>>77985382
The game itself is kinda iffy, but the Obsidian game Tyranny is unique in terms of having a developed bronze age setting

>>77985434
Never heard of it, is it like it's own game system or is it like a D20 3rd party?

>>77985533
Its a mediocre videogame. Also I’d go Babylonian if I were you, it would be quite unique. Maybe during the rise of the Assyrians so that you have these savage people the players can be scared of.

Runequest bro

>>77986273
That game was so disappointing. It had set up some interesting stuff, and then never really uses any of it.

File: barleycorns.jpg (65 KB, 768x512)

65 KB JPG

>>77985382
If you want a bronze age scenario, remember this: money does not exist.

People trade and barter and give gifts to each other. Some items are better for trade than others like cloth, but if people are inclined to quantify value and wealth, they think in terms of food. Everyone's gotta eat after all and people will work for food. By extension can use food to get other things that you can use to pay people with.

>>77985382
I’ve been writing a late bronze age game for about two years (and brewing it in my head for like ten), I’m an amateur sumerologist who focuses on third millennium southern mesopotamia, but decided to base my game in ~1000 BC Levant to have a tighter focus, because 3000 BC Sumer is frankly too weird for people to easily wrap their heads around. Sumerian is my real passion but the textual record is too vast and the archaeology too spotty.

Games that already exist with bronze age settings:
Blood and Bronze
Runequest
Conan
Jackals (recent Osprey game)

They’re all fantasy and not historical games though, so you might also look at Warlords of Alexander and Zenobia

Honorable mention goes to Hillfolk, but it’s got a weird rules system and is setting-lite

>>77986435
Coinage doesn’t exist, but standards of exchange value (weight equivalencies of silver and barley) certainly do from the earliest historical period onwards, along with complex credit/debt systems

>>77987157
Okay, having done some reading over the years about Sumeria, and recently found some interesting documentaries on youtube that went into a lot I hadn't seen in print before, what are some of the "too weird" things?

Unrelated, although kind of related, I've had an idea for some years of writing a book (that takes the ancient astronaut idea) about one of the ancient Sumerian gods who was left behind when her people left, and in the modern day is stuck as an archeologist, trying to hunt down and dig up things that might get her home, starting with Noah's Ark. They have some really rich legends.

>>77987157
Anyways, my advice: Egypt in one of the later dynasties (or an interdynastic period!) would be easiest, there’s a TON of easily accessible information for it.
The Middle Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian periods also have a ridiculous amount of info, in sources that aren’t too obscure or difficult, but not as thoroughly digested as Egyptian historian has been.

I’d start with a city that has a well-documented large archive, like the Assyrian trade-district at Kanesh, and use that as an easy basis for a campaign.

>>77987229
Maybe weird isn’t the right way to put it, I just doubt any representation could really do it justice. There are a lot of aspects of their urban culture that might seem shockingly modern, and yet at the same time, 4th-3rd millennium Sumerian cities more closely resemble the earliest neolithic settlements (Like Çatalhöyuk or Megiddo) in many respects than they do anything we’re familiar with. The Sumerian worldview would be difficult to adequately convey without bastardizing it. Move even a few centuries down the line, say from Ur III to the Old Babylonian or Old Assyrian periods, and there’s a dramatic shift in culture (corresponding to the linguistic shift from Sumerian to Akkadian) and things become much more easily comprehensible

>>77987229
Which documentaries, btw? I don’t usually watch videos, information density is too low, but there are some good ones.
Historians are generally TERRIBLE at communicating information to the public, such that in some niche fields like this one there’s like a 50+ year lag between “current knowledge” and “pop culture integration/public dissemination”

The majority of modern assyriology info exists in hard-to-find compendiums of specialist conventions or collections of essays dedicated to the incrementally-expiring old seminal figures of the field; if you don’t have access to journals through a university library or know how to pirate research, you’re pretty much SOL

File: (Writings from the ancien(...).pdf (5.18 MB, PDF)

5.18 MB PDF

>>77987560
shit may as well post some pdfs for that matter

File: Tzvi Abusch - Riches Hidd(...).pdf (5.59 MB, PDF)

5.59 MB PDF

>>77987580

>>77985382
HAVE
YOU
HEARD
OF
A
INTERNET
SEARCH
ENGINE
?

File: (Ancient Magic and Divina(...).pdf (2.53 MB, PDF)

2.53 MB PDF

>>77987590
just whatever random crap I havr on hand under 8mb
sadly one of my favorite books, “The Administration of Economic Production in an Early Mesopotamian Town” by Wright is 8.4

>>77987580
That's pretty cool, anon. Thanks

File: 2018_The_Nude_at_the_Entr(...).pdf (2.58 MB, PDF)

2.58 MB PDF

>>77987625
rural production* rather

OP here. Thanks for all the tips and info guys, really do appreciate it.

>>77987229
>Noah’s Ark
ahem, you mean Utnapishtim’s, surely

>>77987560
Oooh it still pops up on youtube from time to time. Someone last year doing videos about the fall of civilisations.

God knows if this will work or be filtered or something, I don't paste enough links in 4chan to know :P

https://www youtube com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA

Sorry that took so long to post, dinner, and then watching a doco about lighthouse building which was supposed to be about Bell Rock but ended up being about Eddystone (and then at the end I dozed off and missed most of the end).

>>77987580
>>77987590
And woah, yes, very nice.

>>77987713
Yeah, although the dig is looking for Noah's Ark up on Ararat, and obviously find something, otherwise it would be a crap story.

>>77987493
Details pls, Stop teasing

File: b3aa2883ab997a75c6dfdbe79(...).jpg (96 KB, 1024x509)

96 KB JPG

>>77985382
This intrigues me, I'm currently working on a fantasy setting where civilization is just getting off the ground, the first city states are beginning to expand their territory, and the secrets of magic are being tapped for the first time. What are some good sources of information for me? What about advice, or ideas?

>>77988877
Alright, here’s an example, labor administration: Ur III cities were organized around temple-palace institutions; the state owned pretty much all the land and loaned it out to subsistence farmers to work, letting them live off it in exchange for a yearly tribute, operating under large teams of bureaucrats (most office titles are untranslated but include things like “Chief inspector of district canals, sub-inspectors, assistant canal inspectors”, etc.) There were ideally around 8 bureaucrats per team of plow-oxen. One guy’s job was just to inspect every single headwater divider in the district and report their conditions.
That sounds normal enough right, although some people might be surprised by the distribution methods (basically a universal welfare ration for everyone in amounts based on their ranks), but here’s the twist: The overwhelming majority of administrative texts are lists of workers who have “fled.” Like, ran away to join the nomadic hill and desert tribes, likely.
We’re talking thousands of lists keeping track of individual people, their kids and where they’re from, presumably so that the temples could return them to the right place if they were ever recaptured or came back of their own accord.

The state was constantly losing people to peripheral societies, and state power consisted of a perennial juggling act, balancing between “violently controlling people” and “providing them with luxuries and services” to keep them around. Honey and stick sorta deal (except not literally honey, you’d have better luck getting that among the nomads - beekeeping wasn’t introduced to Mesopotamia until the Middle Babylonian, when one Shamash-resh-usur, governor of Suhu and Mari, had bees brought from Anatolia and taught people to tend them)

>>77991958
The people’s relationship to/understanding of their gods was pretty weird too, scholars have wildly varying opinions about it but it was of central importance and would be hard to explain in a game format.
Also, people drank beer out of straws.

When you get deep into it, the Sumerian language isn’t even that well-understood: significabt disagreements exist about things like basic grammar, many words haven’t been translated and might never be, and comparing translations can give directly opposite interpretations.
The language reveals a lot of the real weirdness; literal translations get bizarre.

Anyways I’m prob just autistic but I think any game set in Sumer would either half to spend half its time explaining things, or gloss over stuff to the point that you may as well set it in an Akkadian civ instead

File: ishtar-by-selina-french1.jpg (39 KB, 425x600)

39 KB JPG

>>77985382
What should someone consider when making an original Bronze Age setting regarding religion and the gods, especially if the latter actually exist in-setting?

I know fertility goddesses are a must, from those ancient statues with exaggerated proportions, but what other deities should be included?

>>77993230
Mesopotamians did think their gods were living beings - their icons had daily rituals, ate, and traveled to meet their relatives on holidays

The types of gods should reflect the society. By the coast? Gods of fishermen, sailors, primal ocean, etc. Big irrigation works? Gods of canals, scribes and records. In the hills? Sun gods and war gods.

>>77991958
>>77992843


More please. Very interesting.

>>77985434
Tyranny started pretty strong. It only sucked because they pussied out with the ending, the combat wasn't great, but it wasn't worse than most crpgs, the magic system was also a pretty cool concept. There was a pretty solid core there.

>>77985382
Glorantha

>>77993514
random stuff: Sumerian word “to know” is literally “to set your ear on,” the sign for “water” also means “semen” and “life force,” and they had a myth that explains the Tigris and Euphrates rivers as the ejaculate of a god.

