ABSTRACT
The Oriental mind (like the primitive one) is presumed to be unable to conceive the ‘linear time’ of history, and to be rather characterised by a ‘cyclical time’ best fitting to explain events as ever-recurring actualisations of mythical models. The Semitic verbal system itself has been produced as a proof thereon. No history-writing, in its technical meaning, can be imagined to have been produced in the ‘original home’ of the proto-Indo-Europeans, nor to have been transmitted to the different branches of those peoples. In the minimal terms of personal history, the validation of a man’s role through his past is coterminous with the personal (or family) property of the means of production, and more closely with their transmission (through inheritance or any other procedure) from generation to generation. The most ancient stage of history writing in Sumer, immediately provides some of the best examples of the aforementioned features.
