>>9319545

(Please read from the start)

“Inscriptions describing the reforms of king Urukagina of Lagash (c. 2300 BC) say that he abolished the former custom of polyandry in his country, prescribing that a woman who took multiple husbands be stoned with rocks upon which her crime had been written.”

“Sumerian culture was male-dominated and stratified. The Code of Ur-Nammu, the oldest such codification yet discovered, dating to the Ur III, reveals a glimpse at societal structure in late Sumerian law. Beneath the lu-gal ("great man" or king), all members of society belonged to one of two basic strata: The "lu" or free person, and the slave (male, arad; female geme).”

“Marriages were usually arranged by the parents of the bride and groom;[53]:78 engagements were usually completed through the approval of contracts recorded on clay tablets. These marriages became legal as soon as the groom delivered a bridal gift to his bride's father.”

“From the earliest records, the Sumerians had very relaxed attitudes toward sex[57] and their sexual mores were determined not by whether a sexual act was deemed immoral, but rather by whether or not it made a person ritually unclean. […] . Prostitution existed but it is not clear if sacred prostitution did.”

>> I personally didn’t find anything indicating the practice of incest nor pedophilia in Sumer, but there are arguments about the existence of homosexuality.

“Language and writing

The most important archaeological discoveries in Sumer are a large number of clay tablets written in cuneiform script. […] A large body of hundreds of thousands of texts in the Sumerian language have survived, such as personal and business letters, receipts, lexical lists, laws, hymns, prayers, stories, and daily records. Full libraries of clay tablets have been found. Monumental inscriptions and texts on different objects, like statues or bricks, are also very common. Many texts survive in multiple copies because they were repeatedly transcribed by scribes in training. Sumerian continued to be the language of religion and law in Mesopotamia long after Semitic speakers had become dominant.”

“The Sumerian language is generally regarded as a language isolate in linguistics because it belongs to no known language family; […].”

A little detour:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform

“Cuneiform[a] was one of the earliest systems of writing, invented by Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia.[b][4][5] It is distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, made by means of a blunt reed for a stylus. The term cuneiform comes from cuneus, Latin for "wedge”.

“Emerging in Sumer in the late fourth millennium BC (the Uruk IV period) to convey the Sumerian language, which was a language isolate, cuneiform writing began as a system of pictograms, stemming from an earlier system of shaped tokens used for accounting. In the third millennium, the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract as the number of characters in use grew smaller (Hittite cuneiform). The system consists of a combination of logophonetic, consonantal alphabetic, and syllabic signs.”

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>>9926828

(Please read from the start)

“Therefore, there are many proposed ramps and there is a considerable amount of discrepancy regarding what type of ramp was used to build the pyramids.[26] One of the widely discredited ramping methods is the large straight ramp, and it is routinely discredited on functional grounds for its massive size, lack of archaeological evidence, huge labor cost, and other problems (Arnold 1991: 99, Lehner 1997: 215, Isler 2001: 213).”

>> Exactly what I was trying to say above about it.

“Other ramps serve to correct these problems of ramp size, yet either run into critiques of functionality and limited archaeological evidence. There are zig-zagging ramps, straight ramps using the incomplete part of the superstructure (Arnold 1991), spiraling ramps supported by the superstructure and spiraling ramps leaning on the monument as a large accretion are proposed. Mark Lehner speculated that a spiraling ramp, beginning in the stone quarry to the southeast and continuing around the exterior of the pyramid, may have been used. The stone blocks may have been drawn on sleds along the ramps lubricated by water or milk.”

>> That’s one incredible quantity of milk they must have used as lubricants. Does anyone believe this? Not me.

“Levering methods are considered to be the most tenable solution to complement ramping methods, partially due to Herodotus's description; and partially to the Shadoof; an irrigation device first depicted in Egypt during the New Kingdom, and found concomitantly with the Old Kingdom in Mesopotamia. In Lehner's (1997: 222) point of view, levers should be employed to lift the top 3% of the material of the superstructure. It is important to note that the top 4% of this material comprises 1⁄3 of the total height of the monument. In other words, in Lehner's view, levers should be employed to lift a small amount of material and a great deal of vertical height of the monument.”

>> I’m all for the use of levers, but I’ve got a problem with this theory: where are the traces of such levers? If we found Cedar wood royal boat buried still in good shape adjacent to the pyramids, so we should have also found at least some traces or fragments of the building equipment, including the wooden logs and the Shaduf levers. But nothing was found, nothing at all.

“In the milieu of levering methods, there are those that lift the block incrementally, as in repeatedly prying up alternating sides of the block and inserting a wooden or stone shims to gradually move the stone up one course; and there are other methods that use a larger lever to move the block up one course in one lifting procedure. Since the discussion of construction techniques to lift the blocks attempts to resolve a gap in the archaeological and historical record with a plausible functional explanation, the following examples by Isler, Keable, and Hussey-Pailos[29] list experimentally tested methods. Isler's method (1985, 1987) is an incremental method and, in the Nova experiment (1992), used wooden shims or cribbing. Isler[30] was able to lift a block up one tier in approximately one hour and 30 minutes. Peter Hodges's and Julian Keable's[31] method is similar to Isler's method and instead used small manufactured concrete blocks as shims, wooden pallets, and a pit where their experimental tests were performed. Keable was able to perform his method in approximately 2 minutes. Scott Hussey-Pailos's (2005) method[29] uses a simple levering device to lift a block up a course in one movement. This method was tested with materials of less strength than historical analogs (tested with materials weaker than those available in ancient Egypt), a factor of safety of 2, and lifted a 2500-pound block up one course in under a minute. This method is presented as a levering device to work complementary with Mark Lehner's idea of a combined ramp and levering techniques.”

>> I think this test should be redone and go further. I’m all for testing and experimenting, and please, do broadcast it so I can watch.

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