02/08/2023

Folha: The Sumerian civilization and the planet Neptune

Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S. Paulo.

On the night of September 23, 1846, astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle observed Neptune in the sky for the first time. It was the culmination of a great feat of science . The existence of the eighth planet had been suggested to explain the movement of Uranus , which seemed not to follow the law of gravitation. And the calculations of mathematician Urbain Le Verrier indicated where to aim the telescope to find the new celestial body. "Le Verrier found Neptune at the tip of his pen," wrote his colleague François Arago.

In archaeology, there is an equally remarkable case of a civilization found "at the tip of a pen." Since the 17th century, travelers and scholars have been excavating hundreds of thousands of clay tablets with cuneiform script in Mesopotamia . The first discoveries, in the ruins of Assyria and Babylon, were followed by others relating to an even older civilization, Akkad, the first empire in history.

As the languages of these peoples, all from the Semitic family, were deciphered, a strange paradox became apparent. At this stage of writing development, the characters could be read in two alternative ways: as ideograms, designating an object, or as phonemes, representing the sound of the object's name. It's somewhat like using the drawing of a shovel in Portuguese to represent both the tool itself and the sound of the syllable "pa". It was up to the reader to decide, based on the context, which of the two readings made more sense in each case.

The paradox is that in Akkadian, the sound associated with the character was often distinct from the name of the object in that language. Continuing with our metaphor in Portuguese, it was as if the phoneme for the drawing of the shovel was "si" instead of "pa". How to explain this? It has been suggested that the Akkadians adapted the writing of an even older civilization, and that these phonemes corresponded to the sounds in that other language. In fact, tablets with two columns have been discovered, as if they were dictionaries: one with Akkadian words, the other with unknown, clearly non-Semitic terms. But who were these ancient people who disappeared without a trace?

To read the full text, visit the newspaper's website.