There is a table of squares from ≈2500 BC https://cdli.earth/artifacts/10678 that predates the earliest known copies of the Sumerian King List by a few centuries. With completely wrong values for the numerals, the math wouldn't add up: https://saalck.pressbooks.pub/mathhistory/chapter/vat-12593/ And many later kings on the list, in particular ones where we have independent evidence from inscriptions produced during their reigns, ruled for much more reasonable periods of a few years to a few decades. It's only the earlier kings that have ridiculous numbers. And at one point the list produces a subtotal of "24510 years, 3 months, and 3 1/2 days" for the 23 kings of the first dynasty of Kish, so the durations are hardly meant to be just some vague large number. (The half-day is contributed by En-tarah-ana, for unclear reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En-tarah-ana )
I'm sorry I expressed myself a bit poorly. I don't mean to say we don't know how to read the numbers. I mean we might be reading as a literal numeral something that was meant to be read in a slightly or completely different way.
There's always the possibility that it is just some mythology without deeper meaning, that it represents garbled memories from pre-literary times. It might be encoding something we don't understand or just collectively misremembered stories or even just gibberish that came to be seen as significant purely by tradition or repetition.
We don't really know all that much about these peoples who lived at the early stages of our current post glacial stage of human society. We have a lot of data, to be sure, but very little in the way of a coherent interpretation for it all. In fact, the vast majority of the cuneiform tablets that have been digged up haven't even been examined properly yet, as in transcribed, translated and analyzed.
We have a few glimpses of the culture of Sumerian and some of it is this odd lists of names and numbers. I mean, even calling them "kings" is anachronistically projecting a very recent concept of Medieval Europe into a past at least 3 times as distant from as as the very earliest tribal leaders that came to be termed 'kings'. One common title used translated as 'king' (I am not sure it is written in these name lists) is lu-gal. It means 'big man', or magnate.
Hell, Sumerian is a language isolate. We interpret it largely based on context from later vocabulary borrowed by Semitic languages such as Akkadian and more recent descendants in Assyrian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic and so on... Studying ancient Sumer and ancient Egypt is very very close to studying alien societies. We share very little with them other then happening to inhabit the same planet. We only understand Egyptian writing because some stone inscription had the same text in common late antiquity Greek, and ancient Egyptian written in hieroglyphics, and a script believed to be its more 'cursive' form.
I'm reminded of the hundred or so fictional kings of Britain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legendary_kings_of_Bri... including King Lear. They didn't exist, but they all had normal lifespans. I'm uncertain to what extent they were ever sincerely believed to exist.
And at one point the list produces a subtotal of "24510 years, 3 months, and 3 1/2 days" for the 23 kings of the first dynasty of Kish, so the durations are hardly meant to be just some vague large number.
Note that the odd precision is due to just a single entry. Remove that entry, and pretty much all of the old entries are either perfect squares or nicely round numbers in their numeral system.
Comments
There is a table of squares from ≈2500 BC https://cdli.earth/artifacts/10678 that predates the earliest known copies of the Sumerian King List by a few centuries. With completely wrong values for the numerals, the math wouldn't add up: https://saalck.pressbooks.pub/mathhistory/chapter/vat-12593/ And many later kings on the list, in particular ones where we have independent evidence from inscriptions produced during their reigns, ruled for much more reasonable periods of a few years to a few decades. It's only the earlier kings that have ridiculous numbers. And at one point the list produces a subtotal of "24510 years, 3 months, and 3 1/2 days" for the 23 kings of the first dynasty of Kish, so the durations are hardly meant to be just some vague large number. (The half-day is contributed by En-tarah-ana, for unclear reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En-tarah-ana )
I'm sorry I expressed myself a bit poorly. I don't mean to say we don't know how to read the numbers. I mean we might be reading as a literal numeral something that was meant to be read in a slightly or completely different way.
There's always the possibility that it is just some mythology without deeper meaning, that it represents garbled memories from pre-literary times. It might be encoding something we don't understand or just collectively misremembered stories or even just gibberish that came to be seen as significant purely by tradition or repetition.
We don't really know all that much about these peoples who lived at the early stages of our current post glacial stage of human society. We have a lot of data, to be sure, but very little in the way of a coherent interpretation for it all. In fact, the vast majority of the cuneiform tablets that have been digged up haven't even been examined properly yet, as in transcribed, translated and analyzed.
We have a few glimpses of the culture of Sumerian and some of it is this odd lists of names and numbers. I mean, even calling them "kings" is anachronistically projecting a very recent concept of Medieval Europe into a past at least 3 times as distant from as as the very earliest tribal leaders that came to be termed 'kings'. One common title used translated as 'king' (I am not sure it is written in these name lists) is lu-gal. It means 'big man', or magnate.
Hell, Sumerian is a language isolate. We interpret it largely based on context from later vocabulary borrowed by Semitic languages such as Akkadian and more recent descendants in Assyrian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic and so on... Studying ancient Sumer and ancient Egypt is very very close to studying alien societies. We share very little with them other then happening to inhabit the same planet. We only understand Egyptian writing because some stone inscription had the same text in common late antiquity Greek, and ancient Egyptian written in hieroglyphics, and a script believed to be its more 'cursive' form.
I'm reminded of the hundred or so fictional kings of Britain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legendary_kings_of_Bri... including King Lear. They didn't exist, but they all had normal lifespans. I'm uncertain to what extent they were ever sincerely believed to exist.
Note that the odd precision is due to just a single entry. Remove that entry, and pretty much all of the old entries are either perfect squares or nicely round numbers in their numeral system.