Around 3200 BCE, in the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk, somebody pressed the end of a reed stylus into wet clay and wrote down a quantity of barley. That clay tablet, and thousands like it, are among the earliest moments human language escaped the breath that carried it — alongside parallel developments in early dynastic Egypt and, somewhat later, in the Indus Valley and China. The language being recorded was Sumerian (eme-gir, "the native tongue"), and 5,200 years later we are still reading it.
Sumerian is a language isolate. Despite a century of effort, no proven relatives have been found — not in Semitic (its much later neighbour Akkadian), not in Indo-European, not in Dravidian, not in any of the Caucasian families. It is also agglutinative and largely ergative: meaning is built by stacking morphemes onto a verbal root in fixed slots, and the agent of a transitive verb takes a special case ending. A typical verbal chain looks like:
i-mu-na-an-šúm — "he gave it to him" (literally: aspect-ventive-3sg.dative-3sg.agent-give)
Writing began as accountancy. The earliest tablets — the so-called proto-cuneiform of Uruk IV (c. 3200 BCE) — are receipts and ration lists: pictographs for sheep, beer, oil, with numbers in a sexagesimal (base-60) system that survives in our 60-minute hour. Over the following four centuries the pictographs were rotated 90 degrees, stylized into wedge-shaped impressions, and gained a phonetic dimension via the rebus principle: a sign for an object came to also stand for the sound of its name. Once a writing system can spell sounds, it can spell anything, and by 2600 BCE Sumerian scribes were writing literature, law, and prayer.
- The Kish tablet (c. 3500 BCE) and Uruk tablet W 9578a are among the earliest known writing.
- The Instructions of Shuruppak (c. 2500 BCE) are among the oldest surviving works of literature.
- The Code of Ur-Nammu (c. 2100 BCE), the oldest known law code, predates Hammurabi by three centuries, and was written in Sumerian.
- Enheduanna (c. 2285 BCE), an Akkadian princess and high priestess of the moon god Nanna, is traditionally counted the earliest named author in human history — though the Sumerian hymns to Inanna that bear her name survive only in copies made roughly six centuries later, and Assyriologists remain divided over whether she composed them.
By around 2000 BCE, after the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur, Sumerian appears to have died out as anybody's mother tongue, displaced by the Semitic Akkadian of their northern neighbours. But it didn't stop being written. For nearly two thousand more years, Sumerian was kept alive in scribal schools (the edubba) as the prestige language of religion, scholarship, divination, and astronomy — the cuneiform world's Latin. Babylonian and Assyrian scribes copied Sumerian texts down into the 1st century BCE, the last datable Sumerian-language tablets postdating Alexander the Great.
The language was forgotten entirely after the death of cuneiform itself, around the 1st century CE. It re-entered human memory only in the 19th century, when Henry Rawlinson, Edward Hincks and Jules Oppert — three of the decipherers of cuneiform — realized that the bilingual lexical lists they were reading recorded not just Akkadian but an older, non-Semitic language behind it. Oppert proposed the name "Sumerian" in 1869, taking it from the Akkadian royal title "King of Sumer and Akkad" — the Sumerians' own name for their land was ki-en-gi(-r).
Today the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary and the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL, Oxford) make it possible to read the world's oldest poetry on a phone. The Epic of Gilgamesh, in its Sumerian-language predecessors like "Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven", is among the oldest stories humanity ever wrote down, and it is still being translated.