that it is difficult not only to date these developments but even to place them in
sequence), and it is possible that this set of changes – to content, material, and object
- correlates with the increased use of the script as a tool for representing language.
Typically these artifacts were deposited in temples, the inscribed object sometimes
being displayed for divine eyes only. The earliest inscriptions record land sales, focusing
on named individuals and suggesting a greater social emphasis on personalized wealth.
Such transactions were later recorded on clay tablets. However, personalization of
status also characterizes the much more widely distributed inscriptions, attested from
approximately 2700 BConward, which were used instead to commemorate the deeds
of rulers.
Two sites in particular document an expansion in textualization on clay toward the
end of the first half of the third millennium: modern Fara (Shuruppag), upriver from
Uruk, and Abu Salabikh (ancient name uncertain), upriver from Nippur (Sumerian
Nibru). These sites show that the administrative repertoire had expanded to include
legal documents and the scribal curriculum to include hymns, narratives and didactic
compositions, as well as other literary texts whose meaning remains less certain. Also
attested for the first time is a type of text that appears to be less associated with the
curriculum, namely incantations, that is, ritual formulae designed to produce a
particular effect. All these changes were permanent innovations. In contrast, a further
group of literary texts is written according to a short-lived set of conventions in which
the signs have atypical values. Modern scholars call this UD.GAL.NUN writing
because it uses these three signs to write the name of Nippur’s patron deity Enlil
(normally den-lil 2 ).
Slightly later texts from northern Mesopotamia – for example, at Tell Mardikh
(ancient Ebla) in what is now Syria – demonstrate the scale of Sumerian’s diffusion as
a language of learning. In the south, developments in the second half of the third
millennium include the first letters, somewhat to the discomfiture of those anthro-
pologists who regard writing as paramountly a means of long-distance communication,
and a marked increase in the complexity and sophistication of some of the royal
inscriptions.
The last Sumerian administrative documents date to the eighteenth century,
although these may simply be preserving a tradition rather than reflecting a spoken
reality: what was to some degree a bilingual society may have already shifted its
allegiance to Akkadian and ceased speaking Sumerian, leaving the latter to live on as a
high-status, heritage language throughout much of the ancient Middle East – a kind
of lingua sacrato Akkadian’s lingua franca. The eighteenth-century textual record also
shows that the literary part of the school curriculum had expanded considerably, now
being dominated by poetry in praise of rulers or petitioning deities on their behalf. This
type of poetry is little attested later. Instead it is compositions to the greater glory of a
deity or kingship in general that were chosen for transmission, recast in bilingual
versions along with the lexical lists and incantations. A different Sumerian genre is also
more widely attested from this period on, cultic laments written in a variety of the
language referred to as Eme-sal(“tongue” + “thin,” that is “Thin-language”). These
texts were written much more phonographically than usual, a type of writing that was
also applied very occasionally to Emegir Sumerian.
Emesal and Emegir differ occasionally in their lexicon and morphology but more
often in the distribution of their consonants, the former having /z/, for example, where
–– Graham Cunningham ––
