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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.