Gilgamesh's epic

This is a request from Goldflash (it's your gift ). The epic of Gilgamesh: the statue is Gilgamesh and his great friend Enkidu, for who Gilgamesh goes on Hell to save him.

Preview:



Splash:



File:

Download (ace archive)

Very nicely put together, but what effects should this wonder have?

There are several possibility:

1. + chance for leader appearance: Gilgamesh was a semideity, his epic war again Enkidu was a lesson for Sumerian youngs.
2. +xx happies: the epic was reading on public, and it is also a holy lecture
3. Make walls on each city/defending bonus: Gilgamesh had build Uruk's walls, the greatest walls on Mid-east.

Yet another fine one, Rufus!

-Oz

YES! AWESOME! I'm going to have it produce the Enkidu Warrior untill Literature, Sicne I removed the Sumerians from the GEAM

Goldflash said:

YES! AWESOME! I'm going to have it produce the Enkidu Warrior untill Literature, Sicne I removed the Sumerians from the GEAM

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Yeah, the Sumerians are kind of redundant when the Babylonians are already in the game. They're usually the first to get cut when I'm adding new races.

Personally I prefer the Sumerians to be in the game being that they are one of only two Civs that were actually around in 4000 BC.

Egypt and Sumeria are the only two Civs in the game that go back to 5000BC.

Pounder said:

Personally I prefer the Sumerians to be in the game being that they are one of only two Civs that were actually around in 4000 BC.

Egypt and Sumeria are the only two Civs in the game that go back to 5000BC.

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More like 2800 BCE for the first Egyptian dynasty and Sumer's heyday (although the Akkadians were actually dominant in the fertile crescent at this time).

In 4500 BCE Egypt was still a Neolithic culture whereas the fertile crescent was part of a larger Chalcolithic cultural grouping. The turning point at this juncture was copper working; Bronze working didn't hit the scene until about 2000 BCE.

-Oz

ozymandias said:

More like 2800 BCE for the first Egyptian dynasty and Sumer's heyday (although the Akkadians were actually dominant in the fertile crescent at this time).

In 4500 BCE Egypt was still a Neolithic culture whereas the fertile crescent was part of a larger Chalcolithic cultural grouping. The turning point at this juncture was copper working; Bronze working didn't hit the scene until about 2000 BCE.

-Oz

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I guess I need to know what is a civilization. Weren't both Egypt and Sumeria agricultural communities between 5000BC and 3000BC, a collection of city states. The first dynasty in Egypt was when the north conquered the south around 3100 BC, but there had to be civilizations growing to the point where one had to conquere the other. To me these Civ's started long before the empires did.

I don't claim to be a scholar, these are just my perceptions, I don't mind being taught.

BTW, Just an aside, I have seen documentaries and read that the sphinx's are maybe as old as 10,000 years, may not have been built by the Egyptians, similiar to some of the monuments in Sumeria. I find this curious, seems to be alot of missing pieces.

Good work Rufus.

Edit: Sorry Rufus, didn't mean to hijack your thread, forgot where I was, I'll stop.

I think that the sphinx was actually built after the great pyramid of Khufu, by his son Khafre (it bares his face apparently). This would be around the mid-third millenium BCE, a mere four-and-a-half millenia ago.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

(deleted post)

Interesting stuff - although if you look carefully at the splash for the Heroic Epic, you'll notice that it appears to be the Epic of Gilgamesh anyway (the book has the Bull of Heaven on the cover)!

Plotinus said:

Interesting stuff - although if you look carefully at the splash for the Heroic Epic, you'll notice that it appears to be the Epic of Gilgamesh anyway (the book has the Bull of Heaven on the cover)!

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I know that original epic is Gilgamesh one, but Goldflash want a new one!

ozymandias said:

More like 2800 BCE for the first Egyptian dynasty and Sumer's heyday (although the Akkadians were actually dominant in the fertile crescent at this time).

In 4500 BCE Egypt was still a Neolithic culture whereas the fertile crescent was part of a larger Chalcolithic cultural grouping. The turning point at this juncture was copper working; Bronze working didn't hit the scene until about 2000 BCE.

-Oz

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Neolithic or chalcolithic technology is not a barrier to organized civilization, and a number of civilizations represented in the game never had a central, unified state (eg the Scandinavians were a collection of small kingdoms in the "Viking" era). So I always took Sumeria to mean the pre-Akkadian collection of city-states, but maybe also including the Akkadian Empire. Their heyday might have been alot later, but there was a Sumerian civilization around in 4500 BC, advanced enough to have developed complex mathematics, a calendar, organized agriculture, a priest class, urban centres, and a primitive type of writing. Qualifies as a civilization in my mind, and even if it's fairly amorphous and indistinct as a term, the usual one is "Sumeria", even if properly that only refers to a small part of Mesopotamian civilization of the time - because its specific as to the time frame whereas "Mesopotamian" could mean anything right up to present-day Iraq.

I have a huge problem with the Enkidu warrior UU though, seems like they didn't really do their research too well and just sort of made this one up. Alot of cultures' warriors worshipped some hero or another, there's nothing really exceptional about it. The Sumerian UU should be an axeman, or possibly maceman, since their greatest innovation on the battlefield was a socketed copper axe or mace head (as opposed to earlier heads which were simply bound on).

I can't see any overlap with the Babylonians, two completely different time frames and style of civilization, the Sumerian period of Gilgamesh etc was over a thousand years before Hammurabi. And alot happened in between. The Babylonians weren't even really Sumerians, they were Amorites.

Pounder said:

Personally I prefer the Sumerians to be in the game being that they are one of only two Civs that were actually around in 4000 BC.

Egypt and Sumeria are the only two Civs in the game that go back to 5000BC.

Click to expand...

Hrrmm ... not really, there was civilization at this time in China too. The Yangshao and Lungshuan had urban settlements, pottery, irrigation and agriculture - even silk. It might be that the Yangshao go back much further than the Near Eastern groups, a number of agricultural settlements along the Huang He are dated to 10 000BC. They were Xia groups, and in my opinion if you consider Shang etc to be predecessors of the "China" represented in the game, then so are the Yangshao and Lungshuan.

And there was a civilisation in Malta befoe any of these. But do you see the Maltese in civ? Nooooooo.

Does anyone know how old is Indus civilization?

Corvex said:

Does anyone know how old is Indus civilization?

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5000BC or so ... it's thought now to be somewhat related to the wider Mesopotamian grouping, but not the same thing. Just that there was extensive contact and the two shared alot of ideas, technology, etc.

Indus civilization is a big mystery ... the archaeology has really failed to turn up much clues. They haven't for instance been able to associate any buildings with either a ruling class or a priesthood; no palaces, no temples, no great monumental structures of any kind. The closest things they've found to any sort of public buildings at all are some granaries (which *could* be palaces - but nobody really knows) and a few public baths. So we don't really know very much about them at all. It's a good guess that there remains some undiscovered sites, but who knows, maybe they were utterly destroyed somehow and we will never find them. Or perhaps it was a unique civilization that just didn't build these things for some reason. But it's possible, anyway, that Indus is older than the remains they've found so far. As I understand it, not alot of excavation has really been done, so further exploration might turn up alot more.