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Sumerian language
The Sumerian language of ancient Sumer was spoken in Southern Mesopotamia from at least the 4th millennium BC. Sumerian was replaced by Akkadian as a spoken language around 2000 BC, but continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial and scientific language in Mesopotamia until about 1 AD. Then, it was forgotten until the 19th century. Sumerian is distinguished from other languages of the area such as Hebrew, Akkadian, which also comprises Babylonian and Assyrian, and Aramaic, which are Semitic languages, and Elamite, which may be an Elamo-Dravidian languages.
Chronology
The chronology of the Sumerian language may be divided into several
periods according to linguistic and historical considerations:
- Archaic Sumerian - 3100 – 2600 BCE
- Classical Sumerian - 2600 – 2300 BCE
- Neo-Sumerian - 2300 – 2000 BCE
- Post-Sumerian - 2000 – 100 BCE
From the beginning of the second millennium, Babylonians and Assyrians maintained and utilized
the extinct Sumerian language in much the same way that ancient Greek and Latin
are used for artistic, religious and scholarly purposes today.
Decipherment
Elamo-Dravidian languages on the occasion of her election]]
Henry Rawlinson (1810-1895) deciphered the cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia, and helped prepare The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia (5 vol., 1861–84) for the British Museum. These oversize volumes of cuneiform tablet transcriptions were the primary source of texts for cuneiformists, e.g., Father Johann Strassmaier who compiled an Alphabetisches Verzeichnis (= "cuneiform syllabary") in the 1880s, but Rawlinson's volumes contain little Sumerian because they mainly reproduce tablets from Akkadian-speaking Nineveh and Babylon.
Ernest de Sarzec (1832-1901) began excavating the Sumerian site of Tello (ancient Girsu, capital of the state of Lagash) in 1877, and published the first part of Découvertes en Chaldée with transcriptions of Sumerian tablets in 1884.
The University of Pennsylvania began excavating Sumerian Nippur in 1888.
A Classified List of Sumerian Ideographs by R. Brünnow appeared in 1889.
Credit for being first to scientifically treat a bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian text belongs to Paul Haupt (1858-1926), who published Die sumerischen Familiengesetze [= The Sumerian family laws]: in Keilschrift, Transcription und Übersetzung : nebst ausführlichem Commentar und zahlreichen Excursen : eine assyriologische Studie (Leipzig : J.C. Hinrichs, 1879).
The bewildering number and variety of phonetic values that signs could have in Sumerian led to an unfortunate detour in understanding the language - a Paris-based orientalist, Joseph Halevy, argued from 1874 onward that Sumerian was a secret code, and for over a decade the leading Assyriologists battled over this issue. For a dozen years, starting in 1885, even the great Friedrich Delitzsch accepted Halevy's arguments, not renouncing Halevy until 1897.
In 1908, Stephen Langdon summarized the rapid expansion in knowledge of Sumerian and Akkadian vocabulary in the pages of Babyloniaca, a journal edited by Charles Virolleaud, in an article [http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=genpub;cc=genpub;sid=925969e1cdb54224dccf86fdb4bdef76;rgn=full%20text;idno=ACG1616.0002.001;view=image;seq=00000217 'Sumerian-Assyrian Vocabularies'], which reviewed a valuable new book on rare logograms by Bruno Meissner. Subsequent scholars have found Langdon's work, including his tablet transcriptions, to be not entirely reliable. In 1944, a more careful Sumerologist, Samuel Noah Kramer, provided a detailed and readable summary of the decipherment of Sumerian in his [http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/sum/sum05.htm Sumerian Mythology, accessible on the Internet].
Friedrich Delitzsch published a learned Sumerian dictionary and grammar in the form of his Sumerisches Glossar and Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik, both appearing in 1914. Delitzsch's student, Arno Poebel, published a grammar with the same title, Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik, in 1923, and for 50 years it would be the standard for students studying Sumerian. Poebel's grammar was finally superseded in 1984 on the publication of The Sumerian Language, An Introduction to its History and Grammatical Structure, by Marie-Louise Thomsen.
The difficulty in translating Sumerian can be illustrated by a quote from Miguel Civil of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, regarding a tablet for making beer:
"Two previous attempts, by J.D. Prince in 1919 and M. Witzel in 1938, had produced less than satisfactory results. A line that now even a first year Sumerian student will translate "you are the one who spreads the roasted malt on a large mat (to cool)," was translated "thou real producer of the lightning, exalted functionary, mighty one!" by the first author, and "starkest du mit dem Gugbulug(-Tranke) den Gross-Sukkal" by the second.
"Two developments during the fifties made possible a better understanding of Sumerian literature. In Chicago, Benno Landsberger was editing the Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon. In Philadelphia, where I had been working before 1963, Samuel Noah Kramer was busy making available to scholars as many literary tablets as possible from the collections in Philadelphia, Istanbul, and Jena."
Landsberger worked to publish important bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian lexical tablets from the Old Babylonian period, which have greatly helped our knowledge of Sumerian vocabulary. Kramer and Thorkild Jacobsen both increased our understanding of Sumerian by publishing and translating Sumerian literary texts.
Transcription, in the context of cuneiform, is the process in which an epigraphist makes a line art drawing to show the signs on a clay tablet or stone inscription in a graphic form suitable for modern publication. Not all epigraphists are equally reliable, and before a scholar publishes an important treatment of a text, the scholar will often arrange to collate the published transcription against the actual tablet, to see if any signs, especially broken or damaged signs, should be represented differently.
Transliteration is the process in which a Sumerologist decides how to represent the cuneiform signs in Roman script. Depending on the context, a cuneiform sign can be read either as one of several possible logograms, each of which corresponds to a word in the Sumerian spoken language, as a phonetic syllable (V, VC, CV, or CVC), or as a determinative (a marker of semantic category, such as occupation or place). See the article Transliterating cuneiform languages. Some Sumerian logograms were written with multiple cuneiform signs. These logograms are called diri-spellings, after the logogram 'diri' which is written with the signs SI and A. The text transliteration of a tablet will show just the logogram, such as the word 'diri', not the separate component signs.
Classification
Sumerian is the first known written language. Its script, called cuneiform, meaning "wedge-shaped", was later also used for Akkadian, Ugaritic and Elamite. It was even adapted to Indo-European languages like Hittite (which also had a hieroglyphic script, as did Egyptian) and Old Persian, though the latter merely used the same instruments, and the letter shapes were unrelated.
Sumerian is an agglutinative language, meaning that words could consist of a chain of more or less clearly distinguishable and separable suffixes.
Sumerian is a split ergative language. In an ergative language the subject of a sentence with a direct object is in the so-called ergative case, which in Sumerian is marked with the suffix -e. The subject of an intransitive verb and the direct object (of a transitive verb) are in the absolutive case, which in Sumerian, and most ergative languages, is marked by no suffix (or the so-called "zero suffix").
Example: lugal-e e2 mu-du3 "the king built the house"; lugal ba-gen "the king went".
A split ergative language is one that behaves as ergative in some contexts and as a nominative-accusative language (like English) in others. Sumerian behaves as a nominative-accusative language e.g. in the 1st and 2nd person of present-future tense/incompletive aspect (aka maruu-conjugation), but as ergative in most other instances. Similar patterns are found in a large number of unrelated split ergative languages (see more examples at split ergativity).
