Cuneiform Quotes

• Reading in the third millennium B.C. may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.

  Julian Jaynes

  Reading, Matter, Hearing

  Julian Jaynes (2000). “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, p.192, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

  Margaret Atwood

  Writing

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• Human life and objects and trees vibrate with mysterious meanings, which can be deciphered like cuneiform writing. There exists a meaning, hidden from day to day, but accessible in moments of greatest attentiveness, in those moments when consciousness loves the world.

  Adam Zagajewski

  Writing, Tree, World

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• How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that...we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies.

  Alice Weaver Flaherty

  Writing, Men, Color

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• Philosophical studies are beset by one peril, a person easily brings himself to think that he thinks; and a smattering of science encourages conceit. He is above his companions. A hieroglyphic is a spell. The gnostic dogma is cuneiform writing to the million. Moreover, the vain man is generally a doubter. It is Newton who sees himself in a child on the sea shore, and his discoveries in the colored shells.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Children, Philosophy, Philosophical

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• Notions of property, value, ownership, and the nature of wealth itself are changing more fundamentally than at any time since the Sumerians first poked cuneiform into wet clay and called it stored grain ... few people are aware of the enormity of this shift and fewer of them are lawyers or public officials.

  John Perry Barlow

  Change, People, Firsts

  "The Economy of Ideas" by John Perry Barlow, www.wired.com. March 01, 1994.

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• When the hell is Warren Moon going to retire? I mean, this guy is older than the cuneiform in Nebuchadnezzar's tomb.

  Dennis Miller

  Football, Mean, Moon

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