NationStates Jolt Archive

Urukagina was the ruler of the city Lagash in Sumer in the 24th century BC. This was a time in which the human mind was still in the dark. People had begun to domesticate animals and plants, and to settle down, but they hadn't yet had the chance to think all the things humans can think of.

This is difficult to follow, but many of the concepts that are the most basic to our thinking had to be developed then.

Urukagina is credited with being connected with the first time humans wrote down something called "Freedom":
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Amagi.png/180px-Amagi.png

His policies were essentially to let people in peace much moreso than was done before. Tax Collectors were called back, and humans were credited with having certain rights (among which the right to own property, by the way).

So my question to you is: Could it have been different? Is "Freedom" something that is genetically wired into us and would have been known anyways? Or is it really thanks to someone like Urukagina that we have such a concept as freedom at all?

If you look at chimpanzees you will see that sometimes one dominant chimp will call the shots and at other times the chimpanzees will be more cooperative. We could probably say that when the chimps aren't trying to boss each other around they have more "freedom."

Also, when you look at different groups of tribal people, although none have the freedom we have and the relative freedom of these groups is a judgement call, you can see that some groups are more authoritarian and others more cooperative.

So I think that we would still have a concept of "freedom" even without good old Urukangina. It would develop naturally when people try to cooperate without any one person having complete authority.

Oh... bad title for the thread... I only came in here because it reminded me of the pseudo sumerian god in Ghostbusters - Winston Zeddemore: Hey, wait a minute. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hold it. Now, are we actually gonna go before a federal judge, and tell him that some moldy Babylonian God is going to drop in on Central Park West, and start tearing up the city?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Sumerian, not Babylonian.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Yeah. Big difference.
Winston Zeddemore: No offense, guys, but I've gotta get my own lawyer.:D

But anyway, I realised what this post was about as soon as I saw the cuneiform. I've seen it once or twice before and haven't forgot it.

Whilst we are naturally free sometimes, I do not believe that the concept of freedom is natural, nor that the idea that we should be free is natural. So I think Urukagina is very important in the development of humanity. It is the first recorded instance that acknowledges that humans should not be coerced into doing things that are against their will. For instance, that they should not have to pay taxes, nor be levied into an army. It's definately very impressive for have been first thought of in 2400BC.

These records were only recently discovered right? I think rights discourse before Locke is very rare. But I'm not too sure on this. I think there is talk of free will and democracy, but not so much as to people having the right to follow their free will or to democracy.

Bump

Oh... bad title for the thread...
Quiet you!

I think it's a combination of things; freedom is probably somewhat hard-wired in to us as an evolutionary advantage that maximizes the efficiency of the distribution of resources and increases the ability of the group to respond to challenges, but that freedom is considerably limited because in a survival situation too much freedom could lead to a disadvantage rather than advantage.

Therefore some of it has to come from somewhere else; it seems social experiments fall in to the same group as philosophy or technology in that they very well may not be the most efficient or useful when they are developed but mature over time, and the resources spent pursuing them seem contrary to the notion of self-interest as a motivation for all decisions. If we look at human history, the trend overall has been towards a more representative and free society, but at the same time there are occasional hiccups in the process that actually reverse or prevent the development of more advanced methods, and sometimes a "less advanced" method might arise from another that came after it on the developmental path.

For example, fascism was in many ways a more "primitive" system in that it greatly reduced personal freedom and concentrated power in the hands of the state rather than in the hands of its citizens, which reduced economic, social, and political efficiency and stagnated technological and social progress which seem totally contrary to the natural drive of humanity to better its situation over time. Religious fundamentalism is a similar development, and it seems that these movements arise as a response to sudden shocks or changes rather than a trending pattern; if we look at history the strongest support for totalitarian and morally authoritarian rule came during times of hardship and war.

Given that human beings do react irrationally at times, it is perfectly logical that these interruptions would occur; irrational behavior does tend to lead to behavior that is not advantageous in the long term. However, I feel that freedom as a concept would have arisen regardless of exactly when and where because the pursuit of technology and social thought is virtually universal amongst societies capable of supporting a specialized workforce and society.

