Herding and farming symbiosis: a dialogic exercise on the manifestation of a universal toposin Sumerian and Roman primary cultures

Abstract

At a microeconomic level, the ancient inhabitants of southern Mesopotamia and regions of the Italic peninsula gained their sustenance from a combination of rain-fed cereal cultivation and herding. These already highly connected activities would inevitably, for many practical and cultural reasons, have profound repercussions on the construction of abstract thinking and on the conception of abstract vocabulary in a transversal cultural matrix. Such cultural compositions would come about by similar linguistic mechanisms, independently of the cultural context and time span, for the practical experience together with natural phenomena and rural life would be the source for these primary constructions. In that sense, in this paper I speculate on the relationship between the signs of these two complementary activities and their imaged representation as a source for abstract meaning in the collective mind. By approaching a kind of archaeology of traditional thought, I intend to establish a dialogic analysis between the data from two unrelated sociolinguistic cultures, in order to identify a transversal mode of constructing meaning upon similar compounded images of daily life.