The Obituary
Sumerian was spoken in southern Mesopotamia and gave the world its first written records, pressed into clay in cuneiform script. A language isolate with no known relatives, it dominated the region through the third millennium BCE. As Akkadian-speaking peoples rose to power, Sumerian slowly faded from daily speech, dying out as a vernacular around 2000 to 1700 BCE. Yet it refused to vanish entirely: scribes preserved it as a sacred and scholarly language for another two thousand years.
Worth remembering
- Sumerian cuneiform, scratched into clay tablets, is the earliest known writing system on Earth.
- Long after no one spoke it, Babylonian and Assyrian scribes still learned it the way Europeans later learned Latin.
Sources
- Sumerian is a language isolate, the oldest attested written language, gradually replaced by Akkadian as a spoken language by around 2000 BCE. Wikipedia
- Sumerian was written in cuneiform and survived as a classical and liturgical language long after it died out in everyday speech. Encyclopaedia Britannica
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.