Aye. I was at my friend's grandparent's house (he grew up in his grandparents house) as a youth, probably 11 or 12, and his grandfather mentioned he was offered to join the masons by a work buddy. He promptly told us he did not join.
Yes and no. Yes in the sense that there was a formal pattern for learning that developed from 3k bc - end (right around 1800bc) which typically included a combination of math (fractions, pemdas, etc, administrative math, enough so you could make a bill of sale) and writing (which meant learning Sumerian as well as cuneiform), among a few other "administrative" disciplines (like calculating the calendar- the Sumerian calendars often arbitrarily added a month or two whenever they felt like the calendar was too far off, so knowing when and how to add those months was critical to maintaining the cultic schedule. fun for archaeologists later to figure out what month it is..). The essential purpose was to prepare you for a life of administration of some kind, whether in a temple or household.
No in the sense that this kind of education was not available to everyone, and I would imagine the vast majority never learned to write.
Here's more Sumerian tablet jokes:
"If a scribe knows only one line, but his handwriting is good, he is indeed a scribe!"
"A scribe whose hand can follow dictation is indeed a scribe!"
"What kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?"
"In short, machine learning methods are in place, but accessible data is not."
"Finally, one must address the concerns of various commercial stakeholders."
"A few chemical databases of reactions do exist, but these are commercial (e.g., Beilstein/Reaxys [Elsevier], SPRESI [InfoChem], and CAS [ACS]), and even when a license is purchased, the underlying data are accessible only through a narrow, one-query-at-a-time interface, completely stifling the application of powerful artificial intelligence and machine [...]"
This seems like the first point of approach, not the last. Can anyone comment why these data gatekeepers have not made a business model to give programmatic access to nerds?
And if they have financial reasons for not doing so, how will governments sweet talk shareholders into supposedly losing money?
You have some very detailed reasons why Thucydides would side with the Athenians; I appreciate that.
> Finally, if you want to argue that he'd say the Athenian empire was dangerous, I'd need a good reason as to why. Consider how it came into being, as a result of the Persian war.
Thucydides himself would have been very close to the halls of power in the conflict against Persia, if sources are correct that he is related to Miltiades, the Athenian general whom was one of 10 strategoi at Marathon. (how he is related is uncertain; wikipedia seems to suggest his father Olorus also had a daughter (so Thucydides had a sister) who married Miltiades, making Miltiades his brother in law. But this is uncertain; it could very well be that Thucydides father and great grandfather, or uncle etc were named "Olorus". Nonetheless the sources about Thucydides being from a well to do family with interests in mines and being from Thrace are agreed upon)
Thucydides, like many of our learned in the past few thousand years, attempts to present himself as a "just the facts" narrator (a counterpoint to his crazy other, Herodotus, who unabashedly presents the will of the gods, oracular prophecies, dreams, etc all intertwined in a tale seemingly spun by your drunk grandfather). As to your question why he thought the Athenian empire was dangerous... Leo Strauss, who in City+Man noticed that Thucydides has a habit of detailing the aftermath of the Sicilian Expedition in terms of all the "natural destruction" (floods, earthquakes, famines etc) that befell Athens after the Expedition, thought that the timing was not incidental.
The Sumerians were well known to forcibly reposition the local rivers of which there were many in the flood plain. There are probably plenty of areas with long lost boats, areas today that wouldn't appear to having been a river, ever.
There's a whole back story here of the Persian gulf which receded something like 100 miles around the time Sumer disappeared[0]. My theory for this is that population growth in the south created caused an expansion of irrigation/agriculture- and as kings became more willing and able to reposition rivers, they unintentionally created the first major human environmental catastrophe. This is why the Akkadians, to the north of the Mesopotamian flood plain, were the inheritors of Sumerian culture. Cities like Uruk would have much been closer to the coast than they are today, giving southern Sumer (in its heyday) a very similar environment to the Nile river delta pouring into the Mediterranean, with all those cities parked right in the middle of the delta.
We know too that southern Sumer was trading heavily with many neighbors, including India, so we can easily imagine they were active in the Persian gulf... and naturally I'd imagine there are plenty of boats stuck in sand deep underground, undisturbed, and loaded with artifacts of trade.
A healthy chunk of the Sumerian texts we have today are training tablets. Scribes would copy these tablets much in the same way we copy sentences today to learn to write today, with more of an emphasis on hand writing. A small sample of the content of these include:
"If a scribe knows only one line, but his handwriting is good, he is indeed a scribe!"
"A scribe whose hand can follow dictation is indeed a scribe!"
"What kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?"
Sumerian really was the Latin of its day; long after southern Mesopotamia succumbed, the northern Mesopotamian civs like Akkadia and Babylon still wrote Sumerian, much in the same way that medieval England still used Latin.
On the topic of Sumerian translations, there is an unsolved mystery about UD.GAL.NUN text. UD.GAL.NUN is the modern name given to it, with UD meaning normal orthography AN, GAL meaning EN, and NUN for LIL. ("text of God?" enlil was the primary deity) This text is found randomly throughout Sumerian texts, sometimes changing context within a sentence; the practice died out within a few hundred years, maybe even 100. It's meaning and why its there is still debated, with some suggestions that it maybe was a scribal code or the first encryption system. From what I know it has not been cracked because there are no "Rosetta Stones"..yet
Because there were so few people. The inverse of your question is why did technology seemingly explode beginning around 10k years ago? And the answer to that is simple: the Milankovitch cycles had brought about a warming trend, bringing an abundance of resources.
It is interesting to notice that sedentism and agriculture happened at the same time. The modern theory is that agriculture practice led to sedentism, but at the very least its unclear which came first because the earliest confirmed harvested (ie non wild growing) varieties of grains from the middle east come from approximately the same period as the beginning of this warming.
However, once not only agriculturalism but pastoralism (and even beyond that nomadic pastoralism, and the domestication of the horse) had proven their usefulness to maintaining scaling sedent populations, the populations exploded and naturally, bored human beings with brains and full bellies sit around and think of different ways to do things.
tl;dr: they were unlucky wrt technological innovation
Few are called, even fewer accept the call.