Molecular impressions of water as cuneiform cascade*

This cascade is made up of cuneiform characters that include the character for water, drawn from the website of the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project.

Sumerian is one of the world’s oldest written languages, dating back to 3000 BCE. It was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, in the part of West Asia that is now Iraq and its neighbors. The most familiar literary writings in Sumarian are the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hammurabi Stelae, and the Bihistun mountain inscription.

I have long regarded this ancestral sign of water as the most elegant depiction of H₂O’s colligative features: the left wedge with its long tail as the lone pair of electrons, the upper right wedge as the proton and lower right wedge with its shorter tail as the hydroxyl anion.

The next six tiers in my visual cascade somewhat reflect a chaotic cascade of thoughts that comprise this molecular impression of water.

Tiers two and three include this sign in the interrogative questions that are the basis of the science of biological chemistry and other sciences.

Tier four is habitats of germs.

Tier five explores vascular plant processes of extracting minerals from soils and is intended as a simile to elaborate biomorphic images at the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics Protein Data Bank, or RCSB PDB. 

Tier six depicts various biological fluids.

Tier seven shows the beginnings of a more personable chronology into biomorphic chemistry’s natural history and whether this sign for water may have morphed into Poseidon’s trident or also perhaps the question mark(?). Creation of the question mark has been credited to Alcuin of York, an eighth-century scholar.

*“But we can trace the formation of many words further back than that of species, for we can perceive how they actually arose from the imitation of various sounds.”                                                        

— Charles Darwin, “Descent of Man”

Fiona Yang, adapted from Thomas Gorrell's design

The cascade begins at the top with the Sumerian symbol for water and moves down through the tiers described in the text.