Linguistics question

[steenkh]

And just to muddy the waters, I can't resist bringing up Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind." From the Wikipedia article: "Jaynes asserts that until roughly the times written about in Homer's Iliad, humans did not generally have the self-awareness characteristic of consciousness as most people experience it today."

So, if the nature of consciousness changed, what did that do to language?

I wonder how the Sumerian or the Egyptian civilization would have developed if humans had been self-conscious at that time?