Which Kish?

I started a list of things I had read or heard about that sounded interesting. I consult that list for ideas for blogs. Sometimes my list entry is a helpful short paragraph; other entries are a phrase or just a word. This time, the entry was “Kish, Iran”.

I googled “Kish, Iran” and came up with Kish Island, a duty-free giant shopping mall on an island, according to Wikipedia. What? I must have misunderstood or mis-wrote, because I have extremely little interest in giant shopping malls, duty-free or otherwise. I read the history section, and it mentioned some ancient info about the island, but it was all summed up in a couple sentences, with lots of references to other articles, and it didn’t sound all that interesting.

What a bummer. What do I do, cross off that entry and pick another?

I opened google again, and put in “Kish”. What came up concerned an ancient city in what is now Iraq. I always seem to confuse Iran and Iraq. I decided to take look at what Wikipedia had on this Kish.

Around 4000 BC, the Sumerian people appeared in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates River in Mesopotamia (modern southern Iraq). They all shared the same culture and language, but they settled in about a dozen different places, which eventually became walled cities.

Kish was a city that came into existence around 3100 BC, sitting on the Euphrates River. The Sumerians as a whole developed a system of writing that was adopted by many other cultures. They also invented the wheel, the plow, law codes, literature and brewing. They placed their cities on rivers so that they could irrigate crops.

Although the Sumerian cities all shared a culture and language, they were constantly at war with each other, which explains why their cities were walled. The contained area was almost always dominated by a ziggurat – a tiered, pyramid-like temple. Individual houses were built either of bundles of marsh reeds or mud bricks. Sumerians traveled long distances to trade with other peoples. They may have reached as far as Afghanistan and Ethiopia.

Kish was the first city to have kings after the deluge, according to the ancient Sumerian kings list. It had several dynasties. Two leaders from the 2nd dynasty, Enmebaragesi and his son, Aga of Kish, are said to be contemporaries of Gilgamesh of Uruk.

The third dynasty had an unusual beginning; the new king was Kubau, a female who had previously been a tavern keeper. She came to power at about 2500 BC. At some point, she was deified. The fourth dynasty consisted of Kubau’s (male) descendants.

Early in the 2^nd millennium BC, Sumer was invaded by the Amorites and Babylonians. The culture did not survive this invasion. By 1750 BC, their history, culture, language were all forgotten. Eventually, Kish was abandoned and also forgotten. Just like the people who had been living in this area when the Sumers arrived.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_(Sumer)

http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/9-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-ancient-sumerians

A Rose by Any Other Name...

We’re all aware that language evolves, right?

Somewhere in school - probably in an English class - the teacher gave us a glimpse at that evolution. Language in Europe and Asia started from an unknown Indo-European language that split into other languages, including Germanic and Latin. Latin developed into French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. That was all we heard about the ‘Romance Languages’.

That teacher spent much more time on the Germanic tongue. I remember she mentioned High German and Low German, though I don’t remember what the difference was. As I remember it, the Low German used in the British Isles became Old English, then Middle English, and eventually, something that resembled the English we speak today. To emphasize how much the English language had changed, she had us students read The Canterbury Tales - in the original (Old? Middle? I don’t remember).

It seemed hopeless, but I tried. If I was lucky, I might have seen 1 word out of 10 that possibly bore some semblance to a modern word, although the meaning had probably changed. Our ‘reading’ of the Tales was more of her translating to us.

This past week, I read an article that asserted that at least 23 words had traveled down through the various versions of language relatively unchanged for the past 15,000 years. I read the article twice to be sure I understood what they were saying: A core vocabulary has remained fairly unchanged from the original Indo-European, and sound remarkably similar in the various regional languages in that area today.

This list includes thou (you), I, not, that, we, who, man, mother, and hand. These are words that would have been used all the time, no matter what time period a person lived in. But as cave-dwellers became farmers, they would have needed new words to describe the soil, the plants and what they were doing with them. And so on until man’s vocabulary became full of ebooks, cyberspace and so on.

A few words that appeared on this basic vocabulary list did surprise the researchers, and one was bark (of a tree). It’s not a word we use incredibly often today, and those not constantly used are the ones that change. Anthropologists explained that 10-15,000 years ago, tree bark would have been extremely important; people would have talked about it all the time.

So, words change over time. It makes me wonder what a rose would have been called way back when. Maybe some sound combination that roughly translates into “pretty thing that stings”?