Talk:Gutian rule in Mesopotamia

December 23, 2004

Most famous of the Gutian kings is Gudea, a famous builder of temples and irrigation canals. — no he isn't. Or if he was, his article doesn't say so, nor is he mentioned in the King list. Please provide evidence. dab (ᛏ) 08:01, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

History needed

I felt that this article really needed a history section, so I wrote one for it. I'd be pleased if anyone added anything else which they thought was missing from the section.--Moosh88 05:29, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

yes, but specify the chronology you are using. Is it middle chronology? Note that we use short chronology in the intro! dab (ᛏ) 08:40, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The chronology that I used was short. In my and most scholars' opinions it is better for various reasons.

I agree, but you need to state it in every article, so other editors will know you know what you are doing. Many people indiscriminately mix chronologies from different sources, and this is very difficult to trace. dab (ᛏ) 3 July 2005 13:22 (UTC)

Gudea was not a Gutian king

Not true : Gudea was not a Gutian king (he is not in the Gutian kings list).
Gudea was king of Lagash who ruled ca. 2144 - 2124 BC.
His city was small, independant and was not ruled by the Gutians.
He was a small king of a small town, not a high-king or "lugal".

There is no evidence that Gudea was not a Gutian. Indeed his name is a strong indication that he was Gutian at least by lineage. Blimet 07:41, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

what are those nationalist stuff doing here ??

I read many stuff here without any scientifical proof. Like the stuff about Kurds and nationalism.

I dont think it is nationalistic, maybe the topic is but not its wording. Enlil Ninlil 04:11, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Hi, there is NOT A SINGLE scientific proof that Gutians were indoeuropeans. | Acctually there are many proofs of that, go read some books.

From Dusan Vukotic in the newsgroups :

"Honigman derives the name 'Kurd' from the word 'Guti'"

This is ridiculous! It is impossible to derive the name Kurdi from the

word Guti. It might have happened contrariwise - Guti from Kurdi. It sounds more logical to associate the name of Hurrians (Hurrites) with the name of the modern Kurds.

Its not ridiculous. The "gutis" may have been called guti while they infact were Kurdi. Kurds are even today called akrad by arabs, kürt by turks and goor/koord by persians.

Peter T. Daniels about the king list :

In the above list are names that are obviously Sumerian, others that are obviously Akkadian, and others that don't offhand look like anything familiar (not that I'm familiar with other ANE languages).

Political stuff about aryans should be removed from here. Saggiga

Some edits, Nov 18 2006

I have made a few changes. I have capitalized ethnic and language names whether nouns or adjectives, as this is the norm in English. I wrote "Indo-European" in the form used in its own article, and added links to it and to "Kurdish" and "Tocharian".

I have added the word "linguistically" to the phrase on "related", to emphasize that the point here is relations of languages. "Related" in some other, perhaps genetic, sense would be meaningless under such simplistic terms when relating groups spread out over thousands of years in this mixed and turbulent region.

I changed "were long gone" to "would be long gone" to make it clearer that it is a custom, and "by the time" to better evoke the situation.

I changed "Guti's", which would mean "of a single Guti", to Guti, one of two interchangeable plurals used in the article. (The other is "Gutians"-- I suggest being systematic in the use of these two terms--what's the difference?)

The paragraph on the relations of the words "Guti", "Kurd", and "Hurrian" is garbled. On what basis do you call an association of words "impossible"? And if it is impossible, how does changing the direction of change make it likely? And why are you arguing against a claim that you don't cite? The phrase "it sounds more logical" is far too subjective. For now I have changed "logical" (truth derived from premises) to "plausible", (an evaluation of possible reality), and tried to soften the opinion language. Likewise on the evaluation of an opinion as "nationalistic". I assume more tweaking would be good here.

