The oldest written language in the world is generally now agreed to be Sumerian, forged in the kingdom of Sumer in what is now southeastern Iraq, the origins of which date back to around 3100 BCE — 5,000 years ago, during the Bronze Age. The writing is in cuneiform script, patterns of largely wedge-shaped lines that were impressed with a sharpened reed onto tablets of softened and leather-hard clay, eventually baked to ensure their preservation.
A word for wind exists in Sumerian — it is lil. The lexical story of this particular word is a little more complicated, however, since Sumerians, as far as we know, may well have been aware of wind and its effects, yet did not fully understand what caused the air — which was also invisible, of course — to move. There are Sumerian words for other features of the weather — for rain, for clouds, for ice, fog, thunder, and lightning. There is even a cuneiform word for snow, which was not common in Mesopotamia but which certainly occurred once in a while, and the existence of which, together with the challenges it presented to a settled desert people, presumably kept them intellectually on their toes. All of these things — rain, fog, clouds, snow, and so forth — are all easily seen, discernible, visible, describable, and so lend themselves to having a cuneiform noun determined for them and an utterable sound evolved for them.
But with wind, only the effects of its occurrence are ever visible — the ripples on the river water, the waving motion of tree branches, the dust devils rising up from the sides of a desert dune, the dishevelment of clothes occasioned by a particularly violent gust. Such physical effects of wind are translatable; and so, most important of all, are the quarters from which the blasts or the breezes or the gales appear to come. The wind’s direction was the most crucial lexical key, which in time prompted the inhabitants of Sumer to tell one wind from another. They gave names to these most important, most easily recognized directional winds.
The number of these winds that the Sumerians decided to name, and which unintentionally inaugurated a system of nomenclature that would be adopted by most of the rest of the world, was four. The Four Mesopotamian Winds, an invention of Sumerian mythology that has winds blowing from what are still today variants on what are known as the four cardinal points of the compass. It would be the Greek and Hebrew peoples of 2,000 years later who would define the actual cardinal points, North, South, East, and West; but the Sumerians — and their Mesopotamian successors, the Akkadians, the Assyrians, and the Babylonians — worked with what they had, and that was a system arranged around their own prevailing wind directions, all of which happened to be a uniform 45° off true north. (Interestingly, a map will show that the direction the Fertile Crescent takes itself, running between its two great rivers, spears diagonally across the deserts of Iraq at the same 45° angle to north: the connection between the direction of the named winds and that of the topography across which they blow is surely more than a coincidence.)
Of the four, the most familiar, the prevailing wind of Mesopotamia, still blows today from the northwest. It blows right along the parallel valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, along the direction of Mesopotamia itself. In doing so, the wind helps to push along the river waters — and any sailboats that happen to be borne upon them — as they flow some 1,300 miles from the Taurus Mountains in Turkey to the salt marshes near Basra and the rolling waves of the Persian Gulf. The Sumerian word for this wind is quite simply The Regular Wind, and the deity that Sumerian mythology attaches to it is Ninlil.
There are three such cardinal winds, each of them gods and all of them supposedly siblings, three male and the fourth, a southeasterly that tends to blow in the wet winter season, female. This wind is supposed to bring in clouds from the sea and is generally regarded as demonic, so it doesn’t greatly enhance the notion of female empowerment in what would, 3,000 years later, become a predominantly Islamic society. The two other wind gods are the so-called Amorite wind that blows from the southwest and a chilly northeasterly “mountain wind” originating in the Zagros range in modern Iran.
However, the niceties of Mesopotamian wind names and their presumed powers should perhaps concern us less than one plain and unassailable fact: 5,000 years ago, five words were invented from scratch. One of them, lil, denoted the bewildering idea of wind as an entity. Four others were born to signify the gods of the directions along which Mesopotamian air moves. The appearance of these five lexical inventions marks the first time that humankind ever attached words to this invisible and magical mystery. It was, if the metaphor may be mixed for an instant, a watershed moment. For once it had been achieved in the deserts of West Asia, so the very notion of wind as a linguistically definable entity took off everywhere. Wind words proliferated and spread with untamed promiscuity, as did wind gods, all around the planet.
For once it had been achieved in the deserts of West Asia, so the very notion of wind as a linguistically definable entity took off everywhere.
Egypt was probably next, then China, though there is much amiable tussling for post-cuneiform pole position. In the Nile Valley there are hieroglyphs galore that signify weather systems; and, being invisible and inexplicable, wind is denoted by its effect rather than its reality. Hence the symbol for wind in Ancient Egypt is the sail of a boat — not its hull or its crew, just a tiny mast and a tiny convexity of cloth, together illustrating the unseeable force that moves along the passage between Luxor and Aswan over the Upper Nile, or Alexandria and Cairo on its more placid lower reaches.
Advance continues as word spreads. China’s early appreciation and understanding of wind comes with a good deal of sophistication, a little more biology, a little more logic, something of a vaguely discernible rational approach to what still remained, at least in the Yellow River floodplain, as much a mystery as it did 5,000 miles east, beside the Tigris. The character in classical Chinese has nine strokes (in the slimmed-down version used in mainland China today the character is simpler, with only five strokes). The basic etymological explanation is that the character is based on insects, since it was long thought that wind brought insects along with it; a secondary explanation holds that insects have nothing to do with the concept, but that the origin of the character has to do with birds, most notably the phoenix, and that the flapping of the birds’ wings was what caused winds to blow. The explanation is somewhat charming, interesting, and thoughtful — and not simply a matter for mythology left to explanation from the heavens, as it was in Sumer. The Chinese approach has, moreover, a kind of common sense to it, even though it doesn’t hold water today.
In addition, the nine- or five-stroke character for wind is, in the Chinese syllabary, a radical — meaning that it, like the wind itself, is regarded as of major importance within the entire structure of Chinese language and culture. It is appended to scores of other elements to provide an impressive range of other concepts, both related and little connected — as, for example, fengcai, meaning having an elegant demeanor, to fenghai, the damage caused by a storm, or fengjing, a ventilating shaft, to fengmao, a cowl-like hat worn in the wintertime.
By now — and most especially once the Romans, the Greeks, and the Hebrew cultures had gotten hold of the idea — the notion of wind was starting fully to enter the cultural mainstream, enjoying its role at the very center of the human experience. It was no longer entirely a mystery but was seen to have uses, could perform myriad kinds of work, brought changes in weather, was by turns enjoyable and frightening and — most significantly, maybe — worthy of deep study. And yet for many years still, some societies fell back on naming deities for the wind, keeping it as an entity under celestial control, or having unfathomable consequences — and not wishing to pry too deeply into what caused it, taking a pre-Enlightenment attitude to it, letting the mystery be.
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