Sumerian Legacies and Later Transmission

Southern Mesopotamia, in present-day Iraq, was home to Sumerian-speaking communities and their city-states during the third millennium BCE. Political power shifted among rival cities, the Akkadian Empire, and the Third Dynasty of Ur, or Ur III, founded at Ur around 2112 BCE. Later generations kept using parts of this inheritance, but they did so in new settings: scribes learned Sumerian after it stopped being an everyday language, poets recast earlier stories in Akkadian, and rulers renewed worship at ancient sanctuaries.

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From accounting marks to a writing system

In the late fourth millennium BCE, administrators at Uruk in southern Iraq drew or incised accounting signs into wet clay to record goods and workers. Early pictographs could depict counted items such as grain or fish. Over time, scribes replaced many drawn forms with wedge-shaped impressions, made by pressing a reed or wooden stylus into the tablet. By about 2600 BCE, signs consistently represented sounds as well as words, allowing scribes to write spoken language and more complex statements. This system, now called cuneiform, was a way of writing rather than a language by itself; the earliest tablets do not establish which spoken language their signs represented.

By the middle of the third millennium BCE, cuneiform recorded religious, political, literary and scholarly texts as well as economic transactions. Sumerian and Akkadian, a Semitic language, were both written in it. The same script served different languages, while each tablet’s language shaped what its signs and grammar meant.

Learning Sumerian after it stopped being spoken

By about 2000 BCE, Sumerian had largely left everyday speech, but it remained a language of scribal training and worship. In Old Babylonian schools, roughly 2000–1600 BCE, Akkadian-speaking pupils learned the older language alongside the complicated cuneiform sign system. A student exercise tablet in the Metropolitan Museum shows the physical routine: a teacher wrote a sign or word on the front, and the pupil repeated it on the back. The name of the god Urash appears six times, turning repeated writing into practice in both a divine name and the signs used to spell it.

Word lists gave lessons a structure. Early lists grouped signs for occupations, vessels, animals, trees and other topics; in Old Babylonian classrooms, newer lists organized signs and Sumerian vocabulary into a staged curriculum. Many student lists were written only in Sumerian, while teachers supplied Akkadian meanings orally. In later first-millennium copies, Sumerian and Akkadian words increasingly appeared side by side. The lists had shifted from helping organize an unfamiliar writing system to teaching a prestigious language and, eventually, helping scholars interpret it.

Stories copied and recast

Royal support helped keep Sumerian literature in circulation. In the twenty-first century BCE, Shulgi of Ur sponsored literary activity at his capital and at Nippur, a major religious center. After the Ur III kingdom ended, Old Babylonian students copied separate Sumerian tales about Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk. These episodes were not a single continuous epic: one tells how Gilgamesh defeats Akka, another follows his journey against the monster Huwawa, and another recounts the Bull of Heaven.

In Old Babylonian schools, a young scribe also copied an Akkadian poem called “Surpassing All Other Kings,” which combined some Sumerian story elements into a new tale. Toward the end of the second millennium BCE, Akkadian literary works dominated scribal learning. As Ira Spar explains, in the twelfth century BCE the Babylonian scholar Sîn-lēqi-unninni recast this poem as “He Who Saw the Deep”: Enkidu became Gilgamesh’s companion, and their adventures explored power, friendship and human mortality. This later version reshaped inherited material for new literary concerns.

Images could preserve a related but less direct memory. A terracotta plaque in Berlin shows heroes attacking a hairy monster; one interpretation connects the scene with the Sumerian Huwawa story, in which Enkidu acts as Gilgamesh’s companion. Details do not match neatly with the later Akkadian epic, so the image may reflect an older strand of the story rather than illustrate a fixed text.

Gods and sanctuaries under later kings

The moon god of Ur was called Nanna in Sumerian and Su’en or Sin in Akkadian. From the Akkadian period into the middle of the Old Babylonian period, reigning kings’ daughters served as high priestesses at his temple in Ur. In the sixth century BCE, Babylonian king Nabonidus rebuilt the sanctuary and restored that office, renewing an old local institution under a much later kingdom.

At Nippur in southern Iraq, Enlil’s temple Ekur received royal rebuilding under Nebuchadnezzar II (604–562 BCE), long after Babylon’s patron god Marduk had risen to prominence. The project shows a Babylonian king continuing to invest in an older sanctuary and its cult.

A clay tablet probably from Babylon, dated to the second or first century BCE, preserves part of a balag, a lament sung with a stringed instrument. Its Sumerian lines have Akkadian translations alongside many passages. The goddess Inanna mourns the destruction of her cities and shrines, preserving a Sumerian worship text for readers centuries after Sumerian had left everyday speech.

Rediscovery in modern scholarship

While working as a banknote engraver in London, George Smith spent lunch breaks studying tablets at the British Museum and taught himself Akkadian. In 1872, he translated the Flood episode on what is now known as Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Its close parallel to the biblical Flood narrative became a Victorian sensation, and public interest funded Smith’s search in Iraq for more fragments of the story.