[Sumerian literature is the first known literature of the world, from the first known writing system of the world, Hittite.]
You know what I love about reading translated Sumerian texts, from 2000BC? It’s that even if they were translated or not, the context laid, and the long lengths of complex descriptors used still indicate that these were incredibly intelligent, engineering minded folks. Incredibly intelligent. And since they recalled so much oral history with such exact detail, it meant that they had to really, really mean and value every single word they kept. Literally etching into stone for a significant percentage of their brief lives — which means that whatever content they meant to preserve was very valuable and likely had enduring value, sometimes for record keeping, sometimes for humor. Oh, the value of these words, during a time when words were heavy to carry (literally). And the tone, the tone carries through.
From the emotions, to the depth and braveness of the details taken, it all had relevant context directly, rawly related to the life of then; you can’t get a less distorted view of the past than these primary texts (because so much gets lost in secondary summaries, including all intended tone and double sentiments, due to the viewed necessity of brevity, everywhere; whoever was the one who made everyone believe that a “good” idea was one that could be contained in 4 to 5 sentences, per blob, making us appease and nurture the short-attention spanded mind? Turns out, we never used to need things to be *that* simple to absorb it.) Also, unlike the view today — that lack of convenience equals a lack of interest or demand — these texts were both pretty difficult to produce, AND super long. (And so perhaps a convenience-focused culture, is unnatural and loses out?)
It is not like the volumes of freely generated words we have today. So, communication was both thoughtful and exact and easy to follow and profound. All together. It makes me learn that we can use simple words to say really big things if we think about how we communicate, beyond our writing-backed languages. Back to a premordial, shared understanding.
I learned that our premordial shared understanding is and always has been sensitive to details, that draws on shared reactions to the same things, that draws on shared knowledge of what an object does and how it does it. These are our enduring human qualities, across space and across time.
I implore one to read the epics of Gilgamesh, the story of the great Sumerian flood, view the exact records and accountings of how much and what material, and peel at the thick, clever symbolisms. They are exact. No fuzzy mistakes intended. And still, so friggin’ amazingly poetic, while pragmatic. A true time when art and science was simply the life, and it was silly to believe that we could divide them down without seeing its oneness. We humans used to have so much alertness and vividity. And since we are all born the same, perhaps we still can.
~ studied Hitite primary texts for a year at the UChicago Middle East Institute under one of the best and only worldly scholars of Hittite, the first language of the world, and the historical insights from reading those texts led me to amazing revelations about “primitive” thinking.
Example Quotes
“Build… regardless of the costs, to keep human beings alive.”
Cost reduction is secondary to the preservation of human life; perhaps the day we stop applying this is the day we drown in self made destruction, due to a great “flood” of some sorts, aka a sudden sustained rising of drownable material; depending on what you call the material, this makes sense to me that this is how humans would die out.
“They cowered like dogs lying by the outer wall.”
An unprotected outer wall is totally vulnerable, and we all know what a dog looks like when it is cowering.
“…shrieked like a woman in childbirth.”
Damn.
“reminds him of the need for compassion”
We can forget to be compassionate, and we need repeated reminding to avoid “sending a disproportionate punishment”; a 4000 year old adage, still relevant today.
“The story introduces…”
Self-referential
TL;DR It’s just such good literature.
Other awesome primary text: Francis Bacon, the developer of the scientific method, and his primary writings.