Example: i3-du-un (<<
- i3-du-en) = I shall go; e2 i3-du3-un (<<
- i3-du3-en) = I shall build the house (in contrast with the 3 person past tense forms, see above).
Besides, Sumerian is a language with Suffixaufnahme (see more at the relevant entry).
Sumerian distinguishes the grammatical genders animate/inanimate (personal/impersonal) with separate pronouns, but does not have separate male/female gender pronouns. Sumerian has also been claimed to have two tenses (past and present-future), but these are currently described as completive and incompletive aspects instead. There is a large number of cases - nominative, ergative, genitive, dative, locative, comitative, equative ("as, like"), terminative ("to"), ablative ("from"), etc (the exact list varies somewhat in different grammars).
Another characteristic feature of Sumerian is the large number of homophones (words with the same sound structure but different meanings) - or perhaps pseudo-homophones, since there might have been differences in pronunciation (such as tone) that we do not know about. The different homophones (and the different cuneiform signs that denote them) are marked with different numbers by convention, 2 and 3 being replaced by acute accent and grave accent diacritics repectively. For example: du = "to go", du3 = dù = "to build".
Sumerian has been the subject of controversial proposals purportedly identifying it as genetically related with almost every known agglutinative language. As the most ancient known language, it has a peculiar prestige, and such proposals sometimes have a nationalistic background and generally enjoy little popularity in the linguistic community because of their unverifiability. Examples of suggested related languages include:-
- Altaic languages (see Turkish)
- Hurro-Urartian languages (see Subarian, Alarodian)
- Basque language
- Dravidian language (see Elamo-Dravidian)
- Munda languages (Igor M. Diakonoff)
- Uralic languages such as Hungarian (Miklos Erdy)
- Tibeto-Burman (Jan Braun).
- Aymara language (see the Fuente Magna)
More credibility is given to inclusion of Sumerian in proposed super-families like Nostratic or Dene-Sino-Caucasian, but the mere identifiability of these super-families is itself controversial.
Grammar
Finding a place for the Sumerian language in modern analytic linguistics has proven to be a formidable challenge since the first steps of decipherment. Contributing to this dilemma are, first and foremost, the lack of any native speakers (a problem with all ancient tongues); second, the sparseness of linguistic data (which is a distinct difference to many other ancient languages, but a similarity to many others); third, the apparent lack of a closely related tongue (contrast with Akkadian to the Semitic tongues); and finally, the comparatively small amount of research dedicated to the task so far.
These issues notwithstanding, researchers have generally agreed on a few broad typological classifications for the language, as seen above. Sumerian is an agglutinative language, in which many small affixes may be attached to a word, gradually building up refinements in meaning and specificity to the typically abstract lexical root. Furthermore, we see strong indications of at least partial ergativity, where we have the morphological marker for intransitive subjects identical to that of transitive direct objects.
When we make these claims, however, we must be acutely aware that our understanding of the language is frighteningly incomplete.
Leaving aside the problems of classification and typology, however, linguists have pieced together what might be termed a "framework" descriptive grammar of the language, aided lexically by lists of Sumerian words with Akkadian counterparts left to us by ancient scribes. (These lists were necessary as Sumerian was, apparently, the "official language" of Mesopotamia for some time after the language ceased to be spoken by the local population.)
It is this grammar, albeit incomplete and often frequently revised and updated, that we can use to read the basic meanings from a wide variety of the extant texts found throughout Mesopotamia and the surrounding lands. And it is this grammar that is presented below.
A complete Sumerian sentence
As an example, consider the short (and unattested) Sumerian sentence Inanna, nin.ani.r, Ur. Nammu e.0 mu.na.n.du = For Inanna his queen, Ur-Nammu built this temple. We will take as givens the two proper names Inanna and Ur. Nammu, the names of a deity and a ruler, respectively. For the rest of the sentence, we need to do a little linguistic exploring.
Noun
The Sumerian noun is typically a one or two syllable root, occasionally more, of simple structure. Examples are lugal = king, e = temple, or nin = queen. Most frequently, a noun is seen with one or more morphological case markers, which modify the meaning of the noun or attach certain syntactic roles. For instance, the 3rd person possessive marker, -ani, might be suffixed to make lugal.ani = his king.
Nouns may also be placed in adjunction to form a genitive compound, or more simply, two nouns in direct succession with no other markings will often imply a "X of Y" relationship. Proper names, for instance, often take the form Ur. Nammu = Man of Nammu (Nammu being a particular city's patron deity).
In our example sentence above, we see immediately that we have two noun formations, nin.ani.r = for his queen, and e.0 = temple, where we have assumed the .r morpheme to be the dative case marker and .0 to be the ergative. We have thus translated most of our example sentence just by considering nouns and noun formations; this leaves only what must be the verbal form at the very end of the sentence.
Verb
The Sumerian verb, typically a short one or two syllable root, has two conjugations, transitive and intransitive, and two aspects, referred to as hamtu and maru (following the terms in Akkadian grammars of Sumerian).
The prototypical verbal endings are:
:1st person, sg., intransitive, -en
:1st person, pl., intransitive, -en-dè-en
:2nd person, pl., intransitive, -en-zè-en
However, the construction of a Sumerian verbal form is a bit more complex than in many modern tongues, especially English. The verb not only indicates the relationship or activities of the other syntactic players in the sentence, but will also restate many of those relationships in the verbal form itself. For instance, a common verbal form in dedicatory inscriptions (left as "cornerstones" under large building projects) is mu.na.n.du.0 = he built. We have verbal agreement expressing the 3rd person singluar agent of the action in the .na. morpheme, as well as the .n. morpheme noting that there was a dative clause (or a "X did Y for Z" form) somewhere in the meaning. Further, linguists have added the .0 = morhpeme, indicating a non-verbalized marker for an ergative clause. Finally, and most cryptically, the introductory mu. marker has yet to be given a definitive, or even plausible, interpretation.
So the verbal form in our example sentence means something like he built it for her, where the it and her are references to some of the noun formations earlier in the sentence, in this case, the temple and Inanna respectively.
There is clearly much work to be done in the decipherment of the language itself. There is strong motivation to do so, however, as Sumerian is uniquely positioned as one of the few languages for which a writing system was developed without foreknowledge of other systems, and as such, a firm understanding of the connection between the Sumerian tongue and the development of the writing system would shed light on not a small number of interesting linguistic and psycholinguistic areas.
Bibliography
- Edzard, Dietz Otto. (2003) Sumerian Grammar.
- Hayes, John L. (2000) A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts.
- Thomsen, Marie-Louise. (2001). The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to Its History and Grammatical Structure.
- Volk, Konrad. (1997) A Sumerian Reader.
