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Languages and literatures: Cuneiform civilizations

Wes Cecil · Wes Cecil · ·48 min read
Commentary by Hex Index staff

Wes Cecil makes a claim that's immediately arresting: "The written history of mankind goes back over 5,000 years" — and he means it as a provocation. This isn't abstract history; this is personal. He's arguing that we are "in the inheritors of unbelievable cultural riches," and his lecture series aims to make those riches accessible by organizing civilizations not by political boundaries but by language groups. The approach reframes how we think about historical influence — not as empires rising and falling, but as linguistic cultures that "just kept influencing us pretty much until this day."

Lost Civilizations Actually Found

Here is where Cecil's argument becomes genuinely compelling: the idea of a lost civilization isn't theoretical conspiracy nonsense — it actually happened. "It had been completely and totally lost to history for thousands and thousands of years," he writes, and that loss was the Sumerian civilization. This is his strongest point. The archaeologists weren't hiding anything; they found it. And what they found challenges everything we thought we knew about origins.

It turns out that's about 1,500 years too late. There was again the earlier one that's Sumerian. This is the beginning of it all as far as we know.

The oldest texts we have — Greek references to Babylon, Persian accounts, Old Testament mentions — all assumed Babylon was the starting point. But cuneiform tablets pushed that timeline back dramatically. The evidence sits in your hand: "Most of them were the size of a notepad. They're sort of like the earliest iPhone the size of your phone." This is effective framing — making ancient artifacts feel immediate and relatable.

Languages and literatures: Cuneiform civilizations

The Clay Paradox

Cecil makes an observation that sounds counterintuitive but proves to be profound: "The great thing about clay, writing in clay, is that clay lasts about two to 300 years. So that's not so good in some ways, but when you compare it with papyrus or other kinds of technology, that's really quite good."

But the real surprise comes later. When the library at Nineveh was sacked and burned — "fire" — this turned out to be "the greatest thing ever." The clay tablets were baked by the fire and became even more durable. This is the kind of detail that makes a lecture sing: something you'd never expect, framed in language that lands with force.

What Survived

The purpose of the library was revealing: "collect all of the ancient lore, not the contemporary material" — specifically the myths, epics, and poems of Samaria (Sumerian). These weren't just stories. They were the foundation for everything that came after. When the Babylonians took over, they remembered the Sumerians and "began to write them down." The mythological system of ancient Babylon was based in large part on their Samaran predecessors. This transmission across 2,300 years is what Cecil calls "the key thing" — not just preservation but active retransmission generation to generation.

Counterpoints

Critics might note that organizing civilizations by language group rather than political entities is a useful lens but risks oversimplifying complex interactions. Political history and linguistic history aren't mutually exclusive — they reinforce each other. Additionally, calling Sumerian "the oldest known civilization" is technically accurate but ignores the ongoing debates about pre-Columbian Americas, Indus Valley cultures, and other potential candidates that remain undeciphered.

Bottom Line

Wes Cecil's strongest move is his storytelling instinct — turning what could be dry philology into a narrative of lost-and-found civilizations. The library of Nineveh detail is genuinely wonderful: fire made clay permanent, and the result was "perfectly legible" today. His vulnerability lies in overreach — claiming "the beginning of it all" as if Sumerian closes the door on earlier possibilities. But within his scope, this works beautifully.

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Languages and literatures: Cuneiform civilizations

by Wes Cecil · Wes Cecil · Watch video

on languages and here was the idea. So last year I did the humane arts lecture series which was this the notion that throughout history the shared quality of human existence has produced art literature architecture all the things that we tend to love music in abundance. how do you access that abundance? This is something I started thinking about.

we are in the inheritors of unbelievable cultural riches. The written history of mankind goes back over 5,000 years. that is that is a pretty good history. This is just a writing.

Of course, architecture, cave painting goes back even further. But if we if we focus on writing, it goes back a little over 5,000 years. And so I thought one way to look at this is to look at the civilizations by language group. part of this idea came to me by a guy called Oler who wrote a book called Empire of the Words.

a very good book if you're interested in this kind of thing. He looked at the language groups in a different way, but this is a similar idea because if you think about something like we talk like Imperial Rome or Rome and we think of Latin, Rome falls or at least the Western Empire falls in 400 AD give or take. If you went to Europe a thousand years later, the primary language spoken by educated people was Latin. the government institutions were based on Roman models.

So while the political empire which is how we tend to think about history as a as a series of political entities and then they live or die and then history changes dramatically which is not that's wrong but that is one way if you look at the linguistic history what you find is a culture like the Latin 8 Rome it just went on and on and on it just kept influencing us pretty much until this day but even just the language itself was continued to be spoken for over a thousand years later. And so I thought of organizing the lecture series in this way so that we could look at civilizations and their influence by language groups. Try and get a sense of the history of how those languages developed and their major literature. Some of the works that we might want to look at to get a sense of them ...