Oral knowledge plays an important role in every culture. What made dealing with the Mesopotamians especially interesting for me is that, according to this researcher, it is believed that the early Mesopotamians literally invented oral knowledge and the concept of writing (which we’ll deal with in a future unit). “The words of proto-Sumerian are fundamentally different from those of proto-Indo-European. However, because the proto-Sumerians appear to be unique in having started with vowel-only words, they have a good claim not just to having invented a complete spoken symbol system, but to having originated the concept of such a system. Non-speaking populations could have invented their own systems once they had been exposed to the concept of speech (this is not to deny that multiple populations could have invented the concept of speech independently, cf., the use of clicks in Africa). A good parallel example is how the Sumerian invention of the concept of writing appears to have inspired the creation of very different forms of writing in Pre-Dynastic Egypt and the Indus civilization of Pakistan and India.” The newfound ability to verbally communicate a common language facilitated the expansion of shared knowledge.
Ancient Sumer was first settled in about 4500 to 4000 B.C. Widely considered to be the first real civilization, it’s what I learned about first in my World History course during high school (and thus saith Mr. Holmes).
Once they had developed the concept of speech, some of the very first orally transmitted subjects were creation and flood myths/legends. These stories were spread throughout the region, and many other similar stories proliferated. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a text comprised of seven cuneiform tablets, the writing system of the Sumerians. Each tablet deals with these various parts of the legend:
