Non-specialists may find the excellent grammar of third-millennium BC Sumerian by the Dutch scholar Bram Jagersma heavy-going. There is no learner's grammar of Sumerian that can straightforwardly be recommended. 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 are still many disagreements about what words mean, and how the verb behaves, but our knowledge of it is growing by the year. In the absence of related languages, Sumerian has had to be learned through the filter of Babylonian and Assyrian. It was spoken in South Iraq until it died out, probably around 2000 BC, giving way to Babylonianian but it survived as a scholarly and liturgical language, much like mediaeval Latin, until the very end of cuneiform in the late 1st millennium BC. Sumerian is an "agglutinating" language with no known relatives. To try converting modern text into cuneiform, click the link to the transliteration tool or follow the instructions at the bottom of this page. It thus cannot be used to write individual consonants. With possible exceptions in the late first millennium BC, the cuneiform script only writes syllables (a, ba, al, bal). The first language they do write is Sumerian. When they are first used there is so little grammar it is impossible to tell which language is being written. It started out as pictures (a bit like Egyptian hieroglyphs), but these quickly became so stylised as to be unrecognisable. This is the shape which occurs naturally when one impresses a stylus (writing implement) with a triangular cross-section into a flat surface of clay. is so called because each individual stroke (several of which might be used to form a sign) has the shape of a wedge. Mesopotamia was open on all sides to its neighbours, and its influence can be traced from India to Greece: the Pharaoh's scribes used cuneiform script to correspond with the Great Kings of the Hittites in Turkey, at Ugarit on the Syrian coast the forerunners of the Phoenicians kept their legal and commercial records on cuneiform tablets in Babylonian, and later the Biblical and Classical worlds grew up in the shadow of these ancient cultures to the east (and sometimes under their direct political domination). More are found by the year.Īs well as records of daily life and administration, they include religious, mathematical, musical and astronomical texts, the earliest known laws, and a rich literature that includes the Epic of Gilgamesh and the oldest versions of the Flood Story also known from the Bible.Īs the world's first fully urban society, ancient Mesopotamia is of paramount interest to world archaeology, and its art, architecture and technology were the rival, and indeed often the precursors, of Egypt's. Being incredibly durable, clay tablets have been recovered in thousands at archaeological sites from the Mediterranean to Bahrain to Iran. Mesopotamian languages in the cuneiform script are mostly written on clay tablets, though they could also be carved on stone (example here). The subject which studies Mesopotamian languages and the sources written in them is called Assyriology. wedge-shaped) script, deciphered by Henry Rawlinson and other scholars in the 1850s. They have come down to us in the "cuneiform" (i.e. The principal languages of ancient Mesopotamia were Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian (together sometimes known as 'Akkadian'), Amorite, and - later - Aramaic.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |