3 min read
Ancient Sumerian Outside Academia

There are many areas of interest that for most of modern history, have been exclusive to the select few that were simply rich and bored enough to study them. The advent of the internet, along with changes in attitudes on learning in younger peoples, is slowly starting to dissolve those barriers.


After learning that the Ancient Sumerian Language is the oldest written language we know of, unrelated to any other known language, I immediately became entranced not only by its grammatical and syntactical structure, but equally by the culture that spawned it.


It was only thanks to Joshua Bowen and Megan Lewis that I began to get a handle on the structure of the language. Their videos and books became invaluable resources in my learning, but a textbook alone does not substitute for a curriculum. If Duolingo ever adds Ancient Sumerian to their course material, someone let me know. In the absence of one, I created my own.


The first and arguably most vital component of this was creating an Anki flashcard set that would allow me to learn the vocabulary, syllabary, and grammar of the language. Many of my definitions were pulled directly from the Mug Sar Sumerian Dictionary, whereas others were pulled from the writings of Josh and Megan. While I’m not yet confident enough in this flashcard set to make it publicly available, if you email me with inquiry I’m happy to share it with you.


The second component of my learning was to visualize the structure of the language more viscerally. Having spent the past few days discussing X-Bar Theory with Max Scribner, I envisioned a grammar tree of the Sumerian Language and set to work creating it. My primary source here was Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian. After a great deal of iteration, this is the grammar tree I have spawned:



This grammar tree has now informed many of the interpretations I’ve done on Sumerian texts, as well as enabled me to encode my own sentences into Sumerian for use in my ceramic projects.