Sumerian: The First Written Language

But what was this revolutionary language actually like? Peering into Sumerian is like opening a time capsule to a completely alien way of thinking and structuring reality. It’s a linguistic ghost, a language isolate known only through the wedge-shaped cuneiform script it left behind.

A Language Without a Family

One of the most fascinating and frustrating things about Sumerian is that it’s a language isolate. Unlike English, which sits comfortably within the Germanic branch of the vast Indo-European family, Sumerian has no known relatives, living or dead. It stands alone in the linguistic tree. This means linguists can’t use the comparative method—the technique of comparing related languages to reconstruct a common ancestor—to understand its structure or vocabulary. Every single piece of knowledge we have about Sumerian has been painstakingly excavated, not just from the soil of modern-day Iraq, but from the context of the texts themselves.

Sumerian was spoken in Sumer, in southern Mesopotamia, from at least the 4th millennium BC. Around 2000 BC, it died out as a spoken language, replaced by Akkadian (a Semitic language, related to modern Hebrew and Arabic). But its story didn’t end there. Much like Latin in medieval Europe, Sumerian survived for centuries as a classical and religious language. Akkadian-speaking scribes meticulously studied it, creating the world’s first dictionaries: bilingual word lists that are now our Rosetta Stone for deciphering this ancient tongue.

From Pictures to Wedges: The Birth of Cuneiform

Sumerian wasn’t born with the complex cuneiform script we associate with it. It evolved over centuries, starting with simple pictures.

• Pictograms: Initially, the script consisted of pictograms—simplified drawings of objects. A drawing of a head meant “head” (sag), and a drawing of a bowl of food meant “food” or “bread” (ninda).
• Logograms: These pictograms quickly became logograms, where the symbol represented a word or idea. The symbol for “foot” could also mean “to go” or “to stand.”
• The Rebus Principle: The great leap forward was the rebus principle. This is where a symbol was used for its sound value, detached from its original meaning. In Sumerian, the word for “arrow” was ti. The word for “life” was also pronounced ti. Scribes realized they could use the arrow symbol to write the abstract concept of “life.” This innovation was the crucial step from merely recording things to recording spoken language in all its complexity.

Eventually, the tools changed. Drawing curved lines in wet clay with a reed stylus was messy and slow. Scribes began using the edge of the reed to impress wedge-shaped marks, which was faster and neater. This is how the script got its modern name, cuneiform, from the Latin cuneus for “wedge.” The symbols became more abstract, losing their pictorial origins but gaining efficiency.

A Look Inside an Alien Grammar

If the writing system is a window into the Sumerian world, its grammar is a journey into a different cognitive framework. Sumerian is fundamentally different from most modern European languages. Two key features stand out: its agglutinative nature and its ergative alignment.

Gluing Words Together: Agglutination

Sumerian is a highly agglutinative language. This means it forms complex words and sentences by “gluing” a string of distinct prefixes and suffixes onto a root word. Each “morpheme” (the smallest unit of meaning) generally has one clear function. This is different from a “fusional” language like Spanish, where a single ending can denote person, number, and tense all at once (e.g., in hablo, the “-o” means first-person, singular, present tense).

Let’s build a Sumerian word:

lugal-ene-ra = “for the kings”

• lugal: the root word, meaning “king” (itself a compound of lu “man” + gal “big”)
• -ene: the plural marker
• -ra: the dative case marker, meaning “to” or “for”

You can clearly see how the word is built piece by piece, like LEGOs. This allows for incredibly long and precise “word-phrases” that can contain the information of an entire English sentence.

Flipping Subjects and Objects: Ergative Alignment

This is perhaps the most mind-bending feature of Sumerian. Most languages you might be familiar with, including English, use a nominative-accusative system. It works like this:

• The king went. (“The king” is the subject).
• The king built the house. (“The king” is the subject).

In both sentences, “the king” is the subject and is treated the same way grammatically. The object (“the house”) is treated differently.

Sumerian uses an ergative-absolutive system, which turns this logic on its head. It groups subjects and objects differently:

• The subject of a verb without an object (an intransitive verb) is treated the same as the object of a verb with an object (a transitive verb). This is the Absolutive case.
• The subject of a verb with an object is marked in a special way. This is the Ergative case.

Let’s look at a simplified example:

lugal i-gen = “The king went.”

Here, ‘king’ (lugal) is the subject of an intransitive verb (“went”). It’s in the absolutive case (which is unmarked).

lugal-e e₂ in-du₃ = “The king built the house.”

Here, ‘king’ (lugal) is the subject of a transitive verb (“built”). It gets the ergative case marker -e. The object, ‘house’ (e₂), is unmarked because it is in the absolutive case—the same case as the king in the first sentence!

In essence, ergative languages make a fundamental distinction between being an “agent” who does something to something else (Ergative) versus simply being a “patient” or participant in an action (Absolutive). It’s a completely different way of carving up grammatical reality.

The Echo of Sumer

Deciphering a dead, isolated language is an immense puzzle. Scholars rely on the context of thousands of tablets—from epic poems like Gilgamesh to mundane receipts for goats—and the invaluable bilingual lists left by Akkadian scribes. Even so, many words remain unknown, and debates about grammar rage on.

Sumerian is more than just a linguistic curiosity. It was the medium through which humanity first wrote down laws, epics, prayers, and contracts. It’s a testament to the human drive to make our thoughts permanent, to speak across the silent chasm of time. Every time we write a message, we are continuing a tradition that began over 5,000 years ago, with a Sumerian scribe pressing a reed into a piece of wet clay.