Sumerian

Examples of Sumerian in the following topics:

• The Sumerians

  • The Sumerian people lived in Mesopotamia from the 27th-20th century BCE.
  • The Sumerians were eventually absorbed into the Akkadian/Babylonian population.
  • Sumerian culture began to spread from southern Mesopotamia into surrounding areas.
  • Toward the end of the empire, though, Sumerian became increasingly a literary language.
  • Many Sumerian clay tablets written in cuneiform script have been discovered.

• Lagash and the Third Dynasty of Ur

  • The Third Dynasty of Ur, also known as the Neo-Sumerian Empire or the Ur III refers to the twenty-first-to-twentieth century BCE Sumerian ruling dynasty based in the city of Ur.
  • During Ur III, Sumerian dominated the cultural sphere and was the language of legal, administrative, and economic documents.
  • Sumerian texts were mass produced in the Ur III period, and, although the Semitic Akkadian language became the common spoken language, Sumerian continued to dominate literature and also administrative documents.
  • Government officials learned to write at special schools that used only Sumerian literature.
  • Some scholars believe that the Uruk epic of Gilgamesh was written down during this period into its classic Sumerian form.

• The Mesopotamian Cultures

  • The Sumerian city of Eridu, which at that time bordered the Persian Gulf, is believed to be the world's first city.
  • An early form of wedge-shaped writing called cuneiform developed in the early Sumerian period.
  • Metal also served various purposes during the early Sumerian period.
  • The later Sumerian pantheon (gods and goddesses) was likely modeled upon this political structure.
  • Example of Sumerian pictorial cuneiform writing.

• The Akkadian Empire

  • The Akkadian Empire was an ancient Semitic empire centered in the city of Akkad, which united all the indigenous Akkadian speaking Semites and Sumerian speakers under one rule.
  • Sargon, throughout his long life, showed special deference to the Sumerian deities, particularly Inanna (Ishtar), his patroness, and Zababa, the warrior god of Kish.
  • He was also, for the first time in Sumerian culture, addressed as "the god of Agade (Akkad)."
  • Sumerians and Akkadians were bilingual in each other's languages, but Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian.
  • The Sumerian king Ur-Nammu (2112-2095 BCE) later cleared the Gutians from Mesopotamia during his reign.

• Akkadian Government, Culture, and Economy

  • Traditionally, the ensi was the highest functionary of the Sumerian city-states.
  • During the 3rd millennium BCE, a very intimate cultural symbiosis developed between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism.
  • The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian (and vice versa) is evident from lexical borrowing on a massive scale, to syntactic, morphological, and phonological convergence.
  • Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennia BCE (the exact dating being a matter of debate), but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific language in Mesopotamia until the first century CE.
  • Sumerian literature continued in rich development during the Akkadian period.

• Babylonian Culture

  • Hallmarks of Babylonian culture include mudbrick architecture, extensive astronomical records and logs, diagnostic medical handbooks, and translations of Sumerian literature.
  • Women as well as men learned to read and write, and had knowledge of the extinct Sumerian language, along with a complicated and extensive syllabary.
  • A considerable amount of Babylonian literature was translated from Sumerian originals, and the language of religion and law long continued to be written in the old agglutinative language of Sumer.
  • One of the most famous of these was the Epic of Gilgamesh, in twelve books, translated from the original Sumerian by a certain Sin-liqi-unninni, and arranged upon an astronomical principle.

• Defining Globalization

  • Some economists postulate that the roots of global trade links may be attributed to the Sumerians around 3,000 B.C., as they created routes between themselves and civilizations in the Indus Valley Region (what is now the northwestern region of India).
  • As cultures such as the Sumerian's realized the advantages of trading, the surrounding regions began a slow transition towards trade with other nations.

• Early Biotechnology: Cheese, Bread, Wine, Beer, and Yogurt

  • Records of brewing beer date back about 6,000 years to the Sumerians.
  • Evidence indicates that the Sumerians discovered fermentation by chance.

• Specialization by Skillset

  • Division of labor was also a method used by the Sumerians to categorize different jobs and divide them to skilled members of a society.

• Babylon

  • Following the disintegration of the Akkadian Empire, the Sumerians rose up with the Third Dynasty of Ur in the late 22nd century BCE, and ejected the barbarian Gutians from southern Mesopotamia.
  • The Sumerian "Ur-III" dynasty eventually collapsed at the hands of the Elamites, another Semitic people, in 2002 BCE.