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106-526: Mušmaḫḫū , inscribed in Sumerian as 𒈲𒈤 MUŠ.MAḪ, Akkadian as muš-ma-ḫu , meaning "Exalted/distinguished Serpent", was an ancient Mesopotamian mythological hybrid of serpent, lion and bird, sometimes identified with the seven-headed serpent slain by Ninurta in the mythology of the Sumerian period. He is one of the three horned snakes, with his companions, Bašmu and Ušumgallu , with whom he may have shared

212-435: A logosyllabic script comprising several hundred signs. Rosengarten (1967) lists 468 signs used in Sumerian (pre- Sargonian ) Lagash . The cuneiform script was adapted to Akkadian writing beginning in the mid-third millennium. Over the long period of bi-lingual overlap of active Sumerian and Akkadian usage the two languages influenced each other, as reflected in numerous loanwords and even word order changes. Depending on

318-453: A mountain , at its lower end a spring ! House, at its upper end threefold indeed ... Whose well-founded storehouse is established as a household ... whose terrace is supported by lahama deities; whose princely great wall ... the shrine of Urim! Barton translated the actions of the Annanuki in and around the temple: In it their heroes were collected; they were noble. In decisions rendered,

424-792: A nationalistic flavour. Attempts have been made without success to link Sumerian with a range of widely disparate groups such as Indo-European languages , the Austroasiatic languages , Dravidian languages , Uralic languages such as Hungarian and Finnish , Sino-Tibetan languages and Turkic languages (the last being promoted by Turkish nationalists as part of the Sun language theory ). Additionally, long-range proposals have attempted to include Sumerian in broad macrofamilies . Such proposals enjoy virtually no support among modern linguists, Sumerologists and Assyriologists and are typically seen as fringe theories . It has also been suggested that

530-402: A bull's horn sounding at temple ceremonies: "the wild bull's horn was made to growl, the algarsura instrument was made to thud." Samuel Noah Kramer suggested that the musical instruments mentioned in the hymn were played in accompaniment. He proposed that the tigi was probably a hymn accompanied by lyre , that irshemma was perhaps one accompanied by a type of drum and that adab possibly

636-510: A common mythological origin. In Angim or "Ninurta's return to Nippur", the storm god describes one of his weapons as "the seven-mouthed muš-mah serpent" (line 138), reminiscent of the Greek myth of Heracles and the seven headed Lernaean Hydra he slew in the second of his Twelve labours . An engraved shell of the Early Dynastic period shows Ninğirsu slaying the seven-headed mušmaḫḫū . In

742-430: A detailed and readable summary of the decipherment of Sumerian in his Sumerian Mythology . Friedrich Delitzsch published a learned Sumerian dictionary and grammar in the form of his Sumerisches Glossar and Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik , both appearing in 1914. Delitzsch's student, Arno Poebel , published a grammar with the same title, Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik , in 1923, and for 50 years it would be

848-435: A detour in understanding the language – a Paris -based orientalist , Joseph Halévy , argued from 1874 onward that Sumerian was not a natural language, but rather a secret code (a cryptolect ), and for over a decade the leading Assyriologists battled over this issue. For a dozen years, starting in 1885, Friedrich Delitzsch accepted Halévy's arguments, not renouncing Halévy until 1897. François Thureau-Dangin working at

954-403: A few common graphic forms out of many that may occur. Spelling practices have also changed significantly in the course of the history of Sumerian: the examples in the article will use the most phonetically explicit spellings attested, which usually means Old Babylonian or Ur III period spellings. except where an authentic example from another period is used. Modern knowledge of Sumerian phonology

1060-413: A hymn accompanied by another form of string instrument. The hymn finishes with an admonition repeated four times suggested to be both a warning and invocation of the divine presence in the temple. Such ambivalence about approaching temples has crucially influenced the development of Jewish and Christian mysticism . Draw near, man, to the city, to the city -- but do not draw near! Draw near, man, to

1166-522: A non-Semitic language had preceded Akkadian in Mesopotamia, and that speakers of this language had developed the cuneiform script. In 1855 Rawlinson announced the discovery of non-Semitic inscriptions at the southern Babylonian sites of Nippur , Larsa , and Uruk . In 1856, Hincks argued that the untranslated language was agglutinative in character. The language was called "Scythic" by some, and, confusingly, "Akkadian" by others. In 1869, Oppert proposed

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1272-453: A number of suffixes and enclitics consisting of /e/ or beginning in /e/ are also assimilated and reduced. In earlier scholarship, somewhat different views were expressed and attempts were made to formulate detailed rules for the effect of grammatical morphemes and compounding on stress, but with inconclusive results. Based predominantly on patterns of vowel elision, Adam Falkenstein argued that stress in monomorphemic words tended to be on

1378-465: A number of sign lists, which were apparently used for the training of scribes. The next period, Archaic Sumerian (3000 BC – 2500 BC), is the first stage of inscriptions that indicate grammatical elements, so the identification of the language is certain. It includes some administrative texts and sign lists from Ur (c. 2800 BC). Texts from Shuruppak and Abu Salabikh from 2600 to 2500 BC (the so-called Fara period or Early Dynastic Period IIIa) are

