The Discovery of the Sumerian Civilization

3 minutes • 467 words

There must have been civilizations in Mesopotamia even before the 3rd millennium B.C.

But the names of rulers that preceded Sargon of Akkad did not make sense at all.

Sargon was a counselor at the court of king Urzababa.
The king who reigned in Erech was named “Lugalzagesi”, and so on.

Lecturing before the Royal Asiatic Society in 1853, Sir Henry Rawlinson pointed out that such names were neither Semitic nor Indo European; indeed, “they seemed to belong to no known group of languages or peoples.”

But if names had a meaning, what was the mysterious language in which they had the meaning?

Scholars took another look at the Akkadian inscriptions. Basically,

The Akkadian cuneiform script was syllabic. But the pre-Akkadian script used an earlier pictographic writing method.

Akkadian, then, must have been preceded by another language similar to the Egyptian.

One of the greatest finds of Akkadian texts was the ruins of a library assembled in Nineveh by Ashurbanipal.

Layard and his colleagues carted away from the site 25,000 tablets, many of which were described by the ancient scribes as copies of “olden texts.”

A group of 23 tablets ended with the statement: “23rd tablet: language of Shumer not changed.”

Another text bore an enigmatic statement by Ashurbanipal himself:

The god of scribes has bestowed on me the gift of the knowledge of his art. I have been initiated into the secrets of writing. I can even read the intricate tablets in Shumerian; I understand the enigmatic words in the stone carvings from the days before the Flood.

Ashurbanipal could read intricate tablets in “Shumerian” and the tablets from “the days before the Flood”.

But in January 1869 Jules Oppert suggested to the French Society of Numismatics and Archaeology that a pre-Akkadian language and people existed called Sumerians of Sumer.

Oppert was right, but he mispronounced the name—it should have been Simmer, not Sumer.

Sumer was not a mysterious, distant land, but the early name for southern Mesopotamia, just as the Book of Genesis had clearly stated:

The royal cities of Babylon and Akkad and Erech were in “the Land of Shin’ar.” (Shinar was the biblical name for Shumer.)

The tablets with long columns of words were in fact AkkadianSumerian lexicons and dictionaries. They were prepared in Assyria and Babylonia for their own study of Sumerian, the first written language.

The Sumerian script was originally pictographic and carved in stone in vertical columns. It was then turned horizontally.

Later on, it was stylized for wedge writing on soft clay tablets to become the cuneiform writing that was adopted by the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and other nations of the ancient Near East. (Fig. 7)

The fountainhead of the Akkadian-Babylonian—Assyrian achievements was the:

decipherment of the Sumerian language and script
the realization of the Sumerians and their culture