Did “2800 B.C. Assyrian Tablet” complain about decline of civilization?

“The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.” From an Assyrian tablet, written circa 2800 BC.

 

This quote is going around – I just saw it on Facebook. Of course, it’s an attempt to show how people of every age think that they are living in the worst times, perhaps the last times, with their morals and civilization degenerating.

 

The quote got me intrigued. First, was it an actual quote from the third millennium BC? Second, what does it tell us about the idea of the end of the world?

 

The quote appears to be a hoax or urban legend though with a longish history. Bartleby's Quotes gives two versions from sources in the mid 20th century but comments "Both of the above quotations would seem to be spurious." The quote has also been attributed to Socrates.

According to the Wikipedia article on the history of Sumer, writing of speech like this quote isn't recorded before about 2600 B.C. Also, the idea of people writing books would not fit in 2800 B.C.  Furthermore, the Assyrian kingdom, according to the omniscient Wikipedia, didn’t begin until around five hundred years after the supposed date of the supposed tablet. So it’s pretty apparent that the quote is a hoax, or more charitably, a myth with lasting value.

 

But all that doesn't matter much, since people have certainly said such things in the past, and the world hasn't ended. Or has it? In our literal, modernist view, we take these predictions or worries as referring to the end of the physical earth or universe. But we know that such cosmic language is used for historical, local events, as we see in the Bible. If you're an inhabitant of some town and the Assyrians come through killing, burning, raping, and enslaving, then that is the end of the world, period. If your entire civilization becomes weak and is conquered or disappears, that is the end of the world.

 

It's true that the physical world has not ended, but that's small comfort for the millions of people whose cities or entire civilizations have disappeared. See Jared Diamond's Collapse for a few examples and their causes.

 

The practical point of all this is that we should not, perhaps, be too flippant about dire predictions. Our own civilization has not survived nearly as long as some others which are now gone and forgotten, and why should we expect to be an exception? We certainly can list plenty of scenarios which would represent “the end of the world” for millions or billions of people, and I think it befits us to live “in the fear of God” rather than in hubris.

Photo: ancient Mesopotamian ziggurat in Iraq; by Wikipedia user Hardnfast. Used under Creative Commons license.