The idea that a list of kings from 4000 years ago would encodé global climate events for over 240.000 years is completely ludicrous. Astrology has a better grounding on reality than this idea.
And the fact that all lengths are multiple of 600, is even more telling knowing that they counted in base 60
Most likely explanation is we're misreading some antique number system. Our interpretation of Sumerian numbering is tentative at best. The major indicator for accuracy was that early on a few different scholars converged on the same translation for the same tablets so we trust we got it right.
The mathematical and astronomical tablet texts we have of Mesopotamia, where we understand the numbering very well, are much later, in Babylonian Akkadian from the 5th century BCE.
Could be a simple misunderstanding as interpreting something that was intended to be metaphorically read as "quite a long time". Like myriad - literal translations might yield Chinese historical texts claiming unlikely numbers in multiples of 10.000 when the author might have intended to say just "very, very large number, beyond what we have seen around here in living memory".
While they were at it they should have explored whether those kings were actually the cause of those global climate events. You never know, with enough slicing, dicing and p-hacking you can get interesting conclusions :)
Who cares if it’s ludicrous? It’s a fun idea!
> And the fact that all lengths are multiple of 600
I know this must somehow explain the giant numbers but I'm still not sure how precisely.
Counting in base 60 would make for much smaller numbers, no ?
For example, the number 16 in base 2 is 1111. but in base 10 it is 16. Ergo smaller base, larger number, and vice versa.
So did you mean to say they counted in units that are made of 1/600 of our solar years?
I think that would make more sense, putting their reigns between 31-72 years of our counting.
The reasoning is that 600 is 60x10 which is conflating base 60 and base 10 numbering systems. You would expect something like 3600 (60x60), or even (given things like our units of time) 720 (60x12). The latter is because 12 is a factor of 60 and is easier to work with in that number system/base.
Not to nibble at your point, but 16 is 10000 in base 2. 1111 is 15.
current kings live very long lives due to the stability in their environment... not what used to happen in the middle ages for instance
Reality is stranger than fiction.
Interesting breakdown. The author clearly put in the work to test this theory. I like that he's not trying to force the data to fit the result but instead explains why even apparent matches could just be coincidental.
This was fun to read! I wish there was a no tech version of hackers news for this type of content only
> I wish there was a no tech version of hackers news for this type of content only
I used to think the same thing, but I've come to appreciate exposure to highly-technical content (outside my wheelhouse) that also "gratifies ones intellectual curiosity." I don't necessarily deeply care about the merits of GUIs and TUIs, but once it's pointed out, I can see the importance of being keyboard driven (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479837). And I find it valuable fairly often to have a passing familiarity with the fact that something like this is being discussed by intellectuals in the tech space.
For smart, curious people, exposure is valuable even if you don't have the time to understand something very well.
To be more specific, I think most of us would like to have a "not the current tech thing" page. So a front page that isn't 50-90% LLM content in 2026. In 2020 that would be crypto. Etc
https://www.unslop.news/ has been a breeze of fresh air to avoid all the LLM news. I don't care so much about them but there's so much LLM-adjacent content that it requires actual effort to find the non-LLM stuff.
From what I've observed (from the complaints people make about what is and isn't "HN worthy") most people who voice an opinion would prefer HN only have technical stories. It's common enough that it's explicitly called out in the guidelines: (On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.)
This is a forum run by a Silicon Valley startup incubator. Unfortunately tech stories and whatever the current tech thing is will always dominate. And HN's design ethos of "no silos" means everyone has to see all of that content, and it will always push everything else down, especially anything non-technical (unless the mods force it up, which they can and sometimes do.)
The only way to get what you want (I do think it's an interesting idea and I'd like to see it) would be to start another forum entirely or else build a third party client to filter out all of the AI slop. Such stories will always be diamonds in the rough here.
I believe the parent comment was wishing for a separate site for non-tech topics because they want to see more, not less.
> discussed by intellectuals in the tech space
Not to burst your bubble but registrations are open to the public here on HN.
> fun ... a no tech version
Which means, surely, "no tech" and "no current impactful world". You would lose that sight from a community largely trained on hard facts ("works/doesnotwork") and creation, invention, management, on real grounds.
"Intellectual curiosity" as a "bubble", as an escape into a closed reality, is not a good thing. "Oh, the colours of nature in its taxologies!". And meanwhile maybe the world that is allowing you that intellectual growth is eroded.
Just skim through the submissions and pick your thing, obviously.
The community, not the articles, is where I feel /. had value, and where HN has value. Another site with more-relevant-to-me articles but a different community would provide me far less value.
It is precisely the hard tech articles and focus that keeps the valuable community on HN.
There's no shortage of sources seeking to deliver the most important news as quickly as possible. It's the niche stuff that few people care about that requires effort to seek out.
That's kind of what reddit used to feel like when it was brand new. Can you believe it?
Bubbles.town is sorta there, but there’s a lot of fluff
> No hype. No theory far away from practice. Just what works in production and what doesn't.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Related how? I don't see this in the article
Short answer: no.
Interesting nevertheless.
Honestly would love to deep dive into Sumerian literature. Sadly much of it is still untranslated or in the annals of UChicago.
I can certainly recommend :
1. The Literature of Ancient Sumer - Jeremy Black. It is a quite substantial anthology, has myths, hymns, laments, royal praise poetry, proverbs, literary debates, etc.
2. Myths from Mesopotamia - Stephanie Dalley. I bought this for Gilgamesh, loved the rest of it too. One of my most treasured books.
