Massimo Maiocchi: “Studying Sumerian makes you happier”

“Hay gente pa tó!” Rafael el Gallo, known as the divine bald, commented with the unpopular wisdom of bullfighters when they introduced him to Ortega y Gasset at a party and learned that he was a philosopher. The exclamation comes back to the lips when you meet Massimo Maiocchi, Venetian, born in 1975, professor of History of the Ancient Near East at Ca ‘Foscari, while he explains to you that he is a scholar of the Sumerian language; to be precise, that of the third millennium BC; that after all, he says, it is not a dead language; and in the end, he adds, it can constitute a life mission.

There are really all kinds of people, but how does one become passionate about Sumerian?

In my case it happened at the university with an interest in the ancient Near East, when I discovered that unlike the classical world it has an immense amount of documents yet to be explored. And that knowledge of its civilizations assumes direct access to written sources without the filter of historians. There is no Herodotus from Mesopotamia. It is a fantastic intellectual adventure, so vast that it is necessary to choose a specialization.

What is yours?

The Sumerian of the third millennium BC. I mainly dealt with the royal inscriptions.

Is it a rough road?

For two reasons: the cuneiform script and the fact that Sumerian is not related to other known languages. It is an isolated language: we understand it only thanks to the existence of bilingual texts in Akkadian, which is related to modern Semitic languages ​​and whose roots of the words are well understood, beyond the notable changes over the centuries.

When do the first traces of Sumerian date back?

The archaic documents date back to three thousand BC, although the first batch of cuneiform writings is three hundred years earlier and it is unknown in which language it was expressed. It remains the subject of academic debate.

It is fascinating to think that in the age of the metaverse and cryptocurrencies there are those who are hot on Sumerian dating.

I believe it is a life’s mission to explore a cultural heritage which, forgive me if I philosophize, can help us better understand the meaning of our presence on Earth and explain how we got here. These are certainly less monetizable interests than others, just as it happens for many of the most beautiful things expressed by humanity in art and literature.

Who approaches Sumerian?

There are those who discover it coming back to the ancient Near East from biblical studies; who comes from comparative linguistics; who, like me, has a historical interest. Above all, there are those who continue this study even when forced by life to deal with something else.

And it’s not a dead language.

I would jokingly say that Sumerian is a zombie language. Thanks to the quantity of written sources it cannot die, unlike other languages ​​lost due to a lack of texts. When I do outreach in schools, I teach students a few rudiments of cuneiform and they can copy short extracts from thousands of years ago onto clay.

When did Sumerian stop speaking?

Already at the beginning of the second millennium BC, but he was saved by following a path similar to that of ecclesiastical Latin. It survived as a cult language.

Can we pronounce it today as it was?

Its phonemes have been reconstructed based on the reception of Akkadian speakers. Some uncertainty remains, but I have the feeling that if a time machine moved us to Iraq then we would understand well what they say, perhaps better than we could make ourselves understood. Regarding the structure, however, it is said that two Sumerian scholars write three different grammars. There is not one shared, many aspects are still discussed and yet I am optimistic: the heritage of cuneiform writing is estimated at about half a million documents and there is another half a million packed between archives and museums, completely to be studied. . More possible discoveries: on the ancient Near East they count every year, unlike the classical world which no longer reserves big surprises except for the occasional discovery of some fragments.

He is now working on a Sumerian dictionary for Ismeo, the International Association of Mediterranean Studies and the East.

The work will fill a void, because there are no dictionaries of Sumerian in the Italian language. I am convinced that the potential pool of new students is enormous: when I taught some online courses on comparative writing, the response was enthusiastic.

What approach do you recommend to Mesopotamian languages?

Akkadian is simpler, at least that of Hammurabi’s Code which is very clearly worded. Regarding the cuneiform I understand that it can be dismayed with a repertoire of about nine hundred signs, but it is a system that has evolved over time, chasing the languages ​​spoken, which changed more rapidly. For example, the paleoassyrian with fifty signs allowed to write everything. Traders invented it and their beautiful letters speak of transactions and attempts to make money in legal or illegal ways by promoting smuggling operations on Turkish markets. To me, a historian and son of a city of merchants, these readings bring genuine happiness. Other than dead languages: it is topical among the millennia.