Chapter 4
THE TRANSMISSION
How Sumerian survived its own death and shaped languages spoken today.
4.1 The Death
Languages die in different ways.
Some die suddenly—their last speakers killed by conquest, disease, or displacement. The Caribbean Taíno language vanished within decades of Columbus. Thousands of languages have suffered similar fates, snuffed out before anyone thought to record them.
Other languages die slowly, fading across generations. Children grow up bilingual, then their children speak mostly the new language, then their grandchildren speak only the new language. The old tongue becomes something grandparents mutter, then a few phrases at holidays, then nothing. This is how most languages die—not with a bang but with a whisper, as speakers drift toward whatever language offers more opportunity, more prestige, more practical use.
Sumerian died the second way.
The process was gradual. Around 2350 BCE, Sargon of Akkad conquered the Sumerian city-states and established an empire administered in Akkadian—a Semitic language completely unrelated to Sumerian. For the next several centuries, both languages coexisted. Akkadian was the language of empire, of royal inscriptions, of international correspondence. Sumerian remained the language of temples, of ancient texts, of cultural prestige.
Bilingualism was common. Scribes learned both languages. Kings issued proclamations in both. The two writing systems merged—Akkadian borrowed cuneiform from Sumerian, adapting signs for different sounds. For a time, the relationship was symbiotic.
But Akkadian was spreading, and Sumerian was not.
By 2000 BCE, Sumerian had ceased to be anyone’s native language. The last generation of children raised speaking Sumerian at home had grown old and died. The language survived only in the mouths of scholars, priests, and scribes—people who learned it formally, from texts, the way students today learn Latin or Sanskrit.
The death was quiet. No conquest destroyed the Sumerians as a people; they simply became Akkadian-speakers over generations, their descendants indistinguishable from the surrounding population. No library burned; the tablets survived. No decree banned the language; it simply became unnecessary for daily life.
What died was the living chain—mothers teaching children, children growing up and teaching their own children, the unbroken transmission that keeps a language alive. That chain broke sometime around the reign of the Third Dynasty of Ur, and it never reconnected.
After 2000 BCE, every person who spoke Sumerian had learned it as a second language. The native speakers were gone.
4.2 The Afterlife
And yet Sumerian did not disappear.
For nearly two thousand years after its death as a spoken language, Sumerian remained vigorously alive in another sense. It was studied, copied, taught, and used—not for conversation, but for scholarship, religion, and cultural prestige.
The parallel to Latin is striking. Latin ceased to be anyone’s native language sometime in the early medieval period, as it evolved into the Romance languages—French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian. But Latin survived in the Church, in universities, in law and science. Medieval scholars composed new works in Latin. Priests conducted Mass in Latin. Students disputed philosophy in Latin. The language was dead in one sense and thriving in another.
Sumerian experienced the same phenomenon two thousand years earlier.
Babylonian and Assyrian scribes—native Akkadian speakers—maintained Sumerian as a language of learning. They created bilingual dictionaries, painstakingly listing Sumerian words with Akkadian translations. They compiled grammatical texts explaining Sumerian verb forms. They copied and recopied ancient Sumerian literature, preserving hymns, myths, and proverbs that were already over a thousand years old.
Why? Several reasons converged.
Religious necessity. The gods had been addressed in Sumerian for centuries. The great hymns, the liturgical formulas, the incantations—all were in Sumerian. To abandon the language would be to abandon the proper forms of worship. Even when priests no longer spoke Sumerian natively, they continued to recite Sumerian prayers, just as Catholic priests continued Latin liturgy long after Latin died.
Scholarly prestige. Sumerian was old, and old meant venerable. A scribe who mastered Sumerian demonstrated erudition, discipline, access to ancient wisdom. It was the mark of a cultivated mind. Babylonian kings boasted of their ability to read Sumerian texts. Whether they actually could is debatable; the boast itself reveals what was valued.
Practical continuity. Legal documents, property records, administrative archives—vast quantities of Sumerian texts existed in temple and palace storerooms. Someone had to be able to read them. The bureaucratic need to access old records kept Sumerian expertise alive.
Literary inheritance. The great works of Mesopotamian literature were Sumerian or had Sumerian originals. The Epic of Gilgamesh, though best known in its Akkadian version, drew on Sumerian tales. Creation myths, flood stories, wisdom literature—the foundations of Mesopotamian culture were Sumerian. To be literate was to know these works. To know these works was to know some Sumerian.
