For a long time, it was believed in Assyriology and related disciplines

that šumma sentences, or grammatical conditionals, which appeared in

cuneiform texts and tablets of astrology, exorcism, law, extispicy,

oneiromancy, medicine, and divination, were linguistic expressions of

logical conditionals. F. Rochberg (2010; 2016) extended this belief,

suggesting that they are even material conditionals. Andrew Schumann

(2017; 2020; 2021) followed this, claiming that, as a result, we can

trace the origin of symbolic logic in cuneiform writings, through which

it moved to Greece. In this paper, after presenting this approach, I will

challenge it by showing that šumma/IF sentences and similar

constructs in cuneiform literature are arguments or implications that

suffer from the same confusion between conditional and implication

that Quine (1953/1966) highlighted when criticizing C.I. Lewis.

Keywords: logic, conditional, implication, cuneiform texts, argument,

Babylonian science, šumma