in a business or in a hobby.
May contain mind virus. :P
[[Helpful response to article, published 8 December --> http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6027/346.abstract/reply#sci_el_15711]]
Language is complex, having many variables with many possible values; selection of modeled variables has tremendous impact on model's claims; seriously, claims of founder effects are unjustified when you realize that linguists are still debating the basic VARIABLES and MODES of speech perception (gestures or acoustic cues, how they relate, how speech plans are translated into articulation and into perception, rules or constraints, ranked or weighted, exemplars or not, and if so, exemplars for allophony?).
Interesting archaeological discovery -- and I'm sure interesting to historical linguists --, as always, though, the tower of babel remains a fable.
Odin was a prince who lived circa 400 AD and who founded the Kingdoms of Kent & Wessex. Odin was never a stone-age deity, Odin was descended from the House of Heremon. He has always been a perfectly historical figure (until he was worshipped as a deified ancestor by Norsemen 300 year later [euhemerism]).
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
i do not believe that America had Successful landing on the moon yet . http://www.jpzentai.com/ http://www.udreamybridal.com/jp/
I'm not sure whether your trolling or whether you are that big a fucking idiot. Odin was most assuredly present in the Germanic pantheon long before any major Germanic migrations to England. What you wrote is pure unadulterated bullshit.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I've always felt the Babel story is one of destruction of science in the name of protecting religious dogmas. The way it was explained to me is that man was trying to build a tower to reach to the heavens and understand god and this pissed god and his hand came down and stirred up the pot to stop man from trying to be too smart. I see it as the mythical story to cover up the evil actions of man's past. I relate it to the Libraries of Alexandria that were plundered for scientific writings and anything that conflicted with the requirements for current religious belief were burned. Kinda like what some still try to do today. I just see it as a story of a warning not to look to hard at the world around you... and it implies permission to stop and destroy those who attempt to question your dogma. Because after all... that is what god did.
So let me invoke Godwin's law (Sieg) and end this straw man line of questioning.
...that the Tower of Babel was built and destroyed long before the Babylonian empire existed, and that the was only one nation with one language at the time it was built, and it resulted in creation of numerous languages simultaneously, the scattering of people across the earth (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2011:1-9&version=NIV, Genesis 11:1-8). But when did archeologies let facts get in the way of what they wanted to proclaim?
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I posted a reply to this citing sources & documentary evidence, but strangely it has been deleted...
Basically, too many people groups from too many eras across too many cultures, languages, and countries have documentary evidence of their descent from Odin for it to have been made up. Look up Guala/Hvala/Hawala, his genealogy documents the long line of descent from Thor to Odin.
My own genealogy corroborates the Odin genealogies but I am not descended from Odin (Odin is some kind of ancient great uncle to me). My common ancestor to Odin is Milesius 3,000 years ago. The genealogies diverge & corroborate at nearly every generation, e.g., the Smith clan is not descended from Odin either, but my common ancestor to the Smiths (M'Gowans) is about 1,500 years ago.
Back in those days names were often titles, and they were used and reused all over the place. You can't really trust modern scholars when they say that Tacitus "may have" referred to Odin, since the Odin who was worshipped by the Norsemen is very well known to history.
You should study your family history, you just might discover the secrets of the world at a library near you.
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-