Sumer: the "black-headed" vs. the "red-faced"

[Nungali]

21 minutes ago, Taomeow said:

 @sean and the solidarity report bums -- thank you very much.  🙏

 

 

Sumerians also had two kinds of chaos, but both were aspects of one entity, Tiamat.  She is the goddess creatress who peacefully brings the cosmos and all life in it into existence through a sacred marriage between salt and fresh water. 

 

 

 

Salt and fresh water conflicts seem popular in agricultural areas near deltas    

 

here  in Oz, the same , but it seems to be based on sea rises and  inland rising salt polluting water holes .

 

Here is a traditional   story  ( a bit more humorous perhaps );

 

How the water turned salty .

 

Bush Cockroach , Wallaby and Possum decided to have a ceremony ; " We will be needed to be painted up ,  Bush Cockroach, paint me up nice . So Bush Cockroach painted up Wallaby nice . " Now, Wallaby, you paint me up nice . "  So Wallaby painted up Possum nice . But Bush Cockroach , " Hey, what about me ? " So  Wallaby and Possum painted up Bush Cockroack , but not very good .

 

" Hey! What's going on ? You both got painted nice, but look at me , not nice , bad job ! "    So he starting running  around pissing on everything . Possum complained " hey, dont do that, its getting in the water .... you turn it all salty ! "  But he didnt stop, he ran here there and everywhere , pissing on everything.

 

So Wallaby  grabbed their water bag and held it shut so they would have something left to drink .

 

And thats how it happened ; all the fresh water we have today  comes from that water that Wallaby saved , and all the rest of the salty water comes from what Bush Cockroach did .

 

- Ummmm  ... people .... dont piss in your water ! 

 

 

.. and dont dye it blue, for goodness sakes !

 

21 minutes ago, Taomeow said:

 

 And she also embodies monsters of primordial chaos and engages Anzû in a marriage that gives birth to dragons with poisonous blood and sea serpents.

 

 

Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the past:

Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates,

Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits:

Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,

And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,

White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,

Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.

 

( Swinburne )

[Taomeow]

@Nungali If this story is indeed authentic rather than made up by some folklorist (happens all the time) or represents what they told the kids to get them to stop asking questions, it's also a creation myth -- didn't they believe that women become pregnant from swimming in the ocean, from ocean salt and wind?  Putting the two stories together we get conception as the continuation of the cockroach legacy.  And it makes the cockroach the progenitor of the human race.  Well, they do seem to have something in common.  Ubiquitous, opportunistic, omnivorous, indestructible.

 

Swinburne does accomplish in two stanzas what Lovecraft strained for in a hefty tome, and does it better.   

 

   

 

 

 

[Nungali]

Perhaps,  as there  where over 600 sub cultures/ languages here . That birth belief might be in some .  On other forums ( history , anthropology) I have debated with some that claimed Aboriginal people didnt know where babies came from and have cited such myths as proof.

 

Well, of course they knew about that -  otherwise why did men use subincision as a form of birth control . 

 

A lot of northern cultures say the first woman walked out of the sea up onto the beach with a bag full of tubers nuts and roots and  a belly full of babies .

 

In regard to Tiamat   I find the Creation stories with the Rainbow Serpent theme interesting .

[Taomeow]

Mesopotamia, "The Fertile Crescent," "The Cradle of Civilization," left behind what people always leave behind once they're done with the land and move on.  Not magnificent forests, not blooming gardens, not fragrant meadows.  Just a whole lot of nothing interspersed with "archeological evidence" -- pieces of broken stuff, writings on some of those pieces, debris, garbage, more dead meaningless nothing, more garbage.  I envision archeologists of the future digging through our modern formidable landfills still containing similar dead meaningless "evidence," only a helluva lot more of it, trying to understand who we were.  And, from the clueless vantage point of their far-away long-since, attempting to reconstruct and understand why exactly we were doing what we're doing right now. 

Edited November 3, 2019 by Taomeow

[Nungali]

4 hours ago, Taomeow said:

... what people always leave behind once they're done with the land and move on.  Not magnificent forests, not blooming gardens, not fragrant meadows.  Just a whole lot of nothing interspersed with "archeological evidence" -- pieces of broken stuff, writings on some of those pieces, debris, garbage, more dead meaningless nothing, more garbage. ...

 

 

Although I agree with the sentiment ... not ALL people did that.  Way down at the bottom of the world, on an isolated island , they did (eventually ) leave magnificent forests behind . They left them behind the 'meadows' they made as those meadows expanded in the other direction into the forests 'ahead' .   If you could see it in speeded up time, these areas of 'agriculture' or 'pasture' or at least 'meadows' would creep slowly across the land  gradually  going into the forests ahead of them and letting forest regenerate  behind them .

