Late Sumerian: Case Studies, Challenges, Perspectives

Sumerian is the first documented language of humankind, attested in Mesopotamia for three millennia (ca. 3500 BCE – 74/5 CE). However, Sumerian had already been a dead language since the second millennium BCE, but it was still used later in the written cuneiform culture as a language of the cultural elite: the last stage of this language is called Late Sumerian. This conference is the first in its kind, since it gathers all the scholars who work at different levels on Late Sumerian, with contributions about case studies regarding specific texts, grammatical or translation problems, as well as new methods for understanding its grammar.