“Sumer, la tua giusta sapienza, in cui gli dèi furono generati, è inattingibile come il cielo”. Il millennio sumerico: l’invenzione della scrittura e la seconda demiurgia

Since the beginning of its history, Mesopotamia has been a multilingual (bilingual from a literary point of view) and multicultural land. Despite its long life as well as the several linguistic and cultural differences swarming inside it, the Mesopotamian civilization was made homogeneous by the persistence of its writing system (the so-called cuneiform writing) during the three millennia of its history. This article addresses three aspects of the Mesopotamian civilization: the king’s body as a message; the representation of space as a creative act; the translations from Sumerian into Akkadian. The common element to these three aspects is the performative effectiveness of writing.