You know how in the bible, God divides the languages after the tower of Babel?
Sumerians had an inverted tradition of that; King Enmerkar was attributed with having “united all the tongues,” making everyone speak Sumerian, and he also allegedly invented clay-tablet writing: He was having a back-and-forth exchange with the lord of Aratta, and it got so lengthy that the messenger couldn’t remember the whole message “because his tongue was too heavy, he could not repeat it” so Enmerkar put the words on clay and sent the messenger with it to the lord of Aratta - who either could or couldn’t read it, depending on the translator (the text basically just says that when he received it “the words were nails; his brow darkened” which I figure is probably a word-play about the words looking like nails, being wedges, and striking the lord like nails in his displeasure).


Oh, and my favorite temple fact: the temple to the fish-god at Ur received sacrifices of fish (except manta rays, which were forbidden) and after doing the ritual, they apparently just tossed the carcass on the ground and left it there. They did this for centuries.
When excavated, the floor of the altar room was covered in a densely compacted layer of fish bones, fat and skin several inches deep, and was described as having a “golden sheen” from all the fish oil.

Honor is important.

>>77987297
Interdynastic egypt would be cool, if you tally it all up there were more years without pharaohs than with them, yet everyone only ever depicts egypt as an absolute monarchy

>>77995777
>floor of the altar room was covered in a densely compacted layer of fish bones, fat and skin several inches deep, and was described as having a “golden sheen” from all the fish oil.

revolting, imagine the stench

>>77999253
Almost as bad as your gf 's pussy

File: RamsesIIIvsSeaPeoples.jpg (112 KB, 628x321)

112 KB JPG

TFW you and a plucky band of adventurers drive off the Sea Peoples.

>>77985382
What is a good system for bronze age stuff?

>>77999416
Fuck yeah, that's going to be the campaign. Party having to journey across the deserts to find Artifacts to help fight off the Sea Peoples.

>>77999915
If you're doing artifacts like that, have the Sea Peoples try and summon Cthulhu or something equally horrible from the sea.

>>78000040
Not even that. I'm thinking about like ancient siege weapons to use against incoming ships. It's just a war, no elder god summonings.

File: a9bfcfc85f8c7b0931dd3e038(...).jpg (138 KB, 956x1482)

138 KB JPG

>>77985382
Should such a setting have a Gilgamesh analog? Also, how was he in Fate?

File: a49.jpg (76 KB, 680x459)

76 KB JPG

>>78003210
Of course we'd need a king of Uruk somewhere.

And for all the fault's Fate has with historical and mythological accuracy, Gilgamesh has ALWAYS been really accurate in anything he's in.

File: Mercator Traveller.pdf (554 KB, PDF)

554 KB PDF

>>77999486
Traveller, with pdf related.

>>77999416
>The manlet has ditched the bow and just started shoving them off the platform

Kek.

>>78004453
reject archery
return to s h o v e

File: 003921236.jfif.jpg (302 KB, 1280x960)

302 KB JPG

>>78003294
>Gilgamesh has ALWAYS been really accurate
Wut

>>78007287
Ok, minus the weeb design.

>>78007323
the weeb design is just the nip take on him being the perfect human being who looks great

the bigger issue with anime gilgamesh is that hes a bit fedora-tippy when he was the opposite in the source, also his characterization is a bit fucked (hes his asshole self despite enkidu already being dead and him already having done his journey/arc)

>>78007472
Gilgamesh was also in the first of the original Doctor Who novels after the end of the original TV series, with Ishtar being an alien posing as a deity and Enkidu being a Neanderthal, and Utnapishtim being an alien in a giant city ship out in the mountains. Was a pretty good read.

>>78003294
Why did they make him blonde, anyway? Seems weird given the location and time period.

>>77990971
Golden Bough is a good place to start when learning about magical beliefs.

File: blueeyessumer.jpg (50 KB, 690x332)

50 KB JPG

>>78008115
The ancient ruling classes of Mesopotamia were Indo-European Nordics

>>78008147
Okay, providing proof for claims like those is a given, but what's with the blue eyes?

>>78008115
Because gold, also because they wanted him to be sexy.

>>78008147
lol no they fucking weren’t, their name for themselves means “The Black-Headed Ones” and the only two tenable language group families they could be connected to are Munda (India/SE Asia) and Sino-Tibetan

>>78010865
Lapis lazuli was the most highly-regarded substance/color in Mesopotamia, due to its rarity and its celestial associations. There are also divine bulls with blue eyes and blue beards, and many of the gods are described as having lapis beards, eyes or skin

>>78008128
No it fucking is not, are you the jackass who keeps telling people to read Campbell too? The fuck is wrong with you, does real scholarship scare you or something?

>>78010982
referring to Sumerians ofc, those being Sumerian statues.
There were in fact Indo-European chariot-riding warrior nomads who took over parts of the western fertile crescent in the 2nd millennium, but the ruling classes of mesopotamia proper were initially Sumerians, then later Semites and near-neighbors of Semitic groups

File: 1485723004180.jpg (196 KB, 1280x960)

196 KB JPG

>>78010998
Oh, you have to re-educate yourself before it's too late.
Read Frazer and Campbell, and shake that sjw garbage out of your head.

>>78012754
>deliberately consuming fiction-tier garbage that hasn’t been taken seriously in nearly a century (or in Campbell’s case, ever) to own the libs

Campbell is a clown and Frazer made up most of his stuff. You’re filling your head with trash.

Here’s what Frazer himself had to say about The Golden Bough: “Books like mine, merely speculation, will be superseded sooner or later (the sooner the better) by better induction based on fuller knowledge.” In truth he was superseded before he even wrote it.
Gottfrey Lienhardt remarked that even in Frazer’s lifetime, social anthropologists distanced themselves from his theories, and that his influence was “literary rather than academic.”
Robert Ackerman called Frazer “an embarrassment to British social anthropology.”
Edmund Leach pointed out how Frazer deliberately altered ethnographic evidence to fit his pre-drawn conclusions.
Rene Girard called the book “a grave injustice to ethnology.”

Reading The Golden Bough to study comparative religion is counter-productive: you will come away knowing LESS than you did before because so much of it is just plain wrong or distorted.

The only worse shit you could possibly read is Campbell, or Grave’s “The White Goddess.”

I’m sorry that you’re an ignorant fuck but you should quit promoting this quackery.

The only reason to read any of those three (Frazer, Campbell or Graves) is to understand their influence on literature or to analyze the disproportionate role that bad pop-scholarship plays in shaping mass culture.

>>78014753
the only comparative mythologists worth reading are Levi-Strauss and Eliade, the whole field is a joke

>>78014923
Eliade was literally a fascist though

>>78010998
>>78014753
What would you recommend instead then?

>>78017835
saleonard.people.ysu.edu/mythknowing.html , the history of mythology essays on the lower left especially

>>77986435
Also ancient age had Ea-nasir, worst trader in history, and professional troll since it does seem that fucker collected the complaint letters of his clients

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir

>>77985434
A bit out of the scope of the thread, but i'd kill for a Mount and Blade mod set in bronze age Mesopotamia

>>78018369
shocked that doesn’t exist already
>>78018341
> it is considered to be the oldest known written complaint
It actually isn’t, that’s just a case of pop-history media hype. There are about 40,000 tablets of letters from private merchant archives in Kanesh that are a century or two older, and many are similar to that one.
I’m also about 90% sure that if I dig through the Sumerian corpus I could find one much older.
Still, that one’s a classic.

>>78018624
Why is journalist reporting on science and history so hideously bad? It’s almost a rule that if it’s in a popular media headline, it’s wrong.
There are a dozen articles proclaiming that to be the oldest customer service complaint, when they could’ve asked literally any cuneiform specialist and been told it’s just *an* old customer service complaint and is only one of thousands like it.
But they want sensational headlines for clicks, so fuck the truth, and now Ea-Nasir is a meme. Ah well, at least it gets people to read some history.

Have a link to more ancient mesopotamian letters:
https://oi.chicago.edu//research/publications/misc/letters-mesopotamia-official-business-and-private-letters-clay-tablets

Bump

Adding some inspirational listening

https://youtu.be/QUcTsFe1PVs

https://youtu.be/kd7qeP3R5vw

File: a88cb9ebedd8a9ceb79e3aea5(...).jpg (304 KB, 1920x901)

304 KB JPG

>>77985382
How was religion handled in these time periods? What were common practices, temple designs, etc.?

>>78023198
For the greeks I know each city had specific Deities they worshipped most, and a specific ASPECT of those gods.
Like how Aphrodite was considered a War God as well as the goddess of Love to the Spartans.

>>78024339
>Like how Aphrodite was considered a War God as well as the goddess of Love to the Spartans.
Really? That’s news to me. How did that manifest in their rituals, and why did they believe it?

>>77987653
>muh gender and queer theory
into the trash it goes.

>>78010865
They also gave them lapis lazuli nipples. So either they were blue eyed and blue nippled, pink eyed and pink nippled, or >>78010982

>>77971956

Check out the Runequest thread already up lad. Might be work looking at

>>77993230
>but what other deities should be included?
Dyeus Pater, God of the Chad pastoralist horsemen.

