Any Egyptologists confirm?

Ennigaldi-Nanna lived in the mid 6th c. BCE, she was the daughter of Nabonidus, last king of the Neo-Babylonian empire just before Cyrus steamrolled through the whole place. She was the high priestess of Ur - and the first museum curator in History. Her dad, like many other kings between Sumer and Babylon, went around rebuilding temples that were up to 1500 years old in his time, but he picked up more stuff to bring back home.

Ennigaldi-Nanna built herself a special room with shelves where she lined up objects that were dated between 1400 and 2000 BCE, having them cleaned and restored, and she placed clay tablets next to them to explain what they were, where they came from, who made them. In three languages. In a room open to the public.

It's believed that she was present on sites when those objects were picked up. Some of those were from Ur, the city of her temple - her position as high priestess in that temple had been abandonned for a few hundred years before her temple was restored (because her dad was a big fan of the Moon god Nanna and this was his main temple for over a thousand years), so she may have just needed to look around and pick a shovel and a good brush. Nabonidus is also considered "the first serious archaeologist", antiquarian and antique restorer.

Some of the artifacts from Sumer and Babylon that are most famous today, oldest and best preserved, come from that museum. We found a 2500 year old museum, and we put it in a museum.

Is Ennigalda any relation to Inagadda-Davida?
- No. That song name comes from one band member trying to say "In ~~a garden of life~~ the garden of Eden" while being ~~high~~ drunk as fuck. Then the name stuck.
  EDIT: thanks for the correction. While checking, I also saw that he was drunk, not high.
- Thanks, now I have a 17 minute song stuck in my head.
Did England put the museum-museum in a museum?
Thats amazing! Do you have any sources or papers on this temple? (I would love to share with my teacher friends!)
- Wikipedia is a good start
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennigaldi-Nanna%27s_museum
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennigaldi-Nanna
  Then the history of Ur in general is relevant. For instance, an item listed as part of the museum is a statue of Shulgi, who was king of Ur around 2100 BCE and rebuilt the very same temple to Nanna. One of his statues (statuette) served as foundation nail for the rebuilding of the temple - Sumerians rebuilding temples involved digging down to the foundation to find the original foundation marker, and starting over leaving a new foundation marker by the new king, and we know Shulgi used a statuette of himself for several temples he rebuilt (they all look the same but we found several across different temples). I don't know what specific Shulgi statue Ennigaldi had, but she might have had, for example, a foundation nail recovered when Nabonidus rebuilt the same temple in the same way.
  I don't know off the top of my head where to find a list longer than 3 entries for the items she had, unfortunately, I only find non-specific mentions of tablets, jewelry, carved statues, mace heads, kudurrus. Wikipedia only has a vague few items and says they're in a museum in Iraq, but Ur was one of the major cities and we have a lot of things from there in good condition. Including statues of Shulgi, and of course tablets and jewelry. Obviously the biggest problem is that a bunch of items landed in private collections for a while after Leonard Woolley dug up the museum, and the tablets that Ennigaldi wrote for them were separated from the items themselves, so we know from the display explanations what sort of items she had, but it's a lot harder to trace the exact items themselves - but we do have them between private collections and museums.
  I don't know any paper that specifically talks about the museum, beyond Woolley's original notes. A few books talk about it, but that's usually less academic (Wikipedia has some links). This article looks like a good write-up.
  In 1925, the Woolleys knew they were excavating a Sumerian site that existed in 500 BCE but Ennigaldi’s museum of much older artifacts filled in major historical gaps about an era that had no previous record.
  It's from back when they didn't know how old Sumer really was (the first major Mesopotamian cities were found when people in the late 19th c. were trying to prove that the Bible was real and was the beginning of time, instead they found Sumer and doubled the length of known civilized History), so imagine finding a museum that existed in a period you thought was the beginning of history, and that museum held pieces that were nearly as ancient to them as the museum was to you... In 3000 years, people believing Trump was the beginning of civilization will dig up the Penn Museum and the Louvre and oh boy.
  Another good link

I think its interesting that we are also very biased towards long lasting societies, because they leave more stuff for us to study, and literate ones, because they can tell us with their own words what events there were. We still dont have a complete picture of the battle of Cannae, one of the consequential in all of history, whose effects we are still living with. Writing was only invented 4500ish years ago, and humans are as a species are way way older.

Its fucked up to think about Catal Hayuk, or Utsie.

It's also interesting how short these time frames actually are. 2000 years are just 80 generations.
All but the most important bullet points of history from that time is wiped out.
And our intuitive understanding "how the past was" is just from maybe 4-5 generations ago.
The past is a vast place and we only ever scratch the very surface of it.
- No one even really knows what their great grandparents were like, unless they were famous or something. I have no idea who my great, great grandfather even was. It stops in 1872
- And now there is an overwhelming amount of information, as long as someone keeps rotating in fresh hard drives and replacing the dead ones

And then we have the Epic of Gilgamesh, a 6,000 year old story that reminisces about times long past.

I don't think it's that old.
... and Dinosaurs ruled the earth for about 165 million years and even that is only 3% of the time our planet has been around.
Modern man, including the writers of Gilgamesh, are but a fleeting speck on the history of life on this planet.
Times long past could be like your childhood...
- Touché

Also crazy is that the thing that brought down the Old Kingdom around 2180 BCE, after nearly a millennia in power, was a megadrought thanks to a climatic change. It took them about 140 years to reboot things into the Middle Kingdom.

