Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

Sumerian knows better than any the tantalising evanescence of life and fame for a language. All knowledge of this language had been lost for almost two thousand years when the royal library of the ancient Assyrian capital, Nineveh, was excavated in 1845, and it turned out that the earliest documents were written in a language older than Akkadian, and so different from it that the Assyrians of the seventh century BC had approached it armed with a student’s panoply of bilingual dictionaries, grammars and parallel texts. Nothing in the Greek or biblical record of Mesopotamia had prepared the new researchers to expect such an alien foundation for this civilisation; the majority of the documents after all were written in a language reassuringly similar to Hebrew and Aramaic. Whatever had survived down the ages of the greatness of Nineveh and Babylon, the linguistic basis of their achievements had been totally effaced.

Sumerian, the original speech of Šumer , as they called the southernmost part of Mesopotamia, had in fact already been dead for another 1300 years when those documents from Sennacherib’s library were written. But it turned out that the only way to understand Akkadian cuneiform writing was to see it as an attempt to reinterpret a sign system that had been designed for Sumerian use. The intricacy, and probably the prestige, of the early Sumerian writing had been such that any outsiders who wanted to adopt it for their own language had largely had to take the Sumerian language with it.

This was not too big a problem in cases where signs had a clear meaning: signs that stood for Sumerian words were just given new pronunciations, and read as the corresponding words in Akkadian. But Akkadian was a very different language from Sumerian, both in phonetics and in the structure of its words. Since no new signs were introduced for Akkadian, these differences largely had to be ignored: in effect, Akkadian speakers resigned themselves to writing their Akkadian as it might be produced by someone with a heavy Sumerian accent. Sumerian signs that were read phonetically went on being read as they were in Sumerian, but put together to approximate Akkadian words; and where Akkadian had sounds that were not used in Sumerian, they simply made do with whatever was closest.

So Sumerian survived its death as a living language in at least two ways. It lived on as a classical language, its great literary works canonised and quoted by every succeeding generation of cuneiform scribes. But it also lived on as an imposed constraint on the expression of Akkadian, and indeed any subsequent language that aspired to use the full cuneiform system of writing, as Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, Hittite and Urartian were to do, over the next two millennia. It is as if modern western European languages were condemned to be written as closely as possible to Latin, with a smattering of phonetic annotations to show how the time-honoured Roman spellings should be pronounced to give a meaningful utterance in Dutch, Irish, French or English. [20] The Amorites did not have their own literate tradition, but their language can be partially reconstructed when their names are quoted in other languages, usually Sumerian. This provides a link with the later western Semitic languages, such as Ugaritic, Phoenician and Hebrew, which do not show up in the written record for another five hundred years or more. Since there was a tendency to assign names that are full sentences, they give a fuller picture of the language than might have been expected: Aya-dadu , ‘Where is Daddu?’, Šūb-addu , ‘Return, Addu!’, Yašub-’ilu , ‘God returns’, Samsu-’ilu-na , ‘The Sun is our god.’

The origin of Sumerian is obscure; only some Georgians claim that their language is related, [249] Tsereteli (1959 [1912]). but the claim has not been widely accepted. Whatever their previous history, there was evidently a lively set of communities active in southern Mesopotamia from the fourth millennium BC, absorbing the gains from the then recent institutionalisation of agriculture, and establishing the first cities, which seem first of all to have been collectives each holding all their goods in the name of a presiding deity, with effective managerial power in the hands of the priesthood. The potter’s wheel, the swing-plough and the sail all came into use, and a beginning was made in working gold, silver and bronze. Since pictograms, and their development into cuneiform writing, were invented in this period, this gives us our first direct testimony of the language history of the world. It seems that commercial uses came first: impressions of symbols on clay began as convenient substitutes for sets of clay tokens, used for inventories and contracts. [250] Expounded in Schmandt-Besserat (1997).

The unprecedented riches and cultural brilliance of the city-states in third-millennium Sumer had soon attracted unwelcome attention from the north, resulting in a hostile takeover and political consolidation under the king of Akkad. The result of Sargon’s invasion in the twenty-fourth century, and the five generations of Akkadian dominance that followed, must have been much greater contact between the Sumerian and Akkadian languages. Sumerian-Akkadian bilingualism would have become common in the elite, and one can see evidence of this at the highest level, since Sargon’s daughter Enheduanna is supposed to have composed two cycles of Sumerian hymns, and the most famous (to Inanna) has been found in some fifty copies. [251] Hallo (1974: 185-6); the Hymn to Inanna is translated in Pritchard (1969: 579-82).

This participation by women, especially princesses and priestesses, in Sumerian literature was not uncommon. They wrote funeral hymns, letters and especially love songs.

Thy city lifts its hand like a cripple, O my lord Shu-Sin,

It lies at thy feet like a lion-cub, O son of Shulgi.

O my god, the wine-maid has sweet wine to give,

Like her date-wine sweet is her vulva, sweet is her wine … [252] Pritchard (1969: 496): Love Song to a King (trans. S. N. Kramer), slightly adapted.

There is also the occasional lullaby.

usa ŋanu usa ŋanu

usa ŋanu ki dumuŋaše

usa kulu ki dumuŋaše

igi badbadani u kunib

igi gunani šuzu ŋarbi

u eme za malilikani

za mallilil u nagule…

Come sleep, come sleep,

Come to my son,

Hurry sleep to my son,

Put to sleep his restless eyes,

Put your hand on his sparkling eyes,

And as for his babbling tongue

Let not the babbling hold back his sleep.

He will fill your lap with wheat.

I will make sweet for you the little cheeses,

Those little cheeses that are the healer of man…

My garden is lettuce well-watered…

May the wife be your support,

May the son be your lot,

May the winnowed barley be your bride,

May Ashnan the goddess of fruitfulness be your ally,

May you have an eloquent guardian angel,

May you achieve a reign of happy days … [253] Pritchard (1969: 652): Ua-aua, a Sumerian lullaby (trans. S. N. Kramer), slightly adapted; .

These works are usually written in Emesal , ‘the fine tongue’, a separate dialect of Sumerian, well documented in scribal dictionaries. In dialogue works this dialect is used for the speech of goddesses. It differs from standard Sumerian, Emegir , ‘the princely tongue’, both in vocabulary (including the names of many gods) and also in pronunciation (consonants by and large being articulated farther forward in the mouth); it differs not at all in its grammar. For example, when the goddess Inanna is affecting to repel the advances of an importunate suitor, she cries: