Chapter 3
THE VOCABULARY OF A LOST WORLD
Sumerian words preserve the concerns, categories, and cosmos of the first civilization.
3.1 What They Named
Every language is a museum. The words that survive are the things that mattered enough to name.
Sumerian vocabulary tells us what the first civilization found important. Some categories are universal—every human language has words for body parts, family relations, food, water, sky. But the specific terms, and the distinctions within categories, reveal a culture’s particular concerns.
The body. Sumerians divided the body much as we do, with a few revealing differences:
| Sumerian | Meaning | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| sag | head | Also means “first,” “chief”—the head as prime |
| igi | eye | Also means “face,” “front”—perception as orientation |
| ka | mouth | Also means “word,” “speech”—the mouth as source of language |
| ĝeštug | ear | Also means “wisdom,” “understanding”—hearing as comprehension |
| šà | heart, belly | The interior, the seat of emotion and will |
| šu | hand | Extremely common in compound verbs—the hand as primary tool |
Notice how many body words do double duty. The head is leadership. The eye is the front of things. The ear is wisdom. The Sumerians didn’t abstract body parts from their functions—the word for the organ was the word for what the organ did.
The hand, šu, appears in dozens of compound verbs:
- šu…ti — “to receive” (hand + approach)
- šu…tag — “to touch” (hand + touch)
- šu…bar — “to release” (hand + open)
- šu…du₇ — “to complete” (hand + finish)
The hand is action itself. Whatever humans do, they do with their hands.
Family. Sumerian kinship terms reveal a patriarchal society with clear generational hierarchy:
| Sumerian | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ama | mother |
| a-a / ad-da | father |
| dumu | child (son or daughter) |
| dumu-nita | son (literally “male child”) |
| dumu-munus | daughter (literally “female child”) |
| šeš | brother |
| nin₉ | sister |
| ab-ba | elder, grandfather, ancestor |
| um-ma | old woman, grandmother |
| dam | spouse |
| ibila | heir |
The word dumu (child) doesn’t specify gender—you add nita (male) or munus (female) if it matters. This might suggest gender was less grammatically central than in languages with gendered nouns. Or it might reflect nothing more than an accident of linguistic evolution. We must be careful not to over-interpret.
But ibila (heir) tells us something clear: inheritance mattered. There was a word for the person who would receive what you left behind. The Sumerians built for the future.
The gods. Sumerian theology permeated vocabulary:
| Sumerian | Meaning |
|---|---|
| dingir | god, deity |
| an | sky, heaven; also the god An |
| ki | earth, ground, place |
| en-líl | Enlil, “Lord Wind,” chief of the gods |
| en-ki | Enki, “Lord Earth,” god of wisdom and water |
| inanna | Inanna, goddess of love and war |
| me | divine powers, cultural norms decreed by gods |
| nam-tar | fate, destiny |
The me deserve special mention. These were the divine decrees that made civilization possible—the rules of kingship, priesthood, craftsmanship, sexuality, truth, falsehood, music, lamentation. The goddess Inanna famously stole them from Enki. They weren’t natural laws but cultural forms, and the Sumerians believed they had divine origin.
Nam-tar—fate—was equally fundamental. The gods assigned destinies. What would happen was determined. Humans could petition, plead, offer sacrifices, but ultimately the decision belonged to powers beyond them.
This worldview is visible in the vocabulary. The Sumerians named fate because fate was real to them—not an abstraction but a force that governed lives.
3.2 What They Counted
The Sumerians used a sexagesimal number system—base 60.
This seems bizarre. We use base 10. Computers use base 2. Why would anyone use base 60?
Several theories exist. Sixty has many divisors—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60—making it convenient for dividing quantities. If you’re distributing grain among workers, sixty measures can be split evenly in many ways. Twelve measures can’t be split into fifths; sixty can.
Another theory: the system emerged from combining two earlier systems, base 10 (counting fingers) and base 6 or 12 (counting finger-segments on one hand, using the thumb as pointer). Merged, they produce 60.
Whatever the origin, the consequences were lasting:
| Sumerian legacy | Modern survival |
|---|---|
| 60 seconds in a minute | Still used worldwide |
| 60 minutes in an hour | Still used worldwide |
| 360 degrees in a circle | Still used worldwide |
| 12 months in a year | Preserved through Babylon to us |
| 12 hours on a clock face | Preserved through Babylon to us |
When you check the time, you’re using Sumerian mathematics.
The number words themselves:
| Sumerian | Value |
|---|---|
| diš | 1 |
| min | 2 |
| eš₅ | 3 |
| limmu | 4 |
| iá | 5 |
| àš | 6 |
| imin | 7 (literally “2 minus 10”? debated) |
| ussu | 8 |
| ilimmu | 9 (literally “minus 10”? debated) |
| u | 10 |
| ĝeš₂ | 60 |
| šár | 3,600 (60²) |
The number šár (3,600) appears in Sumerian creation myths as a cosmic number—the count of years in divine ages, the measure of eternal time. For a civilization that believed the gods determined fate, large numbers had theological weight.
Mathematics wasn’t purely practical. It was sacred. The order in numbers reflected the order the gods had established. Counting was participation in cosmic structure.
