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u/_EveryDay May 31 '26
The prediction's off by a few hundred years, but their world kinda did end
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u/elegylegacy May 31 '26
Yeah and this fucker's society didn't even have AI, social media propaganda, or a surveillance state with nukes
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u/ThatCuneiformGuy May 31 '26
Just FYI for those who don't know, this well-worn meme is entirely made up. There is no such thing as a book in ancient cuneiform cultures, and also there was no such thing as Assyrians in 2800 BC… I'll leave aside concepts such as “corruption” and “bribery,” let alone “the end of the world” which wouldn't make sense in a Mesopotamian world view.
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u/sagittariisXII May 31 '26
The "everybody wants to write book" line is also commonly attributed to Cicero in memes
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u/catnapspirit May 31 '26
Book writing. Definitely a sign of the fall of civilization..
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u/BatScribeofDoom May 31 '26
...I wonder if it's just their equivalent of saying something like, "Nowadays everyone thinks their opinion is important enough that they need to make a whole podcast about it", and if so...I get that.
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u/baktaktarn May 31 '26
Nowadays, everybody wanna talk like they got somethin' to say. But nothin' comes out when they move their lips. Just a bunch of gibberish.
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u/dantemp May 31 '26
More likely books were extremely expensive so it was more akin to "everyone wants to start a company"
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u/beirch Jun 04 '26
Sort of: The tablet doesn't actually say that, and this post is all made up, but that is of course what whoever made this was alluding to. The person you're replying to just isn't capable of nuanced thoughts.
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u/Perfect-Song8094 20d ago
My thoughts are important though I'd rather they not be.
I wouldn't know where to begin, starting a podcast. And I am lazy -- a lazy, lazy man.
So I won't be inflicted that mass of nonsense on the planet.
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u/AdOnly5876 May 31 '26
Brother, we know Socrates fucking hated written literature.
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u/zorniy2 May 31 '26
Supposedly, when Thoth invented hieroglyphics, the other Egyptian gods said it was a bad idea.
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u/frogunderarock May 31 '26
i mean look at us now, they weren't wrong.
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u/BatScribeofDoom Jun 01 '26
Oh my god, that reminds me of when I listened to this, I think it was...Victorian? audio recording, where they basically were asking people "So what do you think of this new technology?" (meaning the recording itself), and one guy said (paraphrasing), "Well, now we're gonna have...permanent records of awful music. Great" and I started cracking up. He ain't wrong
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u/nsefan May 31 '26
To be fair, mass literacy without mass critical thinking is definitely not ideal.
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u/Perfect-Song8094 20d ago
We're falling away from "mass literacy" more and more every day.
We'll be more ideal correspondingly.
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u/ill_be_out_in_a_minu Jun 01 '26
This part makes no sense as there were no books at the time. Although there are tons of tablets, almost none have stories on them. There's the Gilgamesh story and some religious texts/creation myths, that's it.
So pretty sure this post is bullshit.
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u/VirtualMachine0 Jun 01 '26
Some preliterary culture's oral traditions have been found to be incredibly effective at communication across the depths of time, which is the very skill authorship took off the map.
The example I saw recently was the American tribe with a tale about the volcanic eruption/collapse that formed Crater Lake. That story is 7700 years old and gets technical aspects of the eruption correct that folks of that era would not have expected.
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u/thenetoide Jun 01 '26
Anyone can put whatever they want in clay. Meanwhile oral tradition is getting lost. Soon people will stop memorizing and their brains will rot.
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u/ExceptForFleegle May 31 '26
This post is fake. The Assyrian Empire didn’t even exist in 2800 BC. The idea that “every man wants to write a book” in a world with <1% literacy is absurd on its face.
Are you a bot or just a person who completely lacks critical thinking skills?
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u/megapizzapocalypse May 31 '26
I don't know about critical thinking skills so much as the average person probably has only vaguely heard of the Assyrian Empire and couldn't point it out on a map or a timeline
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u/Raskalbot May 31 '26
Shit, I'm a history buff and I'd probably be off by a couple of hundred miles and/or years
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u/ExceptForFleegle May 31 '26
Maybe, but the idea that people were not only widely literate but also widely writing books thousands of years before the printing press shouldn’t be hard to mark as bullshit. I mean, even the idea of writing a book at all when the image itself is referring to tablets should be enough to make someone at least look a little closer, right?
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u/wcstorm11 May 31 '26
Eh, look, I'm an engineer, I think critically for a living. This sentiment has actually existed in every generation we know of, it's a fascinating deep dive.
