Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian: An Introduction for Complete Beginners.

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The book contains an overview of the writing system, a complete grammar, and a handful of exercises for review.

Konstantopoulos studied the language with an instructor at Michigan through direct reading of primary texts supplemented with a range of grammars. This is a brilliant starting point for people wanting to start learning ancient Sumerian language with no previous knowledge of the language. This is my chapter (Chapter 11 "Sumerian Grammar for Babylonians") in ISACMP 1 "Back to School in Babylonia. The site also contains a “Consolidated bibliography of Sumerian literature” that students may find useful. As a spoken language, it likely died out around the middle of the second millennium, but continued to be used as a literary language for at least another 900 years.

Sumerian grammar is simple, but it is difficult to nail down the rules, especially as the language changed over its long documented history. I also enjoyed how invested it is in just the language itself, avoiding a tale of the culture, history and gods that could hurt the book’s goal of teaching the language (though, perhaps an acknowledgment of figures persons and places may be good to distinguish say, a god’s or king’s title, from a body of text). If there ever was an ideal book for people with an interest in ancient languages, but lacking the spare time to spend a few years pursuing a university course in them, then this has to be the perfect book for Sumerian.

If you’d like to file an allegation of infringement, you’ll need to follow the process described in our Copyright and Intellectual Property Policy. Joshua Bowen has filled a space in the market with this edition that was desperately needed and I like many others are very grateful.

Turning off the personalized advertising setting won’t stop you from seeing Etsy ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive. I sat down recently with Konstantopoulos, who earned her doctorate in Ancient Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan, to discuss learning Sumerian. Sumerian is the oldest language that we can read that has come to us from antiquity, with clay tablets surviving from as far back as roughly 3200 BCE. Here are her recommendations, from grammars to lexica, from texts to translations, and where you can find them while at ISAW.