3.3 What They Borrowed
Languages borrow words from neighbors, predecessors, and prestige cultures. English borrowed “beef” from French, “algorithm” from Arabic, “tsunami” from Japanese. These loanwords leave traces of historical contact.
Sumerian contains loanwords too—but from a language we cannot identify.
Linguists detect these borrowings through phonology. Sumerian had consistent sound patterns, and words that violate those patterns probably came from elsewhere. Names that don’t parse as Sumerian roots likely preserve the language of an earlier population.
City names:
| Name | Sumerian meaning? |
|---|---|
| Ur | None clear |
| Eridu | None clear |
| Nippur | Perhaps from nibru, meaning unknown |
| Lagaš | None clear |
| Šuruppak | None clear |
These are the oldest cities in Sumer—and their names aren’t Sumerian. Whatever people founded them, or lived there when Sumerians arrived, spoke something else.
Agricultural terms:
| Sumerian | Meaning | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| apin | plow | Does not follow Sumerian patterns |
| engar | farmer | Possibly borrowed |
| numun | seed | Possibly borrowed |
| ĝišimmar | date palm | Likely borrowed |
If agricultural vocabulary was borrowed, what does that suggest? Perhaps the Sumerians were not the first farmers in Mesopotamia. Perhaps they arrived as conquerors or migrants and learned farming from indigenous peoples, adopting the local words for tools and techniques.
This is speculation. We cannot prove the existence of “Proto-Euphratean” or any other pre-Sumerian language. We can only note the anomalies—words that don’t fit—and infer that something came before.
Divine names:
| Name | Pattern |
|---|---|
| Inanna | Reduplicated syllables |
| Zababa | Reduplicated syllables |
| Bunene | Reduplicated syllables |
This pattern—repeated syllable structures—might be a signature of the substrate language. Or it might be a feature of divine names specifically, unrelated to linguistic origin. We don’t know.
What we know is that Sumerian didn’t emerge from nothing. It absorbed something. Beneath the written record lies an unwritten one—voices we can almost hear in the borrowed words, but never clearly.
3.4 What They Gave
The Sumerians received from their predecessors. They also gave to their successors.
When Sargon of Akkad conquered Sumer around 2334 BCE, he didn’t destroy Sumerian culture—he absorbed it. The Akkadian language was Semitic, completely unrelated to Sumerian. But Akkadian scribes adopted Sumerian writing, Sumerian literature, Sumerian religion. And they adopted Sumerian words.
Akkadian borrowings from Sumerian:
| Sumerian | Akkadian | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| é-gal | ekallum | palace (“big house”) |
| dub-sar | ṭupšarrum | scribe (“tablet-writer”) |
| saĝĝa | šangûm | temple administrator |
| dam-gàr | tamkārum | merchant |
| sukkal | sukkallu | vizier |
| dub | ṭuppum | tablet |
| aga | agû | crown |
| zabar | siparru | bronze |
These aren’t obscure technical terms. They’re core vocabulary—government, administration, trade, writing itself. Akkadian civilization was built on Sumerian foundations, and the language showed it.
The chain continued. Akkadian was spoken across the ancient Near East for two thousand years. It carried Sumerian loanwords with it. And when Akkadian influence reached other Semitic languages—Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic—some of those Sumerian words traveled further.
The journey of é-gal:
| Stage | Form | Language |
|---|---|---|
| Origin | é-gal | Sumerian |
| Borrowing | ekallum | Akkadian |
| Further borrowing | hēḵālā | Aramaic |
| Into Hebrew | הֵיכָל (hēḵāl) | Hebrew |
| Into Arabic | هيكل (haykal) | Arabic |
When a Jewish congregation today refers to the heikhal (the ark area in a synagogue), they’re using a Sumerian word. Five thousand years, three language families, thousands of kilometers—and the word survives.
Other surviving traces:
| Domain | Sumerian origin |
|---|---|
| Time divisions | 60-minute hours, 60-second minutes |
| Angular measurement | 360 degrees |
| Calendar structure | 12-month year |
| Literary themes | Flood myth, divine council, creation from clay |
| Legal concepts | Written law codes, contractual tablets |
The Sumerians invented not just writing but bureaucracy—the technology of administering complex societies through records. Every tax form, every legal contract, every government archive descends from their innovation.
They also established literary genres. The praise hymn, the lamentation, the wisdom dialogue, the heroic epic—all have Sumerian precedents. When Hebrew poets composed Psalms or Greek bards sang of heroes, they worked in forms the Sumerians had pioneered.
Most remarkably, they gave us the idea that the past can be preserved. Before writing, the past existed only in memory, subject to drift and loss. After writing, the past could be fixed—debated, reinterpreted, but never entirely lost.
We know the Sumerians existed because they invented the technology that preserves existence. Without them, we wouldn’t have history. We would have only legend, fading with each generation, until nothing remained but the monuments.
The monuments survive too—ziggurats and city walls, eroded but present. But the tablets speak. They carry voices across millennia. That technology, that possibility, is the Sumerians’ greatest gift.
We are still receiving it.