Sumer and Modern Nationalism

The first known written language was that of ancient Sumer, in the lower Tigris and Euphrates basin of what is now Iraq. Sumerian cuneiform writing, pressed with a stylus into wet clay, dates from as early as the fourth century BCE. Later Akkadians, who adopted the technique, spoke a Semitic language. Surviving bilingual clay tablets in Sumerian and Akkadian allow scholars to partially decode the more mysterious Sumerian tongue.

Who cares? Present-day nationalists of many stripes. Unsolved mysteries leave room for a mythical past, linking ethnic pride to roots in deep antiquity. Certain nationalist circles in Turkey and Azerbaijan point to similar words in Sumerian and Turkish, suggesting common descent from Turkic peoples of the Asian steppe. Some Hungarian Neo-Pagans, too, claim Sumerian/Turkic kinship and sing Sumerian prayers. For Tamil separatists in southern India, grammatical and phonetic parallels between their pre-Sanskrit tongue and Sumerian—along with a Sumerian allusion to dark skin—indicates the ancestors of both groups had migrated from Africa.

Linguists and historians care too, of course. Most people would find their work obscure. Scholarship doesn’t pack the popular punch of claims barely constrained by evidence. After all, who wouldn’t want to be related to the earliest known writers on Earth?

Image: Detail of Sumerian warriors from the Standard of Ur, found in a royal tomb.