External links
In addition to the links listed in the entry on Sumer, (particularly [http://www.sumerian.org/sumerian.htm The Sumerian Language Page] and the links there), there are some rather specialized linguistic articles on Sumerian grammar available on the Net:
- [http://www-personal.umich.edu/~piotrm/DIGLOS~1.htm The Life and Death of the Sumerian Language in Comparative Perspective] by Piotr Michalowski
- [http://www.assziriologia.hu/site/publikaciok_zg.html Zólyomi Gábor]
- [http://www.eva.mpg.de/~cschmidt/SWL1/handouts/Zolyomi_2.pdf handout] (PDF)
- [http://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/web/staff/johnson/johnson.html Cale Johnson]
- [http://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/web/staff/johnson/AOS2004handout.pdf handout] (PDF)
- [http://www.eva.mpg.de/~cschmidt/SWL1/handouts/Ebeling.pdf Jarle Ebeling] (PDF)
- [http://www.eva.mpg.de/~cschmidt/SWL1/handouts/Cunningham.pdf Graham Cunningham] (PDF)
- [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_iso639.asp?code=sux Ethnologue report--contains very little info]
- [http://55.1911encyclopedia.org/S/SU/SUMER_AND_SUMERIAN.htm Sumerian language article] in 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
Category:Ancient languages
Category:Language isolates
Category:Sumer
Category:ISBN needed
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Sumer
Sumer (or Shumer, Egyptian Sangar, Bib. Shinar, native ki-en-gir) formed the southern part of Mesopotamia from the time of settlement by the Sumerians until the time of Babylonia. The oldest tablets thus far discovered containing Sumerian pre-cuneiform script date to around 3500 BC.
Background
The term "Sumerian" is an exonym (a name given by another group of people), first applied by the Akkadians. The Sumerians described themselves as "the black-headed people" (sag-gi-ga) and called their land ki-en-gir, "place of the civilized lords". The Akkadian word Shumer possibly represents this name in dialect. The Sumerians, with a language, culture, and, perhaps, appearance different from their Semitic neighbors and successors were at one time believed to have been invaders, but the archaeological record shows cultural continuity from the time of the early Ubaid period (5200-4500 BC C-14, 6090-5429 [http://www.calpal-online.de calBC]) settlements in southern Mesopotamia. The challenge for any population attempting to dwell in Iraq's arid southern floodplain was to master the Tigris and Euphrates river waters for year-round agriculture and drinking water. In fact, the Sumerian language is replete with terms for canals, dikes, and reservoirs, indicating that Sumerian speakers were farmers who moved down from the north after perfecting irrigation agriculture there. The Ubaid pottery of southern Mesopotamia has been connected via 'Choga Mami Transitional' ware to the pottery of the Samarra period culture (5700-4900 BC C-14, 6640-5816 [http://www.calpal-online.de calBC]) in the north, who were the first to practice a primitive form of irrigation agriculture along the middle Tigris river and its tributaries. The connection is most clearly seen at Tell Awayli (Oueilli/Oueili) near Larsa, excavated by the French in the 1980s, where 8 levels yielded pre-Ubaid pottery with affinities to Samarran ware. Sumerian speakers spread down into southern Mesopotamia because they had developed a social organization and a technology that enabled them, through their control of the water, to survive and prosper in a difficult environment where, other than a possible indigenous hunter-gatherer population in the marshlands at the head of the Arabo-Persian Gulf and seasonal pastoralists, they had no competition.
A distinctive style of painted pottery spread throughout Mesopotamia in the Ubaid period, when the ancient Sumerian cult-center of Eridu was gradually surpassed in size by the nearby city of Uruk. The archaeological transition from the Ubaid period to the Uruk period is marked by a gradual shift from painted pottery domestically-produced on a slow wheel, to a great variety of unpainted pottery mass-produced by specialists on a fast wheel. The date of this transition, from Ubaid 4 to Early Uruk, is in dispute, but calibrated radiocarbon dates from Tell Awayli would place it as early as 4500 BC.
By the time of the Uruk period (4500-3100 BC calibrated), the volume of trade goods being inexpensively transported along the canals and rivers of southern Mesopotamia facilitated the rise of many large temple-centered cities where centralized administrations could afford to employ specialized workers. It is fairly certain that it was during the Uruk period that Sumerian cities began to make use of slave labor, and there is ample evidence for captured slaves as workers in the earliest texts. Artifacts, and even colonies of this Uruk civilization have been found over a wide area - from the Mediterranean sea in the west, to the Taurus mountains in Turkey, and as far east as Central Iran.
The Uruk period civilization, exported by Sumerian traders and colonists, had a stimulating and influential effect on surrounding peoples, who gradually evolved their own comparable, competing economies. The cities of Sumer could not maintain remote, long-distance colonies purely by military force; the domestic horse did not appear in Sumer until the Ur III period - one thousand years after the Uruk period ended. The end of the Uruk period coincided with a dry period from 3200-2900 BC that marked the end of a long wetter, warmer climate period from ca. 9,000 to 5,000 years B.P. called the Holocene climatic optimum. When the historical record opens, the Sumerians seem to be limited to southern Mesopotamia, although very early rulers such as Lugal-Anne-Mundu are indeed recorded as expanding to neighboring areas as far as the Mediterranean, Taurus and Zagros, and not long after legendary figures like Enmerkar and Gilgamesh, who are associated in mythology with the historical transfer of culture from Eridu to Uruk, were supposed to have reigned.
The term 'Sumerian' applies to speakers of the Sumerian language. The Sumerian language is generally regarded as a language isolate in linguistics because it belongs to no known language family; Akkadian belongs to the Afro-Asiatic languages.
History
Main article: History of Sumer.
In the earliest known period Sumer was divided into several independent city-states, whose limits were defined by canals and boundary stones. Each was centered on a temple dedicated to the patron god or goddess of the city and ruled over by a priest or king, who was intimately tied to the city's religious rites.
Some of the major cities included Eridu, Kish, Lagash, Uruk, Ur, and Nippur. As these cities developed, they sought to assert primacy over each other, falling into a millennium of almost incessant warfare over water rights, trade routes, and tribute from nomadic tribes.
The Sumerian king list contains a traditional list of the early dynasties, much of it probably mythical. The first name on the list whose existence is authenticated through archaeological evidence, is that of Enmebaragesi of Kish, whose name is also mentioned in the Gilgamesh epics. This has led some to suggest that Gilgamesh really was a historical king of Uruk.
The dynasty of Lagash is well known through important monuments, and one of the first empires in recorded history was that of Eannatum of Lagash, who annexed practically all of Sumer, including Kish, Uruk, Ur, and Larsa, and reduced to tribute the city-state of Umma, arch-rival of Lagash. In addition, his realm extended to parts of Elam and along the Persian Gulf.
Lugal-Zage-Si, the priest-king of Umma, overthrew the primacy of the Lagash dynasty, took Uruk, making it his capital, and claimed an empire extending from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. He is the last ethnically Sumerian king before the arrival of the Semitic conqueror, Sargon of Akkad.
Downfall
As the local states grew in strength, the Sumerians began to lose their political hegemony over most parts of Mesopotamia. The Amorites conquered Sumer and founded Babylon. The Hurrians established the empire of Mitanni in northern Mesopotamia around 1595 BC, while the Babylonians controlled the south. Both groups defended themselves against the Egyptians and the Hittites. The Hittites defeated Mitanni but were repulsed by the Babylonians; but the Kassites defeated the Babylonians in 1460 BC. The Kassites were in turn defeated by the Elamites around 1150 BC.
Agriculture and hunting
The Sumerians grew barley, chickpeas, lentils, millet, wheat, turnips, dates, onions, garlic, lettuce, leeks and mustard. They also raised cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. They used oxen as their primary beasts of burden and donkeys as their primary transport animal. Sumerians hunted fish and fowl.