I remember a Hardcore History episode where he talks about how in the time of the Assyrian empire, it was known even then that the world was ancient, filled with individual civilisations that saw themselves as the centre of the world and would marvel at the ignorance of being lumped in together with equally self-possessed civilisations by the historians who write of them only in passing with incomplete sources.

I might have a bit of that wrong, I just woke up and it's been almost a decade since I listened to it. But the part that stuck with me was the idea that even to people we see as deeply ancient, they too had an apprehension that human history is no spring chicken.

And yet, compared with the span of time claimed by the ages of the dinosaurs, humanity has barely existed long enough to clear its throat and introduce itself. And in that time we have been imperiled very often.

I was intrigued to hear that the Toba catastrophe hypothesis may be discredited. I enjoy the idea that 200,000 years ago we may have had as few as 10,000 individuals. It must have been a peaceful time...

Ah ty for the reminder, I'm surely a few episodes behind on Hardcore History. Also, <3 your name
- (⁠•⁠ө⁠•⁠)⁠♡

I've read that their governance was geared towards stability, not growth or disruption. It helps with keeping things going for a long time.

I've read that their governance was geared towards stability, not growth or disruption. It helps with keeping things going for a long time.
I'm confused. How could their leaders earn a big enough quarterly bonus to blow on cocaine?
Edit: This might be something modern government models could adapt and use, to everyone's benefit... If we can just crack the cocaine challenges with it.
I think I'm joking, except I can't stop thinking about how a universal basic cocaine subsidy might actually be what is needed to convince a bunch of problematic leaders to retire...
- I suspect it's unbridled psychopathic greed that's the problem.
- Cocaine is actually quite cheap to make...

The oldest recorded song in history starts with "in those ancient times". Tale of Gilgamesh IIRC

A few poems written in Sumerian times, around 2100 BCE, have this starting line or similar (in those far remote times, in those days when heaven and earth were created...). The instructions of Shuruppak, Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld (not actually part of the compiled Epic), Enki and Ninmah, the Flood part of the Gilgamesh Epic...
Myths always take place back a long time ago.
I wonder if they were referring to the protoindoeuropeans, who just slowly wandered the earth spreading their language
- No, those texts are about the time of the building of their own cities and civilization. The older big Sumerian cities are dated back between like 6000 and 3000 BCE (with Eridu around 5500 BCE). That's what the faraway days are.
  The instructions of Shuruppak, the oldest known example of that line, is dated about 2600 BCE give or take, and it's talking about the city of Shuruppak and a king teaching his son Ziusudra. Ziusudra is later named as the Flood survivor in the Gilgamesh texts starting 2100 BCE, and the Flood in question is believed to point to one particular flood that destroyed Shuruppak around 2900 BCE (it got better).
  The Sumerians of the Ur III period who wrote those texts (at least put them in writing from a probable older oral tradition) perfectly knew their civilization was old AF, more than a thousand years. The use of Ziusudra / Utnapishtim in the Flood narrative of Gilgamesh almost definitely points to the Instructions of Shuruppak, a text the later Sumerians and Babylonians also made copies of, being the specific "wisdom from the time before the Flood" that Gilgamesh brings back from meeting the guy. Like, they're saying Gilgamesh is the reason they all got copies of what Ziusudra's dad told him about how to make a city right - because Ziusudra repeated to Gilgamesh what his dad taught him (just before his city was wiped by the gods). It's also probably an explanation on why that specific line, "in those days, in those faraway days", is repeated in Gilgamesh, because it's in the Instructions. The "death of Gilgamesh" poem goes like this
  you reached Zi-ud-sura in his dwelling place. Having brought down to the Land the divine powers of Sumer, which at that time were forgotten forever, the orders, and the rituals
  And as a bonus, the Shuruppak flood would be around 2900, Gilgamesh would have lived around 2700, and the oldest copy of the Instructions is from around 2600, so even that timeline matches in their reconstruction if we imagine they figured that out correctly (or more realistically, Shuruppak was rebuilt after the flood destroyed it and that's when they wrote it themselves).
  Proto Indo Europeans have no connection to them, no genetic, geographical, or cultural connection. They are probably a bit later than the older Sumerian cities, even.
- Why would Akkadian or semite myths speak about a people that not only isn't theirs, but also unknown?
Oddly enough it was actually a mistranslated copy of Jerusalem as the rest of the stone said "walk upon England's mountain green"

Being in the same place doesn't make it the same civilisation. Cleopatra was more similar to the ancient Greeks than the ancient Egyptians

An unbroken span of time with the same name and identity makes it the same civilization. It isn't like countries stopped being themselves due to an industrial revolution.
- The ruling class in Egypt spoke Greek in Cleopatra's time
- That identity was gone by Cleopatra's time. By a couple of centuries.
  What actually doesn't change the numbers a lot. In fact, it changes them less than the rounding the OP did. But there were a couple of other deep changes like that.

Want yet another fun fact? All the most famous egyptian pyramids were built in a span of 100 years or so.

They blew their retirement savings and their heirs couldn't afford to build more!
- Pyramid building was serious society-stabilizing policy, not government-breaking waste.
Fashion is ephemeral by nature.

Yes. Ramses II's son "found in Thebes" (Khaemweset) was known and recorded for his passion in archeological study and restoration, and has been called the "first Egyptologist."

Confirm what, exactly?

Sumeria Jones.

What's his job during winter?
- College professor. 90% of all archeology is done in your local papyrus repository.

The people and/or sentient crabs that study us in thousands of years are going to have WAY crazier things to think about than how ancient the pyramids were to us.

And time, goes by so slowly. And time can do so much.

fuck

fuck