>>77987580
>>77987590
>>77987625
>>77987653
Yoinked for later reading.
>>77987602
AN*

>>78014753
What’s bad about Campbell then? I’m doing my re-read of masks of god ( I’m on volume 4 now) and I love it to bits. If it’s about the monomyth I don’t care. Masks of God is too fucking good, criminally under appreciated. Every time I see people criticize him it reads like they just read the sparknotes page for ‘Hero’s journey’ and invented a guy in their head to get mad at.

Yeah sure I can see how he might upset people in trying to create a comprehensive vision (wrt masks of god) , can’t make an omelette without cracking some eggs. But I find his overall vision to be true, and thought provoking. Also he writes in a wonderful way, he had a great grasp of English (and some foreign) lit. Criticisms of him read like they’re by salty anthropologists who want to stick to their highly specialized jigsaw piece of truth, without trying to build an overall pictures with it. I mean I’m echoing Campbells complaint about how academia was then. I’ve got a low opinion of academia too so I guess I vibe with it. Though granted you’ve at least recommended something else instead of ignoring people asking for alternatives.

File: Sacred_Ibis.jpg (55 KB, 650x434)

55 KB JPG

>>77985382
Just gonna dump two bits of stuff I recently learned about Ancient Egypt.

First, let`s say you had a question. Logically, you`re going to ask Thoth, the god of wisdom. But how to ensure he`s gonna answer? You sacrifice something to him. In Thoth`s case, that means mummifying an Ibis, which is his sacred animal. The Egyptians mummified literally millions of Ibises. That`s so freaking many that some consider that they likely had one or more sacred factory farms/aviaries, dedicated to breeding these birds. Such a location might include soldiers with trained baboons, a mummification complex, double as a temple with several statues and such, and, as it is dedicated to Thoth, have a library and scribes.

File: a7EL93L_700b.jpg (72 KB, 700x384)

72 KB JPG

>>78030315
Second, trained baboons. Another animal sacred to Thoth. Egyptians depicted tamed/trained baboons picking up fruits from trees. But the neat thing is using them as we use guard dogs today. Marketplaces, for example, would have watchmen which would unleash said baboons on thieves. And it might be worse than having dogs chasing you, because climbing anything won`t save you and they are quite clever and strong. Once it catches you, it will bite your arm or your leg until tits handlers arrive.

>>77999416
I read once that the Sea Peoples left a certain area alone, and that the locals worshipped Dagon. If we consider the Lovecraftian Mythos, that could mean that the Sea Peoples were Deep Ones?

If you encounter someone called Ea-nasir don't buy metal ingots from him.

>>78030478
>>78030315
Where did you learn these things? Do you have any other interesting facts?

>>77988448
Thanks for that link, anon. It was a pretty good documentary, or at least seemed so to a layman like myself.

>>77987580
>>77987590
>>77987625
>>77987653
And thank you for these. This is the kind of stuff I can't find in my local library.

>>78027783
It's really not what the titles says.

>>78027465
Aphrodite is very old, far older than the greeks.
Athene is another god far older than the greek people.
Hell, even Dionysus isn't originally greek.
The greeks took these gods, or aspects of them, for themselves from far older peoples.

File: AP_090313014020.jpg (505 KB, 1456x1860)

505 KB JPG

>>78014753
>>78017921
>saleonard.people.ysu.edu/mythknowing.html
Oh my God, how pedantic and uninformed this is.
"So, for example, Apollo, Helios, and Hephaestus represent the element fire, while Poseidon and Skamander represent water. Such abstract qualities as wisdom and desire were represented by Athena and Aphrodite, respectively."
kek
This is kindergarten-tier.
Each of these gods was a fully developed entity centuries before they were turned into some abstract Hellenistic concept by the late greek mythographers.
Jesus.
Study moar.

>>78035583
If the gods actually existed in-setting, how would they feel about it do you think?

>>78027783
jesus christ you’re dumb
>>78036103
and you’re either illiterate or deeply confused by your a priori notions

>>78035583
>>78027465
Aphrodite came from the west semitic Astarte/Ashtoreth cult complex which came from Ishtar, who was very much a war goddess and an emblem of divine paradox.
Note how they’re all assoc. with venus, the morning star and the evening star - it’s one entity that traverses the underworld and comes out the opposite side. Ishtar specifically was a complicated syncretization of several older goddesses, including ones of war and love.

She’s also very frequently linked to hermaphroditic or gender-flipping gods and cults, or conceived of as having two twin forms of each gender.

>>78029257
I read Hero of a Thousand Faces and Masks of God when I was a teen and liked them a lot, but upon revisiting them with better critical apparatus, they’re trash.
It’s not just a matter of ivory tower elitism, it’s that Campbell’s theories are fundamentally unsound because he came up with ideas he liked and THEN cherry-picked (and misrepresented) data to support it, which is the opposite of doing good research.
It’s ultimately just ideological pandering to a popular but misconceived cultural prejudice.

The whole premise of Campbell’s work, that there are universal themes underlying stories and myths, is almost certainly wrong and runs counter to pretty much the entire body of literature on cultural anthropology and mythography. Fucker basically killed mythography as an academic pursuit because he butchered it so badly no serious academic wanted to risk their careers associating themselves with it, which is a shame; it’s only recently started to recover through tangential interdisciplinary studies attacking it from different angles, like linguistic phylogeny (which is VERY cool work btw; one paper showed that “Jack and the Beanstalk” is a story structure that dated back to the late neolithic!)

Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy is like Campbell but better, if you want some casual old-school stuff to read

>>78029257
There are several approaches to comparative mythology; Campbell represents the “psychological” school, derived from Freud and Jung, and it’s been hugely unpopular with virtually all anthropologists and social historians.

The currently-favored methods are linguistic and structural, and those have largely branched into other fields, very few people specialize in this stuff anymore. you’re expected to either do statistical linguistics and leave the religious shit out of it, or do cultural anthropology and again, leave religion alone. Theologians unfortunately have their heads up their asses, so it’s become a neglected field, another casualty of academic modernity and institutional biases.

>>78023198
I have a compendium of every temple in the Ancient Near East, over a thousand of them iirc. Designs varied widely across the region, and many “temples” are being reinterpreted as other sorts of public buildings.

The ones that are easiest to casually study are probably the big ones with well-preserved ruins: stuff like Karnak and Dendara at Egypt, the Etemenanki at Babylon, the many temples of Uruk but especially the Eanna, and Chogha Zanbil in Iran.

>>78038618
Oh and Dur-Kurigalzu and the Great Ziggurat of Ur - that one’s especially interesting because it was rebuilt twice, two-thousand years apart in each case. First built around 2100 BC, then restored in the 6th century by Nabonidus, who claimed to have had a dream of the god telling him where to dig to find it, after which he excavated it in what may be the first formal archaeological dig (ALSO: See the associated Museum of Ennigaldi-Nanna, his daughter, who collected and displayed ancient artifacts including some dating back to the early third millennium in what’s likely the first real museum).
Then recently it was rebuilt AGAIN by Saddam Hussein in the 80s. Then the US bombed it in the Gulf War, and later used it as a tank depot during the invasion of Iraq.

File: 30149217-FE3E-43A9-82B2-5(...).jpg (251 KB, 800x1037)

251 KB JPG

>>78038714
I fucking love ziggurats

>>77985382
I wish you the best, I tried something similar and it failed due to players being uninterested and me a shit GM I guess.

>>78030315
My favorite ancient egyptian temple is the one at Faiyum, also known as “Crocodilopolis” to the greeks. It’s probably the oldest city in egypt, settled before agriculture in the epipaleolithic/early neolithic.
The city worshipped a tame crocodile lineage named Petsuchos, who wore gold jewelry and gems and lived in a pond at the temple.

Which remind me, the temple to the water-god Ea at Eridu, the E-Abzu, had a carp pond.

File: 02A42A23-7BC7-419A-BD1A-2(...).jpg (313 KB, 1024x1468)

313 KB JPG

>>78030315
I also LOVE how many animals the Egyptians tried to domesticate: Baboons, Hyenas, Crocodiles, Hippos, anything they could attempt to breed, they did.

>>78038867
cf. Shedet (old name of Faiyum), Sobek, another name of the crocodile god, and the temple of Kom Ombo

crossover post >>78039489
> The plague god Nergal was the tutelary deity of Cuthah and Mashkan-Shapir, and was worshipped at Dilbat, Isin, Larsa and Nippur.

>Aplu was a Hurrian plague god who was the protective deity of Wilusa.
Apollo-Smintheus was a plague god worshipped at Troy and Tenedos.

>The plague god Resheph or Rašap was the chief deity of Atanni, Gunu, Tunip and Shechem, also worshipped at Ebla and Ugarit.

>>78033653
I have many more books like those on another device (like, 27gb of books and papers) if I remember I’ll post some of the <8mb ones later

>>78038867
Damn, I regret having already run my "crocodile temple" dungeon. It had stuff like frenzied crocs going feral as they gathered under the feeding ledge without a meal for the nth day in a row and a special trough of drugged mud for wallowing but jewellery would have been great high risk treasure.

>>78038133
How would gods feel about a new society worshipping them, albeit 'wrongly'?
I suppose they'd be happy, and would try to rekindle their old ways.

>>78038456
>he came up with ideas he liked and THEN cherry-picked (and misrepresented) data to support it
Y-you have a source for that, I'm sure...you wouldn't just pull that out of your ass....

