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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.
That tablet has a glossy black surface and rounded corners
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.
That's not socialism . You're describing a totalitarian state.
The story is nonsense. By the time the ziggurat was built, pretty much all the language families known today were already in existence. The breaking up of languages very likely happened in Africa tens of thousands of years before the first mud bricks that were used to construct the Ziggurat were formed.
And no, it's not socialism, not in any meaningful sense of the word. It was, as another poster pointed out, a dictatorship, or more properly an absolute monarchy. It would be like calling the government of Louis XIV a socialist government.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
The submitter is an idiot. The whole "origin of language" bit demonstrates that well enough. WTF is wrong with Slashdot editors?
Ah well, I remember a time when every conman selling a perpetual motion machine could get a submission here, so maybe things haven't changed that much. Maybe next week we'll have an article on Noah's Ark being found, that would be about right if this is the standard.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Not quite. If I remember correctly, God dropped by to check out the tower (various unnamed parties were worried it would actually reach heaven), and found a woman performing manual labor while her baby was unattended. Something like that. Which pissed him off.
Something of a hidden message which states humanity has to deal with its social / welfare issues before trying to reach the stars. Or technology is evil; hard to tell after that garden story. Possibly, anyways. I've found trying to gather understanding from this book to be on par with examining the liver of some poor animal for 'signs' or trying to read tea leaves. If I ever open a practice of psychiatry for the biblically-minded, I'm going to use that book instead of an ink-blot -> "So, what do you think the Bible was trying to tell you this week? Uh huh, that's nice. And how did that make you feel?" However, I never will. Having seen what religion of any sort has done to the minds of mankind, I cannot believe that my tinkering with it would help.
I am John Hurt.
I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a deliberate parody of religion, or genuine crazy. Impossible to tell sometimes. It's also very common in US poltics for the term 'socialism' to be thrown around to scare people without any obvious relation to its correct meaning - the cultural relics of the Red Menace never entirely left the country.
And no, it's not socialism, not in any meaningful sense of the word. It was, as another poster pointed out, a dictatorship, or more properly an absolute monarchy. It would be like calling the government of Louis XIV a socialist government.
To right-wing nutballs, anything they don't like is socialism. How do they know it's socialism? Because they don't like socialism, and so if there's something they don't like, socialism is what it must be!
Any attempt to point out the flaws in this line of reasoning is, of course, socialist propaganda.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
One could make a weak argument that it was Marxist. Of course, the Marxist interpretation would probably differ greatly from the mainstream interpretation: a utopian society, living in a state of peace and egalitarianism, is caused to splinter, because God fears the accomplishments capable of this society that has no need of him. In fact, you could even use that same exact sentence as the Objectivist interpretation. Hey, I should publish this! I bet you could bend it into half a dozen interpretations without changing a word.
But, no, it's definitely not socialist. There's nothing in that story about workers owning the means of production.
Well, you know how it is. Look at how many people call Nazi Germany "socialist" just because the word "Socialist" is in the name, but people do it all the time. It is about as stupid as calling The Democratic People's Republic of Korea a democracy or a republic.
Hell, the sheer number of people that equate socialism and fascism, let alone socialism and communism, or socialism and a social democracy...it's all ridiculous. Ignorance is our greatest threat in this nation, not terrorism.
Wow. thanks for distilling the essence of the right-wing.
Not. Go call Bill Maher and ask him for a more insightful analysis, as even that would indeed be more insightful.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Need to do a bit more reading, my friend. The account doesn't have anything to do with women performing manual labor:
"(The Babylonians) said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
5But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 6The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
8So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9That is why it was called Babelc—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth."
So, it had nothing to do with labor practices. Many scholars think the tower was some sort of astrological artifact, and that the scrambling of the languages had to do with dispersing the population of the earth. That is, according to the scripture.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
The story is nonsense. By the time the ziggurat was built, pretty much all the language families known today were already in existence.
A large group of humans all cooperated (with a common language to facilitate) to build a tower several miles tall to reach the heavens, which angered a god so much that with a swipe of his hand he scattered the humans across the world and made them all speak in different languages.
And the reason that story is nonsense is because by the time some large Mesopotamian structures were built, humans were already speaking different languages?
Recent Discovery Contains Oldest Depiction of Cthulu
Who are these many "scholars"?
