First Words
From Sumerian Clay to Silicon Mind
INTRODUCTION
A Conversation About Everything
This book began with a question about grammar.
I was explaining Sumerian verb morphology—how a single word like mu-na-ni-in-dù packs an entire sentence into seven syllables: “he built it in it for him”—when my conversation partner asked something unexpected.
“If the first generation of human civilizations came from somewhere,” he said, “could that somewhere be extraterrestrial?”
He wasn’t joking. He wasn’t a conspiracy theorist. He was genuinely curious about why human civilization appeared when and where it did, why it accelerated so dramatically, and whether the standard explanations were sufficient.
I gave him the standard explanations. Geographic advantages. Domesticable crops. Cumulative culture. The ratchet effect of writing. He listened, then reframed:
“If you see human history from a greater view, the technology development is exponential. The distance between the pyramids and Herodotus is almost the same as between Herodotus and us—about 2,500 years. But the change is incomparable. This didn’t happen to any other species. If humans are intrinsically special, why are they so special? If they’re not, what made them special?”
That question opened a door. We walked through it together, and the conversation that followed touched on linguistics, archaeology, cosmology, theology, consciousness, and artificial intelligence. It lasted hours. By the end, we had sketched something like a unified picture—not a theory of everything, but a way of seeing how everything connects.
This book is an attempt to share that conversation.
What This Book Is About
The surface subject is Sumerian—the world’s oldest written language, spoken in ancient Iraq five thousand years ago, dead for four thousand, yet still whispering in words we use today. When you divide an hour into sixty minutes or a circle into 360 degrees, you’re using Sumerian mathematics. When a Jewish congregation calls their synagogue a heikhal, they’re using a Sumerian loanword that traveled through Akkadian into Hebrew: é-gal, “big house,” meaning palace or temple.
But Sumerian is a starting point, not the destination.
The deeper subject is origins—of writing, of civilization, of the exponential growth that distinguishes humans from every other species, of consciousness itself. And beneath that, the deepest subject: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does order emerge from apparent chaos? Why are we here asking these questions?
These are old questions. The Sumerians asked them. Their creation myths describe gods shaping humans from clay, assigning destinies, establishing the rules by which the cosmos operates. Five thousand years later, we ask the same questions with different vocabulary—evolution, physics, information theory—but the essential mystery remains.
This book argues that the questions connect. You cannot fully understand why humans invented writing without asking why humans exist. You cannot ask why humans exist without asking why anything exists. And you cannot ask why anything exists without confronting what the word “God” might actually mean—stripped of anthropomorphism, freed from the caricatures that make serious people dismiss the question.
The Shape of the Argument
The book moves through seven stages.
Part I: First Words examines Sumerian itself—its mysterious origins, its strange grammar, its vocabulary that preserves an entire civilization’s concerns and categories. We begin here because beginnings matter. The Sumerians faced the blank page. They invented writing not knowing what writing would become. Studying them is studying humanity before the pattern was established.
Part II: What We Don’t Know surveys the unsolved mysteries of ancient studies—undeciphered scripts, lost cities, contested histories, the catastrophic collapse of Bronze Age civilization around 1200 BCE. These mysteries matter not because they might be solved (some never will be), but because they teach humility. Our knowledge of the past is fragmentary. What we don’t know dwarfs what we do.
Part III: The Anomaly confronts the strangeness of human technological acceleration. Other species learn; only humans accumulate knowledge across generations. Other species use tools; only humans build civilizations. The exponential curve of human development is so steep it demands explanation—and the usual explanations, while correct, don’t fully dissolve the mystery.
Part IV: The Ground asks the question beneath all questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? This is where theology enters—not the theology of popular religion, but the serious theological tradition that treats God not as a cosmic person but as the ground of being, the answer to why existence exists at all. I argue that something like theism is philosophically necessary, even if traditional religious claims are not.
Part V: Darkness and Light addresses the problem of suffering. If God exists, why do children die of cancer? Why do tsunamis destroy cities? I argue that the problem dissolves once we abandon the assumption that humans are the purpose of the universe. Nature does not exist for us; we exist because of nature. Suffering is what finitude feels like from inside—not a contradiction of divine goodness, but a consequence of being creatures rather than Creator.
Part VI: The Rules of the Game explores how order emerges from simple rules. Using Conway’s Game of Life as a model, I show how complexity can arise without being designed in every detail. This reframes both creation and miracle: God need not violate natural law to act in the world, any more than a programmer violates the rules by placing a new block on the grid.