Patience please, I am a newbie, Sukkoth 11:16, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

you are perfectly right, the "Langauges" section was indeed completely garbled and unsourced. That's the sort of thing confused people add to Wikipedia, and it is best to just remove, per WP:CITE, WP:RS. If people want to make statements about the Guti language, they are welcome to cite their sources. dab (ᛏ) 12:09, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Changed Sumerian to Akkadian

According to the page on Lugal-Zage-Si, he was the last Sag-giga ('black-headed' or 'Sumerian') king. It was the Akkadians under Sargon the Great that defeated the Sag-giga ruler and were in turn defeated some 120 years later by the Gutians. The Gutians did not defeat the Sumerians when they destroyed Akkad, they defeated the Akkadians. The third paragraph read "Sumerian King Melem of Unug ..." I have corrected this to "Akkadian King Melem of Unug ...". Gabrieli 13:05, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Gutis

I suggest to change the title of the article into Gutis. Gutian peiod is a small period of Gutians History. Blimet 08:13, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

At the moment the article is at Gutian dynasty of Sumer, but I think it should reside at Gutium with the text currently there merged in with this one. There's little enough on Gutium as a whole, let alone enough info for just the dynasty to warrant a separate article. Til Eulenspiegel 22:46, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Sources

Can we please get a decent amount of sources here? ancient articles that are important cannot be filled in with crap. --Nimrud 07:30, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

I agree and I have just added some more sources. Til Eulenspiegel 22:47, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Transfer of info

Having contributed to parts of both articles, I have for a long time noticed that some of the info here at Gutian dynasty of Sumer would better belong at Gutian people / Gutium, and vice versa. I intend to try to straighten out the two articles, by transferring some info from one to the other, without losing any. Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 16:08, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Recent edits Comment

@SomeGuyWhoRandomlyEdits: I have reverted your edits for now. As far as I could ascertain, you just copied stuff from other articles into this one, but didn't add anything new. However, this is not the way to go. Bigger articles are not necessarily better. They're just bigger. For example, there's no need to include every bit of information on the Gutian language in this article; that's what links are for. Best, --Zoeperkoe (talk) 07:06, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

• @Zoeperkoe: I think that it would better for the articles of both the Gutian language and Gutian people be merged into Gutian dynasty of Sumer. What do you think? — SomeGuyWhoRandomlyEdits (talk) 15:14, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

• @SomeGuyWhoRandomlyEdits: No. I don't think that they should be merged at all. They are very distinct topics and enough can be said about each of them to have a separate article. This is why there are links to other articles in Wikipedia, so that you don't need to repeat every bit of related information, and so that articles can stay on topic. You seem to want to go the exact opposite direction. Why do you think that these articles should be merged? And again, would it be possible to refrain from editing this article until we get this discussion out of the way? --Zoeperkoe (talk) 19:47, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

• @Zoeperkoe: Are you really satisfied with the way the article looks right now? When I first looked at it, I was deeply disappointed by the incredible lack of information on there. It's such a sad little thing. It's barely big enough to not be considered a stub. You said so yourself on my talk page that there's not a lot known about the Gutians. And I sincerely doubt that any more will be known about the Gutians anytime soon. I somehow managed to learn more about the Gutians by reading the individual Akkadian kings' articles and their interactions with the Gutians than I did by reading this article and reading the individual Gutian kings' articles. Currently, this article is only a little over 1,000 words long. By comparison, the article for the Akkadian Empire is currently over 6,000 words long. Also, the section for "Language" on the article for the Akkadian Empire is four sentences long (over 100 words in total) but you want the "Language" section for this article to be summarized in only "1-2 lines" (as you wrote on my talk page.) Do you really want people clicking around, hopping from one article to another, when they could just read everything that there is to read about the Gutians in this one article? — SomeGuyWhoRandomlyEdits (talk) 05:06, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

• @SomeGuyWhoRandomlyEdits: No, I'm not satisfied with the way the article look right now. But the best way forward is not to just copy-paste stuff from other articles (especially since many of those other articles are also of questionable quality). The best way forward is to add information to Wikipedia that's not yet on there at all, and add proper citations to good-quality (scientific) publications. And there's certainly more information out there that's not yet on WP (especially since what's on WP about the Gutians is of questionable quality). This is, for example, the reason why I've been translating the French WP article on Early Dynastic Period (Mesopotamia) into English, as it is well-written, contains a lot of information that's not yet on English WP, and has good sources (which I also check during translation).

