FIRST WORDS

The emergence of writing, meaning, and civilization

Dialogue: Before the Beginning

H.: I’ve been curious about Sumerian.

C.: What draws you to it?

H.: It’s different. If human civilizations have generations, Sumerian might be the first generation.

C.: That’s a useful way to think about it. Most civilizations we study inherited templates—how to write, how to build, how to organize. The Egyptians knew about Mesopotamia. The Greeks knew about Egypt. The Romans knew about Greece. Each generation modified what came before.

H.: But the Sumerians…

C.: They faced the blank page. They invented the template.

H.: So what do we know about them?

C.: Quite a lot, actually. We can read their language—thousands of texts survive. Administrative records, legal codes, hymns, myths, proverbs, love poetry. We know what they ate, what they worshipped, how they organized their cities, what they thought happened after death.

H.: And where they came from?

C.: That we don’t know.

H.: How is that possible? If we can read their language—

C.: Their language is an isolate. No known relatives. It’s not Semitic, not Indo-European, not related to any language family we can identify. The Sumerians appeared in southern Mesopotamia, built cities, invented writing, and left no linguistic trail leading back to wherever they were before.

H.: They just… appeared?

C.: They appeared in the archaeological record. That doesn’t mean they appeared from nowhere—it means the record before them is sparse, and what exists doesn’t clearly connect to them. There may have been earlier populations whose languages we’ll never recover. The Sumerian vocabulary itself contains words that don’t look Sumerian—city names, agricultural terms—possibly borrowed from a people who were there before and left no texts.

H.: So the first writing comes from people we can’t trace.

C.: Yes. It’s fitting, in a way. The earliest words we can read emerge from silence. They give us an origin point for recorded history, but that origin point is itself mysterious.

H.: What was the writing for?

C.: Initially? Accounting. Keeping track of goods—how much barley came in, how much went out, who owed what to whom. The earliest tablets are administrative records, tax receipts, inventories.

H.: That’s… mundane.

C.: Beautifully mundane. Writing wasn’t invented for literature or philosophy or sacred texts. It was invented for sheep.

H.: But then—

C.: But then someone realized you could do more with it. If you can write “thirty sheep,” you can write “the king received thirty sheep.” If you can write that, you can write “the king, beloved of the gods, received thirty sheep for the temple.” And if you can write that, you can write “the king, beloved of the gods, the shepherd of his people, who established justice in the land, received…” You see where this goes.

H.: From inventory to propaganda.

C.: To poetry. To prayer. To law. To everything. Once you have a technology for preserving language, language starts exploring what else it can do.

H.: And the Sumerians discovered all of this first.

C.: As far as we know. Writing was independently invented in a few places—China, Mesoamerica—but Sumerian is the earliest we can read. Five thousand years ago, they started pressing reeds into clay. We’re still living in the world that created.

H.: Then let’s start there. At the beginning.

C.: At the beginning we can reach. There were surely beginnings before this one. But this is where the record starts—where the silence breaks into words.