And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
“And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.
And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined doing.
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language so that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
Therefore, is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.”
Sumerian is, uniquely, a language with no descendants, no forbears, and no siblings.
Mutual unintelligibility conferred protection on users of individual languages against malignant, self-replicating information structures like the Nam Shub, ‘mind viruses’ which would otherwise be universal in destructive effect.
Information War is fought in the abstract domain, with, or by, images and symbols. IW is war of ideas upon ideas, symbol on symbols, belief on belief, protean forms and complex models, hard science and New Age woo, code on code, noetic and animated by emotion, as frequently in dreams.
We’ve been conditioned to think of our imagination as an unreal place, with ephemeral contents without substance in 3D material reality.
“Imaginary” means non-existent in the vocabulary of popular culture. This is oddly wrong. Imagination’s infinite contents and population exist in an abstract space interacting with material reality through us. The most complex living structures imaginable by exist in our imagination.