Early Mesopotamia and Sumerian Language Interview

The following transcription is an abridgement of the interview I conducted with instructor Ed Stratford whose area of expertise is Ancient Near East studies. Stratford earned his B.A. at Brigham Young University in 2000, his M.A. at the University of Chicago in 2002, and his Ph.D. also at the University of Chicago in 2010.

I read on an online article that another researcher wrote, that Sumerians essentially taught themselves how to speak or invented an oral language system for their civilization. Is that a valid statement?

Well, taught themselves how to speak is a pretty strong claim…it’s probably too extensive a claim. On the other hand, as far as written language goes, somebody like Glassner who is a French scholar, he argues that between about or around 3500 BC the Sumerians, or some group of Sumerians, absolutely invent writing as a dramatic revolution in communication. Not every scholar agrees with that, some would like to see it as a slow accumulation of written tokens that come together and then finally start working together as a system….that’s harder to defend than a sudden revolution, an invention. I think that’s a reasonable stance…But as far as speaking, I can’t agree with that.

To what extent does the Sumerian Language survive today?

The Sumerian language survives today in tiny bits and pieces. That is there are words that we continue to use today, some very few that we can trace back to the Sumerian language. For example the word “abyss” which the Greeks get from the Mesopotamians and the Sumerians called it the abzoo (spelling?). But there’s at least a half dozen. But beyond that, as a derivative language stream, or a family of languages that continue from Sumerian, there is no uncontested child language.

What would you say is the main thing that keeps a language such as Sumerian alive, or fails to keep it alive?

Languages are performed within contexts…we think that the Sumerian language as a vibrant language used by a broad base of people was probably already waning by the time Hammurabi was writing his laws…Sumeroligists these days, of which there are less than two dozen people that can really read Sumerian well in the world today, and none of them use it at the dinner table haha, just to reiterate that it’s dead. Grammarians in Hammurabi’s day did not fully understand the Sumerian language. They were already sort of treating it with kid’s gloves. But technical treatises, medical texts and things like that still participated in a Sumerian language, although in a wooden way, sort of the same way we used Latin 100 years ago. That still existed all the way down to the Babylon Empire.

What is the Epic of Gilgamesh’s significance?

I think most people consider it to be one of the oldest pieces of world literature…and we believe there was a real person named Gilgamesh around 2600 BC because we can find bricks where they inscribed who was building the building, and that generally wasn’t fake. The Gilgamesh epic has a lot of different themes running through it…but this consciousness of a city and the importance of the city as a social organ is one important theme you see. Though the earliest copies of Gilgamesh are in Sumerian, most of what we read and know about Gilgamesh comes from copies much later.

Written Sumerian, that’s found on Cuneiform, correct?

Ya, cuneiform is the writing system and the earliest cuneiform tablets we identify as Sumerian.

So Sumerians developed the system, but Cuneiform was then used elsewhere?

Correct, there’s almost a dozen languages that use the Cuneiform writing system, in the same way the alphabet is used to write many more than that.

Without Cuneiform, would we know anything about early Sumer? Or what would survive?

Right, um, we would have archeological knowledge. We’ve excavated many of these cities. We have massive architecture. On some level, comparably, we don’t have extended texts until 2300 BC, and yet we still know a lot about Egypt. So we would know a lot less about Sumerians…there are on the order of 50,000 documents from the… Sumerian Renaissance in 2100 BC, so you can imagine that without 50,000 documents we’d know a lot les haha.

Haha, ya I’m sure.

Our focus is on oral knowledge; do you have any comments on their oral tradition?

A lot of my colleagues will say that what we have written down about Gilgamesh, or other tales, largely existed within an oral framework and what we have is simply a derivative of the primary oral culture that was at least going on in parallel with the written culture. And I would stress the parallel. There is a lot of oral tradition, and ya there’s a lot of things that they talked about orally…but I believe that there were, if you read some of the myths, they’re touching on things that push philosophical questions of sorts, but they never chose to write those things down. There were a lot of things they didn’t write down that they must have been doing.