Thread by @serbiaireland

Thread: I wonder if people looking at this image realize that it contains a proof that people in one part of this map preserved a story about the arrival of agriculture as an oral legend for at least 5000 years, before it was first written down...

https://twitter.com/DGronenborn/status/1437712564801228805

I am talking about these dudes here...The dudes who lived in the ancient city of Susa (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susa) which is currently located in Iran

When archaeologists excavated the city, they discovered, among other things, a text, known today as "How grain came to Sumer" (etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.…)

I talked about this text in this thread:

https://twitter.com/serbiaireland/status/1408463380248158212

The text tells us that: "Men used to eat grass with their mouths like sheep. In those times (before grain), they did not know grain, barley or flax..."

The text then tells us that: "Enlil...looked southwards and saw the wide sea; he looked northwards and saw the mountain of aromatic cedars. Enlil piled up the barley, gave it to the mountain..."

And finally the text tells us that later Ninazu said: "Let us go to the mountain, to the mountain where barley and flax grow...Let us fetch the barley down from its mountain, let us introduce the barley into Sumer..."

When was this time "before grain" in Mesopotamia? Well, according to the above map, sometime between 8500 BC and 8300 BC...

And when was "How grain came to Sumer" written down? Well the earliest Sumerian texts date to the early 3rd millennium BC en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_…

What the text "How grain came to Sumer" is telling us happened, is exactly what happened. But how could people who wrote this text in the 3rd (or 2nd) millennium BC know this?

They couldn't have deduced this themselves in any way at the time when this text was written. So they had to have had this knowledge passed down to them, first as a history, then as a myth, then as a legend, orally, from generation to generation for at least 5500 years!!!

I think this is kind of cool...

PS: if you think this is cool, check these out. Some Irish legends, first recorded in the late 1st millennium AD could be accounts of actual events from the mid 3rd millennium BC

https://twitter.com/serbiaireland/status/1232980094588768258