I measure your place? That doesn't sound right. I <3 you :)
I may not be quite as ready to place hate and love so close together but I certainly agree about the indifference. Really liking the Sumerian historical posting. I have a hobby of creating devil/demon accounts here, any particularly good Sumerian devil/demon type names you could recommend?
On a couple of occasions I asked my professors why they thought that there isn't one word for love and that Sumerian has this "to measure a place" business, and nobody seemed all that interested in thinking that over with me. Sumerian is built on a fairly limited number of monosyllabic words that have a wide range of meanings, and then there are a lot of compound words (like ki ang and hulu gig). Sometimes those compound words makes sense and sometimes they don't. It just seemed to me like love was a pretty basic thing that is ubiquitous enough to warrant its very own monosyllabic word. There's probably some boring explanation, but I don't have any native Sumerian speakers to ask, so I'll go ahead and imagine that there's a deep philosophical reason behind it.
Sumerian demons! There are so many of them. The Mesopotamians believed that sickness and premature death were caused by demons, and they wrote exorcism incantations with long lists of demon names to try to rid people of them. I can go dig into some books tomorrow and find a good one for you.
oooh you had me at exorcism incantations with long lists of demon names lol