Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

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

Like her date-wine sweet is her vulva, sweet is her wine…

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There is also the occasional lullaby.

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…

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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:

Friend of Enlil, let me free! Let me go to my house!

What lie shall I tell my mother?

What lie shall I tell my mother Ningal?

Both Enlil and Ningal are, of course, gods. In Emegir this would have been (with the differences highlighted):

So it seems that Sumerian, like many other languages all over the world, had a special dialect for women’s speech. What marks out Sumerian is that this had gained a special, explicit, status, recorded in the grammar books: this could be taken as further evidence of the high status of women in Sumerian literature.

Returning to the question of Sumerian–Akkadian bilingualism, specialists agree that the balance of language spoken in Sumer shifted over the period 2400–1600 BC from total Sumerian to total Akkadian. Sumer began this period as a collection of independent city-states, suffered Akkadian domination in the twenty-third century, Amorite and (briefly) Elamite domination in the nineteenth, and the Babylonian rule of Hammurabi in the eighteenth. It ended with a restored independence, or rather anarchy, after the breakdown of this first Babylonian empire, but the language on the streets and in the homes was now Akkadian.

It was an interesting example of unstable bilingualism, since in many ways the situation is reminiscent of the relation between Greek and Latin in the Roman empire, one dominating cultural and the other political life. In that case, despite the political instability, and the generally shifty reputation of the Greeks, contrasting with the towering political prestige and steadiness of the Romans, Greek nowhere lost ground to Latin. Yet here in Mesopotamia, where the various Semitic peoples, for all their political dominance, were sources of disruption, where there was apparently no major movement of the Sumerian population, and where Sumerian culture’s prestige was unchallenged, Sumerian steadily lost ground.

In some cases even Semitic rulers attempted to fight a rearguard action on behalf of Sumerian culture. In the kingdom of Isin, which held the three most important Sumerian cities of Nippur, Uruk and Eridu in the twentieth to nineteenth centuries BC, the ruling dynasty stemmed from Mari, in the Akkadian-speaking north of Mesopotamia; yet its king termed himself ‘King of Ur, King of Sumer and Akkad’, all its official inscriptions were in Sumerian, and there was flourishing production of new editions of the classics of Sumerian literature.

One factor working against the survival of Sumerian as a living language alongside Akkadian may have been the fact that the influential newcomers already spoke a Semitic language, and so found it easier just to get by in Akkadian. Only the Akkadians had lived in close proximity with Sumerian from time immemorial, and perhaps become bilingual. Others would be more impatient of the cultural complications they found down south. It is easy to imagine the average Amorite on the move saying: ‘After all, they all speak Akkadian, don’t they?’ The whole Fertile Crescent was familiar with some Semitic language or other, and by their nature they were all very similar, and to some extent mutually comprehensible. For all their cultural prestige (which clearly never diminished), the Sumerians found themselves having to compromise on language in their daily and business lives.

In a sense, though, Akkadian had already taken up the burden that the speakers of Sumerian were laying down. It remained unthinkable, as it always had been, to learn to write Akkadian in any way but as an extension of Sumerian, and this despite the fact that Sumerian and Akkadian were poles apart as languages, with all their basic vocabulary totally unrelated, and quite different sound systems. The system never provided the means to distinguish consistently between b and p, among d, t and

, or among g, k and q in Akkadian. Akkadian appears to be rather lacking in many of the phonetic subtleties that are characteristic of many of its Semitic sisters, having only one h sound where they may have up to three, three s sounds where they have up to four. It is difficult to tell whether it is just the poverty of Sumerian spelling which causes this appearance.

The only innovations that Akkadian scribes appear to have permitted themselves were a new sign for the glottal stop, ’, and considerable licence with the Sumerian word symbols or logograms: they had always been available as punning devices, able to symbolise the same sound as the word they signified in Sumerian; now they could do the same trick for Akkadian as well. So, for example, the Sumerian sign

, meaning ‘hand’, could now be read as idu, ‘hand’, in Akkadian; it could also represent the syllables id, it, i, ed, et and e.

