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Megas Metaphrase - The Horrible Handling of Translation and Transliteration
Sixth Paratima of the Megas Historia Stulos
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Cuneiform. Quite possibly the most bastardized form of language on the planet. Linguists of the modern age will tell you that it wasn't so different from the languages of today. Archaeologists will tell you that it was deciphered using a related language. There are conflicting reports about whether it's made of black granite, or black granodiorite. Among these pieces of misinformation is the truth. A truth that is quite shocking.
Let's start with the linguists. There's no denying that we have a stark group of people who specialize in languages and language development, but those people are missing something important to the supposed time of Cuneiform. Perspective. Consider human beings for a moment. Is there a reality in which we develop a highly advanced language with per-word clay stamp sticks *before* we develop languages with simpler letter symbols? Who made the stamp sticks? Who designed the complex letters? How many years did it take to perfect Cuneiform before the Epic of Gilgamesh was written? Who taught the writer how to stamp Cuneiform into bricks? If it was written with stamp sticks, then how do we know what words are supposed to be comprised of multiple syllables? These questions, regardless of the validity, are often met with snarky remarks such as "that's just not how it's translated" without actually providing proof or information further.
Of course, I don't blame them. The linguists really just work with what they have. Their goal isn't to provide a perspective on ancient languages. Their goal is to look at supposed translations of ancient languages, and later determine how sentence structure and articulation likely sounded based on what they're given. This is transliteration. Or, in other words; This is bullshit interpreted from other unverifiable bullshit. Transliterators are almost never given complete languages to work with, leading to words like "bar" having 20 separate unrelated definitions. So, who is really responsible for the accepted translation of cuneiform?
Ancient Sumerian Cuneiform was translated using Old Persian Cuneiform. Old Persian Cuneiform doesn't actually have any relation to Sumerian Cuneiform, despite claims that "la" was somehow derivative. Their letters aren't even close to similar, but that's a small mistake contained in the greater bullshit of the whole thing. The reality is that Old Persian Cuneiform also had to be translated, and that never actually happened. The accepted translation of Old Persian Cuneiform was assembled with guesses. Yes. They guessed at it, and some people made wild claims that are completely unverifiable. One explorer claimed that Old Persian Cuneiform was made from three separate alphabets, which cannot be verified. Other morons claimed to have deciphered individual words and they were accepted to be the truth, despite the fact that their sources were, themselves, unable to prove what they were claiming.
The undeniable and unfortunate reality is that Cuneiform has never really been deciphered correctly. But so many guesses have been made that we can make an assumption based on that. Unfortunately; Archaeologists are really bent on selling their narrative. I'll lay it out and then tell you exactly why it's bullshit.
The Archaeological narrative: For billions of years, bacteria evolved into a series of giant birds, giant lizards, giant mammals, and giant fish. Then one day, a giant rock came crashing down from space and killed everything. Somehow, homo sapiens emerged from this because all of the small animals apparently didn't die, only the big ones. Then for 300,000 years, homo sapiens spent %100 of their time hunting, gathering and migrating using stone tools, broken volcanic glass, bones and sticks. Then suddenly, as if from nowhere, human beings erupted into large kingdoms with fully developed languages, complete architectural knowledge, alchemy, astronomy, animal husbandry, and agriculture. They then erected thousands of megalithic buildings, all within the same 500 years, and then nature buried it all. We just said "fuck it" and did it all again.
So, despite the fact that we have never actually had any real resources to transcribe cuneiform, archaeologists clung to and accepted the stories of gods, monsters, legends and whatever other Homeric style epic they could sell to the public. This is proven and displayed by the fact that I, we, you are not allowed to attempt to translate Cuneiform today. You can try, for sure. But regardless of how logical it is; your translation will never be accepted as a contribution. Sure, theories about aliens and ghosts and monsters and gods are accepted as accurate translations of things. But a realistic story depicting humanity doing what humanity still does will be laughed at, shunned, and outright insulted.
The grand ego of the modern Archaeologist bastardizer is to assume that we must be the most advanced human civilization to exist. That's why you'll never hear them talk about their re-discoveries. They unearth a massive society that once had a thriving population. They learn of the technology they used, and how they performed government. They call it a "discovery" as if the humans who built it didn't actually exist there first. They uncover old things, present them as new, and then perpetuate lies like "we invented the battery" or "Euclid was the first mathematician to develop geometry". For the record; the oldest battery in the world was discovered in Parthian in Iraq. It was Sumerian. The oldest documentation of geometry was also unearthed in Sumeria, presumed to be Babylonian.
This segment had two points:
-Sumerian was translated from a translation of a translation of a translation of a set of guesses. "Scholars" then declared that it was proof when they agreed with each other about these guesses in private settings with no public review. If you think they were wrong, they think you are wrong.
-Stories of humanity are often shunned in favor of gods and monsters. Museums make more money that way. They don't want gradual stories of humanity. They want grandiose stories of apocalypses, gods, cloud cities, and men who throw lightning from their fingertips. They want massive destruction stories that make us the underdog of the big asteroid. They want us to look like we were simultaneously smart enough to evolve, but too stupid to plant anything for 300,000 years. In the case of the Great Sphinx; they want us to believe that the wind both created the body and buried the entire statue because just believing that humans could have done it is not epic enough. As if by the hand of God, nature erected a lion statue and the men just found it and fucked with it until it was shiny.
The greatest disrespect we show to our ancestors is the assumption that they were stupid. They were the furthest from stupid a species could be. They were incredibly intelligent, and our entire society is built on the work that they did. Science and mathematics don't exist without our ancestors from thousands of years ago who developed the practices. Architecture doesn't exist without thousands of years of trial and error, and we totally abandoned their hard work in favor of cheap rebar cement towers. Much of our history has been erased by idiot leaders who would rather portray their own society as the great discoverers of things. Today, every major country in the world attempts to claim the discovery of topics that were likely discovered 10,000 years ago or more. It's sad.