Sumerian cuneiform is one of the worlds oldest languages, written scripts that is. In it’s original form it had around 1000 characters and no linguistic content. So to start, and maybe to add some focus, what is your familiarity with Sumeria the culture and language so far?

Very little.

Well, Sumerians were in the ancient middle east…Persia? Were they the ones who wrote about the annunaki?

I just know a little about the artwork. My assistant just showed me something that looked like a Sumerian figure that she found at goodwill. It had chia in the beard. A Sumerian inspired sculpture? It was actually supposed to be a biker, but it looked Sumerian the way they did the beard.

Ah, they say our creative efforts actually all draw from channels that were established previously. Once something like a sculpture is done, then that will shape all further sculptures over time. You can see some evidence of this especially between sculptures of widely differing cultures over the age of empires, as the call it.

Yes, the Babylonians tended to texture beards with little spherical bumps.

Sumer would correspond to modern day Iraq, where as Persia I believe corresponds to Iran. The difference is in size and degree of centralization. Sumer would have been more central to the Mesopotamian area than Persia, and well at one point it controlled the region that would only later go by the name Persia anyway. Persia was the land of the Magi where we get modern day terms like mage and magic from today. In fact the practice of what is loosely called Arabic astrology would have had it’s roots in Sumerian culture and the surrounding peoples.

The astrology most people are familiar with is Arabic, and draws a great deal of its symbolism and lore from cultures such as Sumer like the goat being used to symbolize Aries. The term Aries was only tacked on later with the coming predominance of the Roman empire.

The original Sumerian script had nothing we would recognize as linguistic content today. Our own alphabet draws from the later Phoenician script rather than anything like the Sumerian. The original set of characters were entirely logographic. One character was one word or concept. Modern examples of logographic communication are things like the restroom symbols.

Ah, like hieroglyphics. Indeed, it would have things in common both with Chinese kanji and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Some people would say we’re returning to logographic communication today. It’s all symbols.

Many traffic signs. Easier for people of different languages to understand. Indeed, though they don’t recognize the naturalness or appropriateness of it.

It’s very useful in airports.

A distinctive characteristic of logographic systems is to transcend the limits of spoken language. The restroom symbols are understood world wide.

Numbers too. The numeric system is Arabic like our astrology. The original signs of Sumerian cuneiform were more obviously pictographic, only later moving to the more strictly logographic form you see in these stellae.

Mysterious script archaeologists find is often probably the equivalent of a sign for the toilet.

What this has to offer to the modern spiritual seeker, and student of magick, is an understanding of the relationship of imagery to conceptual formation.

Cuneiform is perhaps not unlike our doodling today, a sort of primitive form of conceptual abstraction. I use the term primitive not in a derogatory sense, but more in the sense that we use the term prim in Second Life, basic building blocks. To the modern mind these figures perhaps look strange, no?

I like the way cuneiform looks.

Modern neuroscience has discovered that even the contemporary brain is more sensitive to straight lines and divisions, as well as the angel of lines, than it is to contours and abstract shapes or even colours. What do you think of this?

I like ‘angel of lines’. Angle. Pardon the typos, though even those are sometimes meaningful.

Freud thought so.

Why a lot of people don’t understand art maybe.

Yes, straight lines are easier to grasp quickly. A straight line only requires two points of data…a curve requires many more. Straight lines are less data to absorb.

So yes, perhaps cuneiform was the most natural short hand style evolution of a strictly logographic lexicon.

Perspective in drawing or photography is all about lines and angles.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~