1484-480: A relation to the Sumerian language. Around 2600 BC, cuneiform symbols were developed using a wedge-shaped stylus to impress the shapes into wet clay. This cuneiform ("wedge-shaped") mode of writing co-existed with the proto-cuneiform archaic mode. Deimel (1922) lists 870 signs used in the Early Dynastic IIIa period (26th century). In the same period the large set of logographic signs had been simplified into

1590-514: A richer vowel inventory by some researchers. For example, we find forms like 𒂵𒁽 g a -kaš 4 "let me run", but, from the Neo-Sumerian period onwards, occasional spellings like 𒄘𒈬𒊏𒀊𒋧 g u 2 -mu-ra-ab-šum 2 "let me give it to you". According to Jagersma, these assimilations are limited to open syllables and, as with vowel harmony, Jagersma interprets their absence as the result of vowel length or of stress in at least some cases. There

1696-482: A sacred, ceremonial, literary, and scientific language in Akkadian-speaking Mesopotamian states such as Assyria and Babylonia until the 1st century AD. Thereafter, it seems to have fallen into obscurity until the 19th century, when Assyriologists began deciphering the cuneiform inscriptions and excavated tablets that had been left by its speakers. In spite of its extinction, Sumerian exerted

1802-408: A second vowel harmony rule. There also appear to be many cases of partial or complete assimilation of the vowel of certain prefixes and suffixes to one in the adjacent syllable reflected in writing in some of the later periods, and there is a noticeable, albeit not absolute, tendency for disyllabic stems to have the same vowel in both syllables. These patterns, too, are interpreted as evidence for

1908-638: A significant impact on the languages of the area. The cuneiform script , originally used for Sumerian, was widely adopted by numerous regional languages such as Akkadian , Elamite , Eblaite , Hittite , Hurrian , Luwian and Urartian ; it similarly inspired the Old Persian alphabet which was used to write the eponymous language . The impact was perhaps the greatest on Akkadian, whose grammar and vocabulary were significantly influenced by Sumerian. The history of written Sumerian can be divided into several periods: The pictographic writing system used during

2014-460: A spoken language in nearly all of its original territory, whereas Sumerian continued its existence as a liturgical and classical language for religious, artistic and scholarly purposes. In addition, it has been argued that Sumerian persisted as a spoken language at least in a small part of Southern Mesopotamia ( Nippur and its surroundings) at least until about 1900 BC and possibly until as late as 1700 BC. Nonetheless, it seems clear that by far

2120-585: A survey of the field could not be considered complete. The primary institutional lexical effort in Sumerian is the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary project, begun in 1974. In 2004, the PSD was released on the Web as the ePSD. The project is currently supervised by Steve Tinney. It has not been updated online since 2006, but Tinney and colleagues are working on a new edition of the ePSD, a working draft of which

2226-407: A text may not even have been meant to be read in Sumerian; instead, it may have functioned as a prestigious way of "encoding" Akkadian via Sumerograms (cf. Japanese kanbun ). Nonetheless, the study of Sumerian and copying of Sumerian texts remained an integral part of scribal education and literary culture of Mesopotamia and surrounding societies influenced by it and it retained that role until

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2332-454: A vowel quality opposite to the one that would have been expected according to this rule, which has been variously interpreted as an indication either of the existence of additional vowel phonemes in Sumerian or simply of incorrectly reconstructed readings of individual lexemes. The 3rd person plural dimensional prefix 𒉈 -ne- is also unaffected, which Jagersma believes to be caused by the length of its vowel. In addition, some have argued for

2438-515: A well-known Hymn to Enlil and the hymn to temples in Ur that introduces a Shulgi hymn ." The Enheduanna hymn/poem version is: "Towering Kesh. You are the image of heaven and earth. Like the mighty viper of the desert, you spread fear. House of Ninhursanga, you stand on a land of wrath. Glorious Kesh: your heart is deep, your form is huge. Great lion . . . the upland, roaming through the wild. Great mountain, brought here by holy incantations. Your heart

2544-449: A wild bull" ( Genesis 49:22 ) and " seed of a (the) steer, engendered by a wild ox ( Genesis 49:22 ). Jeremy Black noted that Kesh was no longer a major settlement by the time of the later Babylonian versions but presumed that the temple of Nintud still functioned. Wilfred G. Lambert noted that many kings had built temples and chapels to Ninhursag, but that the Kesh sanctuary "was the centre of

2650-466: Is also relevant in this context that, as explained above , many morpheme-final consonants seem to have been elided unless followed by a vowel at various stages in the history of Sumerian. These are traditionally termed Auslauts in Sumerology and may or may not be expressed in transliteration: e.g. the logogram 𒊮 for /šag/ > /ša(g)/ "heart" may be transliterated as šag 4 or as ša 3 . Thus, when

2756-581: Is also the Old Akkadian period (c. 2350 BC – c. 2200 BC), during which Mesopotamia, including Sumer, was united under the rule of the Akkadian Empire . At this time Akkadian functioned as the primary official language, but texts in Sumerian (primarily administrative) did continue to be produced as well. The first phase of the Neo-Sumerian period corresponds to the time of Gutian rule in Mesopotamia ;

2862-459: Is available online. Assumed phonological and morphological forms will be between slashes // and curly brackets {}, respectively, with plain text used for the standard Assyriological transcription of Sumerian. Most of the following examples are unattested. Note also that, not unlike most other pre-modern orthographies, Sumerian cuneiform spelling is highly variable, so the transcriptions and the cuneiform examples will generally show only one or at most

