• pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
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    23 days 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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      23 days ago

      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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        23 days 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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          23 days 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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      23 days 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