The Last Blog Post

The Sumerian Kinglist

Dear readers,

This is the last blog post. I had started this blog some years ago as a college project. We were asked to create a blog on something, to help us learn about the web. I chose history because I loved the subject and long after the course had finished, I kept writing.

Over the years it has grown and morphed and changed until it is almost unrecognisable from the earlier posts. What was originally a disjointed set of summaries, eventually became a detailed year-by-year recounting of the history of the world. While the quality of the research is certainly not up to proper professional standards, I am nevertheless proud of the work that I have put in over the years. It will be left here and may be of use to readers in the future.

Because I enjoyed writing it so much, I became somewhat obsessed over the last few years and have poured much of my free time into it. I grew intrigued with the idea of writing a history of the world, year-by-year, covering all regions of the globe in as much detail as possible, up to about 1BC. I was going to focus on the Near East, Greece and Rome to begin with and then to backtrack and focus on India and China, as well as other parts of the world that I had neglected.

In retrospect, this was a foolish pipe-dream. There is so much detail in history, that to do this to the extent that I wished would have taken several lifetimes. Perhaps a collaborative effort between friends might have made this a feasible project, but as a solo project it was too much. It was also unclear how much benefit it was to others. I enjoy helping others, but to spend all my free time on something of marginal value to others was not a sensible use of time. The blog was also beginning to take up all free time and was impinging on other activities in life. It was time to appreciate what had been created, and to walk away.

The remains of the city of Eridu, what may have been
the world's first city

I will spend some time cleaning up some of the earlier blogs perhaps, and I will look at cloning the pages so that if this hosting ultimately disappears, that the work is not lost. It is perhaps possible that at some point in the future I will return to this with more limited goals, but we shall see what the future holds.

I do not often ask for comments, but if anyone has read the blog and found it useful, please leave a comment below. It would be heartening to know if this has helped anyone.

I have learned a great deal from researching these blogs. As I have said many times on these pages, I am not a professional historian. I studied Classics many years ago in college, but have never pursued these studies past an undergraduate level.

Perhaps the field of history that is most fascinating to me is the study of Mesopotamian history. There is much that is unknown about them, but they are the first people whose words can still speak to us today. The long chain of history, in many ways, begins with them. Their culture was long-lasting and durable and their system of writing endured for over three millennia. The last dated cuneiform inscription is an astronomical text from around AD75. The knowledge of this script probably died out in the following century. In a similar fashion, the last known Egyptian hieroglyphs date from AD394, with the knowledge of hieroglyphs being lost shortly thereafter.

Graffito of Esmet-Akhom,
The last known hieroglyph
inscription

It is sad to think that the world’s first writing system disappeared in such a manner. However, cuneiform writing had already allowed Sumerian, a language isolate that would have vanished without trace, to survive as a scholarly language for millennia after it had ceased to be a living language.

This is part of what it means to be human. We remember. We strive to know. The story of the past has shaped what we are and is part of who we are.

But sometimes things are lost. Sumerian, cuneiform, hieroglyphics, and so much of what once was that we cannot even fathom, has been lost to human knowledge. Chance, war, ignorance, carelessness, the inevitable passage of time and the slow falling apart of all things, mean that we will always lose more than we remember. Ultimately, on this earth, all will be forgotten.

But for all that is lost, sometimes we rediscover. In the 19th century, scholars were able to reach back and decipher these ancient scripts. The lost millennia began to speak to us again. It is a rare privilege to live in a time and place where we can know these things.

Outside the Solar System, flying through the interstellar medium, are the Voyager spacecraft. They are the fastest man-made objects and they are the farthest from this cosmic speck we call Earth; this mote of dust suspended in a sun-beam that we call home. Soon their communications systems will fail and they will travel silently through the void. It is unknown if they will ever be seen again, by humans or by civilisations yet unknown.

Voyager spacecraft

These spacecraft carry messages, golden records, which could be played by any who find these objects. On these records are images and sounds of our planet, recorded before the launching of these ships.

Among the sounds sent out on this message to the stars are greetings recorded in various languages. Efforts were made by the compilers to include languages that had once been important, but which were now no longer spoken. The very first greetings on our interstellar message are in Sumerian, which is fitting in so many ways. The greeting says “šilim-ma hé-me-en”, meaning, “May all be well”.

As I bid farewell to the blog I can think of no better way to leave it than to thank my readers and to say, may all indeed be well.