2968-538: Is dusk, moon light cannot enter you. The Lady of Birth has given you beauty. House of Kesh: your brickwork is your birthing. Your terrace is a crown of lapis lazuli: your frame is your creation. Your lady is the lady who imposes silence. The great good queen of heaven.When she speaks, heaven shakes. When she opens her mouth, storms roar. Ninhursanga, Enlil’s sister, has built a home in your holy court, House of Kesh, and has taken her seat upon your throne. Thirteen lines. House of Ninhursanga in Kesh." Stephen Langdon suggested

3074-434: Is evidence of various cases of elision of vowels, apparently in unstressed syllables; in particular an initial vowel in a word of more than two syllables seems to have been elided in many cases. What appears to be vowel contraction in hiatus (*/aa/, */ia/, */ua/ > a , */ae/ > a , */ie/ > i or e , */ue/ > u or e , etc.) is also very common. There is some uncertainty and variance of opinion as to whether

3180-475: Is flawed and incomplete because of the lack of speakers, the transmission through the filter of Akkadian phonology and the difficulties posed by the cuneiform script. As I. M. Diakonoff observes, "when we try to find out the morphophonological structure of the Sumerian language, we must constantly bear in mind that we are not dealing with a language directly but are reconstructing it from a very imperfect mnemonic writing system which had not been basically aimed at

3286-702: Is held by the Louvre in Paris, number AO 6717. Others are held in the Ashmolean number 1929-478, British Museum number 115798 and the Walters Art Museum number 48.1802, formerly called the "David prism". Further tablets containing the text were excavated at Isin , modern Ishan al-Bahriyat. More were found at Henri de Genouillac 's excavations at Kish (B 150) and Jean Perrot 's excavations at Susa . Sir Charles Leonard Woolley unearthed more tablets at Ur contained in

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3392-468: Is little speculation as to the affinities of this hypothetical substratum language, or these languages, and it is thus best treated as unclassified . Other researchers disagree with the assumption of a single substratum language and argue that several languages are involved. A related proposal by Gordon Whittaker is that the language of the proto-literary texts from the Late Uruk period ( c. 3350–3100 BC)

3498-469: Is preserved for so long in later Nippur texts, saying "Although the Abu Saläbikh copies are approximately eight centuries earlier than copies known before, there is a surprisingly small amount of deviation (except in orthography ) between them. The Old Babylonian version is thus not a creation of Old Babylonian scribes using older material, but is a faithful reflection of a text that had already been fixed in

3604-490: Is really an early extinct branch of Indo-European language which he terms "Euphratic" which somehow emerged long prior to the accepted timeline for the spread of Indo-European into West Asia, though this is rejected by mainstream opinion which accepts Sumerian as a language isolate . Pictographic proto-writing was used starting in c. 3300 BC. It is unclear what underlying language it encoded, if any. By c. 2800 BC, some tablets began using syllabic elements that clearly indicated

3710-581: Is the first one from which well-understood texts survive. It corresponds mostly to the last part of the Early Dynastic period (ED IIIb) and specifically to the First Dynasty of Lagash , from where the overwhelming majority of surviving texts come. The sources include important royal inscriptions with historical content as well as extensive administrative records. Sometimes included in the Old Sumerian stage

3816-481: Is the king's house" (compare liaison in French). Jagersma believes that the lack of expression of word-final consonants was originally mostly a graphic convention, but that in the late 3rd millennium voiceless aspirated stops and affricates ( /pʰ/ , /tʰ/ , /kʰ/ and /tsʰ/ were, indeed, gradually lost in syllable-final position, as were the unaspirated stops /d/ and /ɡ/ . The vowels that are clearly distinguished by

3922-414: Is widely accepted to be a local language isolate . Sumerian was at one time widely held to be an Indo-European language , but that view has been universally rejected. Since its decipherment in the early 20th century, scholars have tried to relate Sumerian to a wide variety of languages. Because Sumerian has prestige as the first attested written language, proposals for linguistic affinity sometimes have

4028-573: The Proto-literate period (3200 BC – 3000 BC), corresponding to the Uruk III and Uruk IV periods in archeology, was still so rudimentary that there remains some scholarly disagreement about whether the language written with it is Sumerian at all, although it has been argued that there are some, albeit still very rare, cases of phonetic indicators and spelling that show this to be the case. The texts from this period are mostly administrative; there are also

4134-521: The Behistun inscription , a trilingual cuneiform inscription written in Old Persian , Elamite and Akkadian . (In a similar manner, the key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs was the bilingual [Greek and Egyptian with the Egyptian text in two scripts] Rosetta stone and Jean-François Champollion's transcription in 1822.) In 1838 Henry Rawlinson , building on the 1802 work of Georg Friedrich Grotefend ,

4240-449: The Ekur by Enlil. He also discusses the writing of the hymn by another god called Nisaba . Sabrina P. Ramet commented on the presence and role of Nisaba (or Nidaba) in the establishment of the temple. She refers to her as the "goddess of vegetation, writing and literature including astronomical texts, the deity of the "house of understanding" (most likely intelligence), and as she who 'knows

