In Mesopotamia, this is happening. The destruction
of ancient treasures, even the leveling of
entire cities, by the self-named dawlah al-islamiyah.
I think the reason this hurts us so much has
something to do with language.
We have much older artifacts. We even know
of older cities. But the people of Mesopotamia
were the first to speak to us on their terms
in their own words.
Whose words?
For starters, Sumer. 5500 years ago, they
spoke and wrote in emegir, Sumerian, an isolate
unrelated to surrounding languages. Even when
the Akkadians took over 1200 years later,
they kept Sumerian civilization going, Sumerianizing
their words and culture - as one linguist
puts it - “on a massive scale”.
This amazingly early cultural transmission
shaped ideas in the Middle East and Europe.
At a time when most languages have to be hypothesized,
we know what the Mesopotamians had to say.
Here. This is a city. They called it Eridu.
This is how much barley every child and every
adult should get: 20 pints for the kids, 30
to 40 for the grown ups. This is a story they
wrote about a giant flood.
The first documented Semitic language wasn’t
written in Phoenician or the Hebrew alphabet.
It was in Cuneiform.
Even the oldest Indo-European texts were written
in Cuneiform.
Now, I think, contrary to what’s going around
on the news, Cuneiform doesn’t make Mesopotamia
EVERYONE’S cradle of civilization. It’s
hard to see what kind of impact Sumer could
have had on China, and certainly the Caral
and the Olmec in the Americas were a world
away.
But it was this act of writing early and extending
its influence to later ages that causes us
to connect with Cuneiform civilizations, to
hold them in such high regard, and to stand
horrified at people who, confronted with that
same influence, feel not respect, but hate.
