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

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However, I personally found the style irritatingly far too “chatty” and the author really over-labours most points. Jacobsen describes his translation as “high prose and short lines,” but the overall effect is a verse translation.

There are about 600 common Sumerian characters, so in this respect at least Sumerian is easier than Chinese. 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. This volume is perfect for getting more selfconfindence concerning the knowledge already gained thanks to volume I. When asked to recommend a dictionary for Sumerian students, Konstantopoulos hesitated, saying that there is not yet a complete, comprehensive work in the style of the The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago ( CAD) [Oriental Institute of Chicago; Ref 4 PJ3525 . 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.At the end of this book you truly will be able to read genuine ancient Sumerian, written in cuneiform. The reader—a slim 110 pages—is packed with helpful resources for the elementary student: texts, transliterations, a sign list, phonological charts, and glossaries for vocabulary, divinities, persons, places, dates, buildings, and festivals. Here are her recommendations, from grammars to lexica, from texts to translations, and where you can find them while at ISAW. Some of the technologies we use are necessary for critical functions like security and site integrity, account authentication, security and privacy preferences, internal site usage and maintenance data, and to make the site work correctly for browsing and transactions. The author makes it absolutely clear at the start that this is not meant to be a comprehensive academic grammar.

Konstantopoulos remembers being attracted to the grammar of a particular line on Cylinder A—“Come on, come on! I am not interested in a deep knowledge: I just want to get a feeling for what Sumerian was like, both as a language and as a writing system. A friend of mine was taking Akkadian or Sumerian (I can’t remember which) and described the wide range of possible correct translations of a text with a story from class. We take intellectual property concerns very seriously, but many of these problems can be resolved directly by the parties involved. He wrote his dissertation on the lamentational liturgies of the city of Kiš, and specializes in the Sumerian language.Beyond Volk, however, Konstantopoulos explains that much of the source material tends to appear in scholarly articles. Sumerian grammar is simple, but it is difficult to nail down the rules, especially as the language changed over its long documented history.