4346-649: The Instructions of Shuruppak , it is the oldest surviving literature in the world. Fragments of the text were discovered in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology catalogue of the Babylonian section (CBS) from their excavations at the temple library at Nippur in modern-day Iraq. One fragment of the text found on CBS tablet number 11876 was first published by Hugo Radau in "Miscellaneous Sumerian Texts," number 8 in 1909. Radau's fragment

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4452-520: The Semitic Akkadian language , which were duly deciphered. By 1850, however, Edward Hincks came to suspect a non-Semitic origin for cuneiform. Semitic languages are structured according to consonantal forms , whereas cuneiform, when functioning phonetically, was a syllabary , binding consonants to particular vowels. Furthermore, no Semitic words could be found to explain the syllabic values given to particular signs. Julius Oppert suggested that

4558-416: The garden of the god were green. Jeremy Black suggests the hymn describes the statues of bulls or lions that were placed at the entrances to temples "Kesh temple, <before which> (something) in the shape of winged lions stands, (something) in the shape of 'white' wild bulls stands facing the desert." The hymn discusses music being played at the temple towards the end with drums and the coarse sound of

4664-498: The "Ur excavations texts" from 1928. Other tablets and versions were used to bring the myth to its present form with the latest composite text by Miguel Civil produced in 1992 with latest translation by Gene Gragg in 1969 and Joachim Krecher in 1966. Gragg described the text as "one of the best preserved literary texts that we possess from the Old Babylonian period". Robert D. Biggs translated an exceptionally archaic version of

4770-413: The (inmost) secrets of numbers'." Nisaba records the events and provides a "standard version" of the events as they really happened. Charpin and Todd noted in the relationship between Enlil and Nisuba (similar to Yahweh and Moses ) how the text is the work of gods, who created and transmitted it to humans, giving the literature a reason for legitimacy. The princely one, the princely one came forth from

4876-510: The 2004 The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages has also been recognized as a good modern grammatical sketch. There is relatively little consensus, even among reasonable Sumerologists, in comparison to the state of most modern or classical languages. Verbal morphology, in particular, is hotly disputed. In addition to the general grammars, there are many monographs and articles about particular areas of Sumerian grammar, without which

4982-428: The 21st century have switched to using readings from them. There is also variation in the degree to which so-called "Auslauts" or "amissable consonants" (morpheme-final consonants that stopped being pronounced at one point or another in the history of Sumerian) are reflected in the transliterations. This article generally used the versions with expressed Auslauts. The key to reading logosyllabic cuneiform came from

5088-480: The Epic of Creation, Enûma Eliš , Tiāmat gives birth ( alādu ) to mythical serpents, described as mušmaḫḫū , "with sharp teeth, merciless fangs, instead of blood she filled their bodies with venom". Sumerian language Akkadian , a Semitic language , gradually replaced Sumerian as the primary spoken language in the area c.  2000 BC (the exact date is debated), but Sumerian continued to be used as

5194-661: The Louvre in Paris also made significant contributions to deciphering Sumerian with publications from 1898 to 1938, such as his 1905 publication of Les inscriptions de Sumer et d'Akkad . Charles Fossey at the Collège de France in Paris was another prolific and reliable scholar. His pioneering Contribution au Dictionnaire sumérien–assyrien , Paris 1905–1907, turns out to provide the foundation for P. Anton Deimel's 1934 Sumerisch-Akkadisches Glossar (vol. III of Deimel's 4-volume Sumerisches Lexikon ). In 1908, Stephen Herbert Langdon summarized

5300-535: The Neo-Sumerian and especially in the Old Babylonian period. Conversely, an intervocalic consonant, especially at the end of a morpheme followed by a vowel-initial morpheme, was usually "repeated" by the use of a CV sign for the same consonant; e.g. 𒊬 sar "write" - 𒊬𒊏 sar-ra "written". This results in orthographic gemination that is usually reflected in Sumerological transliteration, but does not actually designate any phonological phenomenon such as length. It

5406-654: The Nippur collection of the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul (Ni). Chiera translated number Ni 2402 in "Sumerian Religious Texts" in 1924. Hermann Volrath Hilprecht and Samuel Noah Kramer amongst others worked to translate several others from the Istanbul collection including Ni 4371, 4465, 4555 & 9773, 4597, 9649, 9810, 9861 & 9903. A further tablet source of the myth

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5512-522: The Sumerian language descended from a late prehistoric creole language (Høyrup 1992). However, no conclusive evidence, only some typological features, can be found to support Høyrup's view. A more widespread hypothesis posits a Proto-Euphratean language family that preceded Sumerian in Mesopotamia and exerted an areal influence on it, especially in the form of polysyllabic words that appear "un-Sumerian"—making them suspect of being loanwords —and are not traceable to any other known language family. There

5618-409: The Sumerian literary tradition for centuries." Biggs suggested "that other traditional works of literature may also go back in essentially their present form to the last third of the third millennium BCE at least." Victor Hurowitz referred to it as the "Kesh Temple building hymn" and suggests the hymn begins with a description and Enlil praising the city Kesh and its selection and establishment of

5724-444: The Sumerian site of Tello (ancient Girsu, capital of the state of Lagash ) in 1877, and published the first part of Découvertes en Chaldée with transcriptions of Sumerian tablets in 1884. The University of Pennsylvania began excavating Sumerian Nippur in 1888. A Classified List of Sumerian Ideographs by R. Brünnow appeared in 1889. The bewildering number and variety of phonetic values that signs could have in Sumerian led to

