![]() ![]() To do so, they relied on many of the same sorts of resources that we still use in language learning today, from lexical lists TT and grammars to bilingual texts. Scribal training remained bilingual, but scribes who grew up speaking the Assyrian dialect of Akkadian now had to acquire Sumerian as a second language. An old Sumerian proverb asks, "A scribe TT who does not know Sumerian, what (kind of) a scribe is he?" ( ETCSL 6.1.02 80), and this continued to hold true in first millennium Assyria. © The Trustees of the British Museum.Įven more importantly, such was the perceived importance and prestige of Sumerian that it continued to be maintained as a language of cult and scholarship, much like Latin in medieval Europe. View large image on British Museum website. The inscription gives an account of silver TT and other commodities and is probably from the Sumerian city of Šuruppag PGP . Image 2: Clay tablet inscribed in Sumerian, c.2500 BC, showing a more linear form of the cuneiform script. This was especially true in the Neo-Assyrian TT period, when the use of logograms as opposed to syllabic writings became a particularly popular way of showcasing one's learnedness and appreciation of cuneiform's complexity. Its influence on Akkadian remained visible in Sumerian loanwords and certain grammatical features as well as in the logograms (or "Sumerograms") which had originated as Sumerian cuneiform signs. However, this did not spell the end of Sumerian. The two languages were used side by side until Sumerian died out as a mother tongue, sometime around 2000 BC (the exact date remains the subject of much debate). "A scribe who does not know Sumerian, what (kind of) a scribe is he?"Įventually, the cuneiform script which had been developed for Sumerian was adapted for Akkadian, a Semitic language TT also spoken in Mesopotamia but linguistically unrelated to Sumerian. ![]() Impressed signs were also used to record numbers in a variety of different arithmetical bases. The script itself functioned as a mixture of logograms, which represent whole words, and phonetic signs, which represent vowels and syllables. Many of the earliest signs were pictorial in nature ( Image 1) but they gradually developed more stylised and linear forms ( Image 2). Sumerian was written on clay tablets TT and other durable materials such as stone using the cuneiform script. The word "Sumerian" derives from the Akkadian TT word šumeru the Sumerians themselves referred to their language simply as eme-gi 7 ("native tongue"). It therefore vies with Egyptian for the title of the oldest recorded language in the world. Sumerian emerged as a written language in what is now southern Iraq at the end of the 4th millennium BC. The sign is used in later Sumerian to mean "eat". Note the pictorial nature of the signs, such as the human head with bread in the lower register, typical of ration texts. Image 1: Clay tablet inscribed with details of food rations, dating from c.3300-3100 BC from southern Mesopotamia. ![]()
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