>>78039752
>drugged mud for wallowing
Nice, that’s very good.
There were a number of sedative drugs in use in ancient egypt: Opium, Sacred Blue Lily, cannabis, datura and mandrake

File: 1479523164933.gif (1.57 MB, 330x186)

1.57 MB GIF

>>78038552
>modern studies of myth avoid religion
>avoid religion
Huh, no wonder modern academics know so much about how myths work, then.

>>78040127
It’s part of a broader issue in academia: an allergy to “big picture” theories and tackling large overarching subjects.
The trend has been micro-everything for decades, probably because it’s safe to specialize, fits careerist incentives.

>>78040103
>Sacred Blue Lily
No shit, I had an abandoned floded noble's estate turned into a drug farm cultivating hallucinogenic lotus. What's the lowdown on the real drug?

>>78040348
Nymphaea caerulea, also known as Egyptian lotus, active constituent is aporphine, acts as a sedative, soporific and potential hallucinogen, candidate for the amnesiac drug consumed by the Lotophagi in the Odyssey, used as a perfume and medicinal drug in egypt
see also https://www.erowid.org/plants/lotus/lotus.shtml

>>78040440
also https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1079300

File: 83569438-28E9-4AE3-9671-A(...).jpg (66 KB, 1024x683)

66 KB JPG

>>78040440
also it’s pretty

>>78040440
Nice, I was drawing from those mythical sources, I guess I shouldn't so surprised those in turn derive from fact. Sure is nice to benefit from accidental historical accuracy. Helps draw contrast to wackier setting elements imo.

>>78038456
I appreciate the response, too tired after ff14 raiding for five hours holy fuck it was painful to respond now. When I’m awake and if I remember I’ll reply again tomorrow.

At my core though I do subscribe to the diffusion theory Campbell talks about. I don’t think he says ‘these myths and stories are the same because it’s some essential platonic truth that all humans know’ and it’s more ‘diffusion is fucking wild and you’d be surprised at the geographic range it can get to.’ He was right about the Polynesians reaching South America iirc, recent stuff has come out supporting that claim.

>>78040305
>safe to specialize, fits careerist incentives.
Holy shit, anon! You nailed it in one! Nice.

I mean, who would even think that a species with a common physiology and common survival needs would come up with common ideas and methods? Ridiculous!!
It makes much more sense to highlight the differences than to examine the similarities. And certainly people would only copy from others and would never come up with their own independent yet similar solutions.

>>78040721
>He was right about the Polynesians reaching South America iirc, recent stuff has come out supporting that claim.

yeah that is the case, definitely

>>78040305
I think it's also the fact that piecemeal/empirical approaches to truth have been yielding decent results where grand models tend to crumble more where a given component no longer holds. Definitely careerism at work and bridging efforts often aren't given the recognition they deserve.

>>78041231
Oh yeah, grand models almost all fail. On the other hand, important paradigm shifts only ever happen from big-picture interdisciplinary syntheses, often motivated by grand models that are bound to fail but provide impetus for exploration.

Most of the small-scall empirical approach is frivolous bean-counting.

File: ziggurat-of-ur-1200x799.jpg (211 KB, 1200x799)

211 KB JPG

>>77985382
Why were most Bronze Age civilizations obsessed with pyramids, and why did the Greeks escape that bug?

What would the Sumerian standard of beauty be?

>>78043044
Greece was too mountainous to have big centralised polities. Greece proper was literally never united until outside powers came along and tard-wrangled the Greeks into unity. The best the Greeks could do themselves was loose tributary/aliiance systems

>>78038297
>or conceived of as having two twin forms of each gender.
>we could've had femboy Aphrodite

>>78043902
That’s what Hermaphrodite is. The word for the intersex phenomenon “hermaphrodite” is Hermes + Aphrodite, after the intersex god[dess]. I’d post a picture of their statues but they’re all nsfw

>>78043044
It's an easy shape to build.

>>78043984
if its a classical statue Im pretty sure it falls under the definition of art and not porn so no banning

File: 2DBE2A08-69BB-4845-982B-8(...).jpg (298 KB, 1024x1810)

298 KB JPG

>>78043071
Luscious black hair if female, a thick curly well-oiled beard if male. They had curling irons, ranging from crude to very high-quality, and there were religious functionaries and deities associated with hairdressers, like Shara, Inanna’s personal attendant and hairdresser or barber (and a solar war deity of their city, KI.UR), and we know of court and temple offices of professional hairdressers as well. Besides being cut and curled, hair might be washed and oiled with various proto-soaps made out of soapwort and saltwort ashes combined with fats and aromatic tree resins and herbs (we have a whole botanical dictionary list with a subsection for “alkali-plants and soapworts,” they lived in a salty river delta so like most people who do, knew the cleaning power of halophytic plants, and left recipes for good pseudo-soaps, featuring juniper, mints and various other pleasing additive)
Coifs and dreads were very popular, as were hair adornments and jewelry.
This pic is some of the stuff from Puabi’s tomb at the “Royal cemeteries” of Ur.

>>78044150
By the way, you all reading this now all know more about Shara than almost anyone, that’s original research from yours truly but a certain fact in the corpus that I can prove, Shara is a war god who was the tutelary diety of KI.UR (a city that has been tenuously identified as a certain war-looted Tell in southern Iraq near Girsu) and was associated with the sun, replacing the later Sun God Utu in a small number of variant tablets of popular Sumerian myth texts, and being invoked as a an archery god who makes “arrows fly straight with sunbeams” in certain legends.
But they’ve previously not been noted by an Sumerologists, their wiki article is a sentence and they’ve only been recognized as a footnote in the analyses of Inanna’s Descent, where they appear as her hairdresser.

File: 99A80DE0-9983-4ABE-91FA-E(...).jpg (347 KB, 1024x1369)

347 KB JPG

>>78044227
and idk if you can can take Inanna/Ishtar as a standard of beauty necessarily but she was supposed to be beautiful and terrifying and sexy, this might be her, might be Ereshkigal her sister, might be a Lilu demon from her huluppu-tree story (a

>>78044150
Also, people wore perfume and burned a lot of incense, mostly imported, things like styrax, mastic, frankincense, myrh,

File: A36001F4-31BE-430B-BC07-2(...).jpg (287 KB, 1024x1536)

287 KB JPG

>>78044296
and various other resinous trees from the mediterannean coast, yemen, india and SE asia. most haven’t been identified yet, mastic only has been by me afaik, cannabis has been ID’ed as an Akkadian incense and perfume though (kunubbu in the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary), no archaeological surety on whether they smoked or ate it too or not though (whereas central asian nomads, indians and chinese were definitely smoking it by 3rd millennium bce)
sorry for bad post formatting, here’s an Inanna icon, 18th c. Larsa
Mastery of the two beasts is the potnia thera trope, attested all the way back into neolithic prehistory

File: 1E139A12-7C2D-4781-9F3E-B(...).jpg (81 KB, 238x600)

81 KB JPG

>>78044036
if you say so, here’s Aphroditus, aka Hermaphroditus. There are many others you can find searching those two names, some are quite good, I went with a cruder one because a few are kinda erotic imo

>>78044418
>I went with a cruder one because a few are kinda erotic imo
w-wow you weren't kidding

File: 2018_Weaving_Revolution_i(...).pdf (1.88 MB, PDF)

1.88 MB PDF

random drunk assyriology book and paper less than eight megabyte dump

File: Anatolian_seals_and_deiti(...).pdf (3.28 MB, PDF)

3.28 MB PDF

>>78044736

File: 9781589835962_OA.pdf (7 MB, PDF)

7 MB PDF

most the best ones are too big, this one might not be for everyone but it fits the size limit

>>78044227
Neat!
So, Shara has a superficial resemblance to Apollo - what else can you tell us about him, and any other possible connection to Apollo?

File: Ancient Land Law_ Mesopot(...).pdf (5.42 MB, PDF)

5.42 MB PDF

this one’s great

>>78044994
Mesopotamianon, what book(s) would you recommend to a neophyte as a general introduction to middle eastern bronze age civilizations and their history? I'm saving all your pdfs, but I find it weird to delve right into the particularity of Mesopotamian textile-making without having a better understanding of the whole thing first.

File: 8A7AE204-CC4A-4F3A-96C8-C(...).jpg (407 KB, 960x586)

407 KB JPG

>>78044993
Apollo is waaaaaay later than Šara, they disappear when Sumerian dies as a living language and gets replaced by Akkadian, there were many random local gods who got syncretized and standardized in the major state-formation periods, many of the sun gods got lumped together into Utu, who then turned into Semitic Shamash, then as Shamash and related trends travelled west they fragmented again in the levant and anatolia (being the junction of 3 or 4 major cultures it tended to mangle religions), and various deities were venerated as sons, daughters and aspects of the sun.
One of those may have been the Hittite/Hurrian god Aplu, later Apulianus, aka Apollo-Smintheus in hellenistic syncretism.

