Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (10 page)

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.
^*

The origin of Sumerian is obscure; only some Georgians claim that their language is related,
⁹
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.
¹⁰

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.
¹¹

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 …
¹²

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 …
¹³

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:

kuli Mulila šu bamu emeše daŋen

amaŋu lulaše ta munaben

amaŋu Gašangale lulaše ta munaben

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):

kuli Enlila šu bamu eŋuše gaŋen

amaŋu lulaše ana munaben

amaŋu Ningale lulaše ana munaben
¹⁴

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
t
, 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, it, ed, et
and
et.

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):