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.