Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Nicholas Ostler
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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):
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 played a key role as bills of lading for long-distance trade. The development into groups of symbols on clay came independently in Sumer, and farther to the east in Shusim (known to the Greeks as Susa), the heartland of Elam. Elam’s pictographic symbols never went far beyond their initial stage as a medium for inventories, although a proto-Elamite script, apparently a syllabary, was in use in the early third millennium. This line of development was aborted in the middle of the third millennium when the Sumerian system, which was by then a true writing system, even if one heavily adapted for the Sumerian language, was taken over.
In fact, Elam went farther than borrowing the writing system: for the nine hundred years from 2200 BC almost all the official inscriptions that have been found are in Akkadian. For much of this time it was under the direct political control of one of the powers to its west, Sumerian, Babylonian or Assyrian. Nevertheless, Elamite must have continued to be spoken in Elam, since in 1300 BC it springs back to life as the official language, replacing Akkadian for all written purposes, except curses.16
Elamite’s subsequent career showed persistence for at least eight hundred years.
From 1300 BC Elam pursued a succession of wars, not always defensive, with its neighbours from across the Tigris marshes. Through the vagaries of these power struggles, which often resulted in periods of foreign control, Elam was able to retain its independence in the long term through retaining access to a large but defensible hinterland, Anshan, in the Zagros mountains to its south-east, never penetrated by Akkadian speakers.17 The real disaster came only in the seventh century BC when the Elamites lost this stronghold: it was taken by the Persians, whose attack came, for the first time, from the south. Thereafter Anshan came to be called Parša. (The area is called Fars to this day.)
The Elamites had lost their safe redoubt for emergencies. Almost at once, in 646, the Assyrian Asshurbanipal sacked Susa. This calamity put an end to the last independent kingdom of Elam, if not to the Elamites or their language. But in the characteristic Assyrian way, Asshurbanipal deported many of the population, to Assyria on his own account, and according to the Book of Ezra (iv.9–10) as far away as Samaria in Palestine.
But events were now moving beyond the traditional pendulum swing of power shifts within Mesopotamia. The Elamites scarcely had the satisfaction of seeing Assyria itself fall to the Medes and Babylonians in 612 before they found themselves under Babylonian control, and then, within a generation, under Persian. This put Elam, for the first time, at the centre of world events. Two generations later, in 522 BC, Darius (Dārayavauš), the Persian heir to Anshan, took control of the whole Persian empire, which by now extended from Egypt and Anatolia to the borders of India. Despite two abortive Elamite rebellions shortly after his accession, he chose Elam as the hub of this empire, with Susa itself (known to him as Šušan) as the administrative capital, and Parša, i.e. Anshan, as the site for a new ceremonial capital, to be better known in the West by its Greek name of Persepolis.
The Persians had never prized literacy very highly. Famously, their leaders were educated in three things only: to ride a horse, to shoot a straight arrow, and to tell the truth. So their Elamite neighbours, with two thousand years of cuneiform education behind them, were well placed to be extremely useful in the more humdrum side of empire-building.
On the monumental inscriptions that Darius set up round his domains (most notably at Behistun, on the Silk Route), the legend was written not only in Persian and Akkadian but in Elamite. And although the official language of the empire was designated as Aramaic, it is clear that until about 460 the central administration was actually conducted in Elamite, since an archive of several thousand administrative documents on clay was discovered in Persepolis in the 1930s. They most likely owed their preservation to fireraising by Alexander’s conquering soldiers in 330 BC.
But these are the last Elamite documents to have survived anywhere.18 Aramaic took over as the language of written administration, and Elamite, lacking any political focus to sustain the cuneiform tradition, apparently ceased to be written. Some time later, perhaps much later, the spoken language too must have simply died away. Arabs writing in the tenth century AD mention a language spoken in Khuzistan which was not Persian, Arabic or Hebrew: they do not record any words, so no one knows whether that was the last of Elamite.19
It has been speculated that Sumer and Akkad’s struggles for control of the mountains behind Elam, with their raw material riches in stone, timber and metals, may be reflected somewhat abstractly in the surviving literature of the period.20 In the poem Lugale u melambi nirgal, known in English as The Exploits of Ninurta, the god greets his mother, who has come to visit him in his mountain conquests:
Since you, Madam, have come to the rough lands,
Since you, Noble Lady, because of my fame, have come to the enemy land,
Since you feared not my terrifying battles,
I, the hero, the mound I had heaped up
Shall be called hursag, and you shall be its queen,
From now on Ninhursag is the name by which you shall be called—thus it shall be.
…
The hursag shall provide you amply with the fragrance of the gods,
Shall provide you with gold and silver in abundance,
Shall mine for you copper and tin, shall carry them to you as tribute,
The rough places shall multiply cattle large and small for you,
The hursag shall bring forth for you the seed of all four-legged