Why I'm Learning Sumerian
25 comments
·November 6, 2025msuniverse2026
Fancy that. I recently bought the book 'Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian: An Introduction for Complete Beginners' by Joshua Bowen and Megan Lewis and have been designing a 3D printed pasta roller to pass sheets of air-dry clay thru a typewriter with a few rotatable typeslugs to make different Sumerian symbols with minimal keys.
Jun8
If you are interesting anything related to cuneiform writing or ancient Mesopotamian culture , Irving Finkel, a British Museum curator, is a treasure.
Here he is teaching how to write cuneiform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVmsfL5LG90
Here is a hilarious talk he gave at Chicago's Oriental Institute on Noah's Ark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fkpZSnz2I
sothatsit
I was lucky enough to meet Irving Finkel a couple of times and he is as eccentric in person as he is in his brilliant lectures, talks, and videos. When I met him all the shelves, and even the floor, in his office was covered with different books, papers, and artifacts. He has amassed quite a collection of interesting things.
I met him through my work related to the Royal Game of Ur, which he also did a fantastic video on with Tom Scott: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WZskjLq040I
hashbig
"That's when I learned the difference between burnout and disillusionment. Burnout drains your body; disillusionment erases your purpose. You can recover from exhaustion with rest, but you need something else entirely to recover from meaninglessness."
This is an accurate pathology to burnout at least in my experience. I worked on many hard things in my life, from school to obsessing over hard problems on weekends but I never felt burned-out. I felt tired, but content.
It took 6 months of being stuck after reaching a local maxima in my career. I was working on menial, meaningless, tasks that I knew amounted to nothing while I was doing them. That caused my burnout.
komali2
> Two weeks before launch, they pulled the plug
> It took 6 months of being stuck after reaching a local maxima in my career. I was working on menial, meaningless, tasks that I knew amounted to nothing while I was doing them. That caused my burnout.
This idea I think about a lot, and I believe another way to describe it is "alienation from labor," or, in the doing of labor, alienation from purpose or meaning. Marx wrote about alienation from labor:
> “If the product of labor is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong? To a being other than myself.” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)
> "Labour power is...a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to capital. Why does he sell it? In order to live...the worker, who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc.--does he consider this twelve hoursí weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shovelling, stone breaking as a manifestation of his life? On the contrary, life begins for him where this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed. The twelve hoursí labour...has no meaning for him...but as earnings, which bring him to the table, to the public house, into bed...." (Wage Labour and Capital, 1847)
Imo though I agree with Graeber that we've gone beyond just alienation from the product of labor and into alienation from all purpose, in a world where a huge swath of labor and productive energy is put towards genuinely useless things.
> "...a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case." Bullshit Jobs, a Theory
Jun8
“Years ago, I stumbled across an image online: a Sumerian clay tablet covered in tiny wedge-shaped marks.”
Seeing weird ancient symbols and feeling a great urge to embark on a journey to learn/decipher them is common; actually doing it is much rarer. Think of Champollion who, when shown Egyptian hieroglyphs by Fourier (as it is often mythologized) when he was just 11, devoting his life to them.
However, if you are tempted to take on Sumerian after reading this, I suggest that you start with Akkadian first. Chances are you’ll try to learn ancient languages by self study and you’ll need a lot of reading material: this is the advantage of Akkadian over Sumerian. Also the grammar will be easier to grasp. And it has borrowed a lot from Sumerian, so you can take it as a later step, if you so choose.
If you want to read inscriptions from local museums while keeping the cool ancient script angle, then, of course, go with Middle Egyptian. If, on the other hand you are determined to be one of the handful experts in the world on an ancient language, I’d suggest Hurrian or Luwian.
drcode
yeah, but it's so much cooler/romantic to learn the very first written language, even if other languages have advantages.
theletterf
They had the guts and willpower to learn Sumerian. Why, I wonder, had they to use an LLM to write the essay about it? It kind of invalidates the core messages.
yde_java
I read the entire post, very well written, and didn't suffer from that impression that it was written by an LLM
theletterf
The entire "Why Irrelevance Works" uses several LLM patterns. As I said elsewhere, I don't care if someone uses GPT to coauthor a post, but the irony is just too big in this case.
androng
GPTZero says its 44% AI generated
some_guy_nobel
What makes you say that? Sad how easy it is for someone to dismiss writing these days as, "must be AI written!" (I'd wager the average LLM blog post takes more effort than your dismissive response, though I wish I didn't have to read either).
