Entertainment / Literature / Nam-Shub: (1) An incantation, chant, poem, or speech thought to have magical power in Sumerian texts. The most famous example is the nam-shub of Enki, in which Enki creates a nam-shub that causes others to lose the ability to speak, and which may be a source for the later Hebrew legend of the Tower of Babel. In the cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson uses the nam-shub as a dangerous meme (i.e., an idea or pattern of thought that 'replicates' by being passed along from one thinker to another). He re-interprets the Sumerian myth of Enki by imagining that the Chomskyian deep structure of the brain can be reprogrammed with different capacities for language, i.e., that humans once shared a common and innate agglutinative language, but lacked individual consciousness. A priest or scribe named Enki creates a nam-shub that re-writes the linguistic wiring of those who read it in cuneiform (or hear it spoken aloud), causing them to lose the ability to understand language. This fictional nam-shub creates in the victim the capacity for individual, conscious language, but also destroys the individual's access to universal language.
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