Free Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler Page B

to tell whether it is just the poverty of Sumerian spelling which causes this appearance.
    The only innovations that Akkadian scribes appear to have permitted themselves were a new sign for the glottal stop, ’, and considerable licence with the Sumerian word symbols or logograms: they had always been available as punning devices, able to symbolise the same sound as the word they signified in Sumerian; now they could do the same trick for Akkadian as well. So, for example, the Sumerian sign, meaning ‘hand’, could now be read as
idu
, ‘hand’, in Akkadian; it could also represent the syllables
id, it, it, ed, et
and
et.
    Sumerian word symbols, and Sumerian literature, remained the basis of written Akkadian, even as the language swept all round the Fertile Crescent, and well beyond the domains of the Semitic-speaking peoples, as a lingua franca for international communication. The same educational system, based on the
edubba
‘tablet-house’ schools, was maintained for at least two millennia, since sign lists to teach the symbols, in the same order, have been found in the Sumerian city of Uruk dating from the third millennium and Ashurbanipal’s library in the Assyrian capital Nineveh from the mid-seventh century BC. Mastery of the classics of Sumerian literature, a canon of texts which was not extended after the mid-second millennium, remained the pinnacle of scholarly achievement, and the focus of later years spent at school. Even in mathematics, most of the terminology was in Sumerian, though the textbooks were written in Akkadian. It appears that Sumerian went on being spoken in the classroom: this has made the remaining exercises and textbooks less explicit on pronunciation than we should have liked.
    It is the Akkadian culture’s enthusiasm for all things Sumerian which has in fact saved Sumer’s finer culture. Almost all the Sumerian literary texts that have been found were copied, often by schoolboys, in the first half of the second millennium, after the death of Sumerian as a living language; by contrast, most of what has come down from the pre-Akkadian days, when the cities of Sumer were proud and free (and still spoke Sumerian), is a mass of inscriptions and administrative documents.
    But this six-hundred-year-long Sumerian heyday, after the death of the living language, at last came to an end, and showed that Akkadian could not support it indefinitely. After the fall of Babylon to the marauding Hittite King Mursilis in 1594 BC, and the takeover of Mesopotamia by the Kassite mountain tribes which followed, true appreciation of Sumerian culture never recovered. For the rest of the second and first millennia (indeed down to the Greek takeover under the Seleucid empire in 323 BC), no more Sumerian compositions were attempted, and in fact only two literary texts continued to be copied:
The Exploits of Ninurta
(which we have already sampled), and a companion piece,
Angim
, about Ninurta’s return from the mountains to Nippur. Henceforth, the rest of the Sumerian classics would be known only in translation.
    As a poet had remarked (on the earlier destruction of an Akkadian city that aspired to take the Sumerians under their control):
    iribia gatuš bindugga kituš nummandadug
agadea ganu bindugga kinu nummandadug
agade hula inana zami.
He who said ‘I would dwell in that city’ found not a good dwelling place there.
He who said ‘I would sleep in Agade’ found not a good sleeping place there.
    Agade is destroyed. Praise Inanna. 15
     
    Since Akkadian too was destined ultimately to be replaced—and when it happened, by a language whose literacy did not depend on the ancient tradition of cuneiform writing—Sumerian was ultimately to die out. Aside from the tablets waiting to be discovered in the tells of Iraq, it left no trace.

FIRST INTERLUDE: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ELAMITE?
     
    The clay tokens that had given rise to Sumerian script seem to have been widespread: not surprisingly, since they would have