Posted on 07/23/2002 12:31:32 PM PDT by blam
Posted on Mon, Jul. 22, 2002
Key to an ancient tongue
Penn archaeologists have puzzled over the cuneiform writings for decades. At last, a Sumerian dictionary may be ready by 2004.
By Faye Flam
Inquirer Staff Writer
Steve Tinney and Tonia Sharlach hold cuneiform tablets from the collection at Penn’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The two Sumerologists are working on the 30-year dictionary project.
The people known as Sumerians are credited with starting the first civilization and building the first settlements worthy of being called cities. They also invented writing, and then they wrote and wrote and wrote, filling millions of tablets with their intricate, detailed characters.
They left behind everything from religious texts to poetry to receipts, much of which remains preserved 5,000 years later. Understanding the symbols they etched in clay is another matter. The oldest language known left no descendants.
Scholars studying the ancient world are therefore eagerly awaiting the first Sumerian dictionary, a 30-year project at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Sumerologists there hope to release an early version by 2004.
The Sumerians settled and farmed the area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is often called the Fertile Crescent or Mesopotamia, now part of Iraq. Around 3500 B.C., they became the first people on Earth to congregate in cities, to use complex mathematics, and to record their ideas with a written language.
They did most of their writing between 3000 and 2000 B.C. Over the next millennium, they were gradually assimilated into the Babylonian civilization, which continued to advance Sumerian literature, astronomy and mathematics.
The dictionary project will allow scholars to glean much more meaning from the text-covered tablets left behind. Most range in size from business cards to laptops, and many are still to be unearthed.
The tablets, said Rubio Gonzalo, an expert on Sumer at Ohio State University, "provide us with an amazingly rich perspective on the most diverse facets of human life in such early periods, from economy to medicine, from animal husbandry to childbearing, from literature to mathematics, from magic and religion to astronomy and politics."
That their writings survived to the present day was a lucky byproduct of the Sumerians' choice of materials. They wrote by pressing a reed tool into clay tablets and then drying them, a method that has let their most mundane lists endure for millennia. (The Greeks and Romans wrote on early forms of paper. Much of what is known about them is from versions of the originals that were repeatedly copied and passed down.)
"There is no other ancient culture for which there is so much written material," said Piotr Michalowski, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
And yet, of all the ancient languages in both Eastern and Western civilization, said Rubio, Sumerian is the only one that has lacked a comprehensive dictionary to aid scholars. Some words were translated into other languages and passed down through the ages. Others are still unknown.
The dictionary being produced in Philadelphia is more than just a simple translation tool, such as an English-French dictionary. Sumerian is so different from any current language that to understand each word requires a detailed entry, explaining how each word was used and its various shades of meaning, both literal and metaphorical.
The written language consists of about 600 symbols, each representing what we would call a syllable or word fragment. The syllables can be words by themselves or can be combined with others, and they often have multiple meanings. Ca (pronounced kah), for example, means mouth and voice and to speak.
Some of the symbols are believed to have originated as pictographs, but by 3000 B.C., they had become completely abstract.
In the staff-only back rooms at the Penn museum, three Sumerologists - experts in a field that combines the humanities with archaeology and linguistics - apply skills ranging from research to sleuthing to puzzle-solving.
British-born Steve Tinney, 40, tall and jovial, started working on the dictionary project in 1991 and officially took over this month as director. Tonia Sharlach, 31, is a researcher and specializes in reconstructing the economic system of the ancients. Another researcher, Phil Jones, fills out the team.
They are building on work started by Penn Museum Sumerologist Ake Sjoberg in the 1970s. He began the compilation by volume and got through words starting with sounds of A and B.
The clay tablets and tablet pieces - 30,000 of them, sorted in wooden drawers by category - were collected by Penn museum archaeologists in expeditions that started in the late 1800s and continued through much of the 20th century. Most come from Nippur, one of the major Sumerian cities, along with Ur and Uruk.
Some contain poetic, literary text. Others are just accounting records: lists of household possessions, of goats and sheep, or tax receipts. Many appear to have come from a school where young boys were learning the art of writing - a system called cuneiform, named for the wedge-shaped script created by pressing reeds into clay.
Even the lists of grazing animals are beautiful, intricate objects, the writing a complex mix of strokes that, to the Western eye, bear a resemblance to Japanese or Chinese characters.
Tinney brings out one particularly exquisite object: a clay letter with its own envelope, like a 3-inch-wide pillow in a clay pillowcase. The envelope was closed with an official seal, imprinted in the clay, so that no one could tamper with the letter inside, said Tinney.
Many words in the dictionary were already known to scholars through tablets that ancient people created as guides to translation between Sumerian and Akkadian, a Semitic language spoken in the same part of the world at the time. Akkadian evolved into other languages that eventually branched into modern Hebrew and Arabic.
Hundreds of words have no Akkadian translation, however. To decipher these, Tinney and Sharlach study the context.
Some are simple concepts, said Sharlach. "A dog is a dog is a dog." Other words are more abstract. Ma, for example, seems to mean "that without which life is not possible."
Sharlach recalls one mysterious word written as part of a list of three things that priests should not eat before performing rituals. The other two were fish and leeks, which suggested, she guessed, that the priests were being told they should not have bad breath while talking to the gods.
At first the researchers thought the word was cress, the leafy green, but in other contexts it was described as a spice, and it appeared to be used to flavor beer. She now thinks it more likely means cardamom, which was a common flavoring in food and drink.
By the mid-1990s, Tinney decided to change how the dictionary was compiled. With the advent of the Internet, he realized their work could be released as they progressed.
In an electronic format, scholars elsewhere could make use of the mountain of translations they've already completed, while Penn's Sumerologists continued to puzzle out the rest.
While the original A and B volumes have long entries for each word with many shades of meaning, something like the Oxford English Dictionary, Sharlach and Tinney have gone all the way to Z with simple translations for thousands of words.
They show a printout of some of their work. There are all kinds of translations - words for counting and for farm animals and for professions, words for heroic men and sorcerers. There are multiple words for female genitalia. "You have to remember, many of these came from a school," explained Sharlach - a school attended by preteen and teenage boys.
And lots of lists. "They liked lists," Sharlach said. "They liked controlling their environment," and cataloging the names for things seemed to be a part of that.
Their list of gods has about 2,000 entries. Sumerians believed in a whole shadow world of gods in every city. All the gods had their own families and servants, also made up of gods.
The Sumerians wrote proverbs, too. Tinney's favorite is "The road is bad, beer is good." That, he said with a chuckle, seems to mean "travel is hard, but the beer is worth it."
The Sumerians also wrote the first known epic - Gilgamesh - consisting of a dozen different stories about a man's quest for immortality. It started as a series of Sumerian myths and evolved into a Babylonian legend. One of them tells of a great flood, and of a man who builds a boat and loads it with pairs of each type of animal.
Gilgamesh has been translated, but like much of the writing in Sumerian, many phrases are still not fully understood.
The language gets richer year by year, said Tinney. "The dictionary is a process, not a project."
Block that metaphor!
That amount of sea level increase can hide a lot of real estate and sea shore property is where the money is made, you know, ports and shipping.
Marine archeology is in its infancy now, but I believe we will in the future be reading more about lost cities underwater and the civilizations that have disappeared under the waves.
Even today there have been reports and photographs taken of stone pyrmids deep off the shore of Okinawa.
The jury is still out on whether this is manmade or not. Otherwise....I agree 100% with what you've said. (Actually, I hope that they are manmade)
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
Yup. Quite a while. I can't remember posting some of these articles, lol.
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I like your translation better!
btt
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