Sumerian: A Language Isolate and Mesopotamia's Oldest Writing

Sumerian is a language isolate with no established relationship to any other known language family, attested in southern Mesopotamia from around the thirty-first century BCE and associated with the world's earliest known writing system, cuneiform, initially developed for administrative and economic record-keeping before expanding to literary, religious and legal use over subsequent centuries. Sumerian ceased to function as anyone's everyday spoken language sometime in the early second millennium BCE, displaced by the Semitic Akkadian language, but persisted for roughly another two thousand years afterward as a learned scholarly, religious and literary language studied and used by Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian scribes much as Latin persisted in medieval Europe long after ceasing to be anyone's native tongue.

Sumerian literature includes some of the oldest surviving substantial literary compositions in human history, including hymns to Sumerian deities, extensive mythological narratives, and the Sumerian King List, a semi-legendary chronicle blending historical and mythological material to trace Mesopotamian kingship back to before a great flood. Sumerian grammar's agglutinative structure, in which grammatical meaning is built by stringing together distinct suffixes rather than through the inflectional patterns typical of Indo-European or Semitic languages, sets it apart typologically from both its Akkadian successor and virtually every other ancient Near Eastern language scholars have documented in comparable written detail.