 

But if you stay in one spot for a too long  and do not allow regeneration , due to dependence on a river or something ... you end up living in your own shit hole  and making an ulcer on the earth .

 

[Taomeow]

41 minutes ago, Nungali said:

 

Although I agree with the sentiment ... not ALL people did that.  Way down at the bottom of the world, on an isolated island , they did (eventually ) leave magnificent forests behind . They left them behind the 'meadows' they made as those meadows expanded in the other direction into the forests 'ahead' .   If you could see it in speeded up time, these areas of 'agriculture' or 'pasture' or at least 'meadows' would creep slowly across the land  gradually  going into the forests ahead of them and letting forest regenerate  behind them .

 

But if you stay in one spot for a too long  and do not allow regeneration , due to dependence on a river or something ... you end up living in your own shit hole  and making an ulcer on the earth .

 

 

I meant "civilized," i.e. domesticated people practicing sedentary agriculture/city living, two sides of the same counterfeit coin.  No domesticated animal is capable of preserving its habitat, for lack thereof.  Instead of habitats, they live in enclosures, corrals, coops, sties, pens, cages, etc..  And they invariably foul them up.  

[Apech]

Sheep farming produced this:

 

 

which most people think of as natural.  

[Taomeow]

 

25 minutes ago, Apech said:

Sheep farming produced this:

 

 

which most people think of as natural.  

 

 

Whereas the real natural is this:

 

 

 

 

Edited November 3, 2019 by Taomeow

[Taomeow]

And the real sheep are these:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited November 3, 2019 by Taomeow

[Nungali]

5 hours ago, Apech said:

Sheep farming produced this:

 

 

which most people think of as natural.  

 

 

When the first Euros came to Tasmania they found a vast expanse of pasture in the middle of the forest . They thought it 'natural' (for some bizarre reason ) and named it 'The New Hampshire Hills ' as it reminded them of Hampshire back home.  It was created by Aboriginals though and had existed for thousands of years as kangaroo  pasture and  hunting ground .

 

So they put sheep on it ... and in 20 years it was so ruined it couldnt even support sheep any more 

 

( source Josephine Flood,   'Archaeology of the Dreamtime ' )

 

A lot of Australia that people think is desert is just trashed over dead ex sheep farming land .   The real desert is something different and the Australian central desert (ie a large part  of the interior ) used to be the 'native grain belt'   !  (source Tindale )

 

 

Macropods nibble the tips of vegetation, sheep eat down to the ground and will also pull the roots out . It went something like ;

 

a whole lot of sheep are let out, they go for the best food available first and will hunt it down and eat all of it , forcing the other animals into secondary feeding zones . The sheep follow on there when the best is gone. Then to the  third source, and then the fourth source and to, eventually, those special reserves and emergency zones preserved by Aboriginal law ; increase sites, from where species generate and where people are not allowed to get food or drink except in times of dire emergency and last resort .

 

The impact of those sheep made an emergency, they bought conditions like a 'flash drought' , virtually overnight .  And when people and animals did seek refuges at these special places, often the sheep had got there first, trashing that , or they came soon after. And of course, if you speared any to keep the numbers down, you where taken away from your country and put in detention somewhere, or  shot in the field, or had your last water supply poisoned.

 

Then cattle came fast after the sheep .   A healthy waterhole, even in severe drought can still survive, kangaroo and other animals perch on the waters edge, bend down and drink .... like the people did , often side by side  ( like you see sometimes in Africa in drought  where a leopard or lion might be drinking out of a water hole next to an antelope ).

 

 

But not sheep and cattle .... they destroyed these last refuges and waterholes , they walk down the bank, eroding it, go out into the water, stirring up the bottom and churning up the base  water holding layers and then shit in the water .

 

Of course, the sheep eventually start dying off too , then the blighted landscape is littered with sheep carcasses . 

 

 

 

 

Edited November 4, 2019 by Nungali

[Taomeow]

Yup, that's pretty much how it goes.  But only with domesticated sheep -- the wild ones are part of their natural habitat and don't destroy it.  Moreover, the land itself regulates the number of grazing sheep -- plants which they eat in their natural environments (notably clover) respond to being overgrazed by producing phytoestrogens that interfere with sheep's fertility, so next year, there's fewer sheep.  Once the plants recover, they stop administering birth control.  Any natural ecosystem has countless feedback loops like this.  Most of them, in all likelihood, on the level of the soil-based-organisms. 