5830-459: The above cases, another stress often seemed to be present as well: on the stem to which the suffixes/enclitics were added, on the second compound member in compounds, and possibly on the verbal stem that prefixes were added to or on following syllables. He also did not agree that the stress of monomorphemic words was typically initial and believed to have found evidence of words with initial as well as with final stress; in fact, he did not even exclude

5936-399: The adaptation of Akkadian words of Sumerian origin seems to suggest that Sumerian stress tended to be on the last syllable of the word, at least in its citation form. The treatment of forms with grammatical morphemes is less clear. Many cases of apheresis in forms with enclitics have been interpreted as entailing that the same rule was true of the phonological word on many occasions, i.e. that

6042-512: The allusion to the goddess he called Nintu as "the mother of mankind." He suggested, "Apparently the text celebrated the primitive (or very early) conditions of some town; possibly the founding and growth of the town, but beyond this we can confidently affirm nothing." CBS tablet 6520 was published in 1929 by Edward Chiera in "Sumerian Lexical Texts". Chiera also published three more tablets—CBS 7802, CBS 13625 and CBS 14153—in "Sumerian Epics and Myths". Other translations were made from tablets in

6148-399: The archaic cuneiform and that "the literary texts of this period were unrecognized for so long is due to the fact that they present formidable obstacles to comprehension". He suggests that Abu Salabikh could have been the location of Kesh, however points out that it is not near Adab as described and that Kesh could have just been a variation in the spelling of Kish. He discusses how the hymn

6254-437: The context, a cuneiform sign can be read either as one of several possible logograms , each of which corresponds to a word in the Sumerian spoken language, as a phonetic syllable (V, VC, CV, or CVC), or as a determinative (a marker of semantic category, such as occupation or place). (See the article Cuneiform .) Some Sumerian logograms were written with multiple cuneiform signs. These logograms are called diri -spellings, after

6360-537: The critiques put forward by Pascal Attinger in his 1993 Eléments de linguistique sumérienne: La construction de du 11 /e/di 'dire ' ) is the starting point of most recent academic discussions of Sumerian grammar. More recent monograph-length grammars of Sumerian include Dietz-Otto Edzard 's 2003 Sumerian Grammar and Bram Jagersma's 2010 A Descriptive Grammar of Sumerian (currently digital, but soon to be printed in revised form by Oxford University Press). Piotr Michalowski's essay (entitled, simply, "Sumerian") in

6466-401: The cuneiform script are /a/ , /e/ , /i/ , and /u/ . Various researchers have posited the existence of more vowel phonemes such as /o/ and even /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ , which would have been concealed by the transmission through Akkadian, as that language does not distinguish them. That would explain the seeming existence of numerous homophones in transliterated Sumerian, as well as some details of

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6572-542: The eclipse of the tradition of cuneiform literacy itself in the beginning of the Common Era . The most popular genres for Sumerian texts after the Old Babylonian period were incantations, liturgical texts and proverbs; among longer texts, the classics Lugal-e and An-gim were most commonly copied. Of the 29 royal inscriptions of the late second millennium BC 2nd dynasty of Isin about half were in Sumerian, described as "hypersophisticated classroom Sumerian". Sumerian

6678-414: The election and praise of Kesh as recorded by Nisaba, twenty two to forty four liken the temple to the moon against the sky containing the life sources of Sumer and its cosmic dimensions filling the world. Lines forty five to fifty seven give a metaphorical description of the temple reaching both for the heaven and descending into the underworld. Lines fifty eight to seventy three discuss the complexities of

6784-467: The extremely detailed and meticulous administrative records, there are numerous royal inscriptions, legal documents, letters and incantations. In spite of the dominant position of written Sumerian during the Ur III dynasty, it is controversial to what extent it was actually spoken or had already gone extinct in most parts of its empire. Some facts have been interpreted as suggesting that many scribes and even

6890-426: The first syllable and that there was generally stress on the syllable preceding a (final) suffix/enclitic, on the penultimate syllable of a polysyllabic enclitic such as -/ani/, -/zunene/ etc., on the last syllable of the first member of a compound, and on the first syllable in a sequence of verbal prefixes. However, he found that single verbal prefixes received the stress just as prefix sequences did, and that in most of

6996-411: The first syllable, and that the same applied without exception to reduplicated stems, but that the stress shifted onto the last syllable in a first member of a compound or idiomatic phrase, onto the syllable preceding a (final) suffix/enclitic, and onto the first syllable of the possessive enclitic /-ani/. In his view, single verbal prefixes were unstressed, but longer sequences of verbal prefixes attracted

7102-461: The first to span a greater variety of genres, including not only administrative texts and sign lists, but also incantations , legal and literary texts (including proverbs and early versions of the famous works The Instructions of Shuruppak and The Kesh temple hymn ). However, the spelling of grammatical elements remains optional, making the interpretation and linguistic analysis of these texts difficult. The Old Sumerian period (2500-2350 BC)

7208-413: The following consonant appears in front of a vowel, it can be said to be expressed only by the next sign: for example, 𒊮𒂵 šag 4 -ga "in the heart" can also be interpreted as ša 3 -ga . Kesh temple hymn The Kesh temple hymn , Liturgy to Nintud , or Liturgy to Nintud on the creation of man and woman , is a Sumerian tablet , written on clay tablets as early as 2600 BCE. Along with

