Göbelki Tepi’s role as a ritual center for nomadic peoples is supported by the dearth of any evidence for houses at the site. Çatalhöyük, on the other hand, hits its peak c. 7000 BC with about 5-7k estimated populated, and gets occasional proto-city billing.

Ah. Well, that cleared everything up. While before I couldn’t somehow grasp how you can quote sections of the Dialogue of Pessimism and yet, magically, not be talking about the text at all, your use of capslock has cleared up the fact that’s it all a higher-level meta discourse - the poor attempt at satire becomes the…

I’m well enough acquainted with sarcasm and satire to apply it to my understanding of the original text itself, since it’s - again - a well know satirical composition. You can certainly chose to interpret the text from whatever ill-conceived standpoint you like, the Thought Police aren’t going to come knocking, but…

I did, and saw nothing to recommend to me that you’d considered the context of the piece as a whole, its satirical nature, or the place of such works within both the broad - and narrow - span of Mesopotamian culture. Context is critical for ancient texts, and they get misinterpreted all the time. There are plenty of…

We do certainly have evidence - in the archaeological context as well as textual - for women in positions of power within the temple structure/hierarchy, and it’s true that this is found in earlier periods - the entu priest or priestess of each deity is primarily a mis-match to their gender - so Enheduanna, the…

While I’d certainly advocate for reading the whole text (which is satirical, and late, and Sumerian is a language, not really a culture, not since the days of Kramer, at least) I’d also advocate for the fact that Mesopotamia, even in the Early Dynastic period and all the way through, was certainly a patriarchical…

Context is pretty critical...well, all the time, but especially with ancient texts: the Dialogue of Pessimism is, at its core, a satirical text. It’s also 86 goddamn lines long.

Kind might be pushing it, but it’s certainly true that the culture shifts over time. And we do see women in positions of power throughout all periods of Mesopotamian history. The earlier Sumerian hymns to Inanna are great - but I mean Sumerian in the sense of a language, not a culture, because the idea of a Sumerian…

Okay, so - the Dialogue of Pessimism is a late piece, from the tablets we have of it - most of them are from the Library of Ashurbanipal, so 688-627 BC) and thus Neo-Assyrian empire. It may come from an earlier period, but it’s pretty doubtful. It’s in Akkadian, not Sumerian. And it’s pretty clearly satirical.

First two songs are in Akkadian, second two are in Sumerian. Akkadian’s the better term for the language, to be sure, but it does have ‘dialects’ that can be linked to the period - more region - the texts come from. So, Assyrian for first-millennium north (Neo-Assyrian empire, mostly) and Babylonian for the south.

Pretty neat! To Assyriology-nitpick, though on their terms - Sumerian is a language - a linguistic isolate (and what the last two songs are in) and Babylonian is, from this context, the ‘dialect’ of the language Akkadian that we find in the south of Mesopotamia in certain periods. Both are written in cuneiform. The…

I’m a big fan of this one from Ms Marvel:

To add another wrinkle to the political complexity of the situation, the bust officially passed into private ownership, into the collection of James Simon, who helped fund many digs (including the Amarna one). So it was held in his private house until being donated to the museum in the early 1920s, when it went on…

The Met Gala is sort of a two-headed beast, I think. There’s the gala itself, which is entirely the Costume Institute’s baby, and they are in charge of all of the fundraising for the event and have control over it and it stands as their own largest fundraising event of the year (at least, according to google).