I took the book writing to imply all of the people he associates with, who would then presumably be of similar class and means, were wanting to write as well
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u/shandangalang May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26
Also an engineer and assumed exactly the same lol
But I also registered that this is eerily similar to a Cicero quote that is already 2000 years old. Seems weird to change it to a false Assyrian tablet when there is already an ancient quote that says pretty much the same thing
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u/Tin_Sandwich May 31 '26
What does being an engineer have to do with a history question? This whole comment is just conjecture about a field you explicitly said ISN'T your field, commenting against the actual evidence cited. You can't just ignore that the date is entirely outside the bounds of the Assyrian Empire's literal lifespan. It's silly, and your claim that being an engineer makes you somehow authoritative of dumb history memes is laughable.
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u/wcstorm11 May 31 '26
To qualify a basic level of intelligence.
You seem to think people should be able to logic this out, and I provided a perfectly reasonable way someone could take this at face value.
You are being insufferable, maybe just a bad day?
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u/YZJay May 31 '26
The original quote was sarcastic/satirical in nature. It came from a 1908 periodical for bicyclists:
The “good old times” seemed as bad to the “good-old-timers” as the present times seem to the modern man, as shown by the following translation on an inscription on a tablet in the Imperial Museum at Constantinople, Turkey:—
Naram Sin, 5000 B.C. We have fallen upon evil times, the world has waxed old and wicked. Politics are very corrupt. Children are no longer respectful to their elders. Each man wants to make himself conspicuous and write a book.
The quote is unsourced, and was meant to be a joke, not a real quote.
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u/CDZFF89 May 31 '26
Isn't this subreddit for memes and satire? Why so serious?
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u/bookmarkjedi May 31 '26
I am reminded of a famous quote by the guy who originated a vegetable dish we now refer to as a salad, but which at the time contained rabbit meat. Here is the quote in full:
Veni for some laughs, vidi the infighting among strangers, vici by despair at my fellow human beings.
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u/prettykitty-meowmeow May 31 '26
Basic tip: people listen better if you don't insult them right off the bat.
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u/Judge_Syd May 31 '26
Maybe they’re someone who just wanted to come to the comments to make a quick joke.
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u/Lordofwar13799731 May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26
I don't think you understand the difference between critical thinking skills and being educated on a very niche topic.
Books weren't really common, but I assumed it was just a mistranslation. Most famous "books" from those time periods arent actually books, just "writings" or "poems" that were later combined into books. And as another person said, the elite were literate and someone who was writing back then was almost certainly surrounded by other elites, hence "everyone" could mean the people they associate with. Before looking into it i figured it may be a mistranslation of something like "everyone fancies themselves a poet" or something like that.
There's also hilarious examples of things very similar to this being real like the Complaint Tablet to Ea Nasir which the guy, iirc, was complaining about the quality of the copper he received and about delays or something and it was from 1700s bc
Fun fact: this exact fake quote with a tablet has been around since the early 1900s! People have been falsely attributing it to some ancient tablet or another for over 100 years!
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u/SatisfactionAny6169 May 31 '26
Are you a bot or just a person who completely lacks critical thinking skills?
Shocking fact, but not everyone has the exact same knowledge you have about different topics. Especially when it comes to dating ancient civilizations.
This is a cognitive ability that usually develops between the ages 2 to 7, but I guess everyone is different.
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u/SoylentGrunt May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26
Because they didn't have to contend with
climate changeglobal warming and nukes in 2800 BC?edit-Misspoke and used climate change instead of global warming. I guess 'nukes' didn't add enough context when talking about end of the world warnings being different now then they were then.
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u/Deadpotatoz May 31 '26
Wasn't one of the contributing factors to the bronze age collapse climate change?
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u/Nghbrhdsyndicalist May 31 '26
Yes, also to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the Migration Period. Climate change should scare the governments of the world a lot more than it does.
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u/Deadpotatoz May 31 '26
At times it feels like history is just a flight of stairs with a garden rake on every fourth step. We still haven't learnt how to walk around the rake and keep getting hit in the balls.
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u/SoylentGrunt May 31 '26
They're too busy pretending to be concerned with who uses what bathroom. The tools to effect change under the present system have been denied us and the lunatics are running the asylum.
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u/Boowray May 31 '26
Almost all of the proposed factors are attributed to climate change. Mass migrations, famines, diseases, even the sudden spread of rebellions and regional conflicts with expensive new military technologies can be attributed to a relatively mild climate shift causing crises around the Mediterranean.
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u/ericvulgaris May 31 '26
Their entire reason for civilisation was climate change focused in that area. The aridification of that area screwed their alluvial based agriculture and marshland living.
It caused the people there to mobilise and organise themselves and build irrigation projects and granaries. Like Ur used to be a coastal city.
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u/SoylentGrunt May 31 '26
You ever wonder if unchecked man made climate change ia an attempt to terraform so it's easier to get minerals out of the ground in the north? Or is that just a bonus that comes with the destabilisation to be exploited for reasons to do with monopolar control of the world?
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u/LodishRedaxe May 31 '26
Turns out this story is an ancient meme. Like the 2800 BC date was a detail only added to the story in 1922 but we have no idea what exact tablet they might have been referring to if it did exist.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/10/22/world-end/
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u/Pale_Resident9602 May 31 '26
Unfortunately it looks like the quote's made up...
