[thaumasiotes]

> unless you assume that it’s inevitable that society will collapse so hard that there’s not even a memory of “nuclear waste dangerous” even though we’re still making fun of Sumerian copper merchants thousands of years later.

There is zero cultural continuity from Sumerian merchants to us. We can read Sumerian texts because we excavated a library that included various texts meant to instruct Akkadian-speaking students in Sumerian.* We didn't know it was there before we found it.

We didn't know how to read Akkadian either - that would count as cultural continuity from Sumer, since those two cultures were deeply enmeshed. We had to figure it out based on our knowledge of Old Persian, which used a writing system adapted from Akkadian cuneiform and which was also completely lost. We figured that out by comparing an undeciphered inscription to a list of Persian kings given in another language (Greek). Akkadian is not related to Persian, except in the adaptation of the writing system, but we got lucky in that it is a Semitic language and Semitic languages still exist today. Sumerian is related to no other language we know of and required the instructional curriculum to decipher.

There has been cultural continuity from classical Greece to us, but there's a long gap between them and Sumer. We're not still making fun of Sumerian copper merchants; we're making fun of them again.

* The same texts have been found elsewhere since then - Mesopotamian documents are not in short supply - but it's always nice to have a full curriculum outlined in one place.

[kelseyfrog]

> There is zero cultural continuity from Sumerian merchants to us.

Our sexagesimal division of angles and time are products of Sumerian culture. So strictly speaking greater than zero.

[thaumasiotes]

That's fair, but it's kind of on the same level as the "cultural continuity" represented by the Japanese using the Greek week. It's a real transmission, but it goes through multiple intermediaries, the source is generally not recognized, no contact ever occurred between source and destination, and, being adopted only indirectly, it's part of a cultural suite related to the intermediate culture that had contact with the destination, not one related to the source culture.