Late Sumerian as a Sacred Language?

Date: 

Mon, 24/01/2022 (All day)
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Lecturer: 

Dr. Beatrice Baragli

Several languages written in a cuneiform script were attested in the Ancient Near East. Sumerian, the first known language of humankind, was attested as a language spoken by native speakers in the third millennium BCE. Roughly from the second millennium BCE onwards, Sumerian is attested as a written language of Mesopotamians cultural and religious elites. Several religious and literary texts are attested in this period in a bilingual form, in Sumerian and Akkadian. The colloquium gave a short introduction on these kinds of texts and tried to answer the following question: Why keep using a language after roughly two millennia the last Sumerian native speaker died? One of the many possible answers may lie in the sacred nature of Sumerian as the Mesopotamians saw it.