How the writing works

Cuneiform is not an alphabet. A sign can stand for a whole word, for a syllable, or for nothing at all: a silent marker telling you what kind of thing the next word is. The same sign does all three jobs depending on where it sits, which is why a transliteration writes AN for the sign, an for the word sky, and superscript d for the same sign used as the god-marker.

The three strokes

A reed stylus with a triangular tip makes one shape, pressed at different angles. Held so the tail runs right, it is a horizontal. Turned so the tail runs down, a vertical. Pressed with only the corner, a winkelhaken. Every sign in the script is these three, in some arrangement, and nothing else.

Counting by sixty

Numbers ran in base sixty. A vertical wedge is one, a winkelhaken is ten, and a big vertical wedge starts the next order at sixty. Sixty seconds in a minute and 360 degrees in a circle are the same system, still in use.

diš

1, one vertical wedge

u

10, one winkelhaken

ĝeš

60, back to a vertical wedge, written larger

One sign, two words

𒀭 is read an when it means sky and diĝir when it means god. It is the same sign because in Sumerian thinking they are close to the same thing: the sky is where gods are. Written in front of a name it stops being a word at all and becomes the marker that says a god is coming. Nobody read it aloud.

an

sky

diĝir

god

The Land

The Sumerians called their country kalam, the Land, with nothing added. Everything beyond it was kur: mountain, foreign country, and the land of the dead, all one word. Geography and theology in a single sign.

Big man

lugal, king, is LU2 plus GAL: man plus big. Sumerian builds a great deal of its vocabulary this way, by putting two plain words next to each other and letting the compound harden into a title.

lugal

king, from lu2 gal, big man

e2-gal

palace, from e2 gal, big house

dub-sar

scribe, from dub sar, tablet-writer

Animate and inanimate

There is no masculine and feminine here. The split that matters is animate against inanimate: people and gods on one side, everything else on the other. Only animate nouns take the plural -(e)ne, and only animates get the possessive -a-ni, which is his and hers at once.

The adjective comes second

iri gal is the big city, never gal iri. Numbers behave the same way: udu min is two sheep, sheep-two. Whatever describes a noun follows it.

iri gal

the big city

e2 ku3

the pure house

udu min

two sheep

A sign inside a sign

gu7, to eat, is the sign KA, mouth, with the sign for bread drawn inside it. nag, to drink, is the same mouth with water inside. The script says what it means, and once you see the trick you can read signs you have never met.

gu7

to eat: bread in the mouth

nag

to drink: water in the mouth

Beer as wages

Beer was rationed out by the jar as pay, and the administrative tablets that record it are most of what survives. Sumerian is not mainly a literature. It is mainly accounting, and the literature came along afterwards.

Compound verbs

Sumerian likes to make a verb out of a body part plus a plain verb. igi du8 is to see, eye plus to open. šu ti is to receive, hand plus to approach. The noun stays a separate word and can drift away from the verb inside the sentence, which is one of the harder things about reading a real line.

The me

me are the divine powers: the fixed set of things that make a civilisation work. Kingship, priesthood, the crafts, music, the art of the scribe, and less obvious entries like strife and deceit. Inana gets Enki drunk and carries them off to her own city, and the poem lists them one by one.

Ergative

This is the thing that trips up every English speaker. A subject that does something to an object takes -e. A subject that just is, or goes, or stands, takes nothing at all, and so does an object. So the same bare form covers the king in the king went and the house in the king built the house. The language groups them together; English does not.

lugal i3-ĝen

the king went. Bare: nothing was acted on.

lugal-e e2 mu-un-du3

the king built the house. -e on the king, nothing on the house.

The endings, in order

They stack onto the noun in a fixed order, and more than one can appear at once. These are the ones this course uses.

-Ø

absolutive: the bare form. Intransitive subject, or object.

-e

ergative: the subject that acts on something.

-ak

genitive: of. Usually heard as -a, since the k only shows when something follows.

-ra

dative: to, for. Animates only.

-še3

terminative: towards.

-ta

ablative: from, out of.

-a

locative: in, on.

-da

comitative: with.

Possessives

-ĝu10 is my, -zu is your, -a-ni is his or hers, -bi is its. They sit between the noun and the case ending, so a noun can end up carrying three suffixes at once: e2-ĝu10-še3, towards my house.

The chain

A Sumerian verb is a root with a run of prefixes in front of it and a short tail behind. The prefixes are not optional decoration: they carry the mood, the direction of the action, and pointers back to the participants. A finite verb almost never appears bare.

i3-ĝen

he went. i3- is the plainest prefix there is.

mu-un-du3

he built it. mu- points the action this way, -n- points back at the doer.

nu-ĝen

he did not go. nu- replaces the prefix rather than joining it.

i3-ĝen-eš

they went. -eš on the end is the plural.

Word order

The verb goes last. Everything else lines up in front of it, roughly subject, then the rest, then object, then verb. Since the endings say who does what, the order in between can move without breaking the sentence.

Ḫamṭu and marû

Sumerian does not split time into past and present so much as into finished and unfinished. Ḫamṭu, quick, is the completed one, and marû, slow, is the ongoing one. Some verbs mark the difference with a different ending, and a few switch to a different root entirely. This course stays in ḫamṭu.

What survives

Sumerian died as a spoken language somewhere around 2000 BCE and carried on for two thousand years afterwards as the language of scholarship, the way Latin did. Almost everything we can read was copied out by students in scribal schools long after anybody spoke it, which is why the same poem survives in a dozen slightly different versions.

How it is meant to sound

Nobody knows. The pronunciation used here is the conventional reconstruction: five clean vowels, š as in ship, ĝ as the ng in sing, ḫ as the ch in loch. Peter Pringle's recording of Gilgameš, sung to a long-necked lute, is the reason this app exists, and it is one reconstruction among several.