Languages and Literatures: Cuneiform Civilizations

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 uh literature architecture all the things that we tend to love music in abundance. Um how do you access that abundance? This is something I started thinking about.

I mean we are in the inheritors of unbelievable cultural riches. The written history of mankind goes back over 5,000 years. I mean, 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. Um, part of this idea 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 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 that's wrong but that is one way if you look at the linguistic history what you find is is a culture like the Latin Latin 8 Rome it just went on and on and on I mean it just kept influencing us pretty much until this day but even just the the language itself was continued to be spoken for over a thousand years later. And so I thought of organizing uh 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 ...