Sumerian

(noun)

A group of non-Semitic people living in ancient Mesopotamia. 

Related Terms

Examples of Sumerian in the following topics:

  • The Sumerians

    • The Sumerian people lived in Mesopotamia from the 27th-20th century BCE.
    • The Sumerians were eventually absorbed into the Akkadian/Babylonian population.
    • Sumerian culture began to spread from southern Mesopotamia into surrounding areas.
    • Toward the end of the empire, though, Sumerian became increasingly a literary language.
    • Many Sumerian clay tablets written in cuneiform script have been discovered.

  • The Akkadian Empire

    • The Akkadian Empire was an ancient Semitic empire centered in the city of Akkad, which united all the indigenous Akkadian speaking Semites and Sumerian speakers under one rule.
    • Sargon, throughout his long life, showed special deference to the Sumerian deities, particularly Inanna (Ishtar), his patroness, and Zababa, the warrior god of Kish.
    • He was also, for the first time in Sumerian culture, addressed as "the god of Agade (Akkad)."
    • Sumerians and Akkadians were bilingual in each other's languages, but Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian.
    • The Sumerian king Ur-Nammu (2112-2095 BCE) later cleared the Gutians from Mesopotamia during his reign.

  • Akkadian Government, Culture, and Economy

    • Traditionally, the ensi was the highest functionary of the Sumerian city-states.
    • During the 3rd millennium BCE, a very intimate cultural symbiosis developed between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism.
    • The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian (and vice versa) is evident from lexical borrowing on a massive scale, to syntactic, morphological, and phonological convergence.
    • Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennia BCE (the exact dating being a matter of debate), but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific language in Mesopotamia until the first century CE.
    • Sumerian literature continued in rich development during the Akkadian period.

  • Babylonian Culture

    • Hallmarks of Babylonian culture include mudbrick architecture, extensive astronomical records and logs, diagnostic medical handbooks, and translations of Sumerian literature.
    • Women as well as men learned to read and write, and had knowledge of the extinct Sumerian language, along with a complicated and extensive syllabary.
    • A considerable amount of Babylonian literature was translated from Sumerian originals, and the language of religion and law long continued to be written in the old agglutinative language of Sumer.
    • One of the most famous of these was the Epic of Gilgamesh, in twelve books, translated from the original Sumerian by a certain Sin-liqi-unninni, and arranged upon an astronomical principle.

  • Babylon

    • Following the disintegration of the Akkadian Empire, the Sumerians rose up with the Third Dynasty of Ur in the late 22nd century BCE, and ejected the barbarian Gutians from southern Mesopotamia.
    • The Sumerian "Ur-III" dynasty eventually collapsed at the hands of the Elamites, another Semitic people, in 2002 BCE.

  • The Assyrians

    • In the late 24th century BCE, Assyrian kings were regional leaders under Sargon of Akkad, who united all the Akkadian Semites and Sumerian-speaking peoples of Mesopotamia under the Akkadian Empire (c. 2334 BC-2154 BCE).
    • Following the fall of the Akkadian Empire, c. 2154 BCE, and the short-lived succeeding Sumerian Third Dynasty of Ur, which ruled southern Assyria, Assyria regained full independence.

  • Ur

    • Ur was a major Sumerian city-state located in Mesopotamia, marked today by Tell el-Muqayyar in southern Iraq.

  • Harappan Culture

    • One seal from Mohenjo-daro shows a half-human, half-buffalo monster attacking a tiger, which may be a reference to the Sumerian myth of a monster created by Aruru, the Sumerian earth and fertility goddess, to fight Gilgamesh, the hero of an ancient Mesopotamian epic poem.

  • Dates and Calendars

    • The first recorded calendars date to the Bronze Age, and include the Egyptian and Sumerian calendars.