Cuneiform Šumma Sentences: Conditionals or Implications?

Moubarez, Hany

doi:10.2478/sh-2025-0001

Abstract

For a long time, it was believed in Assyriology and related disciplines that šumma sentences, or grammatical conditionals, which appeared in cuneiform texts and tablets of astrology, exorcism, law, extispicy, oneiromancy, medicine, and divination, were linguistic expressions of logical conditionals. F. Rochberg (2010; 2016) extended this belief, suggesting that they are even material conditionals. Andrew Schumann (2017; 2020; 2021) followed this, claiming that, as a result, we can trace the origin of symbolic logic in cuneiform writings, through which it moved to Greece. In this paper, after presenting this approach, I will challenge it by showing that šumma/IF sentences and similar constructs in cuneiform literature are arguments or implications that suffer from the same confusion between conditional and implication that Quine (1953/1966) highlighted when criticizing C.I. Lewis.

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Cuneiform Šumma Sentences: Conditionals or Implications?

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