Sumeria and the planet Neptune – 01/08/2023 – Marcelo Viana

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

In archeology there is an equally remarkable case of a civilization found “at the tip of the pen”. Since the 17th century, travelers and scholars have been excavating hundreds of thousands of clay tablets in Mesopotamia with cuneiform texts. The first discoveries, in 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 of the Semitic family, were being deciphered, a strange paradox became evident. At this stage of writing development, characters could be read in two alternative ways: as ideograms, designating an object, or as phonemes, representing the sound of that object’s name. A bit like if in Portuguese we used the drawing of a shovel 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 of the shovel drawing 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 sounds in that other language. In fact, tablets with two columns were 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?

In fact, there was a trace, which had gone unnoticed: the fact that the Akkadian monarchs called themselves “kings of Sumer and Akkad”, without anyone knowing why. Later, from the last decades of the 19th century, excavations in the south of present-day Iraq revealed concrete evidence of the remarkable Sumerian civilization, whose existence had been forgotten for millennia. In 1905, the publication of “The Sumer and Akkadian Inscriptions” by the archaeologist François Thureau-Dangin, ended the debate definitively.

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