Sumerian agriculture depended heavily on irrigation. The irrigation was accomplished by the use of shadufs, canals, channels, dykes, weirs, and reservoirs. The canals required frequent repair and continual removal of silt. The government required individuals to work on the canals, although the rich were able to exempt themselves.
Using the canals, farmers would flood their fields and then drain the water. Next they let oxen stomp the ground and kill weeds. They then dragged the fields with pickaxes. After drying, they plowed, harrowed, raked thrice, and pulverized with a mattock.
Sumerians harvested during the dry fall season in three-person teams consisting of a reaper, a binder, and a sheaf arranger. The farmers would use threshing wagons to separate the cereal heads from the stalks and then use threshing sleds to disengage the grain. They then winnowed the grain/chaff mixture.
Architecture
Main article: Sumerian architecture
The Tigris-Euphrates plain lacked minerals and trees. Sumerian structures comprised plano-convex mudbrick, not fixed with mortar or with cement. Mud-brick buildings eventually deteriorate, and so they were periodically destroyed, levelled, and rebuilt on the same spot. This constant rebuilding gradually raised the level of cities, so that they came to be elevated above the surrounding plain. The resultant hills are known as tells, and are found throughout the ancient Near East. The most impressive and famous of Sumerian buildings are the ziggurats, large terraced platforms which supported temples. The Biblical Tower of Babel may have been built in a similar manner. Sumerian cylinder seals also depict houses built from reeds not unlike those built by the Marsh Arabs of Southern Iraq until recent years.
Sumerian temples and palaces made use of more advanced materials and techniques, such as buttresses, recesses, half columns, and clay nails.
Culture
Sumerian culture may be traced to two main centers, Eridu in the south and Nippur in the north. But the streams of civilization that flowed from them were in strong contrast. The deity Enlil, around whose sanctuary Nippur had grown up, was considered lord of the ghost-land, and his gifts to mankind were said to be the spells and incantations that the spirits of good or evil were compelled to obey. The world he governed was a mountain; the creatures whom he had made lived underground.
Eridu, on the other hand, was the home of the culture god Enki (absorbed into Babylonian mythology as the god Ea), the god of light and beneficence, ruler of the freshwater depths beneath the earth (the Apsû), a healer and friend to humanity who was thought to have given us the arts and sciences, the industries and manners of civilization; the first law-book was considered his creation. Eridu had once been a seaport, and it was doubtless its foreign trade and intercourse with other lands that influenced the development of its culture. Its cosmology was the result of its geographical position: the earth, it was believed, had grown out of the waters of the deep, like the ever widening coast at the mouth of the Euphrates. Long before history is recorded, however, the cultures of Eridu and Nippur had coalesced. While Babylon seems to have been a colony of Eridu, Ur, the immediate neighbour of Eridu, may have been a colony of Nippur, since its moon god was the son of Enlil of Nippur. But in the admixture of the two cultures, the influence of Eridu was predominant.
Historian Alan Marcus says: "Sumerians held a rather dour perspective on life"
One Sumerian wrote: "Tears, lament, anguish, and depression are within me. Suffering overwhelms me. Evil fate holds me and carries off my life. Malignant sickness bathes me."
Another wrote, "Why am I counted among the ignorant? Food is all about, yet my food is hunger. On the day shares were allotted, my allotted share was suffering."
Though women were protected by late Sumerian law and were able to achieve a higher status in Sumer than in other contemporary civilizations, the culture was male-dominated.
Economy and trade
Discoveries of obsidian from far-away locations in Anatolia and lapis lazuli from northeastern Afghanistan, beads from Dilmun (modern Bahrain), and several seals inscribed with the Indus Valley script suggest a remarkably wide-ranging network of ancient trade centered around the Persian Gulf.
The Epic of Gilgamesh refers to trade with far lands for goods such as wood that were scarce in Mesopotamia. In particular, cedar from Lebanon was prized.
The Sumerians used slaves, although they were not a major part of the economy. Slave women worked as weavers, pressers, millers, and porters.
Sumerian potters decorated pots with cedar oil paints. The potters used a bow drill to produce the fire needed for baking the pottery. Sumerian masons and jewelers knew and made use of alabaster (calcite), ivory, gold, silver, carnelian and lapis lazuli.
Military
lapis lazuli
On Left: The Standard of Ur, the bottom panel of the War Side
City walls defended Sumerian cities. The Sumerians engaged in siege warfare between their cities, and the mudbrick walls failed to deter foes who had the time to pry out the bricks.
Sumerian armies consisted mostly of infantry. Light infantrymen carried battle-axes, daggers, and spears. The regular infantry also used copper helmets, felt cloaks, and leather kilts.
The Sumerian military used carts harnessed to onagers. These early chariots functioned less effectively in combat than did later designs, and some have suggested that these chariots served primarily as transports, though the crew carried battle-axes and lances. The Sumerian chariot comprised a four-wheeled device manned by a crew of two and harnessed to four onagers. The cart was composed of a woven basket and the wheels had a solid three-piece design.
Sumerians used slings and simple bows. (the recurve bow is a later invention.)
Religion
Main article: Sumerian mythology
It can be difficult to speak of a 'Sumerian religion' as such, since practices and beliefs varied widely through time and distance, with each city having its own twist on mythology and theology. It might be said to be henotheistic. The Sumerian were the first recorded beliefs and the source for much of later Mesopotamian mythology, religion, and astrology.
The Sumerians worshipped An as the primary god, equivalent to heaven (indeed the word "an" in Sumerian means "sky"). An's closest cohorts were Enki in the south, Enlil in the north and Inana, the deification of Venus, the morning (eastern) and evening (western) star. The sun was Utu, the moon was Nanna, Nammu or Namma was the Mother Goddess, probably considered to be the original matrix; there were hundreds of minor deities. The Sumerian gods (Sumerian dingir, plural dingir-dingir or dingir-a-ne-ne) each had associations with different cities, and their religious importance often waxed and waned with the political power of the associated cities. The gods were said to have created human beings from clay for the purpose of serving them. The gods often expressed their anger and frustration through earthquakes and storms: the gist of Sumerian religion was that humanity was at the mercy of the gods.
Sumerians believed that the universe consisted of a flat disk enclosed by a tin dome. The Sumerian afterlife involved a descent into a vile nether-world to spend eternity in a wretched existence as a Gidim (ghost).
Sumerian temples consisted of a central nave with aisles along either side. Flanking the aisles would be rooms for the priests. At one end would stand the podium and a mudbrick table for animal and vegetable sacrifices. Granaries and storehouses were usually located near the temples. After a time the Sumerians began to place the temples on top of multi-layered square constructions built as a series of rising terraces: the ziggurats.
Technology
Examples of Sumerian technology include: the wheel, saws, leather, chisels, hammers, braces, bits, nails, pins, rings, hoes, axes, knives, lancepoints, arrowheads, swords, glue, daggers, waterskins, bags, harnesses, boats, armor, quivers, scabbards, boots, sandal (footwear), harpoons, and beer brewing.
The Sumerians had three main types of boats:
- skin boats comprised reeds and animal skins
- sailboats featured bitumen waterproofing
- wooden-oared ships, sometimes pulled upstream by people and animals walking along the nearby banks
Language and writing
Main article: Sumerian language.
Sumerian is a language isolate, meaning that it is unrelated to any other known languages. There have been many failed attempts to connect Sumerian to other languages group. It is an Agglutinative language; in other words, morphemes (word-units) are stuck together to create words.
