*A fun, educational companion guide to my story Batty* Contains historical info and facts, as well as ancient Sumerian language, cuneiform, translations, and fun. Come into ki-umun-m, my place of knowledge...if you dare.
⭐️ Rated #1 in Anunnaki by W...
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Several years ago, I had come across an archaeological story about ancient Sumerians and the Anunnaki – (I'll write more about them in an upcoming chapter), and was instantly fascinated. From there, I read everything I could find on the subject, which led me to their language.
For two years, I studied and taught myself their complex language, which believe me was no easy task! I'll give you a little history on it and you'll see why...although this barely scratches the surface.
The Sumerian language is the oldest written language in existence. First attested about 3100 BC in southern Mesopotamia, it flourished during the 3rd millennium BC. About 2000 BC, Sumerian was replaced as a spoken language by Semitic Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian), but continued in written usage almost to the end of the life of the Akkadian language, around the beginning of the Christian era.
Sumerian never extended much beyond its original boundaries in southern Mesopotamia; the small number of its native speakers was entirely out of proportion to the tremendous importance and influence Sumerian exercised on the development of the Mesopotamian and other ancient civilizations in all their stages.
Around the time of Christ, all knowledge of the Sumerian language disappeared along with cuneiform writing, and in the succeeding centuries even the name Sumer vanished from memory.
Several Sumerian dialects are known. Of these the most important are eme-gir, the official dialect of Sumerian, and eme-SAL, the dialect used often in the composition of hymns and incantations.
Four periods of Sumerian can be distinguished :
Archaic Sumerian - 3100 - 2600 BC
Classical Sumerian - 2600 - 2300 BC
Neo-Sumerian - 2300 - 2000 BC
Post-Sumerian - 2000 - 100 BC
When the decipherment of cuneiform writing was achieved in the early decades of the 19th century, three languages written in cuneiform were discovered : Semitic Babylonian, Indo-European Persian, and Elamite, of unknown linguistic affiliation.
The linguistic affinity of Sumerian has not yet been successfully established. Ural-Altaic (which includes Turkish), Dravidian, Brahui, Bantu, and many other groups of languages have been compared with Sumerian, but no theory has gained common acceptance.
Sumerian is clearly an agglutinative language in that it preserves the word root intact while expressing various grammatical changes by adding on prefixes, infixes, and suffixes. The difference between nouns and verbs, as it exists in the Indo-European or Semitic languages, is unknown to Sumerian.
For example, the word "dug" alone means both "speech" and "to speak" in Sumerian - the difference between the noun and the verb being indicated by the syntax and by different affixes.
The distinctive sounds (phonemes) of Sumerian consisted of four vowels, a, i, e, u, and 16 consonants, b, d, g, ŋ, h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, ś, š, t, z. In Classical Sumerian, the contrast between the consonants b, d, g, z, and p, t, k, s was not between voiced (with vibrating vocal cords) and voiceless consonants (without vibrating vocal cords) but between consonants that were indifferent as to voice and those that were aspirated (pronounced with an accompanying audible puff of breath). The semivowels y and w functioned as vocalic glides.
While we're on the subject of sounds, I'd like to end the chapter with this...
One of the crowning achievements of Mesopotamian literature is the "Epic of Gilgamesh," a 3,000-line poem that follows the adventures of a Sumerian king as he battles a forest monster and quests after the secret of eternal life. It's the earliest great work of literature that we know of.
While the poem's hero is a demigod with Hercules-like strength, most scholars believe he is based on an actual king who served as the fifth ruler of the city of Uruk. The historical Gilgamesh appears on the Sumerian "King List" and is thought to have lived sometime around 2700 B.C. Few contemporary accounts of his reign have survived to today, but archaeologists have found inscriptions that credit him with building Uruk's massive defensive walls and restoring a temple to the goddess Ninhil, which suggests he may have been a real ruler whose deeds were later repurposed as myth.
Here is The Epic of Gilgamesh, sung in ancient Sumerian, accompanied only by a long-neck, three-string, Sumerian lute known as a "gish-gu-di". The instrument is tuned to G - G - D, and although it is similar to other long neck lutes still in use today (the tar, the setar, the saz, etc.) the modern instruments are low tension and strung with fine steel wire.
Listen to it...it's quite beautiful and will certainly give you a little "Batty" flavor. 😂