Pffft. Arthur was the King of Summer. Everyone knows that. Der :p

That symbol is and has been part of the ever changing collage that it my desktop for a few months now.

My opinion on the matter is that if the Sumerians hadn’t done it somebody else would have.

Is "Freedom" something that is genetically wired into us and would have been known anyways? Or is it really thanks to someone like Urukagina that we have such a concept as freedom at all?

cross-culturally we all seem to have tendencies that leads us to desire personal autonomy and more-or-less egalitarian social relations (or at least the desire not to be dominated or treated unfairly ourselves). before the wannabe god-kings threatened people until they paid tribute, our ancestors lived in much freer societies than anything that civilization even came up with until recently - and still better than most of the currently existing regimes.

Urukagina was the ruler of the city Lagash in Sumer in the 24th century BC. This was a time in which the human mind was still in the dark. People had begun to domesticate animals and plants, and to settle down, but they hadn't yet had the chance to think all the things humans can think of.

This is difficult to follow, but many of the concepts that are the most basic to our thinking had to be developed then.

Urukagina is credited with being connected with the first time humans wrote down something called "Freedom":
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Amagi.png/180px-Amagi.png

His policies were essentially to let people in peace much moreso than was done before. Tax Collectors were called back, and humans were credited with having certain rights (among which the right to own property, by the way).

So my question to you is: Could it have been different? Is "Freedom" something that is genetically wired into us and would have been known anyways? Or is it really thanks to someone like Urukagina that we have such a concept as freedom at all?


This was a time in which the human mind was still in the dark? That is complete rubbish. The human mind did evolve in a much larger time span, humans today are not significantly different from those 5000 years ago, they just have better means of transporting thoughts. You only think so because you know so little about that time and only a tiny fraction of information has been unearthed yet.

before the wannabe god-kings threatened people until they paid tribute, our ancestors lived in much freer societies than anything that civilization even came up with until recently - and still better than most of the currently existing regimes.
Yay Anarcho-Primitivism!

Considering that violence and ugliness are pretty much normal for humans in all forms of societies, whether they be modern-day America or pre-settler Aboriginals, and evidence regarding the ease of life in such times is generally more negative than positive, I think the infatuation with our "natural" way of living is fairly silly.

This was a time in which the human mind was still in the dark? That is complete rubbish.
What I was saying is that despite our mind being biologically the same, the concepts we use to get our thoughts and actions in order have to be thought of by someone first.
Before someone created in their head the concept of a higher being than ourselves, there could be no religion, no religious order of society, no god-king.
It's the same with the concept of freedom. First someone had to do the abstract thinking and create the concept, and only once that was done could the mind go on and develop further in that direction.

Also see Orwell's Newspeak in 1984. Same thing - if you eliminate the word/concept in your mind, a whole lot of ways of thinking fall away automatically.

As for means of transporting thoughts, I agree with you there. Which doesn't mean that the people of Sumer couldn't transfer their thoughts to each other and subsequent generations - they obviously had a language and an alphabet.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Amagi.png/180px-Amagi.png



Boy did they get that wrong!

That's an advertisement for Crazy Nunkgenak's House of Oxen.

Yay Anarcho-Primitivism!

Considering that violence and ugliness are pretty much normal for humans in all forms of societies, whether they be modern-day America or pre-settler Aboriginals, and evidence regarding the ease of life in such times is generally more negative than positive, I think the infatuation with our "natural" way of living is fairly silly.

i ain't no primmie, and it ain't my fault that civilization has been essentially a 10,000 year long nightmare that has only come round in the past 200 years or so to anything like a positive force in the world (and even then, mainly for the richest nations - large sections of the world are still just as fucked as ever).

the fact remains that individuals living in the 'band' and 'tribe' socieites we have data on had a good deal more personal autonomy than the vast majority of civilized people do now.

Erm, the Sumerians invented tax and a civil service bureaucracy which was paid a state wage with an official salary scale and everything, before "Freedom". I think that says even more about the fundamentals of humanity. :rolleyes:

Freedom isn't natural because oppression isn't natural, and the idea of "freedom" only comes about when there's something not to be oppressed by. By the same ticket, freedom is completely natural because it's the proper, unadulterated state of human beings.