Contexts of Ancient Rural Landscapes Creating Human Culture and Language

This paper has two main goals: frist, to describe the role of natural space in the creation of anthropological prototypes and in establishing universal biases by using semiotics’ theoretical framework; second, to argue that the cognitive behavior of humanity depends on a universal way of interacting with nature, instead of being limited to social stereotypes. Landscapes are frames for cultural constructions and anthropological behavior, collective and individual. In this sense, landscapes favor the construction of cultural archetypes and, by analogy, can be translated into a symbolic language. That language facilitates complex expression, explains nature and, at the same time, reveals everyday phenomena in a crystalized and invariable manner. Each visible component of a landscape is potentially a driver for the construction of meaning, i.e., the empirical experience with weather, terrain, fauna, and flora generates signs of meaning that is later reflected in the cultural matrix of a culture. In that sense, agricultural context is the main source for abstract language in sedentary cultures from Mediterranean and Mesopotamian regions. The methodology applied in this paper is directed to listen to the silent voices of the past through the analysis of unrelated textual sources, Sumerian and Roman, as the Sumerian text Inana B or Vergil’s Georgics. It is used to ‘break down’ the symbolic language of those texts into ‘signs of meaning’, and from this process, describe the original landscape that inspired it. We argue through anthropological/linguistic evidences that two unrelated cultural contexts in space and time can share cultural features. Such parallel characteristics result from similar anthropological experiences in the natural rural world and from the impact of economic activities in the daily life of ancient people.