Sumerians invented picture-hieroglyphs that developed into later cuneiform, and theirs is the oldest known written human language. An extremely large body of hundreds of thousands of texts in the Sumerian language have survived, the great majority on clay tablets. Known Sumerian texts include personal and business letters and transactions, receipts, lexical lists, laws, hymns and prayers, magical incantations, and scientific texts including mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. Monumental inscriptions and texts on different objects like statues or bricks are also very common. Many texts survive in multiple copies because they were repeatedly transcribed by scribes-in-training. Sumerian continued to be the language of religion and law in Mesopotamia long after Semitic speakers had become the ruling race.
Understanding Sumerian texts today can be problematic even for experts. Most difficult are the earliest texts, which in many cases don't give the full grammatical structure of the language.
Legacy
The Sumerians are perhaps remembered most for their many inventions. Many authorities credit them with the invention of the wheel and the potter's wheel. Their cuneiform writing system was the first we have evidence of (with the possible exception of the highly controversial Old European Script), pre-dating Egyptian hieroglyphics by at least seventy five years. They were among the first formal astronomers. They came up with the concept of dividing the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds. They may have invented military formations. Perhaps most importantly, the Sumerians ushered in the age of intensive agriculturalism in Ancient Mesopotamia. Einkorn and Emmer wheat, barley, sheep (starting as mouflon) and cattle (starting as aurochs) were foremost among the species cultivated and raised for the first time on a grand scale. These inventions and innovations easily place the Sumerians among the most creative cultures in human pre-history and history.
See also
- Sumerian language
- Epic of Gilgamesh
- History of Sumer
- Sumerian king list
- Sumerian architecture
Further Reading
- Ancient Iraq Georges Roux
- Ancient Mesopotamia: The Sumerians, Babylonians, And Assyrians Virginia Schomp
- The Archaeology of Mesopotamia: From the Old Stone Age to the Persian Conquest Seton Lloyd
- Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat
- Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia Jean Bottéro
- Mesopotamia Gwendolyn Leick
- Sumer: Cities of Eden (Timelife Lost Civilizations)
- Sumer and the Sumerians Harriet Crawford
- Sumerian Mythology: A Study of Spiritual and Literary Achievement in the Third Millennium BC Samuel Noah Kramer
- The Sumerians C. Leonard Woolley
- The Sumerians : Their History, Culture, and Character Samuel Noah Kramer
External links
History
- [http://ancientneareast.tripod.com/Sumer.html The History of the Ancient Near East]
Language
- [http://www.sumerian.org/ Sumerian Language Page], perhaps the oldest Sumerian website on the web (it dates back to 1996), features compiled lexicon, detailed FAQ, extensive links, and so on.
- [http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/ ETCSL: The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature] has complete translations of more than 400 Sumerian literary texts.
- [http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/ PSD: The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary], while still in its initial stages, can be searched on-line, from August 2004.
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Akkadian language
Akkadian (lišānum akkadītum) was a Semitic language (part of the greater Afro-Asiatic language family) spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, particularly by the Assyrians and Babylonians. It used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian, an unrelated, non-Semitic language. The name of the language is derived from the city of Akkad, a major center of Mesopotamian civiliazation.
Dialects
Akkadian is divided into dialects based on geography and historical period:
- Old Akkadian - 2500 – 1950 BCE
- Old Babylonian/Old Assyrian - 1950 – 1530 BCE
- Middle Babylonian/Middle Assyrian - 1530 – 1000 BCE
- Neo-Babylonian/Neo-Assyrian - 1000 – 600 BCE
- Late Babylonian - 600 BCE – 100 CE
Cuneiform
Akkadian scribes wrote the language using cuneiform script, an earlier writing system devised by the Sumerians using wedge-shaped signs pressed in wet clay that in Akkadian could represent either (a) Sumerian logograms (i.e. picture-based characters as in Chinese), (b) Sumerian syllables, (c) Akkadian syllables, and (d) phonetic complements. Cuneiform was in many ways unsuited to Akkadian: among its flaws was its inability to represent important phonemes in Semitic, including a glottal stop, pharyngeals, and emphatic consonants. In addition, cuneiform was a syllabary writing system - i.e. a consonant plus vowel comprised one writing unit - frequently inappropriate for a Semitic language made up of triconsonantal roots (i.e. three consonants minus any vowels). Older Sumerian cuneiform also distinguished between the vowels i and e; this distinction, though not originally present in Akkadian, was adopted by scribes to compensate for the disappearance (or non-writing) of the original Semitic pharyngeals.
Akkadian grammar
Akkadian is an inflected language, and as a Semitic language its grammatical features are highly similar to those found in Classical Arabic. It possesses two genders (masculine and feminine), distinguished even in second person pronouns (you-masc., you-fem.) and verb conjugations; three cases for nouns and adjectives (nominative, accusative, and genitive); three numbers (singular, dual, and plural); and unique verb conjugations for each first, second, and third person pronoun.
Akkadian nouns are declined according to gender, number and case. There are three genders; masculine, feminine and common. Only a very few nouns belong to the common gender. There are also three cases (nominative, accusative and genitive) and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). Adjectives are declined exactly like nouns.
Akkadian verbs have 13 separate root stems, of which only the following eight are commonly used:
- Qal: the root stem, used for transitive and intransitive verbs
- Paal: signifies intensity; the middle consonant is doubled
- Shafal: causative, formed by prefix [š]
- Nifal: passive, formed by prefix [n]
- Ifteal: reflexive, derived from Qal
- Iftaal: both active and passive, derived from Paal
- Ishtafal: reflexive of the causative, derived from Shafal
- Ittafal: passive signification, derived from Nifal
The remaining root stems are all derived from the first eight and are very similar in meaning. Akkadian verbs usually display the tri-consonantal root, though some roots with two- or four-consonant roots also exist. These are called radicals.
There are three tenses, present, preterite and permansive. Present tense indicates incomplete action and preterite tense indicates complete action, while permansive tense expresses a state or condition and usually takes a particle.
Akkadian, unlike Arabic, has mainly regular plurals (i.e. no broken plurals), although some masculine words take feminine plurals. In that respect, it is similar to Hebrew.
Word order
Akkadian sentence order was subject + object + verb (SOV), which sets it apart from most other Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, which typically have a verb + subject + object (VSO) word order. (South Semitic languages in Ethiopia are another matter altogether.) It has been hypothesized that this word order was a result of influence from the Sumerian language, which was also SOV. There is evidence that native speakers of both languages were in intimate language contact, forming a single society for at least 500 years, so it is entirely likely that a sprachbund could have formed. Further evidence of an original VSO or SVO ordering can be found in the fact that direct and indirect object pronouns are suffixed to the verb. Word order seems to have shifted to SVO/VSO late in the 1st millennium BC to the 1st millennium AD, possibly under the influence of Aramaic.
Akkadian literature
Among the works written in Akkadian cuneiform are the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Atrahasis Epic.
References
Mercer, Samuel A B (1961). Introductory Assyrian Grammar. New York: F Ungar. ISBN 0-486-42815-X.
