Perhaps the most useful resource in English is the Electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary ( ePSD), an ongoing online lexicon project of Sumerian—an extension of the the print project started in 1976, The Sumerian Dictionary of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania [Babylonian Section of the University Museum; Ref 4 PJ4037 . 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. Albania, Algeria, American Samoa, Andorra, Angola, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Azerbaijan Republic, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bermuda, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde Islands, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Comoros, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas), Fiji, Finland, Gabon Republic, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Gibraltar, Greece, Greenland, Grenada, Guam, Guatemala, Guernsey, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Jamaica, Japan, Jersey, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macau, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mayotte, Micronesia, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Montserrat, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Niue, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Republic of Croatia, Republic of the Congo, Romania, Rwanda, Saint Helena, Saint Kitts-Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Swaziland, Sweden, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Vatican City State, Vietnam, Virgin Islands (U.

More focused, but certainly of interest to students interested in the development of Mesopotamian literature is H. There are about 600 common Sumerian characters, so in this respect at least Sumerian is easier than Chinese.

I sat down recently with Konstantopoulos, who earned her doctorate in Ancient Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan, to discuss learning Sumerian. One possible explanation is that scribes left these suffixes out when they expected the reader to understand them; another is that speakers left them out to save time and effort and the scribes spelled words as they were spoken. From the point of view of the authors I can see it must be difficult to know at what level to pitch such a book. D.) and Fulbright scholarship during the 2014-2015 academic year, allowing him to spend the year in Tubingen, Germany, working with Dr.

The corpus contains Sumerian texts in transliteration, English prose translations and bibliographical information for each composition. I don't know about original clay tablet on which this was written, but it can be found through the original publication I think: https://www. Sumerian is the world's oldest written language, but the ability to read it is restricted to the lucky few - until now! Additional context on the materiality of Sumerian and its art historical context can be found from the early chapters in Z. Because so many Sumerian texts are damaged and published as drawings, students have to become familiar with different forms of the script, whereas students of Greek or Latin can chose to read nothing but modern printed texts with a standard font.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. The book is designed to appeal to readers of all backgrounds, including those with no prior background in Sumerian or cuneiform writing. Beyond Volk, however, Konstantopoulos explains that much of the source material tends to appear in scholarly articles.