Real scholars will tell you that this is a myth and the division of human languages had far more to do with our spread out of Africa than anything else.
Sigh... This old canard again. The Nazis were most certainly socialists, and Hitler certainly espoused a socialist doctrine, but in reality he was simply pursuing power. He aligned himself with the socialist wing of the National Socialists right up until it became clear that he would need to cozy up to the industrialist and aristocratic classes in German society, and it is they that essentially decided to back Hitler as Chancellor.
At any rate, whatever meaningful socialism there was in Hitler or in Nazism was wiped out Rohm was executed during the Night of the Long Knives.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Are those the same scholars that told you the account was a women's right issue?
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
I have never heard of such a tale until another poster made that claim.
I did not make such a claim. Perhaps you should learn to read a little better. I suggest starting with some non-fiction works since you seem to already be quite versed with fiction.
The industrialists still got rich under the Nazi government. Whatever the Nazi party line in the 1920s and early 1930s might be, when Hitler got into power, he understood very well that he needed to get the industrialists and aristocrats on board. And as I mentioned elsewhere, any meaningfully socialist elements of the Nazi party were eliminated during the Night of the Long Knives; in particular the leader of the SA and one of Hitler's most important early allies; Ernst Rohm.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's unfortunate but true. Socialism is in concept a very desirable socioeconomic model. In practice it would require that the society in question be bereft of selfishness, slothfulness and to some extent ambition ( We already have enough brain surgeons so we need you to be a sanitation engineer for the good of the people ). In most cases where Socialism/Communism was the goal Totalitarianism was the result. That's probably why the two are usually thought of as one in the same. While I think we can do better than what we have now we really do have it pretty good compared to societies throughout our history.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
No, it didn't. At least Naziism, I don't know what Mussolini did as well. Hitler was an ardent supporter of mercantilism and believed in using government power to facilitate the maximizing of profits. He also believed in seizing assets from those he believed were unworthy, like Jewish businessmen. Those assets were then sold to companies that supported the Nazi party. It was a method for consolidating power within a group of elites. They did, however, trumpet their supposed socialism in poor neighborhoods hit hardest by the great depression(at least in the early thirties). It's hard to look at Naziism as anything other than the most well organized dickishness in human history.
The Monkey Theory comes into play here, in an indirect fashion. People can only remember so many facts, figures, names and slogans. Some of the smaller minded people in incapable of separating socialism from communism, and they can't go any further afield into the political spectrum to find terms that might fit their ideas. Assuming, of course, that they have any ideas that need to be articulated.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
That's not socialism . You're describing a totalitarian state.
The Soviet Union was called the Union of Soviet "Socialist" Republics or USSR for short. From their perspective they were socialist and they were a totalitarian state when Stalin was in power. Hitler was the Chancellor of the Germany representing the National Socialist Worker Party (NAZI) and his regime was also a totalitarian state. Totalitarianism is neither left or right because totalitarianism is about "social" control rather than "economic" control. You can have "right wing" totalitarian regimes but the majority have been left or left of centre. The Nazis were never right of centre let alone "far right" even if you compare them to their counterparts of their day. They were "LEFT" of the conservatives in england and had more in common economically with the socialists there.
The british socialists have always been a lot less libertarian than socialists in some other countries which is why Tony Blair accelerated things like the CCTV installations in london.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
It's often argued (correctly in my opinion) that socialism inevitably leads to a totalitarian state. Read "The road to Serfdom" by Friedrich Hayek for further info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom
"...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
There is some evidence that there was a "nuclear" war in India thousands of years ago. See http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ancientatomicwar/esp_ancient_atomic_07.htm I'm not sure what to make of it but it is interesting.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
At any rate, whatever meaningful socialism there was in Hitler or in Nazism was wiped out ... during the Night of the Long Knives.
Whatever meaningful socialism there was in _______ was wiped out during ________
1) the USSR / Stalin's purges
2) communist China / Mao's purges
3) Cuba / Castro's purges
and on and on.
Socialism / Communism isn't a way of running a society. It is a method used to disrupt and destroy a society. The nuances and differences between socialism, communism and Progressivism are as meaningless as the nuances and differences between the effects of different types of nuclear weapons on a city. Socialism, Communism and Progressivism are a means to achieving totalitarianism, no more, no less.