External links
- [http://www.language-museum.com/a/akkadian-cuneiform.php Akkadian Language Sample]
- [http://www.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/ A detailed introduction to Akkadian]
Category:Ancient languages
Category:Afro-Asiatic languages
Category:Semitic languages
Category:Assyria
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19th century
:Alternative meaning: Nineteenth Century (periodical)
The 19th century lasted from 1801 to 1900 in the Gregorian calendar (using the Common Era system of year numbering).
Historians sometimes define a "Nineteenth Century" historical era stretching from 1815 (The Congress of Vienna) to 1914 (The outbreak of the First World War).
Europe
For Europe, the period is marked with revolution, social upheaval, and the emergence of a united conservatism from the monarchs of Europe in response to the emerging republican firestorm spreading from revolutionary France. There were many revolutions in Europe in 1848. Furthermore, the later end of the century was dominated by what many call the New Imperialism, which was the rapid aquisition of colonies worldwide by European powers, most noteworthy is the Scramble for Africa.
Many countries in Europe underwent an Industrial Revolution, especially Britain and Germany, that spread elsewhere by the end of the century, with factories and railway lines built all over the continent.
The start of the 19th century there was a struggle between France and Britain and their allies for control of Europe and the world during the Napoleonic Wars, with Napoleon being finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815. During the rest of the century, the British empire became the largest and most powerful empire in history, during the period known as the Pax Britannica.
Americas
In the Americas, the United States slowly grew economically, militarily, and politically, but nevertheless faced dramatic changes domestically, best seen in the Civil War, the end of slavery, and the expansion across the American continent known as Manifest Destiny. Industrially, America will explode following the Civil War, and would eventually begin expansion outward across the Pacific Ocean and in Latin America.
Other countries
For the rest of the world, there were few places not influenced by the West in some fashion, whether through colonialism, imperialism, or war. European powers gained increasing influence in China, where Qing control had weakened, and wars were fought by the western powers against China, such as the first and the second Opium wars and Sino-French War. Japan, which was forcibly opened to Western trade, began a rapid industrialisation.
Africa which was largely free from European control at the start of the century, was almost completely dominated by Europe at the end of it, with the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s and 1890s.
Large European settlement, especially British, of colonies such as Australia, New Zealand and the Cape Colony continued during the nineteenth century.
Events
- 1801: The Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland merge to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
- 1803: The United States buys out France's territorial claims in North America via the Louisiana Purchase.
- 1804-06: Americans Meriwether Lewis and William Clark lead an expedition to the Pacific Coast and back.
- 1805-48: Muhammad Ali modernizes Egypt.
- 1806: Holy Roman Empire dissolved as a consequence of the Treaty of Lunéville.
- 1809: Napoleon strips the Teutonic Knights of their last holdings in Bad Mergentheim.
- 1813-1917: The contest between the British Empire and Imperial Russia for control of Central Asia is referred to as the Great Game.
- 1815: Congress of Vienna redraws the European map.
- 1815: Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo brings a conclusion to the Napoleonic Wars and marks the beginning of a Pax Britannica which lasts until 1870.
- 1816: Year Without a Summer
- 1816-28: Shaka's Zulu kingdom becomes the largest in Southern Africa.
- 1819: The modern city of Singapore is established by the British East India Company.
- 1820: Liberia founded by the American Colonization Society for freed American slaves.
- 1830: France invades and occupies Algeria.
- 1830: The Belgian Revolution in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands led to the creation of Belgium.
- 1833: Slavery Abolition Act bans slavery throughout the British Empire.
- 1834: Spanish Inquisition officially ends.
- 1835-36: The Texas Revolution in Mexico resulted in the short-lived Republic of Texas.
- 1837-1901: Queen Victoria's reign is considered the apex of the British Empire and is referred to as the Victorian era.
- 1845-49: Irish Potato Famine
- 1848: The Communist Manifesto published.
- 1848: Revolutions of 1848 in Europe
- 1848-58: California Gold Rush
- 1850: The Little Ice Age ends around this time.
- 1851-60s: Victorian gold rush in Australia
- 1851-64: The Taiping Rebellion in China
- 1854: The Convention of Kanagawa formally ends Japan's policy of Sakoku.
- 1855: Bessemer process enables steel to be mass produced.
- 1856: World's first oil refinery in Romania
- 1857-58: Indian rebellion of 1857
- 1859: The Origin of Species published.
- 1864-67: French intervention in Mexico
- 1865-77: Reconstruction in the United States
- 1866: Successful transatlantic telegraph cable follows an earlier attempt in 1858.
- 1866: Creation of the North German Confederation and the Austrian-Hungarian Dual Monarchy.
- 1866-69: Meiji Restoration in Japan
- 1867: The United States purchased Alaska from Russia.
- 1867: Canadian Confederation formed.
- 1869: First Transcontinental Railroad completed in United States.
- 1869: The Suez Canal opens linking the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea.
- 1870-71: Unifications of Germany and Italy.
- 1871-1914: Second Industrial Revolution
- 1870s-90s: Long Depression in Western Europe and North America
- 1872: Yellowstone National Park created.
- 1874: The British East India Company is dissolved.
- 1877: Great Railroad Strike in the United States may have been the world's first nationwide labor strike.
- 1877-78: The Balkans are freed from the Ottoman Empire after another Russo-Turkish War.
- 1878: First commercial telephone exchange in New Haven, Connecticut.
- 1880-1902: Great Britain conquers Dutch settlers in South Africa in two Boer Wars.
- 1882: First electrical power plant and grid in Manhattan.
- 1884-85: The Berlin Conference signals the start of the European Scramble for Africa. Attending nations also agree to ban trade in slaves.
- 1885: Unification of Bulgaria
- 1890: The Wounded Knee Massacre is the last battle in the American Indian Wars.
- 1894-95: After the First Sino-Japanese War, China cedes Taiwan to Japan and grants Japan a free hand in Korea.
- 1895-1896: Ethiopia defeated Italy in the First Italo-Abyssinian War.
- 1896: Olympic games revived in Athens.
- 1896: Klondike Gold Rush in Canada
- 1898: The United States gains control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.
- 1898-1900: The Boxer Rebellion in China is suppressed by an Eight-Nation Alliance.
Wars
List of wars 1800–1899
- 1799-1815: Napoleonic Wars.
- 1801-15: Barbary Wars between the United States and the Barbary States of North Africa.
- 1806-12: Russo-Turkish War
- 1810-21: Mexican War of Independence.
- 1810s-20s: South American Wars of Independence.
- 1812-15: War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain.
- 1821-32: Greek War of Independence.
- 1828-29: Russo-Turkish War, 1828-1829
- 1833-76: Carlist Wars in Spain.
- 1839-60: After two Opium Wars, Great Britain, France, the United States and Russia gain many concessions from China.
- 1854-56: Crimean War between Great Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire and Russia.
- 1861-65: American Civil War between the Union and seceding Confederacy.
- 1866: Austro-Prussian War.
- 1877-78: Russo-Turkish War.
- 1879: Anglo-Zulu War in South Africa.
- 1879-84: War of the Pacific between Peru, Bolivia and Chile.
- 1880-81: First Boer War.
- 1894-95: First Sino-Japanese War.
- 1895-96: First Italo-Abyssinian War.
- 1899-13: The Philippine-American War.