 

Even beyond, on the level of minerals.  E.g., a couple of weeks ago I went gathering feijoa which, if you gather it where it grows close enough to the ocean, you can make into preserves that don't spoil without cooking (which is exactly what I did with my little harvest) because the fruit then contains extremely high amounts of iodine, higher than seaweed.  It absorbs iodine from the ocean breeze!  You can usually heal a sore throat within a couple of hours with this yummy remedy, among other things.  It can regulate the thyroid and reportedly even cure some chronic thyroid conditions.  Yet plant it farther inland and it will start progressively losing its medicinal properties.  Our "prehistoric" ancestors were walking encyclopedias of knowledge about that kind of interactions between things in their environment. 

 

It went farther than minerals -- to the kinds of light shining at different plants in different seasons, so you would be instructed to collect this under the full moon, and that, with the first rays of sunlight.  Well, it is known now that hothouse pumpkins (e.g.) which produce both male and female flowers on the same plant get their information about how to diversify sexually from the particular wavelengths of the light they're exposed to -- until it was figured out, they would get a hothouse full of all-male or all-female pumpkins that couldn't reproduce.  Yet all knowledge coming to us from sources other than the fool's method of trial and error we call the scientific method is chalked up to superstition and discarded wholesale. 

 

It went farther than visible light...  but classical feng shui is a separate topic. 

 

Among other things, when we lose our freedom, we also lose all our real natural sciences.      

 

 

[Taomeow]

Recently, a team of international scholars versed in culinary history, food chemistry and cuneiform have been working to decipher a few of the world’s oldest-known recipes using tablets from Yale University's collection.  The ancient recipes seem very close to some foods still eaten today, especially regionally, but also all over the world.  All are meat-based, with plenty of fat used, and suggest some grains, bread and vegetables as additions.  Broths, soups and stews are prominent.  The recipes are neither simplistic nor overcomplicated and seem pretty sound -- you could cook a flavorful hearty meal based on these today, they use specific herbs and spices, and point out health-related affinities of each dish (just like they still do in many restaurants in China).  E.g. a soup called Pashrutum is "unwinding" for someone suffering from a cold.   They also recognized something we call cuisine today, differentiating between local and foreign dishes.  Foreign were considered neither better nor worse, just different.  One of the earliest recipes, for a soup called Tuh'u, is very close to borscht!  (Not what is called this name in the US though --somehow a soup that survived thousands of years elsewhere found its demise on this continent, albeit recent Eastern European immigrants still remember what it really is and still make it at home.)   

 

I might take a closer look and see if I can replicate any of the four fully deciphered recipes verbatim.  Sumerians cooked the way I do -- the recipes specified all the ingredients but none of the amounts for each.  You have to have a feel for these things, not a scale.  I assume most early people experienced with cooking from just observing since childhood how it's done had it.  But of course standardized feed can't be made like that.  I am surprised people try to cook standardized meals in their homes as well...  but then, on second thought, I'm not.  

[Nungali]

So .... dinner at your place at some stage ?

 

 

 

 

 

 

" Sumerian city dwellers usually lacked the space or facilities to cook in their own homes, and so relied on food stalls which lined the city's street for their daily meals. Here is my attempt to recreate a Sumerian take-out dinner."

 

http://thehistoriansguidetocooking.blogspot.com/2014/07/sumerian-street-food-oldest-carryout-on.html

 

 

 

 

[Taomeow]

5 hours ago, Nungali said:

So .... dinner at your place at some stage ?

 

 

 

Sure thing.  Our city gets an average of 35 million tourists every year -- although when they undress on the beach, it becomes clear that most of them are Canadians.  My guess is, not too many Australians have to go to California in search of the sun.  But for a Sumerian dinner -- well, barring time travel, that might be your closest bet.  Just say when.      

[Apech]

5 hours ago, Taomeow said:

 

Sure thing.  Our city gets an average of 35 million tourists every year -- although when they undress on the beach, it becomes clear that most of them are Canadians.  My guess is, not too many Australians have to go to California in search of the sun.  But for a Sumerian dinner -- well, barring time travel, that might be your closest bet.  Just say when.      

 

 

'Next year in Baghdad'  ????

[Taomeow]

/

Edited November 6, 2019 by Taomeow

[Taomeow]

The sun was known to Sumerians to "aṣû" -- "rise, emerge, appear" and "erēbu" -- "set, sink, go down."

Aṣû -- Asia?  Erēbu -- Europe?