In case this is still puzzling anyone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vbd3E6tK2U
I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a deliberate parody of religion, or genuine crazy.
I'd say genuine crazy considering he got the story wrong and there are plenty of Bibles around for reference. God didn't muddle the languages to keep dictators from ruling everyone. He did it because mankind was reaching the heavens and "nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them!" Why that was considered a bad thing is not mentioned (pride?).
Oh not this nonsense again. The Nazis were socialist in the same sense that the former East Germany was a democratic republic.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
He's probably referring to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel#Greek_Apocalypse_of_Baruch
"Those who gave counsel to build the tower, for they whom thou seest drove forth multitudes of both men and women, to make bricks; among whom, a woman making bricks was not allowed to be released in the hour of child-birth, but brought forth while she was making bricks, and carried her child in her apron, and continued to make bricks. And the Lord appeared to them and confused their speech..."
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.
was an ardent supporter of mercantilism and believed in using government power to facilitate the maximizing of profits.
I suggest you re-read Mein Kampf and Third Reich policy. Profit was not discouraged. However the state was very firm in pointing out that you were only allowed to make an "acceptable" profit. If you made more profit than what the state deemed enough for you, you would be dealt with.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
At any rate, whatever meaningful socialism there was in Hitler or in Nazism was wiped out [when] Rohm was executed during the Night of the Long Knives.
For those who haven't bothered reading up on it, TNOTLK was the result of the fact that Rohm wanted to "complete the socialist revolution" on behalf of disgruntled WWI veterans after AH and HG got public offices with a certain amount of power, but at that point they perceived that revolution to be a threat to *them*.
But clearly, people who want to use 'socialism' to make people's knees jerk aren't interested in what was really going on. Just saying "Hitler was a socialist, so our social programs are bad" suits their purposes better.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You know that Canada is a Social Democracy, right? I can't remember hearing about any purges commited by my government. Nor do I think we're run by a totalitarian.
Some of the smaller minded people in incapable of separating socialism from communism
Is that anything like the people who can't distinguish between supporters of market economics and Christians? Or those too caught up in their own high dudgeon to realize that it's possible to have principled reasons for disliking both illegal immigration and racists? Do you also consider "small minded" those who scream that anyone opposed to Obama's policies on one matter or another are racists? Or are people who fail to note your choices of appropriate labels for two kinds of Nanny State collectivism "small minded," but people who knowingly spout nonsense about the racism behind differences of opinoin on tax policy are ...what, politically articulate geniuses?
I'd shake my head and wish you knew better, but of course you do know better, and you're just being a typical hypocrite, awash in your own faux condescension. You're not as clever as you think you are, and far more transparent.
Mod -1: Confused Asshat
As someone who was born and raised in the USSR, I can tell you that socialism was exactly what we had there: state ownership of the means of production, and centrally planned economy (for a country of 180 million people stretching across 8 time zones!), with the prices of everything set by the state with no regard for demand. Oh, and, of course, there was totalitarianism as well. The two are by no means mutually exclusive. In fact, they do seem to correlate quite well.
Need to do a bit more reading, my friend. The account doesn't have anything to do with women performing manual labor:
"(The Babylonians) said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
5But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 6The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
8So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9That is why it was called Babelc—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth."
So, it had nothing to do with labor practices. Many scholars think the tower was some sort of astrological artifact, and that the scrambling of the languages had to do with dispersing the population of the earth. That is, according to the scripture.
Mod -1: Believes evangelicals when they claim to be "scholars"
It's often argued (correctly in my opinion) that *****lism inevitably leads to a totalitarian state. Read [A book (of millions that are out there) written by someone with my same ideas (and who nobody knows about) as a proof of what I think] for further info.
There, fixed that for you. Now you have a generic argument for whatever your opinions are.
Why can't
Sigh. I'm not talking about a brand new class of rich people, I'm talking about the people who were the power brokers in Germany prior to Hitler's rise. Come on people, this is pretty common fucking knowledge. Put away your "the Nazis were Commies" crap and read a fucking history book. Hitler came to power not because he promised people lots of money and government contracts, but because the power brokers in Germany, in particular Franz von Papen. Hitler achieved ultimate power by having Ernst Rohm and the other proper socialists in the Nazi party executed or imprisoned. When Ernst Rohm was shot in the chest in his jail cell, anything particularly socialist about National Socialism died. Hitler needed the co-operation of the wealthier classes of Germany, and he knew very well he wouldn't get that support, and ultimately the political clout to pass the Enabling Act without handing them Rohm, the SA and the other socialist agitators in the Nazi Party on a platter.