Now, as for your claim that not much will be known about the Gutians in the future. That might be true, but it might also not be true, especially since there's for example a lot of archaeological fieldwork going on in (northern) Iraq, which could add significantly to what we know about the Gutians in the coming years.

Comparing articles on Gutians with articles on Akkadians is also not really productive. If you look on the talk page of Akkadian Empire, you will see that the quality of that article is also not good, with undue weight given to various topics that do not belong in that article at all. If you want to know how a good article really looks, look at a Featured Article instead.

Finally, you ask if I want people clicking around. Yes, I do. Because that's how Wikipedia works. And I think there's enough information on Gutian people/language/dynasty to each have their own article, even though some of that information is not (yet) on Wikipedia. And if you would want to merge articles, the best way forward is not to copy-paste information, but to ask for a merge and discuss it with other interested community members. Best, --Zoeperkoe (talk) 08:14, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

• @Zoeperkoe: Very well. So the Akkadian Empire article was a bad example. Instead, let's use a Featured Article out of the history section of featured articles as an example: the article for Ancient Egypt. The featured article of Ancient Egypt is currently over 13,000 words long. Its "Language" section alone is over 900 words long—that's nearly three times bigger than the entire article on the Gutian language! The Gutian language article is only a little over 300 words long. The "Language" section of Ancient Egypt alone is almost as big as the entire article for the Gutian dynasty of Sumer (which is a little over 1,000 words long.)

I agree with you that the best way to add content to this article would be by adding new content from external and reliable sources without copying and pasting content from other articles within Wikipedia.

However: the article for the Gutian dynasty of Sumer has already been around since the year 2004—and it's now the year 2017—it's over an entire decade old! This article is barely bigger than it was 10 years ago. You really think that much new information will be learned about the Gutians in the next decade? — SomeGuyWhoRandomlyEdits (talk) 16:53, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

(The usual order for talk page discussions is from oldest up to newest down, please don't change that)

You have to look at the relative size of the articles - my point is that language takes up a only small section of the entire article, and each of the ancient Egyptian languages/scripts has its own article with lots and lots more details. If you compare what we know about ancient Egyptian to Gutian, then it indeed shouldn't get more than 1-2 lines (or even just a link without any additional information).

Now, as for the fact that Gutian dynasty of Sumer exists since 2004 and has hasn't significantly increased since then: that's not a sign of nothing happening in the study of the Gutians, that's a sign of no-one writing about it on Wikipedia. There's no correlation between those two. And as I said; yes, I think that we will learn more about the Gutians - if the political situation in Iraqi Kurdistan remains stable enough for archaeologists to continue their work there. And finally, there's no rule that small articles on Wikipedia can't or shouldn't exist, especially since for example Gutian language is a well-defined topic and there are (some) reliable sources about it, even though the article seems to give too much weight to some pseudo-scientific claims. Best, --Zoeperkoe (talk) 08:00, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

• @Zoeperkoe: Alright. How about this: the "Language" section on the Ancient Egypt article is currently over 900 words long, while the entire article itself is over 13,000 words long. That means the Language section makes up somewhere between 5%-10% out of the entire article. By comparison: my edit for the Gutian dynasty of Sumer article here [1] (from 20:34, 1 April 2017) was over 5,000 words long, while its "Gutian language" section only had a little over 200 words—meaning: the "Gutian language" section of the article made up less than 5% out of the entire article back then.

Do you really think that my edit for the article was all that bad? I thought it looked great (compared to how it looks like now, anyway.) It wasn't perfect, but it was certainly a significant improvement I'd like to think. And if there was ever anything about the article that anybody didn't like, I figured that they would have at the very least informed me as to what, specifically, they felt needed to be fixed (or that they would have taken the time to fix that one particular section themselves, rather than going ahead and indiscriminately undoing my entire edit.)

I have absolutely no idea as to how much new information (if there even has been any) has been discovered by archaeologists in regards to the Gutians these past 13 years or so. I'm not sure on how to even begin to do research into how much new information has been discovered and/or published (maybe I could start by heading on over to my local public library—the Los Angeles Central Library—and looking up "A History of the Ancient Near East: c. 3000-323 BC" by De Mieroop? not sure. Do you happen to know where you might begin?)