Utu/Shamash symbolism got appropriated as royal iconography for the Assyrian cult of kings under the god Assur, the flying sun or winged disc. Then Cyrus took it when he conquered Babylon, and Alexander adopted it when he in turn conquered Persia. It also influenced Judaic eschatology; the four archangels in early texts are explicitly borrowed from the Babylonian “four beasts of heaven,” sons of Shamash who carry his chariot across the sky. (like the sun chariot of... Helios I think? in greco-roman myth. idk i’m not a classicist).
Sky-god kings and chariots are a proto-indo-european trope incidentally
ancient aliens asshats think it’s a ufo thing

>>78045058
yeah no kidding. Um, the old intro classics are Samuel Noah Kramer’s “The Might that was Assyria,” and his “The Sumerians”. A modern casual read on Babylonia is Paul Kriwaczek’s “Babylon” may have spelled tjat wrong
A Leo Oppenheim and Thorkild Jacobsen’s books are my faves, highly readable

“Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia” by Karen Rhea Nemet Nejat is also excellemt. most libraries should have it, great easy read that covers everything in an interesting way.

>>78044994

Dude, you have to make a mega download or torrent or trove or something for this stuff so we can get the stuff over the 8mb limit.

As someone who has been blocked from his own amateur research in similar fields by academic gatekeeping good, solid, primary source or primary source commentaries are very difficult to come by outside of an academic context.
I've personally spent thousands of dollars to get a hold of english translations of ancient source texts (of all cultrues and time periods) and that's only because I'm a no-life dork who has a hard on for obscure fragmentary primary sources.
People who actually have lives and can't afford to purchase academic volumes of relief translations because, y'know, the kids need to eat, have very few ways to even know how to research and study these materials let alone acquire them.

Anything that can be done to put together packages of material to spread information freely, about all topics, is one of the foremost imperatives in our day and age where knowing the wrong things can get you labeled one of any number of kinds of social-heretic.

I'd do it myself but all my shit is hard-copy because I'm paranoid about electronic texts not being safe enough for long-term preservation.

>>78045250
i agree! access to info being so fucked by publishers is awful, that’s why i have a small library of pirated stuff. i made a torrent of part of my collection but i never got anyone to seed it afaik. I’ll look for it or make a new one and post it tomorrow, or maybe a mega if if i figure that out.
erstwhile, you can find SOOOO much stuff on (archive dot org), (libgen dot r s), and sci hub if you know what to look for. also (b hypen ok dot cc), when it’s up. textualized urls because asshole copyright lawyers have bots hunting this shit like fucking corpo vultures in a cynerpunk game, no bullshit

>>78044993
>Shara has a superficial resemblance to Apollo - what else can you tell us about him

Not much, but there are receipts for “fattened sheep” given to their temple at KI.AN annually during the Ur III dynasty in a text from a “sheep fattener” office record, there’s a list of people who fled the district farm of Girsu that includes a snake-charmer who worked at the temple of šara, and there was a type of priest in their temple whose title hasn’t been translated.

also ERRATA I got the name of their city wrong earlier, it’s KI.AN not KI.UR, i drank too much. it means “earth-sky” if you read it literally (though most place names use phonetic readings of signs, but we don’t know how to read that one except literally). It was probably what is now the mound of tell izbekh, but we might never know much more because the excavations were interrupted by war and the rest of the mound got dug up with backhoes by looters. might be a bit more to uncover in the extant text corpus, I still have more stuff to go through, there are a fucking stupid number of untranslated texts, and even most the translated ones are mainly in obscure collections with poor cataloguing and little interpretation or analysis

>>78040440
You can also put that stuff into wine to make it a real party pusher. I wanted to try that for a long time.

>>77985382
The Aryans (Proto Indo-Europeans) are massively underrated and have a very interesting culture. They're basically the first humans to domesticate horses. So think basically a bunch of blond-haired, blue eyed mongols 1000s of years before the mongols, riding horses and the very first charriots, expanding across the continent from the Caucus mountains, and conquering the ever-living fuck out of the Indus Valley Civilization.

Could make for a very interesting campaign imo.

They worship the Sky Father, whose Left eye is the Sun and his daughter, and Right eye is his son and the moon. His consorts are the earth mothers, which embody death, and the putrid swamps, but also soil and loam. And he's also got two other sons which are the horse-riding twin brothers. Their language is basically the proto form of 90% of the languages spoken around the world.

File: campbell 3.jpg (5.45 MB, 3024x4032)

5.45 MB JPG

>>78038456
OK I’m awake now so I’ll attempt a response

>because he came up with ideas he liked and THEN cherry-picked (and misrepresented) data to support it, which is the opposite of doing good research.

I won’t exactly argue against this, he absolutely has a bias to his idea of the development of western literature being an outgrowth of a very particular fusion of story-telling elements which progressed through to the Arthurian Romance. He is absolutely biased to it, but I think he makes a good argument for it. More important than that, I find his ideas beautiful, empowering and relevant to right now. Specifically that the fundamental problem of Myth and Religion is the constantly expanding horizons of the real world in contrast to the limited horizons of all historic Myth and Religion. Campbell tries to square this circle by seeing the development of Art (largely literature) as the modern outgrowth of ideas from Myth and Religion, the new prophets and spiritual guides are artists and authors not Popes, Prelates and Gurus.

>universal themes underlying stories and myths is almost certainly wrong

I find his argument in Masks of God to not be ‘all myths and religions have the same universal themes’ and more that Myth/Religion of all kinds have a desire to touch upon God (touch upon being a very loose phrase I’m using). There are other functions certainly, but at their core they seek to impart an experience of some fundamental nature to the participant, what that experience is varies according to the specific signs and systems of each people and culture. I understand this isn’t something you can prove with research though, it’s an experience that goes beyond truth, beyond time, beyond all else. ---

1/2

I've attached a passage from volume 3 I picked at random to illustrate how I like how Campbell shows the connections and links. I get he does it poetically and not like, in a workmanlike fashion, and I prefer him for it. He's a joy to read.

File: campbell 2.jpg (1.21 MB, 2259x1694)

1.21 MB JPG

>>78046905
--- Hence making it so difficult to get a grasp on and I can see that the people who lean too hard into it might end up cracked out new age cultists. Also Campbell makes a clear distinction however between West and East, where in the East it is intended that man can awaken to the God inside himself whereas in the West one must come to accord with a God that is largely separate from the created world (that’s a very simplified version of Campbell’s argument, which is already simplified but I find it very useful in pointing out that no, not every thing is the same).

As for Campbell’s general writing in Masks of God, I think he makes the links and connections between Myths and Religion ABUNDANTLY clear. Even if you think he’s using it as a biased means to his biased ends Masks of God is absolutely littered with the connections and under-currents, they don’t even have to be massive ones! I find his understanding of the links of Islamic love poetry, Celtic legends and the stories of the troubadours to be hugely interesting and valuable.
I’ve attached one of my favourite passages of Campbell as an image. Because I like it.

Now I don't want to seem ungrateful, I recognise I'm very parochial because yeah I've basically read Paglia and Campbell and not other stuff (granted their works are very large in scope... and just very large as books) so I do want to look into other perspectives when I'm done with my re-read. So ty for the suggestions and the other stuff posted in this thread.

>>78046936
also I realize having posted that image along with my post, Campbell does fall on the side of Christian Mysticism as being closer to an idea of an immanent God (a very powerful and beautiful idea imo), but throughout volumes 2 and 3 he makes the large difference between West and East clear, even if he thinks ultimately both approaches want that thing beyond limits, beyond temporality. And I agree with that, how can I not? How, after all the love and joy I've gained reading Campbell's work could I POSSIBLY reject that message? Comparative mythology has helped me appreciate life so much more. It helps me say YES to life.
I know this post is verging on masturbatory but it's why I get so upset when people reduce Campbell to a mere sparknotes page. Which you haven't done, to your credit.

That's all, thank you for your time.
I've attached one of my favorite segments of the PBS documenty Campbell did. It's schmaltzy as shit, late 80s/early 90s as fuck but the affirmation of life is something I find deeply moving and powerful. Campbell does not bullshit you on the sorrow of life, that all the great world cultures know and have transmitted to us, but he tries to show the path to awakening from it. Of living with and in it.
https://youtu.be/WV5LO146Q0I

File: campbell dual.jpg (5.09 MB, 3181x4749)

5.09 MB JPG

>>78040305
Campbell does actually point this out specficially with his heavy quotation of Spengler (who was writing in the early 20th century). Ok I've posted enough Campbell.


uuuhhhh Mesopotomians. I can post some Assyrian artifacts I took pictures of when the British Museum did an exhibition on Assyria. The exhibition fucking kicked ass, best thing I've seen at The British Museum.

File: bm2.jpg (1.15 MB, 1959x2612)

1.15 MB JPG

>>78047316
Lion Hunt

File: bm3.jpg (1.14 MB, 2612x1959)

1.14 MB JPG

>>78047330
They had a huuuuuge glass case of a bunch of writings, they were all roughly the size of your hand, bigger or smaller.

File: bm4.jpg (1.32 MB, 1959x2612)

1.32 MB JPG

>>78047347
the nimbus of light you see around the participants of the execution, that was from a projector that was projecting a nimbus of light around particular parts of the large wall friezes they had depicting war. They did this to show key moments and figures, while also projecting white text onto the frieze explaining what was going on. It was really great, an actual use of technology to better show off some artifacts, great exhibition.
Two more posts after this.