I'm not a fan of the author's writing, but you can look at their other articles and see the same (non-AI feeling) style of writing and general theme of content (airport-book style motivation).
theletterf
I usually don't care too much if a post was written using AI (this one was written at least partially using it, check it out using GPT zero), but in this case it irks me deeply, because the post is meant to summarize deep intellectual effort.
null
davidelettieri
Mandatory quote from Brooklyn 99:
> Captain Holt: Well, this is a total waste of time. Sergeant Jeffords: Sure, but you can still have fun, even if you're wasting time. Captain Holt: That's absurd. Productivity is what makes things fun. That's why humans go to work. Sergeant Jeffords: It is?
senorqa
> That's when I learned the difference between burnout and disillusionment. Burnout drains your body; disillusionment erases your purpose. You can recover from exhaustion with rest, but you need something else entirely to recover from meaninglessness.
This can be a life changing thought!
paulorlando
Wonderful. The best lines:
No client can cancel it. No deadline can ruin it. The only failure would be to stop.
floren
Feels a little odd to painstakingly draw, with a pen, symbols that were intended to be created by pressing a stick into wet clay. Surely there's got to be a better way to hand-write cuneiform.
krapp
It's a hobby though.
At the end of the article the author says 'This is why telling burned-out people to "find work-life balance" or "pursue hobbies" often fails.' But this is literally a hobby. Something you put effort into without needing to justify why, just because you enjoy it, is a hobby.
It's cool but the author makes it out to be way more profound than it is (ironically, justifying it with a narrative to turn out as content.)
tjoff
Yes, but the problem is that people often choose a hobby that will benefit their career.
If you are going to spend time on a hobby why not pick a hobby that also benefits your career? Win win?
I struggle with that, partly because computer science was my hobby. Then I went to university studying it, and enjoying it as a hobby. Then I started working, still enjoying it as a hobby.
And if I have 10 interesting topics I want to explore on my free time. Why not pick one that will also benefit my work?
After all, I don't have as much time for my hobbies nowadays. So picking one that also benefits and influences my work is more fun and meaningful and also allows me to be paid doing something I would have done for free anyway.
This article highlights the problem with that approach.
Feels like it is very common in our industry. A very high percentage of "Show HN" fits dangerously close to that. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, it is just exposing yourself to the risks mentioned in the post.
I believe I'm wired in a very similar way to the author, to need hard challenges that I can devote a great deal of focus to. And as someone who isn't burnt out but has been deeply disillusioned many times, I appreciated and enjoyed hearing that distinction made, which seems natural to me but which I had never heard framed that way before.
When I had, let's say, half a million hand-written LoC vaporize overnight for a gaming platform 26 original games I'd written on it, the feeling was much worse than burnout. Burnout implies you don't want to do the work anymore. Disillusionment - the despair and ennui of seeing something reduced to less than ash, which you spent every waking hour of your life and years of mental output and daily sacrifices perfecting and refining... that's not burnout. You wake up and say "I want to do something difficult again" but how do you even take the first step, knowing that it's all so pointless?
So I think, Cuneiform is a very apt analogy to code. Growing up in the early 80s, my older brother (16 years older) was a CS major. He gave me my first programming books, a Tandy laptop and a tape recorder. He said this:
"Remember: Everything we write as programmers is written in sand." I think he meant to tell me to make backups. But over time it became the truest observation I could make about this life of solving problems which disappear, using tools which disappear, in languages and files and thought loops that disappear.
Maybe doctors or lawyers or detectives, or other professionals who deal with serieses of episodic problems feel this way in the end, too. When a mission they were on peters out. That it's all ephemeral and temporary in a way that makes us small and meaningless...
Anyway, burnout is saying you're not interested in anything anymore. So switching to writing on clay is maybe a horizontal move, but no less satisfying.