He has translated a number of documents from Semitic languages and Sumerian into Norwegian, and is considered an expert in ancient languages.

In 1908, Stephen Langdon summarized the rapid expansion in knowledge of Sumerian and Akkadian vocabulary in the pages of Babyloniaca, a journal edited by Charles Virolleaud, in an article ' Sumerian-Assyrian Vocabularies ', which reviewed a valuable new book on rare logograms by Bruno Meissner.

Descriptions of various beer recipes can be found in Sumerian writings, some of the oldest known writing of any sort.

Akkadian fell into disuse, but both it and Sumerian were still used in temples for some centuries.

The Sumerian and Etruscan languages, usually regarded as language isolates, are thought by some to be Nostratic languages as well.

* It lists many Assyrian / Babylonian and Sumerian star names recovered by archaeology, and some of these ( e. g. Sargas and Nunki ) have come into general use.

Scholars have noted that Song of Songs shows similarities of various kinds with other Ancient Near Eastern love poetry in general, but particularly some Sumerian erotic passages, and the Ramesside Egyptian love poetry.

A Sumerian story with some similar elements is told in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta.

There are cuneiform ( Sumerian writing ) on many walls, some entirely covered in script stamped into the mud-bricks.

Sumer ( from Akkadian ; Sumerian, approximately " land of the civilized kings " or " native land "< ref group =" note "> means " native, local ", in some contexts is " noble "( ĝir NATIVE ( 7x: Old Babylonian ) from The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary ).

Drawn from the Sumerian goddess Kubau, known as Hawwah, the biblical חוה, also known as Eve amongst the Aramaeans and some others.

Another characteristic feature of Sumerian is the large number of homophones ( words with the same sound structure but different meanings ), which are perhaps pseudo-homophones, as there might have been differences in pronunciation such as tone or some phonemic distinctions that are unknown.

The Sumerian noun is typically a one or two syllable root ( igi " eye ", e < sub > 2 </ sub > " house, household ", nin " lady "), although there are also some roots with three syllables like šakanka " market ".

It is mostly taken as synonymous with the Semitic Israelites, especially in the pre-monarchic period when they were still nomadic, but in some instances it may also be used in a wider sense, referring to the group known as Shasu of Yhw on the eve of the Bronze Age collapse .< ref > The Electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary < http :// psd. museum. upenn. edu / epsd /> s. v.

The Empire of Kush to the south of Egypt is known from at least 1970 BC, but this name has also been associated by some with the Kassites who inhabited the Zagros area of Mesopotamia, the Sumerian city of Kish.

However, the discovery of a corresponding myth about Inanna, the Sumerian counterpart of Ishtar, has thrown some light on the myth of Ishtar's descent, including its somewhat enigmatic ending lines.

In the movie The Mole People ( 1956 ), some explorers find an ancient Sumerian people living underneath a mountain, and the people think that Ishtar has sent the explorers.

Following a brief Sumerian revival the empire broke up into two Akkadian states, Assyria in the north, and some time later Babylon in the south ( although Babylon was founded by invading Amorites, and was rarely ruled by native dynasties throughout its history ).

Hegemony, which came to be conferred by the Nippur priesthood, alternated among a number of competing dynasties, hailing from Sumerian city-states traditionally including Kish, Uruk, Ur, Adab and Akshak, as well as some from outside of southern Mesopotamia, such as Awan, Hamazi, and Mari, until the Akkadians, under Sargon of Akkad, overtook the area.

External to the city, Sumerian irrigation agriculture created some of the first garden forms in history.

One of the most famous of these was the Epic of Gilgamesh, which first appears in Akkadian during the Old Babylonian period as a circa 1, 000 line epic known by its incipit, šūtur eli šarrī, ‘‘ Surpassing all other kings ,’’ which incorporated some of the stories from the five earlier Sumerian Gilgamesh tales.

Tablet 12 is a near copy of an earlier Sumerian tale, a prequel, in which Gilgamesh sends Enkidu to retrieve some objects of his from the Underworld, and he returns in the form of a spirit to relate the nature of the Underworld to Gilgamesh.

Some of the names of the main characters in these poems differ slightly from later Akkadian names, and that there are some differences in the underlying stories ( e. g. in the Sumerian version Enkidu is Gilgamesh's servant ):

For example, small Scottish and Irish harps can be held on the lap, while some ancient Sumerian lyres appear to have been as tall as a seated man ( see Kinsky ; also Sachs, History ..., under " References ").

