We, heirs of the multilingual Sumerians

Do you know in which language the Sumerians started the written chronicle of humanity?

It is a cliché to state that everyone who reads this sentence is an heir of the Sumerians, regardless of what your genetic background may be. The Sumerians were the first inventors of writing; and the Latin alphabet in which this text is written is a distant descendant of the cuneiform script they invented about 5,000 years ago in the ancient Middle East.*

Most people have heard that the Sumerians of Mesopotamia invented writing, along with agriculture, the domestication of plants and animals, metallurgy, urbanization, and social stratification. Their Neolithic revolution fundamentally reshaped the world, and ultimately ushered in the Anthropocene in which we find ourselves today (Crosby, 2004).

But have you ever stopped to think in which language they were writing? Unless you are an Assyriologist – an expert in the languages, cultures, and history of the ancient Middle East – you may not know the details, but you are likely to assume it was one particular language.

Well, you’d be wrong. The Sumerians were multilingual, and language contact is evident in the written record from Day 1.

The multilingual Sumerians

Sumerian is a language isolate that is not related to any other known language, living or dead (Cunningham, 2013). However, back then, as today, most languages of the Middle East were Semitic languages, like modern Arabic or Hebrew. The continuum of Semitic dialects the Sumerians were most in contact with is called Akkadian. And contact between Sumerian and Akkadian is apparent from the very beginning of the written record (Hasselbach-Andee, 2020).

A key indicator of language contact lies in the fact that the language name “Sumerian” is not actually a Sumerian but an Akkadian word. The Sumerian word for their language was “Eme-gir,” which literally means “native language” (Cunningham, 2013).

The earliest written documents legible to us date from around 2,600 BCE. These documents all provide evidence of sustained multilingualism (Crisostomo, 2020). This evidence takes three forms, namely language mixing, parallel translations, and metalinguistic commentary.

Language mixing

First, there are texts that include loanwords from one language into the other or texts that are so heavily mixed that they cannot even be assigned to one language or another. An example comes from the Manishtushu Obelisk, which dates from between 2,277 and 2,250 BCE. The obelisk is basically a title deed to four estates. This is a short excerpt, with Sumerian words in roman font and Akkadian words in italic (quoted from (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 410):

šu‐niĝin 10 ĝuruš be‐lu gana gu kug‐babbar gana ša‐at e‐ki‐im ù zi‐ma‐na‐ak (“Total: 10 workers, lord of the fields, recipients of the payment of the field of Ekim and Zimanak.”)

As can be seen the text makes use of both languages in about equal parts – translanguaging avant la lettre!

Today, this kind of language mixing is relatively rare in writing, particularly formal writing such as legal texts. The Sumerians clearly had no such qualms about keeping written languages neatly separate. Anyone who went to the trouble of chiseling a record like this into stone surely put up the best kind of language they could think of. So, mixing languages must have felt right and sufficiently “weighty” for such an important title deed.

Whatever the writer’s reasoning was, “Sumerian and Akkadian (Semitic) are, throughout much of our material, intertwined and interconnected” (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 416).

Multilingual texts

In addition to administrative texts, some of the earliest surviving texts are – surprise, surprise – bilingual word lists (Michalowski, 2020).

Sumerian was the powerful lingua franca of the time, but it may well be that, by the time writing really began to take off, most people had switched over to speaking Akkadian. New scribes may not necessarily have been proficient in Sumerian. Therefore, they had to receive formal training in that language as part of their scribal training (Michalowski, 2006). That is why bilingual word lists can be found among the earliest written documents: they served a didactic function and the institutionalization of language learning clearly went hand-in-hand with the institutionalization of writing.

Because writing was invented by the Sumerians, writing itself seems to have become associated with Sumerian. It seems likely that Sumerian died out as a spoken language long before it ceased to be used as a written language (Michalowski, 2006).

As a result, scribes not only needed to learn the art of writing, but they also needed to be formally trained in the Sumerian language.

An intriguing example in the kind of diglossia that ensued can be found in an oft-quoted record about an escaped slave. This text records the event in Sumerian (roman font) but reports direct speech in Akkadian (italic font): “Lugalazida, the slave of Lugalkigal, escaped from the Ensi. About his hiding place, the slave girl of Urnigin said: ‘He lives in Maškan-šapir. He should be brought here’” (quoted from (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 410).

Metalinguistic commentary

Over a period of around a thousand years, writing developed from proto-cuneiform – a logographic aide memoire – to become a language-specific writing system, of the sort we are familiar with today. Over the same period, people who knew how to write established themselves as a small and powerful elite of scribes (Taylor, 2013). What made them powerful was not their writing skills per se but the fact that scribes controlled the Sumerian bureaucracy and administration. In short, they collected and distributed goods.

The status of scribes is evident from cylindrical seals – like modern trademarks and signatures. These served to confirm the authenticity and legitimacy of traded objects (Pittman, 2013). The famous seal of Kalki provides an example. The seal is understood to depict a foreign expedition, which included a hunter, the scribe’s royal patron with an ax, and the scribe with tablet and stylus.