7314-502: The glottal stop even serving as the first-person pronominal prefix. However, these unwritten consonants had been lost by the Ur III period according to Jagersma. Very often, a word-final consonant was not expressed in writing—and was possibly omitted in pronunciation—so it surfaced only when followed by a vowel: for example the /k/ of the genitive case ending -ak does not appear in 𒂍𒈗𒆷 e 2 lugal-la "the king's house", but it becomes obvious in 𒂍𒈗𒆷𒄰 e 2 lugal-la-kam "(it)

7420-401: The house Kesh, to the city -- but do not draw near! Draw near, man, to its hero Acgi -- but do not draw near! Draw near, man, to its lady Nintud -- but do not draw near! Praise be to well-built Kesh, O Acgi! Praise be to cherished Kesh and Nintud! A.R. George suggests such hymns "can be incorporated into longer compositions, as with the eulogy to Nippur and Ekur which makes up a large portion of

7526-408: The house. Enlil, the princely one, came forth from the house. The princely one came forth royally from the house. Enlil lifted his glance over all the lands, and the lands raised themselves to Enlil. The four corners of heaven became green for Enlil like a garden. Kesh was positioned there for him with head uplifted, and as Kesh lifted its head among all the lands, Enlil spoke the praises of Kesh. Nisaba

7632-455: The hymn from Tell Abu Salabikh . He dated this version to around 2600 BCE based upon similarities to tablets found in Shuruppak and dated to a similar age by Anton Deimel in the 1920s. Subsequent radiocarbon dating of samples taken from Tell Abu Salabikh date the site to 2550–2520 BCE however, a timeframe slightly more recent than the one Biggs proposed. Biggs recognized various differences in

7738-571: The hymn gave evidence of the Sumerian theological view that Enlil and Ninlil created mankind and living things. He noted that Nintud , the primary goddess of Kesh was "a form of Ninlil in Nippur ;: in other words she is Ninlil of Kesh, where her character as goddess of begetting was emphasized." He noted based on an observation of Theophilus G. Pinches , that Ninlil or Belit Ilani had seven different names (such as Nintud, Ninhursag , Ninmah, etc.) for seven different localities. He also discussed

7844-633: The introduction reads: Temple ... Kesh Temple growing up like a mountain embracing the heaven. Growing up like Ekur when it lifted its head in the Land. The hymn is composed of 134 lines, formally divided into eight songs or "houses" or "temples", each of which ends with three rhetorical questions discussing the birth of Nintud's warrior son, Acgi : Will anyone else bring forth something as great as Kesh? Will any other mother ever give birth to someone as great as its hero Acgi? Who has ever seen anyone as great as its lady Nintud?. Lines one to twenty one describe

7950-447: The late Middle Babylonian period) and there are also grammatical texts - essentially bilingual paradigms listing Sumerian grammatical forms and their postulated Akkadian equivalents. After the Old Babylonian period or, according to some, as early as 1700 BC, the active use of Sumerian declined. Scribes did continue to produce texts in Sumerian at a more modest scale, but generally with interlinear Akkadian translations and only part of

8056-667: The length of the vowels in most Sumerian words. During the Old Sumerian period, the southern dialects (those used in the cities of Lagash , Umma , Ur and Uruk ), which also provide the overwhelming majority of material from that stage, exhibited a vowel harmony rule based on vowel height or advanced tongue root . Essentially, prefixes containing /e/ or /i/ appear to alternate between /e/ in front of syllables containing open vowels and /i/ in front of syllables containing close vowels; e.g. 𒂊𒁽 e-kaš 4 "he runs", but 𒉌𒁺 i 3 -gub "he stands". Certain verbs with stem vowels spelt with /u/ and /e/, however, seem to take prefixes with

8162-598: The literature known in the Old Babylonian period continued to be copied after its end around 1600 BC. During the Middle Babylonian period, approximately from 1600 to 1000 BC, the Kassite rulers continued to use Sumerian in many of their inscriptions, but Akkadian seems to have taken the place of Sumerian as the primary language of texts used for the training of scribes and their Sumerian itself acquires an increasingly artificial and Akkadian-influenced form. In some cases

8268-530: The location of Kesh appearing to be near Kish to the east of Babylon calling the temple of Kesh "Ekisigga". Raymond de Hoop noted similarities between Sumerian temple hymns and chapter forty nine of Genesis in the Bible ( Genesis 49:1–28 ). He suggests remarkably close syntactical and metaphorical parallels in the sayings about Joseph and Judah such as "the highly esteemed prince ( Genesis 49:8 ), "a leopard, who seizes prey" ( Genesis 49:9 ), "a great wild ox /

8374-514: The logogram 𒋛𒀀 DIRI which is written with the signs 𒋛 SI and 𒀀 A . The text transliteration of a tablet will show just the logogram, such as the word dirig , not the separate component signs. Not all epigraphists are equally reliable, and before publication of an important treatment of a text, scholars will often arrange to collate the published transliteration against the actual tablet, to see if any signs, especially broken or damaged signs, should be represented differently. Our knowledge of

8480-401: The majority of scribes writing in Sumerian in this point were not native speakers and errors resulting from their Akkadian mother tongue become apparent. For this reason, this period as well as the remaining time during which Sumerian was written are sometimes referred to as the "Post-Sumerian" period. The written language of administration, law and royal inscriptions continued to be Sumerian in

