Interview: Jenna S. Smith, author of The Goddess of Sumer - Page 3

Why the dearth of translations? It seems that when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, there was no shortage of people wanting to look at them.

There are relatively few scholars qualified to translate Sumerian, whereas there are thousands upon thousands of qualified Hebrew and Aramaic scholars. To put it in perspective, most of the Dead Sea Scrolls date to between 150 B.C.E. - 100 C.E., whereas the tablets recovered from Nippur and Nineveh date back to 4000 - 2000 B.C.E.

What is your guesses or guesses of the type of information in those untranslated finds?

Probably more of the same: Hymns of worship and stories of the exploits of the gods and rulers of those times. But again, if the translations were presented literally, they could tell a different story...

Is there a way for an armchair hobbyist to learn the language and perhaps work from photographs of the documents?

I would say not. As I pointed out before, the Sumerian language is unlike any other. First of all it is syllabic and ideographic rather than alphabetic. Secondly, over the long span of civilization in Sumer, the language evolved from very basic pictograms eventually into the more well-known Assyrian cuneiform, but it would be necessary to understand all of the forms for each symbol.

This book, besides being a mystery, is called "speculative fiction." How would you describe that genre?

I have taken archaeological evidence and speculated on a possible scenario of events. The translation of hundreds of thousands of ancient texts refer to gods in a way that modern man has assumed to be mythological rather than literal, yet even the most conservative translations hint at something very different than the average boring history book dares to tell.

"[E]ven the most conservative translations hint at something very different than the average boring history book dares to tell." What are they hinting at?

That the gods of ancient times were very real, that they navigated the heavens, and that they civilized planet Earth (gave man laws, math, language, architecture, agriculture...)

The book contains a lot of supernatural events. Are there reports of supernatural phenomena in connection with Sumerian artifacts?

Not that I am aware of.

Reviews: The Goddess of Sumer by Jenna Smith; Dea Ex Machina: The Goddess of Sumer by Jenna Smith.

Article Author: Justene Adamec

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