File: bm5.jpg (1.64 MB, 1959x2612)

1.64 MB JPG

>>78047373
More people getting owned.

File: bm6.jpg (1.04 MB, 1959x2612)

1.04 MB JPG

>>78047385
The lighting of the exhibits was stellar as well, so moody!
Ok that's enough. I've got a bit more I can dump if people want. I'm spamming the thread enough already, last posts in the hour were me.

>>77987157

Is Blood and Bronze good?

>>77993230

The big thing to keep in mind (which is not limited to the Bronze age, plenty of Iron age civilization had the same kind of pantheon) is that religion was entirely transactional for 99% of the people. Nobody cares about the fertility goddess's moral code or way of living, all they cared about was what the acceptable sacrifice was to ensure a good harvest and plenty of new calves for their herd.

This might be extra interesting in a setting where the gods do exist and are able/willing to communicate with the mortals. What to do when the god of the sea raises the tribute for a fishing ship to return home safely by 10%, again? especially when he sometimes gets bored and let's one capsize anyway? How do kings and emperors deal with the fact that the gods are effectively ruling part of their kingdos themselves, and are actually able to make decrees and levy taxes more effectively then them? do they even have kings or are the priesthoods of the different gods the de facto rulers of humankind?

>>78046246
>Their language is basically the proto form of 90% of the languages spoken around the world
more like 46% but that does make it the biggest family

File: slavepits-lite.pdf (1.66 MB, PDF)

1.66 MB PDF

>>78049131
it could probably be fun, it’s kinda old-school and campy

File: 0B8EA383-8849-4281-82AC-2(...).jpg (315 KB, 1280x960)

315 KB JPG

>>78047330
pretty jelly, Ashurbanipal’s lion hint is one of the best pieces of ancient art

>>78045728
Thanks anon!
You better get back to work, translator, so you can tell us more. Them tablets won't interpret themselves.

>>78046936
>because I like it
Anon, you have posted perhaps the best single page from Campbell - no wonder you like it!
Your chosen pic nails one of Campbell's main points: Myth and Religion are not a set of facts to be memorized and appreciated, they do not describe history - they are an experience that is intended to move/affect/change the experiencer; to merely read them is to miss the point.
Well done.

What period of human history would be something like the transition from prehistoric hunter gatherer tribes to proper city states? I'm going for a distant post apocalyptic setting.

>>78052946
Epipaleolithic/Mesolithic to early Neolithic

>>78052946
The agricultural revolution. In a post-apocalyptic context, it could be the rediscovery of agriculture with new crops that grow in the altered and presumably poisoned soil.

File: 5247d6b358ba9c7203f418dd1(...).jpg (76 KB, 736x860)

76 KB JPG

>>77985382
"Excuse me my grecian neighbor, but would you happen to be in the market for some amber? Me and my northern brothers would like to trade for some metals."

>>78053196
Earliest urban sites predate agriculture, and agricultural domestication wasn’t so much a revolution as it was a gradual shifting process.

>>78053164
>>78053196
How do you guys recon the societies should be organized. Only a few are making the transition towards city states? Also, isn't the neolithic still the stone age?

>>78053346
It is still a useful shorthand for a gameworld, and widespread urbanization and the rise of the city-state do not predate it.

>>78053347
> isn't the neolithic still the stone age?
Yes. The earliest high-density permanent settlements are from the late paleolithic (the “old stone age”) and the neolithic (“new stone age”) is characterized by the growth of large cities, towns and village complexes and the spread of agriculture.
Look up sites like Gobekli Tepe, Catal Hoyuk, Megiddo, Mehrgarh, etc

>>78053444
What period would be analagous the formation of cities like Sparta? Would iron weapons still be possible without the development of city states? What if materials from some monsters had the same properties as iron, would that be a non-incentive towards the formation and consolidation of such societies?

>>78053395
Yeah, I just think it’s funny we still use the term “neolitiic revolution” even in university classes and stuff despite knowing that the development of agriculture was neither neolithic nor a revolution. Just one of those things.

> and widespread urbanization and the rise of the city-state do not predate it.

That is true, those depended on grain-based ag.
The sites that predate agriculture aren’t even really “cities” per se, they were probably mostly ritual centers with only small permanent populations but large seasonal variations as people concentrated for ceremonies or festivals.

>>78053491
>Would iron weapons still be possible without the development of city states?

There’ve been a few nomadic societies with prominent metal-working, and the oldest iron implements are all meteoric iron. Predynastic egypt had some meteoric iron, and I think it was the inuit in historical times had a giant iron meteorite boulder which they chipped pieces off of to make tools - then it ended up in the Smithsonian

>>77985382
>So I've been thinking about running a campaign inna setting themed around early ancient Bronze Age civilizations
That's all you'll ever do you shitty no games ideas guy waste of space.

>>78053594
i see

>>78053347
>Only a few are making the transition towards city states?

Probably. Throughout the neolithic and the growth of cities and early kingdoms, the majority of people still lived as hunter/gatherers. Complex agrarian states were clustered around a few primary river valleys with favorable traits - The Nile, Tigris/Euphrates, Indus Valley, Yellow River, Oxus, etc.

>>78053533
That alone could make for a good hook for a post apocalypse settings: pre-collapse sites tended by priests that dispense some vital service or resource on a seasonal basis. You could even have that be the central axis of conflict; there are disciples of the old world that trust in the machines to deliver them to the world-that-was, who are nomads and scavengers and gather at those sites to receive their ancestral blessings, intermarry, and resolve inter-band matters; then there is the world-that-moved-on, and people who are building it back up from scratch in proto-city states.

>>78053680
Thing is, I'm setting this in such a way that the world has basically reset itself. The plot hook is interesting, I'd probably do something like "remnants of humanity are like the ghouls in Fallout. They're so in denial about everything that they strive to rebuild the world from before, getting in the way of the new, pure world that has formed".

>>78053680
There’s one early neolithic settlement that was entirely based around butchering, skinning, tanning and processing wild donkey hides.

And the oldest structure ever found was a “great house” built entirely out of mammoth bones on a mammoth kill site.

Settlements that have a core basis built around some resource or service are totally plausible. In the american southwest in prehistory, places with high-quality flint, chert and obsidian were often ritual centers.

>>77999416
>not playing a band of Sea People reavers, come to plunder the lands of the swarthy faggots with writing and tall hats

>>78054742
>playing a band of Sea People reavers
That sounds pretty cool actually.

>>78018816
Link doesn't work, but it does if you replace "chicago" with "uchicago".

>>78053594
>the inuit in historical times had a giant iron meteorite boulder which they chipped pieces off of to make tools - then it ended up in the Smithsonian
It's in New York, not the Smithsonian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_York_meteorite

>>77985382
Where were the proportions of those ancient fertility goddess statues so distorted anyway?

>>78044265
>Tfw fapped to this while reading inanna's descent into the underworld

>>78059621
>he doesn't know about Brosnansuripal, the ancient architect

File: 1605496305220-1.jpg (114 KB, 714x1095)

114 KB JPG

>>77985382
I suggest looking up nomadic traders, warriors, and herders from the Steppes. Also check out Bronze Age archaeology from Scandinavia like the lunar calendar found in Scania or the Balkakra ritual object.

>>78054742
>sailing forth from your ancestral homelands in the far north to raid and plunder
>enslaving the swarthy peoples of the dark jungles, vast deserts and grassland steps and trading them with the fairer races of the Far East for spices and silks
>establishing colonial settlements and trade routes and spreading language and knowledge to the swarthy peoples you have subjugated
>endless swashbuckling bloody adventures carried across the high seas
>sinister plots and seedy underworld dealings in the many unsavory ports of the world
Absolutely based my guy

File: 02010_Naval_battle_of_Del(...).jpg (1.45 MB, 1757x1165)

1.45 MB JPG

>>78053299
I like how Vikings having horns is a myth but the bronze age equivalent of vikings did have them.

>>78060725
>Vikings having horns is a myth
How did that myth get started anyway?

>>78061707
americans

>>78061707
victorian anglos

>>77986273
>>77986423
>>77994030
The combat is such a shitfest I couldn't make it more than about 20 mins into the game before quitting in annoyance.

>>78060510
Isn't it quite possible that Sea Peoples were desperate, starving refugees driven from their own lands by famine? That's a pretty different tone from swashbuckling high adventure.

>>78038618
Got a PDF?

>>78061707
Both descriptions trying to make them more demonic and possibly misentrepretation of ritual coifs that did have horns, and then taken as face value. The same way that was long believed that they drank from the skulls of their enemies, which in fact was a misinterpretation of a poetic way to say drinking horn (the branch of the skull)

>>78064183
The way the text describe them is from a position of strenght, not despair. They picked their targets and were fearsome warriors, things that you don´t expect from desperate refugees raiding to avoid starvation. On the other hand, a horde of famished plunderers curbstomping powerful empires and these in turn exaggerating their strenght to save face and then blowing out of proportion is really amusing.