Significant people
- Gilbert and Sullivan, playwright, composer
- William Gilbert Grace, English cricketer
- Baron Haussmann, civic planner
- Sándor Körösi Csoma, explorer of the Tibetan culture
- Fitz Hugh Ludlow, writer and explorer
- Florence Nightingale, nursing pioneer
- Ignaz Semmelweis, founder of hygiene
- Dr. John Snow, the founder of epidemiology
- F R Spofforth, Australian cricketer
- Franz Boas
- Edward Burnett Tylor
- Karl Verner
- Brothers Grimm
- Paul Cezanne
- Eugène Delacroix
- Caspar David Friedrich
- Antonio de La Gandara
- Théodore Géricault
- Vincent van Gogh
- Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
- Édouard Manet
- Ludwig van Beethoven
- Hector Berlioz
- Johannes Brahms
- Anton Bruckner
- Frédéric Chopin
- Antonin Dvorak
- Franz Liszt
- Felix Mendelssohn
- Modest Mussorgsky
- Franz Schubert
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
- Giuseppe Verdi
- Richard Wagner
- Charles Baudelaire
- Charlotte Brontë
- Emily Brontë
- François-René de Chateaubriand
- Anton Chekhov
- Kate Chopin
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Charles Dickens
- Emily Dickinson
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Gustave Flaubert
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Nikolai Gogol
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Friedrich Hölderlin
- Heinrich Heine
- Victor Hugo
- Henry James
- Stéphane Mallarmé
- Aleksandr Pushkin
- Arthur Rimbaud
- Stendhal
- Leo Tolstoy
- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
- Jules Verne
- Walt Whitman
- Oscar Wilde
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Herman Melville
- Henri Becquerel, physicist
- Charles Darwin, biologist
- Thomas Alva Edison, inventor
- Michael Faraday, scientist
- Gottlob Frege, mathematician, logician and philosopher
- Carl Friedrich Gauss, mathematician, physicist, astronomer
- James Clerk Maxwell, Scottish physicist
- Gregor Mendel, biologist
- Louis Pasteur, biologist
- Nikola Tesla, inventor
- Amedeo Avogadro, physicist
- Johann Jakob Balmer, mathematician, physicist
- Pierre Curie, physicist
- Christian Doppler, physicist, mathematician
- Bahá'u'lláh, Persian religious leader and founder of Bahá'í Faith
- Báb, Persian prophet and founder of Bábísm
- Nikolai of Japan, religious leader who introduced Eastern Orthodoxy into Japan.
- Mikhail Bakunin, anarchist
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, philosopher
- Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher
- Karl Marx, political philosopher and economist
- John Stuart Mill, philosopher
- Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher
- Joseph Smith, Jr., religious leader, founder of Mormonism
- Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Hindu mystic
- Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher
- Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, founder of French socialism
- Brigham Young, Mormon religious leader
- William Morris, social reformer
- Otto von Bismarck, German chancellor
- Napoleon Bonaparte, French general, first consul and emperor
- Guiseppe Garibaldi, unifier of Italy and Piedmontese soldier
- Ulysses S. Grant, U.S. general and president
- Theodor Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism
- Andrew Jackson, U.S. general and president
- Thomas Jefferson, American statesman, philosopher, and president
- Lajos Kossuth, Hungarian governor; leader of the war of independence
- Hong Xiuquan, revolutionary, self-proclaimed Son of God
- Benjamin Disraeli, novelist and politician
- Libertadores, Latin American liberators
- Robert E. Lee, Confederate general
- Abraham Lincoln, U.S. president; led the nation during the Civil War
- Mutsuhito, Japanese emperor
- István Széchenyi, aristocrat, leader of the Hungarian reform movement
- Queen Victoria, British monarch
- Klemens von Metternich, Austrian Chancellor
Inventions, discoveries, introductions
List of 19th century inventions
- Department stores
- Electromagnetism
- Epidemiology
- Mail order businesses
- Philology
- Postage stamps
- Public busses
- Subway
- The invention of the telegraph connected the world like never before, leading to quicker communication and interaction.
- One of the more devestating technologies emerging from this period is the machine gun, first used during the Civil War (considered the first modern war)
Decades and years
Category:19th century
Category:Centuries
Category:Romanticism
als:19. Jahrhundert
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ko:19세기
ja:19世紀
simple:19th century
th:คริสต์ศตวรรษที่ 19
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken by more than 6 million people, mainly in Israel, the West Bank, the United States and by Jewish communities around the world. The core of the Tanakh (sometimes referred to as the Hebrew Bible), the Torah (which Christianity and Judaism traditionally hold to have been first recorded in the time of Moses 3,300 years ago), is written in (Biblical) Classical Hebrew. Jews have always called it לשון הקודש Lashon ha-Qodesh ("The Sacred Language") as the scriptures written in this language were considered sacred. Most scholars agree that after the first destruction of Jerusalem by the Nebuchadnezzar II and the Babylonians in 586 BCE, the kind of Hebrew prevalent in the Tanakh was replaced in daily use by Mishnaic Hebrew and a local version of Aramaic. After the depletion of the Jewish population of parts of Roman occupied Judea, it is believed that Hebrew gradually ceased to be a spoken language roughly around 200 CE, but has stayed as the major written language throughout the centuries. Not only religious, but texts for a large variety of purposes: letters and contracts, science, philosophy, medicine, poetry, protocols of courts—all resorted to Hebrew, which thus adapted itself to various new fields and terminologies by borrowings and new inventions.
Hebrew was revitalized as a spoken language during the late 19th and early 20th century as Modern Hebrew, replacing a score of languages spoken by the Jews at that time, such as Arabic, Judezmo (also called Ladino), Yiddish, Russian, and other languages of the Jewish diaspora as the spoken language of the majority of the Jewish people living in Israel.
Modern Hebrew became an official language in British-ruled Palestine in 1921, and the primary official language of the State of Israel, (Arabic maintained its official language status). The Hebrew name for the language is עברית, or Ivrit (IPA: )
History
While the term "Hebrew" as a nationality is customarily used to refer to the ancient Israelites, the classical Hebrew language was extremely similar to the Canaanite languages spoken by their neighbors, such as Phoenician; indeed, Moabite and Hebrew are often considered to be two dialects of the same language.
Hebrew strongly resembles Aramaic and to a lesser extent South-Central Arabic, sharing many linguistic features with them.
Early history
Hebrew is an Afro-Asiatic language. This language family is generally thought by linguists to have originated somewhere in northeastern Africa, and began to diverge around the 8th millennium BCE, although there is much debate about the exact date and place. (The theory is espoused by most archeologists and linguists, but at odds with traditional reading of the Torah.) One branch of this family, Semitic, eventually reached the Middle East; it gradually differentiated into a variety of related languages.
By the end of the 3rd millennium BCE the ancestral languages of Aramaic, Ugaritic, and other various Canaanite languages were spoken in the Levant alongside the influential dialects of Ebla and Akkad. As the Hebrew founders from northern Haran filtered south into and came under the influence of the Levant, like many sojourners into Canaan including the Philistines, they adopted Canaanite dialects. The first written evidence of distinctive Hebrew, the Gezer calendar, dates back to the 10th century BCE, the traditional time of the reign of David and Solomon. It presents a list of seasons and related agricultural activities. The Gezer calendar (named after the city in whose proximity it was found) is written in an old Semitic script, akin to the Phoenician one that through the Greeks and Etruscans later became the Roman script. The Gezer calendar is written without any vowels, and it does not use consonants to imply vowels even in the places where more modern spelling requires it (see below).