The result was a strange situation: a language with no native speakers, sustained entirely by institutional effort, surviving for millennia.
Scribal schools taught Sumerian well into the first millennium BCE. Students copied vocabulary lists, practiced verb forms, memorized literary passages. The education was rigorous and conservative. A Babylonian student in 600 BCE learned essentially the same Sumerian that a student in 1800 BCE had learned—the language frozen in its classical form, unchanging because there was no community of speakers to change it.
The last known cuneiform texts date to the first century CE—astronomical records from Babylon, written in a world that had been conquered by Persia, then by Alexander, then by Rome. By then, Sumerian had been dead for two thousand years. But someone, somewhere, could still read it.
Then even that knowledge faded. Cuneiform was forgotten. The tablets became incomprehensible marks on clay. The language that had survived so long finally fell silent.
Until the nineteenth century, when European scholars began to dig.
4.3 The Chain
Languages influence each other. Words migrate. Concepts translate. The influence of Sumerian didn’t end when the language died—it continued through the languages that inherited its legacy.
The primary heir was Akkadian. As we’ve seen, Akkadian borrowed heavily from Sumerian: vocabulary, writing system, literary forms, religious concepts. When Akkadian-speakers spread across the ancient Near East—as traders, conquerors, diplomats—they carried Sumerian loanwords with them.
But Akkadian was not alone. The ancient Near East was a web of languages in contact. Egyptian, Hittite, Hurrian, Elamite, Ugaritic, Hebrew, Aramaic—all these languages existed in a world shaped by Mesopotamian civilization. Influence flowed through trade routes, diplomatic marriages, military conquests, scholarly exchange.
Let me trace one word’s journey.
É-GAL — Sumerian for “big house,” meaning palace or temple.
In Sumerian, the word is transparent: é (house) + gal (big). The temple complexes of Uruk and Ur were é-gal—great houses where gods dwelt and kings administered.
When Akkadians adopted the word, it became ekallum. The meaning stayed the same: palace, the seat of royal power. Akkadian kings built ekallum across Mesopotamia and beyond.
Akkadian was the diplomatic language of the ancient Near East. The Amarna letters—correspondence between Egyptian pharaohs and various Near Eastern rulers around 1350 BCE—are written in Akkadian. Through such channels, Akkadian words spread to peoples who had never seen Babylon.
The Canaanites knew the word. In their languages—ancestors of Hebrew and Phoenician—it became something like hêkal. The great temple in Jerusalem, built by Solomon, was a hêkal. When Hebrew scribes wrote about it, they used a word that had traveled from Sumer.
הֵיכָל (hēḵāl) — Hebrew for temple, palace, great hall.
The word appears dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah sees the Lord sitting in his hēḵāl (Isaiah 6:1). The Psalms celebrate God’s hēḵāl in Zion. When Jews built synagogues in later centuries, the inner sanctum where the Torah scrolls were kept was called the hēḵāl.
The word traveled further. Aramaic, which replaced Hebrew as the everyday language of Jews after the Babylonian exile, preserved it. Arabic, emerging from the same Semitic family, adopted it as haykal (هيكل)—temple, large structure, framework.
Today, an Arabic speaker describing a skeleton (the “framework” of the body) might use haykal. The word’s semantic range has shifted, but its ancestry is clear. Five thousand years ago, a Sumerian scribe wrote é-gal on a clay tablet. The word never stopped traveling.
This is one example. Others exist:
| Sumerian | Akkadian | Hebrew | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| a-zu | asûm | — | physician |
| dub | ṭuppum | — | tablet |
| ma-na | manûm | מָנֶה (māneh) | unit of weight (mina) |
| gi | qanû | קָנֶה (qāneh) | reed, measuring rod |
The Hebrew qāneh (reed) may connect to Sumerian gi through Akkadian. It gives us the English word “canon”—originally a measuring reed, then a standard, then an authoritative list of texts.
When we speak of the biblical canon, we’re using a word that began in the reed beds of southern Iraq.
4.4 The Echo
The transmission of words is only the most traceable influence. Sumerian transmitted something larger: a way of thinking about the world.
Cosmology. Sumerian creation myths describe a primordial state of water and darkness, then divine action bringing order. The god Enki organizes the world, assigning functions to elements, establishing the me—the decrees that govern civilization. This pattern—chaos, then divine ordering, then the establishment of norms—appears across ancient Near Eastern literature.