>>77985382
Babylonia/Mesopotamia

Egypt and greece are overdone

File: hmmmmmm.jpg (131 KB, 820x699)

131 KB JPG

What do bronze age girls smell like?

>>78065483
Shit. Just like everything else that's old.

>>78065483
Dust, probably.

>>78043044
Once read it was the easiest natural shape for stones piled on top of one another to form, so they went with that.

Otherwise, aliens showed them how to do it, the gods showed them how to do it, aliens who were or pretended to be their gods showed them how to do it, or a lot of people came together and did something we still can't quite figure out for reasons that we will never know.

I do have something of a question. At some point, humanity started throwing up cities and organising socities. Sumer is the one I've always read of as being the first (at least as we would recognise a city-state type of deal, I guess. And there are older settled sites that show evidence of skin tents, mine workings, possible temple or other social gathering structures and the like, but there doesn't seem to be any in-between state. Everything I've read shows possibly nomadic most of the time, setting for a few months to do some unknown business (like Gobekli Tepe) and then moved on again until the same time the following year, if not being temporary structures that possibly moved with seasonal game and natural harvesting, and then suddenly there's massive permanent temples, huge administrative classes, organised religions that set up a good chunk of the myths we have today, organised armies, massed metalworking, ceramics, complex stoneworking engineering, where there seems to be no in-between point between the two states.

Where is that in-between point, where humans "suddenly" learnt how to build massive permanent structures at multiple sites around the world, seemingly around the same time.

Also, read once in an article on the potential for asteroids or comets ending a civilisation, the article mentioned there was at least one ancient civilisation wiped out by a comet. Short of this being a sideways reference to Sodom and Gomorrah, where the heck was this place? I've never found reference to it again, and it was a science magazine I read it in.

>>78066063
>suddenly
it took long ass time or trial and error
also since most people were nomadic if you were able to settle some where and it seemed to work then the word spread and people moved in at the same time if shit started to go south them people would just pick up their shit and leave

File: 27.jpg (201 KB, 724x1024)

201 KB JPG

>>77985382
>So I've been thinking about running a campaign inna setting themed around early ancient Bronze Age civilizations like Uruk, Egypt, and Mycenaean Greece. Is there a setting like this out there already I can use, or take inspiration from? And should I go for more of an Egyptian, Greecian, or Babylonian feel? Or all three for more options in character creation?
dont forget that early cities DIDNOT have streets to move around you had to either walk inside buildings or on top of them

>>78066063
>Where is that in-between point, where humans "suddenly" learnt how to build massive permanent structures at multiple sites around the world, seemingly around the same time.

This is very much an ongoing question, short answer is “no one really knows,” less short answer is that the “in between” state of the transition between “semi-sedentary hunter/gatherers” and “urbanized agrarian states” is a long gradual process of increasing social complexity, and that a lot of it’s nearly archaeologically invisible until the appearance of megalithic architecture or large housing complexes.
Long answer is several books and a bunch of papers

>>78066124
>if shit started to go south them people would just pick up their shit and leave
deserves emphasis. The history of early urban sites is one of frequent abandonment and resettlement.

>>78066141
hmm, makes me wonder, when did streets appear? Definitely by the Ubaid in Mesopotamia, but when did that start? I suppose it’d be after the shift in housing architecture from roof-entrances (like Catal hoyuk, see Taos pueblo for a modern reference) to doorways with lintels, but idk when that happened.
Fun fact, street-level in ancient cities gradually rose over time from the accumulation of detritus; people generally tossed their trash into the street like one big midden pile and it got compacted into the surface or occasionally covered over with dirt and rubble, leading to some houses having their doorways shrink overtime and needing to be rebuilt.

>>78066294
>hmm, makes me wonder, when did streets appear?
maybe when two groups of people stopped liking each other and did not wanted their hosing blocks touching each other

>>78049515
Do you have the rulebook for it? I kind of want to see what the classes are like. I was thinking of running a game where the big bad guys have worked out the secret of making iron and they need to learn it too or die since the tin mines are drying up

>>78066330
kek
now I wish it was true

>>78066940
>Eastern Wastes
>Mesopotamia
O I am laffin

>>78066940
>>78068391

You could say said map is by a biased party that hates the civilizations there.

>>78065276
What I've heard and read about them implies a migration forced by circumstances rather than a conquest by choice. I don't think the people defeated by ferocity born from desperation would be in the position to judge the motives and overall status of the Sea Peoples.

>On the other hand, a horde of famished plunderers curbstomping powerful empires and these in turn exaggerating their strenght to save face and then blowing out of proportion is really amusing.
I think that people with nothing to lose and everything to gain can be fearsome opponents even with no exaggeration involved.

>>77985382
Check out Babylon On Which Fame and Jubilation Are Bestowed

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/304978/Babylon-On-Which-Fame-and-Jubilation-Are-Bestowed-2nd-Edition

It’s like 300+ pages of super detailed historical setting info

>>78066141
the wewuzism is off the charts with that one

File: Blood & Bronze - Wonders (...).pdf (1.57 MB, PDF)

1.57 MB PDF

>>78066352
Yeah, but it’s just barely too big to post, check the trove

>>78064329
It’s “House Most High” by AR George

File: Babylon On Which Fame and(...).pdf (7.34 MB, PDF)

7.34 MB PDF

>>78069931
ooh this one looks excellent!
>2nd ed. has 29 more cities

>>78070111
like a graduate school course on Mesopotamia

Someone involved could read cuneiform, there’s a whole section on it

>>78070111
You can tell the people who made this are legit, because they on their blog they just bought Frayne and Stuckey’s “Handbook of Gods and Goddesses of the Ancient Near East,” and they lightly take a dig at Green and Black’s “Gods Demons and Symbols.”

I’ll go ahead and say it: Green&Black’s book is SHIT. It has no citations, little info, and contains multiple statements I consider to be errors. Basically useless for more than casual skimming.

Figure this would be a good place to ask, does anyone know the name of the rpg system that was designed with bronze / antiquity Greek or Mediterranean in mind? It was a class-less system if I recall.

>>78070300
>>78070111
this game literally has a better bibliography than some reference texts, I’m very impressed

>>78069082
Another theory I've read is that they might have been gangs/warrior groups from the hinterlands, rather than unknown foreigners, rebelling against sclerotic palace economies that couldn't project power far enough to squash them

Basically gamers rising up ca. 1000BC

>>78015943
So? Knowladge is knowladge.

>>78070960
“Knowledge” is a social construct mediated by ideology. Eliade’s approach to mythology and culture was heavily colored by his vocal and tangible support for fascist parties and ideology; he overgeneralized and stereotyped and engaged in antisemitism.

>>78039731
Do you have a mega or something with them mate? sounds like a treasure trove.

>>78070111
>>78070847
The 2nd ed dropped the fantasy races and the d20/OSR system, but has a lot of new stuff, like nomadic groups and diseases.

>>78071030
>Social construct.
How I hate that word, everything is a social construct, law love or maths.

>>78071030
Marxist poopytalk is a social construct mediated by ideology

>>78071278
>>78071338
Yes, obviously.

>>78071278
use whatever stupid terminology you want, if you think a fact is just a fact you’re fooling yourself, and if you think being a nazi doesn’t shit on your work and legacy then you’re wrong

>>78071408
Genghis Khan was a mass murdering rapist, but I'm guessing his knowledge of conducting conquest from horseback was still pretty on point. Turns out reality continues existing even when you put on the post modern ideology goggles.

>>78071408
A fact is a fact of course, what kind of stupid statement is that. Truth is truth, 2+2=4 etc.

>>78071408
>no one mentions nazis or anything related to them
>accuse anon of being nazi
Not sure if you're baiting or genuinely brainpoisoned.

>>78071716
The whole discussion is about Eliade, or did you just see nazis mentioned and jumped to the rescue?

>>78071495
>>78071511
Would you trust the Black Israelites take on a biblical history?

>>78071759
? What kind of lame ass comeback is that? If they have good proves and arguments I will hear them, if I find them bad, I will discard them.

>>78071495
Honestly the key difference between Chinggis Khan and other nomadic conquerers is that he understood what he didn´t know and had no repairs in using external counsel and specialists.

>>78071772
Eliade, and any racial supremacist will twist the facts to fit their ideology and worldview. How can you trust anyone's opinion on ethnography when their premise is "this race is inferior because I just don't like them"?

>>78071797
Again, facts are facts, if he arguments it well, I don't care who or what he is.

>>78071797
By cross-referencing their work just like I would everone else's, you absolute imbecile.

>>78071797
You're not white.

>>78015943
Yes, that's one of his better qualities.

>>78071797
Being a member of the Romanian Iron Guard wouldn't make him a racial supremacist but a traditionalist theocrat.

>>78071716
Eliade in 1939
>”Rather than a Romania again invaded by kikes, it would be better to have a German protectorate.”

also,
> Dumitru G. Danielopol, a fellow diplomat present in London during Eliade's stay in the city, later stated that the latter had identified himself as "a guiding light of [the Iron Guard] movement" and victim of Carol II's repression.[53] In October 1940, as the National Legionary State came into existence, the British Foreign Office blacklisted Mircea Eliade, alongside five other Romanians, due to his Iron Guard connections and suspicions that he was prepared to spy in favor of Nazi Germany.[78].

