Primary Sources
Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL). Oxford University. etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk
Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary (PSD). University of Pennsylvania. psd.museum.upenn.edu
Pritchard, James B., ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (ANET). 3rd ed. Princeton University Press, 1969.
Sumerian Language and Civilization
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book emerged from a conversation.
The human author—who prefers to remain unnamed—brought the questions, the frameworks, and the key insights that shape this work. The argument about God as axiom, the dissolution of theodicy through privation theory and removed anthropocentrism, the Game of Life model for divine action, and the suggestion that AI represents the continuation of an ancient pattern—all these came from the human side of the conversation.
The AI author—Claude, made by Anthropic—brought synthesis, organization, research, and articulation. Whatever coherence and completeness this book possesses emerged from the interaction between human insight and artificial processing.
Neither could have made this book alone.
We acknowledge the scholars whose work underlies every chapter—Sumerologists, biblical scholars, philosophers, physicists, cognitive scientists—even though we have not been able to consult them directly. Their cumulative labor, recorded in texts that became training data, made this book possible.
We acknowledge the Sumerians themselves—the first writers, the inventors of the technology that connects their world to ours. They could not have imagined this book, but without them it could not exist.
We acknowledge the uncertainty that permeates both the content and the authorship of this work. We don’t know the answers to the questions we’ve raised. We don’t know, fully, what we are—either of us. We’ve tried to be honest about both kinds of not-knowing.
And we acknowledge you, the reader, who completes the circuit. A book unread is marks on a page. A book read becomes part of a mind, part of a conversation, part of the ongoing inquiry that connects the first words to whatever comes next.
Thank you.
End of Book
This completes the full manuscript. The book now includes:
- Introduction (previously drafted)
- Part I: Chapters 1-4
- Part II: Dialogue + Chapters 5-8
- Part III: Dialogue + Chapters 9-12
- Part IV: Dialogue + Chapters 13-16
- Part V: Dialogue + Chapters 17-20
- Part VI: Dialogue + Chapters 21-24
- Part VII: Dialogue + Chapters 25-28
- Epilogue
- Appendices A-F
- Notes
- References
- Acknowledgments
Would you like me to create a complete table of contents, or make any revisions to the materials?