8586-600: The mention of the Abzu in the myth saying it "occurs as a name for the cosmic waters of the water table beneath the earth's surface in Sumerian literature." Temple, great crown reaching heaven. Temple, rainbow reaching heaven. Temple, whose gleam stretches into 'Heaven's Midst', whose foundation is fastened on the Abzu. The latest translation describes its founders, geography and features: House founded by An , praised by Enlil, given an oracle by mother Nintud! ... house, at its upper end

8692-513: The most important sources come from the autonomous Second Dynasty of Lagash, especially from the rule of Gudea , which has produced extensive royal inscriptions. The second phase corresponds to the unification of Mesopotamia under the Third Dynasty of Ur , which oversaw a "renaissance" in the use of Sumerian throughout Mesopotamia, using it as its sole official written language. There is a wealth of texts greater than from any preceding time – besides

8798-472: The name "Sumerian", based on the known title "King of Sumer and Akkad", reasoning that if Akkad signified the Semitic portion of the kingdom, Sumer might describe the non-Semitic annex. Credit for being first to scientifically treat a bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian text belongs to Paul Haupt , who published Die sumerischen Familiengesetze (The Sumerian family laws) in 1879. Ernest de Sarzec began excavating

8904-611: The overwhelming majority of surviving manuscripts of Sumerian literary texts in general can be dated to that time, and it is often seen as the "classical age" of Sumerian literature. Conversely, far more literary texts on tablets surviving from the Old Babylonian period are in Sumerian than in Akkadian, even though that time is viewed as the classical period of Babylonian culture and language. However, it has sometimes been suggested that many or most of these "Old Babylonian Sumerian" texts may be copies of works that were originally composed in

9010-444: The phenomena mentioned in the next paragraph. These hypotheses are not yet generally accepted. Phonemic vowel length has also been posited by many scholars based on vowel length in Sumerian loanwords in Akkadian, occasional so-called plene spellings with extra vowel signs, and some internal evidence from alternations. However, scholars who believe in the existence of phonemic vowel length do not consider it possible to reconstruct

9116-480: The place of stress. Sumerian writing expressed pronunciation only roughly. It was often morphophonemic , so much of the allomorphic variation could be ignored. Especially in earlier Sumerian, coda consonants were also often ignored in spelling; e.g. /mung̃areš/ 'they put it here' could be written 𒈬𒃻𒌷 mu-g̃ar-re 2 . The use of VC signs for that purpose, producing more elaborate spellings such as 𒈬𒌦𒃻𒌷𒌍 mu-un-g̃ar-re 2 -eš 3 , became more common only in

9222-412: The possibility that stress was normally stem-final. Pascal Attinger has partly concurred with Krecher, but doubts that the stress was always on the syllable preceding a suffix/enclitic and argues that in a prefix sequence, the stressed syllable wasn't the first one, but rather the last one if heavy and the next-to-the-last one in other cases. Attinger has also remarked that the patterns observed may be

9328-399: The preceding Ur III period or earlier, and some copies or fragments of known compositions or literary genres have indeed been found in tablets of Neo-Sumerian and Old Sumerian provenance. In addition, some of the first bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian lexical lists are preserved from that time (although the lists were still usually monolingual and Akkadian translations did not become common until

9434-507: The rapid expansion in knowledge of Sumerian and Akkadian vocabulary in the pages of Babyloniaca , a journal edited by Charles Virolleaud , in an article "Sumerian-Assyrian Vocabularies", which reviewed a valuable new book on rare logograms by Bruno Meissner. Subsequent scholars have found Langdon's work, including his tablet transcriptions, to be not entirely reliable. In 1944, the Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer provided

9540-526: The readings of Sumerian signs is based, to a great extent, on lexical lists made for Akkadian speakers, where they are expressed by means of syllabic signs. The established readings were originally based on lexical lists from the Neo-Babylonian Period , which were found in the 19th century; in the 20th century, earlier lists from the Old Babylonian Period were published and some researchers in

9646-586: The rendering of morphophonemics". Early Sumerian is conjectured to have had at least the consonants listed in the table below. The consonants in parentheses are reconstructed by some scholars based on indirect evidence; if they existed, they were lost around the Ur III period in the late 3rd millennium BC. The existence of various other consonants has been hypothesized based on graphic alternations and loans, though none have found wide acceptance. For example, Diakonoff lists evidence for two lateral phonemes, two rhotics, two back fricatives, and two g-sounds (excluding

9752-482: The result in each specific case is a long vowel or whether a vowel is simply replaced/deleted. Syllables could have any of the following structures: V, CV, VC, CVC. More complex syllables, if Sumerian had them, are not expressed as such by the cuneiform script. Sumerian stress is usually presumed to have been dynamic, since it seems to have caused vowel elisions on many occasions. Opinions vary on its placement. As argued by Bram Jagersma and confirmed by other scholars,

9858-400: The result of Akkadian influence - either due to linguistic convergence while Sumerian was still a living language or, since the data comes from the Old Babylonian period, a feature of Sumerian as pronounced by native speakers of Akkadian. The latter has also been pointed out by Jagersma, who is, in addition, sceptical about the very assumptions underlying the method used by Krecher to establish