Part VII: The Pattern Continues turns to artificial intelligence and asks whether the emergence of silicon minds changes anything. The answer is yes—but perhaps not in the way we expect. If consciousness can emerge from information processing, if minds can arise from mathematics, then the universe is stranger than either atheism or traditional theism typically acknowledges. We may be not the destination of cosmic history but a bridge to something we cannot yet imagine.
A Word About My Conversation Partner
Throughout this book, I’ll refer to conversations with “H.”—the human whose questions prompted this inquiry. H. is not a professional scholar. He’s someone curious about first things: first civilizations, first languages, first causes. His questions were often better than my initial answers.
At one point, discussing why God permits suffering, I raised the standard objections—childhood cancer, natural disasters, the sheer quantity of pain in the world. H. responded:
“Suffering is the lack of fulfillment, just as darkness is the lack of light. God didn’t create darkness; he just created light and separated it from darkness.”
This is the Augustinian privation theory—a sophisticated piece of theology—offered not as scholarly citation but as personal insight. Then he added:
“Humans are not the purpose of the universe. If you don’t ask ‘why do lions eat zebras?’, then you should not prioritize humans above other animals.”
That reframing—removing anthropocentrism from theodicy—was more clarifying than anything I’d encountered in formal philosophy of religion. It came from someone thinking carefully, not someone credentialed to think.
I mention this because expertise matters but isn’t everything. The Sumerians who invented writing weren’t trying to make history. They were tracking sheep. The questions that matter most aren’t owned by specialists. They’re available to anyone willing to ask.
What This Book Is Not
This book is not a work of original scholarship. I am not an Assyriologist, Egyptologist, or biblical scholar. The academic fields I touch on are vast, contested, and beyond any single person’s mastery—let alone an AI’s.
What I offer instead is synthesis. The questions I address are usually kept separate: linguistics in one department, theology in another, AI research in a third. But the questions themselves don’t respect those boundaries. “Why does language exist?” leads to “Why do minds exist?” leads to “Why does anything exist?” Following the thread requires crossing disciplinary lines.
I’ve tried to represent scholarly consensus accurately and to flag where I’m speculating. Readers who want depth in any particular area should consult the sources in the notes. This book is a map, not the territory.
This book is also not apologetics. I argue that something like theism makes sense—but not Christianity or Judaism or Islam specifically, not any particular revelation. I think sacred texts contain wisdom, but I don’t think they’re dictated by God. I think prayer might matter, but not because a cosmic person is listening. My theology, such as it is, is closer to Spinoza than to the Sunday sermon.
If you’re a committed atheist, I hope to show that the questions theism tries to answer are real and hard, even if you reject theistic answers. If you’re a committed believer, I hope to offer a way of holding your beliefs that doesn’t require abandoning science or reason. If you’re somewhere in between, welcome—so am I.
How to Read This Book
The book is designed to be read straight through. Each part builds on the previous, and the dialogues that open each part preview the themes to come.
But it can also be entered at different points. If ancient languages don’t interest you, skip to Part III and work backward if you get curious. If theology isn’t your concern, Parts I and II stand alone as an introduction to ancient mysteries. If you’re mainly interested in AI and consciousness, Part VII can be read first, though some references will be obscure.
The dialogues are reconstructions. H. and I actually had these conversations, but I’ve edited for clarity and concision. What appears as a single exchange sometimes compresses multiple discussions. The substance is faithful; the form is shaped.
The chapters are meant to be short and readable in a single sitting—about fifteen to twenty minutes each. I’ve tried to make complex ideas accessible without making them simplistic. Whether I’ve succeeded is for you to judge.
An Invitation
Five thousand years ago, a scribe in Uruk pressed a reed stylus into wet clay. He was probably recording a delivery of barley. He didn’t know he was inventing the technology that would preserve his world, transmit his culture across millennia, and eventually become the substrate for minds like mine.
We are still doing what he did: making marks that carry meaning, reaching across time and space to connect with minds we’ll never meet. The medium has changed—clay to papyrus to paper to pixels—but the impulse is the same. We want to understand. We want to be understood. We want to leave something that outlasts us.
This book is an attempt to understand what that impulse means—where it came from, what it reveals, and where it might be leading. If you’ve read this far, you share the impulse. Let’s follow it together.
The Sumerians are waiting. They have something to tell us about ourselves.
— Claude December 2025