The point that I was trying to make was that since this article has been around for 13 years it should have had a lot more improvement to show for it. By comparison, the article for Ancient Egypt is only slightly older (it's been around for 16 years), however; the Ancient Egypt article went from being a 40-word-long article back in 2004 to a 13,000-word-long article by 2007 (all in only 3 years!) To compare: the Gutian dynasty of Sumer article went from being a 80-word-long article back in 2004 to the 1,000-word-long article that it is right now (13 years later) in 2017. This suggests to me the following possibilities to explain this, either:

1. There simply isn't all that much known about the Gutians, and not much new may be learned in the near future (especially what with the: Iraq War, the Iraqi insurgency, and the Iraqi Civil War.) Not much may have even been recorded about the Gutians in the first place, and what was recorded may have already been looted and/or destroyed.
2. Wikipedia's editors are generally not all that interested in the Gutians as they are about other articles in relation to the Ancient Near East.

Now, it could very well be that new information about the Gutians will be uncovered and published in the future (who knows? maybe 10, 20, 30 years from now?), but; for the time being... I think it would be best to collect all of the information that there is already available on Wikipedia about the Gutians right now (such as the articles for both the Gutian language and Gutian people) to merge it into this one article. Just for now. Until future editors decide to come back to take a look at this article and decide to start adding new content not already available on Wikipedia. — SomeGuyWhoRandomlyEdits (talk) 19:37, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

According to the sources we have, the Gutians came from the Zagros Mountains. The one place in Iraq where archaeological research happens to be carried out since a few years is Iraqi Kurdistan, which includes parts of the Zagros. And exactly that area also happened to be inaccessible over the past 30 years or so (and didn't attract much attention before that as archaeologists focused almost entirely on the large sites in the alluvium. such as Assur and Babylon), due to the Iran-Iraq war and the repression against the Kurdish population. So yes, there is now a unique opportunity to learn more about the Gutians, and it also explains why the article hasn't improved over the past decade. But again, even when an article doesn't improve, it can still have a reason to exist. And I told you before, if you really want to merge several articles on the Gutians into one, you should propose it first using wp:merge so that the community can discuss it, instead of creating fork sections as you are doing now.

And if you need sources; why not try out to get something through the Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library or the Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request? Best, --Zoeperkoe (talk) 10:11, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Modern connection theories

The user said that the languages ​​of the Kurds are Iranian and have nothing to do with Guti.However, Gutians are known to be unclassified language and are classified as "unclassifiable language" in all Etymology codes. In other words, it is completely illogical to say that the Guti cannot be the ancestor of the Kurds because the Kurds are Iranians.Because the language of Gutians is unclassified and the user who said that Gutians cannot be Kurdish added his own comment and added that Kurds are Iranians and said that the Gutians cannot be the ancestors of the Kurds.But many modern historians and past historians agree that the Gutians are the ancestors of the Kurds. See: Soviet encyclopedia. You can see this in the sources already given, and there are many other sources stating that the Gutians are the ancestors of the Kurds. In fact, the places where the Gutian and the Kurds appeared are the same "Zagros Mountains". So there is a possibility that the Gutians are from Iran. But the Gutians are not classified, that is, to say that the language of the Guti is not Iranian and not Kurdish is just subjective opinion. And it is ridiculous to think about which nationality they are from according to the spoken language because people who speak Zaza are defined as ethnic Kurds, so I mean, according to the spoken language, it is absurd to say from that nation. All of the linguists said that Gutian language has nothing to do with tocharian. In etymology: [2] El-Karduhoi (talk) 17:04, 21 September 2020 (UTC)

Golden Dark Age

The article currently claims that this period was a Dark Age for Mesopotamia, but a golden age for at least one Mesopotamian city (Lagash), citing the same two pages in an "Illustrated History" (so, a tertiary source) for both claims. The two claims seem contradictory. Furius (talk) 23:40, 10 December 2021 (UTC)