 

The Indo-European root hojbh-/*hjebh meant "the sun going down."  It was also used as a metaphor for sex.  Modern Russian retains this ancient root in two profane words, one for the male reproductive organ and another for the sexual act. 

[Nungali]

So.... why the 'tyranny'  in Mesopotamia ?   Other similar  places didnt see the 'need ' for that ,  eg.

 

From  36:08

 

 

 

 

[welkin]

f

Edited November 13, 2019 by welkin

[Taomeow]

9 hours ago, Nungali said:

So.... why the 'tyranny'  in Mesopotamia ?   Other similar  places didnt see the 'need ' for that ,  eg.

 

From  36:08

 

 

Methinks the story about building three levels of walls around a city for no reason, just for the hell of it, holds no water.  Who would do something like that if not cornered into submission?  And how does the city not being attacked prove anything at all? -- no city  enclosed in three walls will be attacked if the opponent doesn't have the capabilities to breach them, and/or is up against an army way bigger and stronger, and/or is not civilized and therefore not interested.  Large scale warfare is a civilized sport.  If city dwellers are not attacked, it doesn't mean they themselves don't attack.  Sumerians and Akkadians didn't attack each other -- they attacked the "uncivilized."  It was only many centuries later that, after peacefully exterminating the "uncivilized," Mesopotamians proceeded to wage wars against each other.  

 

To me it looks as though all ancient city builders had a mind with a long term plan behind their activities, a mind that acted with meticulous uniformity toward the implementation of this plan everywhere.  It unfolded in stages spanning millennia, and ultimately always in one direction only, with fluctuations that can only be seen as minor and temporary in the historical perspective.  Could it be that globalism is not a modern fad?  Could it be that the plan has always been there? -- lots of things that happened to us along the way seem to make sense only if one allows for the possibility.  The uniform and unabating destruction of tribal life and the herding of unrelated and often culturally incompatible tribes into "nations," "countries," "empires," great empires" and their single-minded "alliances."  All those "unifications" (with episodes of dissolution of the unions thus created merely followed by new unifications on a larger and larger scale).  The relentless deforestation and monocultural takeover.  A war on biodiversity on all levels, human to soil-based organisms.  And war as such.  Humanity has been engaged in warfare for 96% of its civilized history.  

 

So I don't think pointing out a particular place that within a particular time frame wasn't at war is of any consequence.  No one attacks the city I live in right now, but we have a large-ass marine corps naval base here...  and you can't have marines without a certain social pre-arrangement that would cause young healthy kids to work their asses off for years toward maybe killing someone someday if told to, for reasons they themselves had nothing to do with.    

[Nungali]

I won't sidetrack your tread into this  , but .... the explanations for the walls are in other parts of the lecture.

 

But  you made some good points .   'Man' just never seems to learn to be able to live in a 'steady state'  - with a few rare exceptions -  he always operated under some type of 'expansionist policy', thinking resources were unlimited . 

[Apech]

5 hours ago, Nungali said:

I won't sidetrack your tread into this  , but .... the explanations for the walls are in other parts of the lecture.

 

But  you made some good points .   'Man' just never seems to learn to be able to live in a 'steady state'  - with a few rare exceptions -  he always operated under some type of 'expansionist policy', thinking resources were unlimited . 

 

Maybe steady states don't exist (?) - I think there is a very complex relationship between the ruler and ruled which can sometimes be tyranny but other times is just the best (or easiest) way to survive.  We forget how hard life was for most of human history.  Grouping together under single rulership and mutual defence is a survival mechanism but involves giving up individual freedom, mobility and independence.  Its hard to live free - so maybe the best option is the edge - in society but not of it (???).  I don't think its a coincidence that moral and mural (wall) are so phonetically similar.  Which is why I choose to live on the edge of town

[Taomeow]

13 hours ago, Nungali said:

I won't sidetrack your tread into this  , but .... the explanations for the walls are in other parts of the lecture.

 

But  you made some good points .   'Man' just never seems to learn to be able to live in a 'steady state'  - with a few rare exceptions -  he always operated under some type of 'expansionist policy', thinking resources were unlimited . 

 

Not so much "man" as yang in men who abandon yin.  "Expansionist policy" is a natural inherent property of yang, and it's not wrong until it loses the opposite balancing drive of yin -- withdraw, stay put, go inward rather than outward, nourish rather than subjugate, increase inner quality rather than outer quantity, and so on.  In practical terms it translated into millennia of patriarchy, which exploits the fact that men are naturally more yang than women.  Once you subjugate women instead of maintaining a healthy yin-yang balance, yang flares out of control.  This never happens in matriarchal societies.  It becomes an issue of gender on autopilot, even though occasionally you might get a very yang female ruler in a patriarchy (rare exceptions, I call them "honorary males," all those patriarchal overlords who happened to be in the position to take on a yang role and perpetuate a patriarchal pattern despite having been born, technically, as a "more yin" gender.)   