3. Weavers, Scribes, and Kings - Amanda Podany. Not Sumerian literature, but my favorite comprehensive history book covering all of Mesopotamian history. I mention this particularly because all the literature we do have came to us through scribes, and this book gets into whatever we can know about their internal lives really well. Reading about their tutoring and how they learnt to write, what we can deduce about how their lessons were structured - fascinating stuff.
For such an ancient civilization, it is astounding how much we do have and how closely we can meet them.
[1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-literature-of-an...
[2] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/myths-from-mesopotam...
[3] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/weavers-scribes-and-...
Thanks mate! Got my weekend reading material!
The whole article seems like AI generated slop.
> One speculative interpretation treats these numbers as a distorted memory of prehistory. Under this hypothesis, the reign boundaries encode real climate shifts...
"One theory" implies that someone somewhere has ever claimed this. But has anyone? TFA gives no source for the claim, AFAICT (although I skimmed a bit).
I wonder why the Sumerians deviated on the last two lengths from the rule they had on the first six. The first six reign lengths (and the total sum of all eight reign lengths) are all n * 60 * 60, where n is an integer. The last two are not, but they could’ve been. If instead you use 18000 years and 21600 years instead of 18600 and 21000, they fit the same formula as the other numbers and the sum remains the same. They used base 60, and apparently got a kick out of multiplying 60 by itself and another integer.
I noticed the deviation because there are mechanical watch movements that run at 18000 and 21600 beats per hour.
The next 28 kings after the flood all have unfeasibly long reigns too. Then there's some believable ones, but even much later on there's Hadanish (360 years, 6*60) and Lugal-kinishe-dudu (120 years, 2*60).
There's a lot to 'guess' with very old text with uncertain translation and no longer spoken or written original forms.
Are these individual human kings, or dynastic reigns, such as the Tudors, Windsors, etc.
They seem to be accompanied by commentary like "son of" or "the fisherman", or nicknames that apply to individuals. Dumuzid "the shepherd", 36,000 years. Kug-Bau, "the woman tavern-keeper, who made firm the foundations of Kish" reigned for 100 years, which is just possible but pretty good going. You have to wonder at what point in her ~120 year life she did her tavern-keeping. Perhaps while ruling?
So, OK, maybe it really means "Kug-Bau, the woman tavern-keeper, and her descendents, not mentioned here".
Maybe they just transposed a few digits? It happens. Somebody should try swapping them in and see if the pattern fits better.
The Sumerians used a sexagesimal notation system; the two lengths would be 5.10.0 and 5.50.0 (which together add up to 11.0.0, FWIW), while all of the other king lengths are 8.0.0, 10.0.0, or 12.0.0.
The Weld-Blundell Prism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weld-Blundell_Prism doesn't use positional notation, so 5.50.0 is expressed as 𒐧𒐢 (five 3600, five 600) and 5.10.0 is expressed as 𒐧𒐞 (five 3600, one 600). (Lines 27-35, each number appearing twice separated by a line with 𒁹𒈗 (one king), if you want to follow along.)
This is besides the point, but you do have to marvel at the technology it took to make this comment render just fine in HN.
Yeah. I had Fable run through every version of it I could think of and it explained the numbering system was the root of everything being divisible by 60.
I did find a pattern though. If you look at ALL the kings, rather than just those 8 it becomes obvious. The recent numbers are realistic and drift further apart, becoming less and less accurate, the further back you go.
Interestingly it also compared some other clay tablets and they were close. So it seems that they were probably written down based on a verbal history that had already drifted wildly well before it was written down .
I ran it through the provided program and the alignment was worse if anything.
> One speculative interpretation treats these numbers as a distorted memory of prehistory.
Well ... some factors are recurring, e. g. energy coming from the sun. So downwards pattern will be created due to that. But many things are rather hard to predict, magnetic changes, eruptions on the sun and even local climate. Antarctica was not always covered in ice, that started at around 34 million years ago, give or take - as one example. Or, as a much more profound case: dinosaurs ruling the lands, then a meteorite induced climate change and dinosaurs went extinct. That would be hard to predict (you can of course calculate trajectories, but what I mean is if you look at Earth as an isolated system only, then it is hard to predict).
I think the "xyz human list" aligns with "paleoclimate events" does not work that well. You don't need a human list to help "align" anything with recurring patterns. Geology isn't based on fantasy events but on specific factors that can be calculated with some extent of certainty; perhaps not 100% (weather remains hard to predict today for some n days in the future) but to a high percentage degree.
To use that human list to then predict the future, makes little to no sense. It makes no real sense. Measuring current data points is much better than some random human-made list ages ago. It seems the author is desperate in wanting to make such an analogy.
You can’t discuss kings without discussing the rich history of Europe with thousands of years of oral and written history long predating the Sumerians and even the ancient Proto Indo-European peoples to which European language and culture is often erroneously attributed.
The dark ages were anything but dark.
Ancient Europe was anything but primitive.
And yet it’s so rarely discussed in the mainstream.
The "dark ages" were also thousands of years after the Sumerians. Even the Greek Dark Age postdates Sumer by a millennium.
So you're not really filling me with confidence about your idea here. Perhaps you can provide some sort of evidence?
> The dark ages were anything but dark
The period is only called dark age in English for what it’s worth, that should make it pretty obvious it’s not a universal understanding of that era
Can you give us a few pointers or links?
Interpreting Vinca symbols as a full-blown writing system is also widely considered a stretch.
Are you talking alphabet or just writing system?
It's clear by the number of symbols it's a writing system of sorts (proto-writing). It could definitely be pictograms (probably IMO), but then again, cuneiform, hieroglyphics and Chinese writing all started as pictograms as well.
> and even the ancient Proto Indo-European peoples to which European language … is often erroneously attributed
Would you mind being a little clearer about what it is you’re saying here?