Namshub (incantation)
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Namshub, scientific transliteration nam-šub, is the Sumerian word for an incantation or self-fulfilling prophecy.[citation needed] The concept was popularized by Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash.
Meaning and nuances[edit]
Various namšub have been used in Sumerian Mythology, primarily by the Gods, for various purposes.[citation needed] As is noted in Snow Crash, most of the uses correspond to mental or psychological changes, as opposed to changes in the physical world, which in the context of the book implies that it is an early form of NLP.[citation needed] Some examples are its use in Enki and Innana and the Me, in which a namšub is used to alternately command Nuddimud (in this myth a servant of Enki, not a pseudonym for Enki himself) and make him forget the commands (by Innana), and in "Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta", which contains the best known namšub (the Namšub of Nuddimud, written in Snow Crash as "The Namshub of Enki").[citation needed]
Transliteration[edit]
The letter 'š' is used in modern scientific transliteration of Sumerian for the consonant phoneme generally thought to have been /ʃ/.[citation needed] Neal Stephenson, drawing on the works of Samuel Kramer as a source (including his translation of "The Namshub of Enki"), used the Anglicised transliteration 'sh' for this sound (compare Gilgamesh, Lagash, Shulgi).[citation needed]
The occasionally-encountered spelling 'namcub' is a workaround to accommodate Unicode-incapable systems which cannot handle the letter 'š'.[citation needed]
Sumerian Connection:
Once upon a time, there was no snake, there was no scorpion, There was no hyena, there was no lion, There was no wild dog, no wolf, There was no fear, no terror, Man had no rival.
In those days, the land Shubur-Hamazi, Harmony-tongued Sumer, the great land of the me of princeship, Uri, the land having all that is appropriate, The land Martu, resting in security, The whole universe, the people well cared for, To Enlil in one tongue gave speech.
Then the lord defiant, the prince defiant, the king defiant, Enki, the lord of abundance, whose commands are trustworthy, The lord of wisdom, who scans the land, The leader of the gods, The lord of Eridu, endowed with wisdom, Changed the speech in their mouths, put contention into it, Into the speech of man that had been one.
This is the nam-shub of Enki, translated from Sumerian cuneiform. It is two things: it is a story of linguistic disintegration, and it is an incantation which supposedly causes linguistic disintegration. To hear the tale is to lose the power of understanding speech. It tells of Enki, who "changed the speech" of the population to "put contention into it." This, of course, is similar in content to the Babel legend, where God disrupted the linguistic unity of the people in order to stop the Tower from being built.
Quotes & nformation goes to teh credit of: Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (216-7). Stephenson obtained it from Samuel Noah Kramer and John R. Maier's Myths of Enki, the Crafty God (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.) In Snow Crash, a sinister industrialist has obtained and translated ancient nam-shubs and is using them to wreak linguistic havoc in the modern world.
Final Thought
The nam-shubs suggest a magical theory of language, in which the only kind of utterance that can cause the breakdown of language is one which also happens to talk about the breakdown of language. In other words, the surface meaning of the incantation is crucial to its deep effect.
Why? Some indication can be found in Hofstader's discussion of the USE-MENTION dichotomy in information theory.
I find it curious that many stories about lethal texts and/or linguistic viruses invoke ancient mythology, as if the ancients knew things about language which have been forgotten in the modern world. Snow Crash posits that Sumerian nam-shubs are being used to wreak linguistic havoc in the modern world. Macroscope has a character who has the "gift of tongues," and takes its protagonist, Ivo Archer, back to Mesopotamian times. Julian Jaynes, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, posits that new kind of "unicameral" consciousness swept like a virus through the ancient world, destroying what had been a kind of Edenic innocence, and cites, as evidence, Sumerian inscriptions which sound much like nam-shubs.
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