Roman script, dates to the 7th century BCE.]]
Numerous older tablets have been found in the region with similar scripts written in other Semitic languages, for example Protosinaitic. It is believed that the original shapes of the script go back to the hieroglyphs of the Egyptian writing, though the phonetic values are instead inspired by the acrophonic principle. The common ancestor of Hebrew and Phoenician is called Canaanite, and was the first to use a Semitic alphabet distinct from Egyptian. One ancient document is the famous Moabite Stone written in the Moabite dialect; the Siloam Inscription, found near Jerusalem, is an early example of Hebrew. Less ancient samples of Old Hebrew include the ostraka found near Lachish which describe events preceding the final capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian captivity of 586 BCE.
The most famous work originally written in Hebrew is the Tanakh, though the time at which it was written is a matter of dispute (see dating the Bible for details). The earliest extant copies were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, written between the 2nd century BCE and the 1st century CE.
The formal language of the latter Babylonian Empire was Aramaic (its name is either derived from "Aram Naharayim", Upper Mesopotamia, or from "Aram," the ancient name for Syria). The Persian Empire, which had captured Babylonia a few decades later under Cyrus, adopted Aramaic as the official language. Aramaic is also a North-West Semitic language, quite similar to Hebrew. Aramaic has contributed many words and expressions to Hebrew, mainly as the language of commentary in the Talmud and other religious works.
In addition to numerous words and expressions, Hebrew also borrowed the Aramaic writing system. Although the original Aramaic letter forms were derived from the same Phoenician alphabet that was used in ancient Israel, they had changed significantly, both in the hands of the Mesopotamians and of the Jews, assuming the forms familiar to us today around the first century CE. Writings of that era (most notably, some of the Dead Sea Scrolls found in Qumran) are written in a script very similar to the "square" one still used today.
Later history
The Jews living in the Persian Empire adopted Aramaic, and Hebrew quickly fell into disuse. It was preserved, however, as the literary language of Bible study. Aramaic became the vernacular language of the renewed Judaea for the following 700 years. Famous works written in Aramaic include the Targum, the Talmud and several of Flavius Josephus' books (several of the latter were not preserved, however, in the original.) Following the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Jews gradually began to disperse from Judaea into foreign countries (this dispersion was hastened when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem (and turned it into a pagan city named Aelia Capitolina) in 135 CE after putting down Bar Kokhba's revolt.) For many hundreds of years Aramaic remained the spoken language of Mesopotamian Jews, and Lishana Deni, one of several Judæo-Aramaic languages, is a modern descendant that is still spoken by a few thousand Jews (and many non-Jews) from the area known as Kurdistan; however, it gradually gave way to Arabic, as it had given way to other local languages in the countries to which the Jews had gone.
Hebrew was not used as a mother tongue for roughly 1800 years. However the Jews have always devoted much effort to maintaining high standards of literacy among themselves, the main purpose being to let any Jew read the Hebrew Bible and the accompanying religious works in the original (see rabbinic literature, Codes of Jewish law, The Jewish Bookshelf). It is interesting to note that the languages that the Jews adopted from their adopted nations, namely Ladino and Yiddish were not directly connected to Hebrew (the former being based on Spanish and Arabic borrowings, latter being a remote dialect of Middle High German), however, both were written from right to left using the Hebrew script. Hebrew was also used as a language of communication among Jews from different countries, particularly for the purpose of international trade.
The most important contribution to preserving traditional Hebrew pronunciation in this period was that of scholars called Masoretes (from masoret meaning "tradition"), who from about the seventh to the tenth centuries CE devised detailed markings to indicate vowels, stress, and cantillation (recitation methods). The original Hebrew texts used only consonants, and later some consonants were used to indicate long vowels. By the time of the Masoretes this text was considered too sacred to be altered, so all their markings were in the form of pointing in and around the letters.
Revival
cantillation
The revival of Hebrew as a mother tongue was initiated by the efforts of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922) (אליעזר בן־יהודה). He joined the Jewish national movement and in 1881 emigrated to Eretz Israel, then a province of the Ottoman Empire. Motivated by the surrounding ideals of renovation and rejection of the diaspora "shtetl" lifestyle, Ben-Yehuda set out to develop tools for making the literary and liturgical language into everyday spoken language.
However, his brand of Hebrew followed norms that had been replaced in Eastern Europe by more modern grammar and style, in the writings of people like Achad Ha-Am and others. His organizational efforts and involvement with the establishment of schools and the writing of textbooks pushed the vernacularization activity into a gradually accepted movement. It was not, however, until the 1904-1905 "Second aliyah" that Hebrew had caught real momentum in Ottoman Palestine with the new and better organized enterprises set forth by the new group of immigrants. When the British Mandate of Palestine recognized Hebrew as one of the country's three official languages (English, Arabic, and Hebrew, in 1922), its new formal status contributed to its diffusion.
While many saw his work as fanciful or even blasphemous, many soon understood the need for a common language amongst Jews of pre-state Israel who at the turn of the 20th century were arriving in large numbers from diverse countries and speaking different languages. A Committee of the Hebrew Language was established. Later it became the Academy of the Hebrew Language, an organization that exists today. The results of his and the Committee's work were published in a dictionary (The Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew). Ben-Yehuda's work fell on fertile ground, and by the beginning of the 20th century, Hebrew was well on its way to becoming the main language of the Jewish population of both Ottoman and British pre-State Israel.
Modern Hebrew
Ben-Yehuda based Modern Hebrew on Biblical Hebrew. Often new words were coined by applying unused word-patterns to existing roots (Biblical k-t-v, "write," gave rise to modern Hebrew hikhtiv, "dictated," and hitkatev, "corresponded.") When this did not suffice and the Committee set out to invent a new word for a certain concept, it searched through the Biblical word-indexes and foreign dictionaries, particularly Arabic. While Ben-Yehuda preferred Semitic roots to European ones, the abundance of European Hebrew speakers led to the introduction of numerous foreign words. Other changes which had taken place as Hebrew came back to life were the systematization of the grammar - the Biblical syntax was sometimes limited and ambiguous -- and the adoption of standard Western punctuation.
Modern Hebrew shows influences from Russian (for example, the Russian suffix -acia is used in nouns where English has the suffix -ation); German (particularly in combination words like "tapuakh-adama," meaning potato (German Erdapfel , earth-apple) or "iton" (German Zeitung, news-ity, news-paper). English has been a very strong influence, both from British influence during the period of the Mandate and American influence in the present day. Finally, Arabic, being the language of numerous Mizrahic and Sephardic Jewish immigrants from Arab countries as well as of the Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, has also had an important influence on Hebrew, especially in slang (for example, "sababa", meaning "excellent", or "ya'alla", meaning "come on".)
Due to its many influences and its youth, Modern Hebrew has many characteristics which are distinctly not Semitic. At the phonetic level, it has abandoned the pharyngeal and emphatic consonants (in most pronunciations). It also uses the occasional foreign morpheme, in words such as רכבל ("rakevel") (meaning "cable car", formed by adding a lamed to the word for "vehicle") and רמזור ("ramzor") (meaning "traffic light", formed by adding a vav and a resh to the root for "hinting" and "allusion"). Even so, the Hebrew preserved part of the prominent characteristics of the Semitic languages. One of the main ques | | |