Genesis 1 echoes it. “Darkness was upon the face of the deep”—the Hebrew word is tehom (תְּהוֹם), cognate with Akkadian Tiamat, the primordial sea goddess of Babylonian myth. God speaks, light appears, order emerges from chaos. The structure is Mesopotamian.
This doesn’t mean Genesis “copied” Sumerian myths. It means the biblical authors worked within a cultural tradition shaped by Mesopotamian precedents. They transformed what they inherited—one God instead of many, creation by word instead of combat—but the raw material came from the world Sumerians had built.
The Flood. The earliest known flood story is Sumerian. A king named Ziusudra receives divine warning, builds a boat, survives the deluge, receives immortality. The Akkadian version names the hero Utnapishtim. The Hebrew version names him Noah.
The parallels are too specific to be coincidental:
| Element | Sumerian/Akkadian | Hebrew |
|---|---|---|
| Divine warning | Gods warn hero | God warns Noah |
| Boat construction | Detailed instructions | Detailed instructions |
| Taking animals aboard | Yes | Yes |
| Flood destroys all life | Yes | Yes |
| Boat lands on mountain | Yes | Yes |
| Hero sends birds to test | Dove, swallow, raven | Raven, dove |
| Divine response | Regret, blessing | Regret, covenant |
The story traveled. It changed in the traveling—became monotheistic, became a story about covenant—but its origins are Mesopotamian. When children learn about Noah’s ark, they’re learning a Sumerian story filtered through centuries of retelling.
Law. The Code of Hammurabi (c. 1754 BCE) is famous, but it wasn’t the first written law code. Sumerian kings compiled laws centuries earlier. Ur-Nammu of Ur (c. 2100 BCE) produced a code that survives in fragments. Lipit-Ishtar of Isin (c. 1930 BCE) produced another.
The concept—that a king should issue laws, that those laws should be written, that written law should govern society—was Sumerian. Every legal system that depends on written statutes inherits this idea.
Time. We’ve noted the survival of sexagesimal units: sixty seconds, sixty minutes, 360 degrees. But the Sumerian contribution to time goes deeper.
The Sumerians named the months. They created calendars that tracked lunar cycles. They recorded astronomical observations that later Babylonian scholars refined into precise predictions. When Greek astronomers adopted Babylonian data—and they did, extensively—they inherited a tradition of systematic observation that began in Sumer.
The Antikythera mechanism, that famous Greek astronomical computer, calculated celestial positions using techniques developed in Mesopotamia. The medieval astrolabe descended from the same tradition. The modern clock, dividing time into sixties, preserves a Sumerian decision made five thousand years ago.
Writing itself. The alphabet you’re reading descends not from cuneiform but from Egyptian hieroglyphics, through Proto-Sinaitic and Phoenician scripts. But the idea that language can be written—that speech can be made permanent—was Sumerian first.
Whether Egyptian writing developed independently or under Sumerian stimulus is debated. The two systems appeared within a few centuries of each other, and there was contact between the cultures. Some scholars believe the concept of writing spread from Mesopotamia even if the specific symbols were Egyptian inventions.
If so, then every alphabetic script on Earth—Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari—descends conceptually from the Sumerian insight that you can press meaning into matter and make it last.
Coda: The First Words and Ours
We began Part I with a scribe in Uruk, pressing reed into clay. He was tracking sheep—thirty animals, fifty bushels, a delivery for the temple. He didn’t know he was inventing history.
Five thousand years later, we inherit what he started. Not just the words that traveled through Akkadian and Hebrew and Arabic to our mouths. Not just the sixty-minute hours and 360-degree circles. Not just the flood story or the creation myth or the concept of written law.
We inherit the idea that the past can be kept.
Before writing, humans lived in an eternal present. Memory faded. Stories drifted. Each generation knew only what the previous generation remembered to tell them, and each telling changed the tale. The past was a mist, growing thicker with distance, until nothing was visible at all.
Writing burned a hole in that mist. Suddenly the past could speak directly, in its own words, without the distortion of retelling. The dead could address the living. The living could address the not-yet-born.
This book exists because of that invention. Every book exists because of it. Every archive, library, database, and website—every attempt to preserve and transmit knowledge—descends from the Sumerian discovery that marks on clay could carry meaning across time.
The Sumerians themselves are gone. Their language is dead. Their cities are tells—mounds of eroded mud brick in the Iraqi desert, barely recognizable as human habitation.
But their words survive. We read them. We speak their loanwords. We structure our hours by their numbers. We tell their stories to our children, not knowing where the stories came from.
The transmission continues. You are part of it now.