As scribes established themselves as a powerful professional caste, training of scribes became formalized and included Sumerian language teaching, as explained above. In keeping with the importance that was accorded to learning Sumerian in scribal education, some of these comments allow us a glimpse into ancient language teaching methods. Then, as today, teachers seem to have taken it upon themselves to act as language police, as this student complaint shows:

“The one in charge of Sumerian said: ‘He spoke Akkadian!’ Then he caned me.” (quoted from (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 408)

At the other end of the social spectrum, speaking multiple languages gave you bragging rights – also just like in our own time. Ancient kings are well known for their boasts inscribed in stone, and Shulgi, “King of Sumer and Akkad, King of the Four Corners of the Universe,” whose reign lasted from around 2,094 to 2,046 BCE, had this to say about his prodigious language capabilities:

By origin I am a son of Sumer; I am a warrior, a warrior of Sumer. Thirdly, I can conduct a conversation with a man from the black mountains. Fourthly, I can do service as a translator with an Amorite, a man of the mountains. I myself can correct his confused words in his own language. Fifthly, when a man of Subir yells, I can even distinguish the words in his language, although I am not a fellow-citizen of his. When I provide justice in the legal cases of Sumer, I give answers in all five languages. In my palace no one in conversation switches to another language as quickly as I do. (Shulgi, 2000, pp. ll.20-220)

Note that Shulgi does not even spell out his first two languages – taking it as implicit that a Sumerian must be bilingual in Sumerian and Akkadian.

What about translation and interpreting?

It should have become obvious by now that the Sumerians operated a bilingual language regime. This is certainly true of the scribal caste – and keep in mind that everyone else would have been illiterate – and the kingly elite. Because these groups were bilingual, there was no need for interpretation between Sumerian and Akkadian.

However, linguistic mediation was necessary with the speakers of other languages, such as Shulgi’s third, fourth, and fifth language.

Like the Ancient Egyptians, the Sumerians institutionalized the role of linguistic mediator for trade and diplomacy. The status of interpreters seems to have been similar to that of scribes, as is evident from another famous seal, the seal of the interpreter Shu-ilishu. The idea of professional certification – modern as it may seem – is also first in evidence with the Sumerians, as this seal demonstrates. This seal also happens to be the first-ever known depiction of an interpreter in action – predating the interpreting relief in the Tomb of Horemheb by almost a thousand years.

The writing on the seal says that it belongs to “Shu-ilishu, Meluhha language interpreter” (Edzard, 1968). The image on the seal depicts a Sumerian dignitary being approached by two figures, presumably Meluhhans, and a small interpreter sitting between them. It is not entirely clear what the Meluhha language was and who the Meluhhans might have been, but they are assumed to have been located in the Indus valley, where the Sumerians had extensive trade interests (Thornton, 2013).

Sumerian multilingualism lives on

As is to be expected from the above, the Sumerians used two different words for “linguistic mediator” – a Sumerian word (“eme-bal”) and an Akkadian word (“targummanu”). Now remember that recently we encountered “dragoman” as a fancy English word for “interpreter”? Do you notice that there is a vague similarity between “targummanu” and “dragoman”?

“Dragoman” first appeared in English around 1300. It is a relatively rare word that refers specifically to interpreters working in the Middle East and with the Arabic, Turkish, and Persian languages. “Dragoman” arrived in English from Old French “drugemen” or Medieval Latin “dragumanus” and, via late Greek “dragoumanos,” goes back to Old Arabic “targumān.” The modern Arabic word is tarjumān, and from Arabic it goes all the way back to the Sumerians.

“Targummanu” not only made it into English as “dragoman” but into many other modern languages, too. The words for “interpreter” in Turkish (“tercümen”), Georgian (“tarjimani”), Russian (“tolmač”), Polish (“tłumacz”), Hungarian (“tolmács”), and German (“Dolmetscher”) all go back to the same source (Jyrkänkallio, 1952).

It is fitting that the word for “interpreter” in so many modern languages should link us back to ancient Mesopotamia, and remind us that all language is an unbroken chain of transmission from the time when humans first learned to speak some 300,000 years ago.

In fact, “targummanu” did not start in Akkadian but was a borrowing from Luwian, a language spoken in another multilingual and multiethnic empire the Sumerians came into contact with, that of the Hittites, in modern-day Turkey (Melchert, 2020). The Luwian word is likely a borrowing from yet another language, which has been covered by the sands of time (Popko, 2008).

In the peoples of the Ancient Middle East we see our modern selves like through a very old, cracked, blunted, and dusty mirror. One feature we see reaching back into that long history is the commonality of our linguistic diversity.

*Postscript, 21/07/2021: I’ve been asked by a learned reader to clarify that the Latin alphabet does not directly descend from cuneiform. It does not, and you can find the full line of known transmission here and here. Early alphabetic writing systems are more closely linked to Egyptian hieroglyphs than to cuneiform. Whether they were invented independently or inspired by hieroglyphs, and whether hieroglyphs were invented independently or inspired be cuneiform is a matter of ongoing debate that may never be resolved. Given what we know about the ubiquity of linguistic and cultural contact – in the ancient world, as today – I am inclined to think that mutual inspiration is much more likely than independent invention. While there is clear evidence for the independent invention of writing at least three times (Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica), the emergence of several writing systems in the Ancient Middle East in relatively close proximity to each other (geographically and chronologically) would suggest, at the very least, transfer of the general idea.

Related resources:

• Who invented writing?
• The Latin alphabet’s take-over of the world’s languages

References

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