The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
"Every man wants to write a tablet."
Also complaining about the beer that kids are drinking nowadays, back in his day beer was unfiltered, had MORE muddy sediment, now THAT was real beer, etcetera etcetera...
I dunno. I think the quote carries more dissonance, and therefore more meaning, if the author was busily pressing their thoughts into clay while the younger crowd was using this new-fangled papyrus stuff. That said, I have no idea how to translate the tablet shown in the photo.
Wondering what the actual text really translates to. I have a hard time believing that in 2800 BCE, "Every man wants to write a book," was really much of a concern, but you never know
I can't speak to the validity of this particular example, but every society has something that they're decrying as a sign of weakness, and it changes over time.
We're all familiar with the denouncement of rock and roll, but at one point reading was seen as a bad thing. People were concerned that it encouraged laziness and distraction from the important things in life.
Every society thinks they're important enough to witness the end of history.
Here I was having some serious climate change related anxiety, and this post, coupled with another meme I saw (which was Neil Degrasse Tyson saying that "If Humans can geo-engineer other planets, we can certainly do it to our own."), helped.
This tablet is of a type used by the Assyrian merchants to track the income and expenses generated by caravan shipments. The cuneiform text, read from left to right, records not only the amount of silver invested in tin and textiles, but also the less commonly traded precious stone lapis lazuli, which was sourced from Afghanistan.