Sumerian word symbols, and Sumerian literature, remained the basis of written Akkadian, even as the language swept all round the Fertile Crescent, and well beyond the domains of the Semitic-speaking peoples, as a lingua franca for international communication. The same educational system, based on the edubba ‘tablet-house’ schools, was maintained for at least two millennia, since sign lists to teach the symbols, in the same order, have been found in the Sumerian city of Uruk dating from the third millennium and Ashurbanipal’s library in the Assyrian capital Nineveh from the mid-seventh century BC. Mastery of the classics of Sumerian literature, a canon of texts which was not extended after the mid-second millennium, remained the pinnacle of scholarly achievement, and the focus of later years spent at school. Even in mathematics, most of the terminology was in Sumerian, though the textbooks were written in Akkadian. It appears that Sumerian went on being spoken in the classroom: this has made the remaining exercises and textbooks less explicit on pronunciation than we should have liked.

It is the Akkadian culture’s enthusiasm for all things Sumerian which has in fact saved Sumer’s finer culture. Almost all the Sumerian literary texts that have been found were copied, often by schoolboys, in the first half of the second millennium, after the death of Sumerian as a living language; by contrast, most of what has come down from the pre-Akkadian days, when the cities of Sumer were proud and free (and still spoke Sumerian), is a mass of inscriptions and administrative documents.

But this six-hundred-year-long Sumerian heyday, after the death of the living language, at last came to an end, and showed that Akkadian could not support it indefinitely. After the fall of Babylon to the marauding Hittite King Mursilis in 1594 BC, and the takeover of Mesopotamia by the Kassite mountain tribes which followed, true appreciation of Sumerian culture never recovered. For the rest of the second and first millennia (indeed down to the Greek takeover under the Seleucid empire in 323 BC), no more Sumerian compositions were attempted, and in fact only two literary texts continued to be copied: The Exploits of Ninurta (which we have already sampled), and a companion piece, Angim, about Ninurta’s return from the mountains to Nippur. Henceforth, the rest of the Sumerian classics would be known only in translation.

As a poet had remarked (on the earlier destruction of an Akkadian city that aspired to take the Sumerians under their control):

He who said ‘I would dwell in that city’ found not a good dwelling place there.

He who said ‘I would sleep in Agade’ found not a good sleeping place there.

Agade is destroyed. Praise Inanna.

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Since Akkadian too was destined ultimately to be replaced—and when it happened, by a language whose literacy did not depend on the ancient tradition of cuneiform writing—Sumerian was ultimately to die out. Aside from the tablets waiting to be discovered in the tells of Iraq, it left no trace.

FIRST INTERLUDE: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ELAMITE?

The clay tokens that had given rise to Sumerian script seem to have been widespread: not surprisingly, since they would have played a key role as bills of lading for long-distance trade. The development into groups of symbols on clay came independently in Sumer, and farther to the east in Shusim (known to the Greeks as Susa), the heartland of Elam. Elam’s pictographic symbols never went far beyond their initial stage as a medium for inventories, although a proto-Elamite script, apparently a syllabary, was in use in the early third millennium. This line of development was aborted in the middle of the third millennium when the Sumerian system, which was by then a true writing system, even if one heavily adapted for the Sumerian language, was taken over.

In fact, Elam went farther than borrowing the writing system: for the nine hundred years from 2200 BC almost all the official inscriptions that have been found are in Akkadian. For much of this time it was under the direct political control of one of the powers to its west, Sumerian, Babylonian or Assyrian. Nevertheless, Elamite must have continued to be spoken in Elam, since in 1300 BC it springs back to life as the official language, replacing Akkadian for all written purposes, except curses.

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Elamite’s subsequent career showed persistence for at least eight hundred years.