Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian: An Introduction for Complete Beginners.

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At the end of this book you truly will be able to read genuine ancient Sumerian, written in cuneiform.

Used in combination with Foxvog’s Elementary Sumerian Glossary [CDLI; available online], this text offers the curious student a entry point into the language. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. A poor condition book can still make a good reading copy but is generally not collectible unless the item is very scarce. Beginners will also want a grammar, but I do not know any which are set up for teaching beginners with the most common aspects earlier and drills to help them learn; there is a list here, to which advanced students can add A.L. Thomsen’s The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to its History and Grammatical Structure [Akademisk Forlag; Ref 4 PJ4021 . Perhaps the most useful resource in English is the Electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary ( ePSD), an ongoing online lexicon project of Sumerian—an extension of the the print project started in 1976, The Sumerian Dictionary of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania [Babylonian Section of the University Museum; Ref 4 PJ4037 . The introduction to The Literature of Ancient Sumer alone could be recommended as a general overview of the period and its literary output, not to mention an overview of the language’s decipherment and increased understanding over the last century and a half. Among the administrative texts from the Ur III period, the Garshana documents stand out for their rich vocabulary and a relatively high quota of phonographic writings. I do not know if I have succeeded, but I hope that this post is at least understandable to people without a background in historical linguistics.

S864 2013; ebook available] contains over thirty chapters on material remains, systems of government, daily life, and neighboring societies among other topics. Nevertheless, it stands as an entry point to applied cuneiform, and while the method does not appear to have seen general adoption, if there can be such a thing as a cult classic in the teaching of ancient languages, Snell’s idiosyncratic cuneiform workbook may be it. Konstantopoulos remembers being attracted to the grammar of a particular line on Cylinder A—“Come on, come on!Turning off the personalised advertising setting won’t stop you from seeing Etsy ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive. If you’d like to file an allegation of infringement, you’ll need to follow the process described in our Copyright and Intellectual Property Policy. Joshua Bowen has filled a space in the market with this edition that was desperately needed and I like many others are very grateful. Because so many Sumerian texts are damaged and published as drawings, students have to become familiar with different forms of the script, whereas students of Greek or Latin can chose to read nothing but modern printed texts with a standard font.