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The end is nigh (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 98 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (16 children)

IIRC "books" were a medieval-period invention. Before the common era, everythign would have been scrolls or tablets. The first codices wouldn't have existed until about 100BCE in Rome. So, assuming that this is (roughly) what a cuneiform tablet was saying, I wonder what the actual work used for 'book' was, and what more accurate translation there would be, if we had the relevant cultural understanding?

But, more so than that - the earliest proto-novel that we know of is The Tale of Genji, that dates to roughly the 11th century ~~B~~CE (Edit: this is a typo; it is definitely CE, not BCE). Which makes the question of what kind of 'books' this is supposed to refer to even more interesting.

Or--alternatively--is it just a shitpost?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I found this on skeptics stack exchange. Supposedly, it's a hoax/urban legend that goes back way before the internet. (The entire stack exchange page on this topic is fun to read, btw)

The quote originally came from Prof. George T.W. Patrick of University of Iowa, who translated an ancient stone tablet into modern English and published in "Popular Science Monthly", May 1913. The full text of the original can be found online at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/popularsciencemo82newy, page 493.

One writer found this same quote in a slightly earlier source dating to 1908.

Yet another writer noted that there was no Chaldea but ...

... there was a stele of a King Naram-Sin of Akkad which has been exhibited in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum since 1892. The inscription on this stele is fragmentary and has nothing to do with degeneration.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4923/was-this-quote-on-a-clay-tablet-about-unruly-kids-written-by-an-assyrian

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