Which, people, is the polar opposite of how Mao came to power. The major industrialists and aristocrats in Nationalist China all scuppered off to Taiwan when Mao seized control of the mainland. The industrial classes you see today in China didn't come into existence until the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, after Mao's death and after the Cultural Revolution had run its course.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
May contain mind virus. :P
There is also no linguistic connection between the tower of "balal" (Hebrew) and the ziggaurat of "babili" (Akkadian).
The Hebrew is not "balal", it's BBL (two "bet" characters followed by a "lamed".) Hebrew is normally written without most vowels, and ancient Hebrew was always written without most vowels; the "nikud" dot systems used to teach Hebrew vowels are no more than 1500 years old. I don't know where you got your Akkadian transliteration from. If your Akkadian is as bad as your Hebrew, it's worthless. But if your Akkadian source was better than your Hebrew source, then it's interesting that Hebrew BBL is quite close to "babili". If you were going to write "babili" in Hebrew, it would look either like "BBL" or BBLY" (the Hebrew yud character can double as a vowel.)
And the linguistics are irrelevant, anyway. Hebrew BBL has long been considered a reference to Babylon. Even if the Hebrew and Akkadian place names were linguistically disparate, BBL would still have been an exonym referencing Babylon. Sort of like Japan vs. Nippon. A modern English article that describes a site in Japan is not incorrect or mythical just because the local name is "Nippon"/"Nihon" rather than "Japan". "BBL means "Babylon" just as "Japan" means "Nippon".
[Disclaimer: I personally don't believe in the Bible. However, that doesn't change the fact that it is an interesting collection of ancient documents that reference other antiquities.]
"socialism was exactly what we had there: state ownership of the means of production"
One minor nit to pick... that's not socialism. Socialism has very little to do with who owns the means of production or capital. Socialism describes a system in which states provide varying levels of service and economic remuneration to citizens in lieu of markets. Communism is concerned with ownership of the means of production, and it is not the same thing; hence two different terms, if they were indeed identical in form and function, there would be no need to differentiate them.
As for the correlation between "socialism" and totalitarianism... would you classify the Scandinavian states as particularly totalitarian? Most of Europe, really, is socialist to a greater or lesser extent. Most are pretty solidly non-totalitarian in comparison to a state like Singapore, which offers economic freedom virtually unmatched anywhere else. It's only a strong correlation if you choose to look only at data points which show that, ignoring all others.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
The problem, of course, is that your hypothetical scenario is nonsense, thus making your point moot (valid or not). Indeed, a cyncial person might even suggest you gave an intentionally inane example just to beat on a strawman in order to deflect any potential criticism of or competition against your own ideology. Of course, that would be a pretty serious accusation of intellectual fraud...
Anyway, assuming that you were making your argument in good faith, you picked an extremely problematic set of careers. Brain surgeons are in extremely limited supply, with only a tiny segment of the population possessing both the physical and mental qualities required to perform that work. Furthermore, it is an extremely prestigious line of work, the sort of thing elementary school children naively aspire to be with no consideration of the work and competition required to get there. Sanitation engineers, by contrast, hold no such prestigious place in our collective psyche. It sounds an awful lot like a job nobody would ever willingly do (which is probably an unfair assumption about their work) and which is of little consequence (which is absolutely untrue, sanitation is an extremely important field which saves untold numbers of lives and prevents all manner of pestilence).
Of course, the unspoken problem with your hypothetical is that it ignores the fact the same thing happens in a capitalist system, just by slightly different means. In a capitalist system, would-be brain surgeons find that the cost of training for that profession is too high, or that they are not qualified, or that they do not possess the necessary skills, and are then kicked into some other field. Often, they spend a good amount of time and money reaching that point, which encumbers both them and the economy at large for little or no gain. You may weigh the indignity of being told "no" at the outset against the cost of learning "no" after significant investment to determine which you consider to be worse, you cannot ignore either for the sake of rhetoric.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.