Late Sumerian: The Afterlife of an Ancient Near Eastern Language

Sumerian is probably the earliest recorded language of humankind and its writings are among the most significant sources for studying the ancient Near East. It has been documented in the cuneiform script for over three millennia, from approximately 3300/3200 BCE to 74/5 CE. To date, however, a fundamental question in the field remains elusive: Why, if the last native Sumerian speaker passed away no later than the beginning of the second millennium BCE, did Sumerian continue to be used by the cultural and religious elite until the beginning of the Common Era? What was it about Sumerian that enabled it to trump Akkadian, Aramaic, Persian, Parthian, and many other languages of that time in the lottery of longevity? The main hypothesis of LASU is that Sumerian survived for so long because it was considered sacred. Two interrelated obstacles have prevented scholarship from advancing in this area of knowledge. First, Sumerian texts of the first millennium BCE, referred to as Late Sumerian, were often written in a bilingual for-mat, combining Sumerian and Akkadian, and are extremely challenging to translate. Second, modern scholars often consider this phase of Sumerian “corrupted” in comparison to the earlier stages, when it was likely still a spoken language. They therefore have tended to overlook Late Sumerian. Applying, for the first time, an innovative philological and religious-historical approach to tackle the longstanding puzzle of Sumerian linguistic longevity, LASU aims to apply a unique, language-order-based framework for deciphering Sumerian’s interactions with other languages of the multilingual ancient Near East of the first millennium BCE. The proposed study has the potential to open new vistas on the interactions among ancient languages, as well as lay the foundation for a ground-breaking understanding of how ancient societies dealt with multilingualism. Ultimately LASU is poised to establish a new subfield called “Late Sumerian Studies” within Assyriology.