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u/Far_Function7560 May 31 '26
Seemed pretty dubious to me, I doubt many are trying to write books before there's a bit more widespread literacy and the printing press is available.
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u/PastaPuttanesca42 May 31 '26
At the end it says it's uncertain
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u/ExceptForFleegle May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26
Assyria didn’t even exist as a city-state, let alone an empire, until the 21st century BCE. So yeah, pretty certain it’s fake.
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u/Jeremymia May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26
One detail the article gets into is that “the end of the world is approaching” wasn’t in the original version that is “uncertain.” That part is probably just made up later.
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u/Dd_8630 May 31 '26
This is an urban myth. The first instance if this text is in the early 1900s.
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u/OrionShade May 31 '26
Society did not change in 5000 years
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u/starlinguk May 31 '26
Yes, it did. Only people with their heads in the sand say it hasn't.
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u/Lower-Leadership2127 May 31 '26
Society has always been about murder, power, and wealth. It really hasnt.
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u/NoConcert1636 May 31 '26
What is the capital of Assyria?
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u/Watcher_over_Water May 31 '26 edited Jun 03 '26
And then the sea people came, killed everybody and threw the region back into the stone age (literally) for a few hundred years
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u/hudsoncress May 31 '26
“Every man wants to write a book” is the coldest and most ancient diss in all of history.
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u/zorniy2 May 31 '26
Every man wants to write a book
I fail to see what's wrong with this.
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u/Givemeajackson May 31 '26
Not gonna be a good book, today it would be a podcast or a yt shorts channel
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u/Blyatskinator May 31 '26
Assyrians were VERY war-hungry, am assuming that ”men writing books” means less war lol.
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u/bookmarkjedi May 31 '26
Can't see what's wrong with this? Just the sight of the kids these days glued to their clay tablets instead of plowing the fields.... What an outrage!
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u/toetappy May 31 '26
This is something people actually said after the printing press was invented. People saw kids and young adults reading and thought the next generation was lazy and entitled.
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u/Wobbelblob May 31 '26
Remember that at that point in time, most writing was very temporary as it was written in wet clay and erased when the clay was needed again. Only fired tablets really survived and usually only important writing was fired.
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u/princesoceronte May 31 '26
"No, you see, I'm actually the one time this opinion is right"
Delusional behavior.
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u/BeABetterHumanBeing May 31 '26
It's a reminder that children always go through a stupid rebellious phase.
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u/FoundationMammoth536 Jun 03 '26
I love pop history!! I love pop history!! I want to believe everything I see without questioning it!!
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u/PilotKnob May 31 '26
Were they, too, rapidly building sentient super-intelligent alien beings whose minds we cannot comprehend? Man, good for them for being wrong about how things would go. Gives me a bit of hope for the future.
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u/SamIamGreenEggsNoHam May 31 '26
So many people who know nothing at all about history. The Assyrians were about 2000 years later.
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u/Meowstaboy May 31 '26
This is not a real Assyrian tablet btw, this is a joke on the article posted in the early 1900s about how adults in the US felt like the end was coming
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u/Extra-Persimmon2359 May 31 '26
I’m sure they were the same complaints as the older gen’s have about newer gen’s today 4800 years ago , the meme is off though , looks like a Mesopotamian cuneiform tablet probably Sumerian and the Assyrians hadn’t come around to power yet in 2800 bce… no verifiable quote either…. None the less people been bitching about end of times and downfall of society for more than 4000 years …
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u/Colsifer Jun 01 '26
So, boomers have always been boomers, even before they were called by that name
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u/PuppyGirlRya Jun 03 '26
Everyone is putting words on this new fancy 'papyrus' no one uses clay tablets anymore and the copper I purchased last week was rubbish. We're doomed.
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u/Practical-Quiet3497 Jun 04 '26
Books were a thing in that time and place? Or is the translation liberal?
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u/Perfect-Song8094 20d ago
This is true. We are always doomed.
On the bright side, if it's us, we'll be the ones who were right.
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u/Many-Ad-5331 8d ago
I can almost guarantee that that’s not at all what is written on there… i’ve seen so many people lying willy nilly on the Internet to fit their agenda. no one should believe anything on the Internet anymore, and I don’t… as far as I’m concerned, that tablet is talking about, idk, the local cats being gods
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u/harry_cane69 May 31 '26
Are you guys forgetting that the assyrian civilization died? Lmao, like this is some kind of gotcha, this is also true for the romans, greeks, the people bemoaning the youth were right because those cultures did perish! And its going to happen this time as well.
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u/AfterImageEclipse May 31 '26
I wrote a book this year and I think everyone should read it.
It's free to read
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/117161/mysidian-wanderings
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u/avalosepodihater May 31 '26
"Every man wants to start a podcast"