I’ve read a lot of his work, he was a talented writer and had good insight, but dude was 100% a pro-nazi fascist and that undeniably affected his interpretation of ethnography and mythology, including outright distortions w/regard to semitic religions.

/pol/ invasion, great, so much for a good thread. eat shit nazis pricks

>>78071924
Oh I get it, you're an uppity jew.

>>78071863
>You're not white.
Like every Bronze Age civilizations of note?

>>78071924
Fair enough. I'm not familiar myself.

>>78071941
you will never be a woman

>>78071961
? Sumerians and all those are caucasian, so depends of what you mean with white. They weren't nordic, if that's what you mean.

>>78071961
That's rather disingenuous when no extant ethnic group had undergone its modern ethnogensis at that point. Anyone claiming otherwise is just larping to maintain specific legitimacy, like the remaining "upper" caste Indians, rabbinate or newly reformed Chinese.

>>78071961
shhh, nazis don’t like being reminded what Europeans were like in prehistory, that’s why they tried so hard to appropriate central asian and north african accomplishments via “Aryanism” and Rome-fetishizing

>>78072020
You have issues dude.

>>78071973
Eliade is so clean he is still published by University of Chicago, where he taught the latter half of his life. His books always have a bit in the preface excusing his views as a young man as a product of his times. In my opinion, his ethnography is fair and evenhanded and his knowledge encyclopedic. The History of Religious Ideas is a great starter for anyone interested in the field.

>>78072033
Yes, I have an issue with braindead white supremacists raiding the games board

>>78071986
>>78072017
What's disingenuous is that every other thread on /pol/ is a debate on whether Mediterraneans or Slavs are white. The definition gets expanded whenever it fits your purpose.

>>78072048
I bet you'd try to cancel Dumezil you jewish faggot.

File: 1615597336782.jpg (77 KB, 512x512)

77 KB JPG

>>78071030
>>78071278
>>78071408
>>78071974
>>78071946
>>78071924
>>78071923
>>78071797
Can you guys take this diet reddit tier /pol/itics shit off my thread while I'm trying to take notes on Bronze age mythology and culture? I'm here for trying to make my fucking game, not to see you faggots act like catty ass old women.

>>78072048
I'm not raiding anything, I'm not the one chimping about Eliade.

Can we ignore this tankie and pol shitfest and talk about Mesopotamia and ancient Civs already...

>>78072060
Wow that must really hurt your feelings.

>>78072079
cope, seethe, dilate

>>78072083
Tell me about Egyptian priests. Why do they wear the masks?

>>78072103
I'm devastated knowing that no Bronze Age civilizations was white.

>>78072046
America harbored loads of nazis because America is and was a fascist stronghold. There are literal SS officers in Arlington, and the entire US rocketry program was staffed by nazi scientists. Being published by U Chicago has no fucking bearing on anything, plenty of fascist shit has come from university presses.

> In my opinion, his ethnography is fair and evenhanded

Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn’t.

>and his knowledge encyclopedic

dude’s dead, no point sucking his dick

>>78072122
To represent aspects of they god, I wager. Once you wear the mask you represent them in a way.

>>78072122
To hide to their shitskin population that they were in fact white.

>>78072142
>America harbored loads of nazis because America is and was a fascist stronghold.
You say this like it is a bad thing.

>>78072166
Oh it's shamanism

>>78072072
Was Dumezil a nazi? No, he wasn’t. In fact he was fired from his job by Vichy france for being opposed to nazism.
If you don’t want to get “canceled” maybe don’t be a nazi bitch.

>>78072183
In a way, lots of ancient traditions had "shamanist" like aspects like that.

File: bronze age D&D.jpg (103 KB, 1080x607)

103 KB JPG

Made a bronze age D&D setting once. There were two pantheons of gods seperated between the gods with human heads/animal bodies and the gods with animal heads/ human bodies.

And a race war between the red and black myrmidons (who were indistinguishable to everyone else)

>>78072209
Religion is just shamanism that went corporate, after all.

>come back to post my book/article collection
>thread is suddenly full of /pol/ shitstains
nope.jpg

>>78072224
The Menesian farmer looks super smug, I love it.

>>78072236
Shitty USA politics destroy everything, tankies and polacks ducking it out while atracting shitposters is a given in current year...

>>78072236
Time for Bronze age thread 2 baby.

>>78072249
he would be. Everyone is else is getting reamed by barbarians, internal strife and mystic catastrophes and he can just grill all day, no barbarians walkign around in PANTS and his Immortal godking has no one to internally strife with.

>>78072233
in a way, I would agree with you, but there so much stuff than we don't know than I'm not sure.

>>78072294
immeasurably based.

>>78072224
Races were:
Human (subraces: myrmidons and barbarians)
Nefilim
Golems (the older the golem the greater their rank. The oldest were primitive clay figures and the newest were intricate bronze and gold constructs)
Monkey (with a lanky and a thicc variant)

Always a bit tricky to come up with non-standard fantasy races.

>>78072209
>>78072233
The presence of imitation isn't enough for something to be proper shamanism.which, at least, as defined by Eliade (whose book on the subject is so long that I can't compress it down to 8mb easily), involves an ecstatic spiritual 'flight', either in actuality or through simulation, where the shaman rises through the ranks of the Heavens.
As for the development of shamans into priests, that's not actually supported by real data. In most Mediterranean religions, before priesthood was clarified into a single caste or group of magistrates, religious authority was held to be the father of an extended clan, who far from the marginal figure of the shaman, would be the very core of the society.

>>78072450
That's pretty cool, so the father/patriarch was the one conducting rites etc? Neat.

>>78072462
tankies and polacks btfo

>>78072479
is this thread done?

File: wpid-Photo-20141103030151.jpg (137 KB, 1018x763)

137 KB JPG

>>78072499
We can shitpost there fast and then migrate to the other.

*Ahem*
CHARIOOOOOOOOOOOOOTS.

>>78072499
There are still 21 posts left, no idea why he made a new one now.

File: 9bbcf175bf0b71637e7db01ec(...).jpg (125 KB, 736x630)

125 KB JPG

TRAMPLE THE PLEBS, CHARIOTS FOR EVER

File: god is dead.jpg (55 KB, 563x375)

55 KB JPG

>>78072597
THIS IS AN INDO EROPEAN THREAD NOW!

File: 9e52fba4c8055a72ffff812df(...).jpg (47 KB, 575x340)

47 KB JPG

A DONKEY IS FINE TOO

>>78072597
>>78072612
Faggot fucking pay-to-win bullshit.

File: FOUND BRONZE CHAR A 01.jpg (276 KB, 1600x1201)

276 KB JPG

>>78072633
I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUNDS OF MY MAGNIFICENT STEED TRAMPLING YOUR ASS.

>>78072621
Post PIE thesauruses and timestamp.

I BRING THE BLING, I BRING THE SPEED.

File: 57af2fee79ccf66d4d96dd72a(...).jpg (103 KB, 736x596)

103 KB JPG

I HEREBY DECLARE IF A TANKIE OR POLACK TRY TO DERAIL THE THREAD WE SHALL UNLEASH THE CHARIOTS OF WRATH

>>78072707
cringe shitskin redditor

File: SCRC18b_Scythed_Chariot_24027.jpg (198 KB, 1050x697)

198 KB JPG

*SCYTHING INTENSIFIES*

>>78046246
Sauce on them being blue eyed and blond haired? I thought it was the og europeans who had that.

>>78072224
Bretty cool, anon.

File: Chariot-Burgundy-and-gold-team.jpg (334 KB, 1097x702)

334 KB JPG

>>78072728
SILENCE PLEB

File: Persian War Chariot.jpg (87 KB, 567x391)

87 KB JPG

*TRAMPLES YOU TO DEATH*

>ctrl+f glorantha
>only one match with no replies to it
Wow, /tg/.

File: chariot WIP B 10.jpg (61 KB, 657x331)

61 KB JPG

>>78072829
WE ALREADY HAVE A GLORANTHA THREAD, THIS IS FOR A MORE GENERAL FLAVOR ONE.
WHEELS FOREVER.

>>78072633
“He who rides by chariot shall never be the friend of those who go by foot!” - Ancient Sanskrit saying, according to Elisee Reclus

>>78072450
Speaking of Shamanism, in the 2004 edition, a preface by his student and successor at U. of Chicago noted his tendency to overgeneralize, the absence of universal applicability of his theories, and the limitations of the era he worked in - lacking serious data about most of the world that’s now easily available, something I was thinking about mentioning in response to alleged “encyclopedic knowledge”

File: persian-war-chariots-char(...).jpg (144 KB, 900x592)

144 KB JPG

>>78072863

I NEVER WOULD BE FRIEND WITH A NO HORSE PEDESTRIAN, THAT'S FOR SURE.

>>78008147
How weird must you have been in the MENA when you had to call yourself the black-haired nation?

File: kurukshetra-war-DM86_l.jpg (117 KB, 750x563)

117 KB JPG

>>78072915
ONLY A HORSE COULD BE COMPARED TO A CHARIOTEER, AS IS ANOTHER GODLIKE WAY TO MOVE.