 

7 hours ago, Apech said:

 

Maybe steady states don't exist (?) - I think there is a very complex relationship between the ruler and ruled which can sometimes be tyranny but other times is just the best (or easiest) way to survive.  We forget how hard life was for most of human history.  Grouping together under single rulership and mutual defence is a survival mechanism but involves giving up individual freedom, mobility and independence.  Its hard to live free - so maybe the best option is the edge - in society but not of it (???).  I don't think its a coincidence that moral and mural (wall) are so phonetically similar.  Which is why I choose to live on the edge of town

 

Life, according to our indoctrination, was hard for most of human history, but according to common sense and also some researchers who manage to bypass the installed narrative, it was easy and enjoyable to the max.  The lost paradise story is retained by all cultures.  Hunter-gatherers didn't know backbreaking labor nor boring mind-numbing labor nor specialization that reduces a human being to a cog in the machine.  People live like that today by paying good money for a week's vacation in conditions and environments that slightly resemble that lost paradise.  And then back to the machine.    

 

We envision their life as hard by placing ourselves in their shoes -- but they were not ourselves.  Far more agile, attuned, competent in their environment, not a victim of it as we're conditioned to believe but the apex predator, collectively.  The apex predator's life is that of the ruler -- we were collectively the ruler, but we didn't rule by going against nature and mutilating it, we ruled because nature made us this way, competent, adaptable, forming a cooperating unit as an extended tribal family (competition is a made-up rationale for our existence -- made up with nasty ulterior motives and jammed down our throats by force), capable of collective work like beavers and of individuation like cats, bound by togetherness like elephants or dolphins yet not helpless when alone, just like one of them.  Fiercely loyal like a family of wolves and yet capable of handling independence like a tiger.  Maybe that's what all those ancient depictions of man-animal combos are about.  We used to be magnificent and capable of having a good life when we were fully human, a good life under any circumstances (we thrived even when the oceans were frozen to the bottom and storms lasted for centuries!) -- of this I am certain.   Every "explorer" in history discovering an "uncontacted" tribe discovered happy, content people who did each other no harm and were immersed in love and joy.  And then armed conquerors, exploiters and enslavers who followed in their footsteps ended that condition within one generation.  So whoever survived, the second generation was already "ourselves."  The damaged kind.          

 

The grouping together under single rulership is natural for children.  The ruler is mom.  The only natural hierarchy is that of seniority in age and the only natural rulership in mammals is determined by who gave birth to whom.  If I'm older and you are my outcome, my creation, I rule, it was as simple as that.  By the time you are old enough and big enough to rule, you create your own kingdom -- your own children, and rule them, not me, not your older siblings, not your father, not your grandparents, not your aunts and uncles.   You either don't rule at all if you have no kingdom, or you rule your own kingdom only, i.e. your own children.  And a non-damaged human mom does not rule by abusing her children.  It's only when child abuse starts that we start coming up with those abusive patterns of rulership extended to the rest of society.  The first abused child in history transferred his imprint onto the rest of our history.  Who he was, who did it to him and why, I don't know, but it never happened in 2.5 million years of our prior existence without kings or presidents or warlords.  And then it happened.  We're the PTSD outcome.     

Edited November 11, 2019 by Taomeow

[Nungali]

12 hours ago, Apech said:

 

Maybe steady states don't exist (?) - I think there is a very complex relationship between the ruler and ruled which can sometimes be tyranny but other times is just the best (or easiest) way to survive.  We forget how hard life was for most of human history.  Grouping together under single rulership and mutual defence is a survival mechanism but involves giving up individual freedom, mobility and independence.  Its hard to live free - so maybe the best option is the edge - in society but not of it (???).  I don't think its a coincidence that moral and mural (wall) are so phonetically similar.  Which is why I choose to live on the edge of town

 

Oh yeah, me too .

 

I lived in beautiful places on the fringe of Sydney; just over the river to huge national park, isolated beaches - 40 mins by train to CBD.

 

Now,  out from a rural town, on the edge of forest .... still got a sealed road to front gate .  And my place; on edge of forest and farmland .

 

(on the 'edge of the law' as well    )

 

Edgy      

[welkin]

too late

 

Edited November 19, 2019 by welkin