Uruk ( Cuneiform: ,< sup > URU </ sup > UNUG ; Sumerian: Unug ; Akkadian: Uruk ; Aramaic: Erech ; Hebrew: Erech ; Greek:, ;, ) was an ancient city of Sumer and later Babylonia, situated east of the present bed of the Euphrates river, on the ancient dry former channel of the Euphrates River, some 30 km east of modern As-Samawah, Al-Muthannā, Iraq.

At some point, Sumerian inscriptions began to be written on clay, in an almost linear script.

Several linguistic problems arise in the attempt to relate Sumerian with known language families.

" Although the book makes the claim that PAZUZU ( like all entities listed therein ) was of Sumerian origin, critics John Wisdom Gonce III and Daniel Harms document the erroneous nature of such a claim, stating: " Likewise, the demon Pazuzu does not appear in myth until Assyria's rise in the first millennium B. c., long after Sumer's prime ...

The band took their name from the folklore tale of the inscribed surrounding land to the ancient Sumerian society ( Fourth B. C ), stating that those who died, either violently or tragically, their souls were to wonder the Fields of Adplumbum ( Aplomb ) until they acknowledged and accepted their fate.

According to Samuel Noah Kramer in The Sacred Marriage Rite, in late Sumerian history kings established their legitimacy by taking part in the ceremony in the temple for one night, on the tenth day of the New Year festival Akitu.

It is a general belief among scholars that a form of " Sacred Marriage " ritual or Hieros gamos was staged between the king of a Sumerian city-state and the High Priestess of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of sexual love, fertility, and warfare, but to date there is no certain evidence that sexual intercourse was included.

Sacred prostitution was common in the Ancient Near East as a form of " Sacred Marriage " or hieros gamos between the king of a Sumerian city-state and the High Priestess of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love, fertility, and warfare.

Both novels deal with an almost " primitive tech " replacing a current, worldwide use technology, in the sense of the reprogramming of the mind through ancient Sumerian chanting in Snow Crash ( which also uses allusions to Babylonian prostitutes passing an information virus like a sexually transmitted disease ), and the idea of nanotechnology propagating and communicating through sexual intercourse, passing from body to body like a virus.

Thorkild Jacobsen has studied the pre-Babylonian Mesopotamia and uses Sumerian epic, myth and historical records to identify what he calls primitive democracy.

The period 2700 – 2300 BC saw the first appearance of the Sumerian abacus, a table of successive columns which delimited the successive orders of magnitude of their sexagesimal number system.

The bewildering number and variety of phonetic values that signs could have in Sumerian led to an unfortunate detour in understanding the language – a Paris-based orientalist, Joseph Halévy, argued from 1874 onward that Sumerian was not a natural language, but rather a secret code ( a cryptolect ), and for over a decade the leading Assyriologists battled over this issue.

The Sumerian / Babylonian word " šár " was one of the ancient Mesopotamian units of measurement and as a number appears to have had a value of 3600.

Whilst the full number of gods and goddesses found in Mesopotamia is not known, K. Tallqvist, in his Akkadische Götterepitheta ( 1938 ) counted around two thousand four hundred that we now know about, most of which had Sumerian names.

For instance, the so-called " giparu " ( or Gig-Par-Ku in Sumerian ) at Ur where the Moon god Nanna's priestesses resided was a major complex with multiple courtyards, a number of sanctuaries, burial chambers for dead priestesses, and a ceremonial banquet hall.

The Babylonian number system had a base of sixty, inherited from the Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations, and possibly motivated by the large number of divisors which 60 has.

A number of scholars suggest that Meluhha was the Sumerian name for the Indus Valley Civilization.

The map includes a number of commonly-known stars, such as Alpha Centauri, Procyon, Sirius, Epsilon Indi, and Altair, as well as a considerable number with more exotic names ( mostly taken from the Sumerian language ).

These were translated by George Aaron Barton in 1918 and first published as " Sumerian religious texts " in Miscellaneous Babylonian Inscriptions, number six, entitled " A prayer for the city of Ur ".

Some scientists, however, believe that Sumerian may have been a tonal language, which seems plausible given the number of homonyms in the language.