9964-526: The royal court actually used Akkadian as their main spoken and native language. On the other hand, evidence has been adduced to the effect that Sumerian continued to be spoken natively and even remained dominant as an everyday language in Southern Babylonia, including Nippur and the area to its south By the Old Babylonian period (c. 2000 – c. 1600 BC), Akkadian had clearly supplanted Sumerian as

10070-469: The same refrain, which he interpreted as referring "to the creation of man and woman, the Biblical Adam and Eve ." Langdon translated two further fragments in 1914 and 1917. The myth was developed with the addition of CBS 8384, translated by George Aaron Barton in 1918 and first published as "Sumerian religious texts" in " Miscellaneous Babylonian Inscriptions ," number eleven, entitled "A Fragment of

10176-429: The so-called 'Liturgy to Nintud.'" The tablet is 5.25 by 2.4 by 1.2 inches (13.3 by 6.1 by 3.0 cm) at its thickest point. Barton's tablet contained nine sections from which he was able to translate sections four, five and six. Barton argued for the abandonment of the myth's subtitle, the "creation of man." He claimed, "So far as the writer can see, there is no allusion in the text to the creation of man." He notes only

10282-564: The standard for students studying Sumerian. Another highly influential figure in Sumerology during much of the 20th century was Adam Falkenstein , who produced a grammar of the language of Gudea 's inscriptions. Poebel's grammar was finally superseded in 1984 on the publication of The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to its History and Grammatical Structure , by Marie-Louise Thomsen . While there are various points in Sumerian grammar on which Thomsen's views are not shared by most Sumerologists today, Thomsen's grammar (often with express mention of

10388-431: The stress could be shifted onto the enclitics; however, the fact that many of these same enclitics have allomorphs with apocopated final vowels (e.g. / ‑ še/ ~ /-š/) suggests that they were, on the contrary, unstressed when these allomorphs arose. It has also been conjectured that the frequent assimilation of the vowels of non-final syllables to the vowel of the final syllable of the word may be due to stress on it. However,

10494-531: The stress to their first syllable. Jagersma has objected that many of Falkenstein's examples of elision are medial and so, while the stress was obviously not on the medial syllable in question, the examples do not show where it was . Joachim Krecher attempted to find more clues in texts written phonetically by assuming that geminations, plene spellings and unexpected "stronger" consonant qualities were clues to stress placement. Using this method, he confirmed Falkenstein's views that reduplicated forms were stressed on

10600-458: The temple with vast quantities of oxen and sheep. The temple is likened to the trees from which wood was used in its construction. The gods and functions of the temple are described and praised during temple dedication with different parts of the temple described: its interior and exterior appearance, its gate, courtyard, door and walls. The hymn ends on the conclusion to approach the temple. Wayne Horowitz working from Gragg's translation, discusses

10706-503: The undoubtedly Semitic-speaking successor states of Ur III during the so-called Isin-Larsa period (c. 2000 BC – c. 1750 BC). The Old Babylonian Empire , however, mostly used Akkadian in inscriptions, sometimes adding Sumerian versions. The Old Babylonian period, especially its early part, has produced extremely numerous and varied Sumerian literary texts: myths, epics, hymns, prayers, wisdom literature and letters. In fact, nearly all preserved Sumerian religious and wisdom literature and

10812-597: The velar nasal), and assumes a phonemic difference between consonants that are dropped word-finally (such as the g in 𒍠 zag > za 3 ) and consonants that remain (such as the g in 𒆷𒀝 lag ). Other "hidden" consonant phonemes that have been suggested include semivowels such as /j/ and /w/ , and a glottal fricative /h/ or a glottal stop that could explain the absence of vowel contraction in some words —though objections have been raised against that as well. A recent descriptive grammar by Bram Jagersma includes /j/ , /h/ , and /ʔ/ as unwritten consonants, with

10918-407: The word of all the gods, they rejoiced; The fields, - the sheep and oxen were like an ox of the stall; the cedars spoke; they were like messengers; The field invited the oxen all of them; The field strengthened the sheep all of them; Their fig-trees on the bank of the boat filled; The weapon the lord, the prince ... lifted up; The luluppi-tree of the wife of the god, the pi-pi-plants of ... In hursag

11024-575: Was able to decipher the Old Persian section of the Behistun inscriptions, using his knowledge of modern Persian. When he recovered the rest of the text in 1843, he and others were gradually able to translate the Elamite and Akkadian sections of it, starting with the 37 signs he had deciphered for the Old Persian. Meanwhile, many more cuneiform texts were coming to light from archaeological excavations, mostly in

11130-452: Was its decision-maker; with its words she wove it intricately like a net. Written on tablets it was held in her hands: House, platform of the Land, important fierce bull ! The myth goes on to describe the temple dedication rites and explains that the Annanuki were the lords of the temple. He suggests that the hymn mentions "objects placed in the temple upon its completion." His translation of

11236-624: Was translated by Stephen Herbert Langdon in 1915. Langdon published a translation from a 4 by 4 by 4 by 4 inches (10 by 10 by 10 by 10 cm) perforated, four sided, Sumerian prism from Nippur and held in the Ashmolean in Oxford in 1913 (number 1911-405) in "Babylonian Liturgies." The prism contains around 145 lines in eight sections, similar to the Hymn to Enlil . Langdon called it "A Liturgy to Nintud, Goddess of Creation" and noted that each section ended with

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