• HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    They also invented selling subpar copper, which led to the invention of writing to customer service about said subpar copper.

    • ComradeSharkfucker@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 day ago

      The Sumerians had fine metallurgy! Don’t let one guy set their reputation. One admittedly very silly guy but nevertheless

      • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        They must have, otherwise that person wouldn’t be so angry to have received the inferior stuff! They expected much better.

        • Skua@kbin.earth
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          1 day ago

          Strictly speaking, and to take a joke way too seriously, the shitty copper actually wasn’t even from Mesopotamia. Ea-Nasir was part of a guild that imported stuff from Dilmun, which was centred on modern day Bahrain. Ea-Nasir was basically running bronze age Temu

  • Boomer Humor Doomergod@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Farmers today don’t talk about much else, either.

    The difference is now farmers are only 2% of the population so our tablets are full of other inane ramblings instead.

  • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    Do we really know that’s the extent though. There are hundreds of thousands that haven’t been deciphered. Maybe they wrote limericks, we don’t know.

    • Skua@kbin.earth
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      We know it’s not the entire extent because we also have a bunch of their literature and history in cuneiform. We even have some jokes! Although none of the ones I have read really survive the translation and time gap… at all. However, stuff like agricultural records are the bulk of it by the numbers simply because that was the stuff that was useful to ordinary people day to day

      • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        Apparently they also documented the effects of too much beer on the human mind. Potentially some of the first records of alcoholism?

        • Skua@kbin.earth
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          1 day ago

          Oh, interesting! I suppose that makes sense, given that humans have been drinking beer for millennia longer than we’ve been writing. The first society to start writing probably would talk about beer a fair bit. I’ve seen prayers about and recipes for beer before (sometimes the same text), but not the one you described

          Semi-related: when I went to have a look for texts about drunkenness, I learned about the Dialogue of Two Scribes. It’s amazing. It’s literally just 130+ lines of back-and-forth insults

    • Uli@sopuli.xyz
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      1 day ago

      There once was a man who had feet

      There was not too much else he could eat

      He had a long look at his arm

      Thought with this I could farm

      And that is why we have wheat