Sumerian is a language isolate, meaning that it has no relatives living or dead. Sumerian is agglutinative; word roots have grammatical elements glued on before or after them to build up complex grammatical forms.
Writing in Mesopotamia begins its life as a pictographic and ideographic system. In other words, the earliest signs were pictures which represented ideas. The sign for mouth could mean mouth, word, speak and so on.
The Sumerian text corpus is huge in ancient terms; at least 100,000 documents have been excavated over the last century or so and are now in museums throughout the world. Because clay is a durable medium for written records, it is certain that hundreds of thousands of texts still await discovery in the ancient ruin-mounds.
This collection brings you some of these ancient Sumerian words in order to improve your vocabulary of this language.
Click on the cuneiform symbol to get a random Sumerian word.
Primary Languages
Sumerian
English