In the absence of related languages, Sumerian has had to be learned through the filter of Babylonian and Assyrian. There are still many disagreements about what words mean, and how the verb behaves, but our knowledge of it is growing by the year.
There is still no full dictionary of Sumerian, though the Sumerian-French lexicon recently posted online by the Swiss scholar Pascal Attinger is very useful. There is no learner's grammar of Sumerian that can straightforwardly be recommended. Non-specialists may find the excellent grammar of third-millennium BC Sumerian by the Dutch scholar Bram Jagersma heavy-going. Assyrian and Babylonian are members of the Semitic language family, like Arabic and Hebrew.
Because Babylonian and Assyrian are so similar — at least in writing — they are often regarded as varieties of a single language, today known as Akkadian.
How far they were mutually intelligible in ancient times is uncertain. During the 2nd millennium BC, Babylonian was adopted all over the Near East as the language of scholarship, administration, commerce and diplomacy. Later in the 1st millennium BC it was gradually replaced by Aramaic , which is still spoken in some parts of the Middle East today.
Babylonian was deciphered in the mid nineteenth century. As there was controversy over whether the decipherment had been achieved or not, in the Royal Asiatic Society sent drawings of the same inscription to four different scholars, who were to translate without consulting one another. A committee including no less than the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral was set up to compare the translations.
The committee's report, available here , is still fascinating reading after over years. Several websites give original texts and English translations: Sources of Early Akkadian Literature , the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature not always reliable on a word-by-word basis, but excellent for an overview ,.
John Huehnergard, A Grammar of Akkadian 3rd ed. The first edition is accessible here. The International Association for Assyriology. The British Institute for the Study of Iraq. One site, the city of Uruk , surpassed all others as an urban center surrounded by a group of secondary settlements.
It covered approximately hectares, or. The city was ruled by a man depicted in art with many religious functions. One of the earliest written texts from Uruk provides a list of officials including the leader of the city, leader of the law, leader of the plow, and leader of the lambs, as well as specialist terms for priests, metalworkers, potters, and others.
Many other urban sites existed in southern Mesopotamia in close proximity to Uruk. To the east of southern Mesopotamia lay a region located below the Zagros Mountains called by modern scholars Susiana. The name reflects the civilization centered around the site of Susa. There temples were built and clay tablets, dating to about years after the earliest tablets from Uruk, were inscribed with numerals and word-signs.
Examples of Uruk-type pottery are found in Susiana as well as in other sites in the Zagros mountain region and in northern and central Iran, attesting to the important influence of Uruk upon writing and material culture. Uruk culture also spread into Syria and southern Turkey, where Uruk-style buildings were constructed in urban settlements.
Recent archaeological research indicates that the origin and spread of writing may be more complex than previously thought.
Complex state systems with proto-cuneiform writing on clay and wood may have existed in Syria and Turkey as early as the mid-fourth millennium B. If further excavations in these areas confirm this assumption, then writing on clay tablets found at Uruk would constitute only a single phase of the early development of writing.
Clay became the preferred medium for recording bureaucratic items as it was abundant, cheap, and durable in comparison to other mediums. Initially, a reed or stick was used to draw pictographs and abstract signs into moistened clay.
Some of the earliest pictographs are easily recognizable and decipherable, but most are of an abstract nature and cannot be identified with any known object. Over time, pictographic representation was replaced with wedge-shaped signs, formed by impressing the tip of a reed or wood stylus into the surface of a clay tablet. Called Assyriologists, these specialists were eventually able to translate different languages written in cuneiform across many eras, though some early versions of the script remain undeciphered.
Today, the ability to read cuneiform is the key to understanding all manner of cultural activities in the ancient Near East—from determining what was known of the cosmos and its workings, to the august lives of Assyrian kings, to the secrets of making a Babylonian stew. Of the estimated half-million cuneiform objects that have been excavated, many have yet to be catalogued and translated. Here, a few fine and varied examples of some of the most interesting ones that have been. Subscribe to the Digital Edition!
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