SUMERIAN LANGUAGE. The language now called Sumerian was revealed about the middle of the 19th century to Sir Henry Rawlinson and other scholars when examining the baked clay tablets which had formed the library of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria. These had recently been discovered by Layard in the ruins of Nineveh and brought to the British Museum. When the cuneiform script in which they were written was deciphered, it was found that certain of them contained works composed in a language entirely different from the Semitic tongue of the Assyr ians, but sometimes provided with interlinear translations into Assyrian; other tablets were dictionaries in which the words of this strange language were assigned their Assyrian equivalents.
It was many years before the study of Sumerian was firmly established, although its meaning could be so confidently in terpreted from the Assyrian translations. This was due both to the impossibility of discovering cognate languages, and to the factitious obstacle of a paradox which was subsequently main tained, chiefly by Joseph Halevy, that Sumerian was no true language at all, but a purely artificial system of secret writing invented for mystification of the vulgar by the Assyrian priests. The second of these hindrances was ultimately removed by the discovery of monuments inscribed in this language, which evi dently belonged to a time before the Semitic tongue was written in Mesopotamia; the problem of finding a cognate language re mains.
habitation they invented (for there is no evidence of borrowing) the pictorial script which became by a long process of evolution the cuneiform signs, later adapted by the Semites for the writ ing of their own language. The year 3500 may be taken as a round date for the beginning of this script, the development of which can now be somewhat exactly observed, from definite pictures into the purely conventional groups of wedges with which it ended in about the last century before Christ. Very early the stage was reached at which signs were used not only to express the idea which they represented as pictures, but also for the mere sound of the corresponding word in a context which did not in volve the actual idea at all; thus the sign ka is the picture of a mouth, but it is also used to write a certain grammatical ending -ka which has nothing to do with the idea of "mouth." The Sumerian writing, then, is a mixture of pictorial and phonetic ele ments, the roots being generally written with a sign which in itself expresses the required idea, accompanied by other signs used simply to supply the grammatical modifications. Two diffi culties are caused by the polyphony of signs, and the existence of homonyms; one picture (e.g. the "foot") having been used to express two connected but different ideas (e.g. the "foot" itself, and "to go"), two phonetic values, or more, became attached to the sign. On the other hand the language possessed many words, of different meanings, which chanced to be of similar sound, (e.g., the word sig was both "low" and "to strike"). In modern works these homonyms are usually distinguished by diacritical marks. Certain of the signs are also used as determinatives, i.e., they are placed before or after words to assign them to a particular class of natural things, such as man, bird, fish, wood and several more.