It Often Seems Like Sumerian Writings Have A Sort Of Poetic Rhythm To Them, Even When They're Something

It often seems like Sumerian writings have a sort of poetic rhythm to them, even when they're something as simple as someone berating her sister's penmanship. Is this accurate, or just a quirk of the translation? If so, why? Is it similar to how a lot of Victorian writings feel a lot more formal than modern-day messages?

Hello! I’m not a poetry expert, but here are my thoughts.

Rhythm in linguistics is a complex topic, but what I’ve gathered of the consensus is that in Sumerian, the emphasis (stress) would generally go on the last syllable of either a word or a word root, based on the fact that words borrowed into Akkadian (which had variable stress, like English) always had their emphasis on the last syllable. So a word like shakira “butter-churn” would be pronounced shah-kee-RAH, while ngarngarngar “hospitality” would be ngar-ngar-NGAR. Stress as it relates to suffixes is less clear: would shakirada “with the butter-churn” be shah-kee-rah-DAH or shah-kee-RAH-dah?

Based on that, our automatic idea of Sumerian “poetic rhythm” may not be what it actually was - try reading a line like this one with the emphasis on the end of every word and see if its rhythm changes!

As for the formal tone, I have two main explanations. One is that the materials in cuneiform we have preserved are generally more formal than average - poetry, hymns, and even letters are going to be written in a different style than a tumblr text post would be. However much I may joke that the letters to Ea-Nasir are the world’s oldest yelp reviews, they read more like an official complaint letter threatening a lawsuit than like a modern internet review. This is because writing in cuneiform was expensive; most people weren’t literate, so you’d have to hire a scribe, pay for the clay to be imprinted and the tablet fired, and then pay for shipping. It’s a much more laborious process than writing a postcard, so you’d want to be more precise as a result (you only get one shot for what you spend!)

The second reason is that our understanding of Sumerian vocabulary has been cultivated over a period of 150 years, dating back to the Victorian era! So when you see a translation, the person is working off resources (dictionaries, grammars, etc) often designed for translating Sumerian into, say, 1910s English rather than 2020s internet lingo. Work is always being done to “modernize” our translations and understandings in Sumerian and other ancient languages, for example with the new and updated Ancient Greek dictionary that tries to use contemporary, rather than 19th-century, definitions. But when reading a translation of Sumerian text, keep in mind when it was translated, and that someone more recent (like me) might always translate it differently.

I know an awful lot of propals have me blocked, so I’m going to ask that while this post should be reblogged, if you know you have significant inroads in goyische Tumblr, copy/pasting or screenshotting this would be great, because we need all hands on fucking deck.

So for those who don’t know: we’ll start with “a whole bunch of articles on Jewish history and identity on Wikipedia have been vandalized, including but not limited to removing mentions of individuals being Jewish and referring to Jewish holidays as Palestinian holidays, and making Jewish holiday pages deliberately vague with such things as ‘it may mean’ or ‘it could represent’ as though real actual living Jews couldn’t tell you what it does or doesn’t mean.”

Next: the same thing started happening to articles about North American indigenous and First Nations people. When I say “the same thing,” I mean I actually contacted the person who brought this to my attention to be like “could these be linked? Because some of this verbiage sounds IDENTICAL.” And little surprise there, because guess what, at least two of the editors involved have been found across both sets of edits.

So at first I assumed this must be a group with some weird hate-on for indigenous groups.

BUT GUESS WHAT I FUCKING FOUND YESTERDAY.

I was on Marsha P. Johnson’s article doing some research for a Pride event, and someone has gone through the entire page replacing her pronouns with they/them.

Marsha used she/her pronouns. The Marsha P. Johnson Institute refers to her with she/her pronouns. Someone has decided that because she was gender nonconforming and called herself “a boy and a queen,” her pronouns should be what they feel are correct—not the ones she actually picked for herself.

They came for the Jews, they came for the North American indigenous groups, now they’re coming for the queers, WE NEED TO FUCKING TAKE WIKIPEDIA BACK.

I cannot encourage you strongly enough to become an editor. You don’t have to write entire articles (although you can). You can do cleanup, you can re-insert appropriate references, you can add sources. There are editing guides to help you and if you’re going “there are SO MANY ARTICLES, I don’t know where to start,” just hit the random article button and start fact-checking.

We cannot allow a group of five or six people to monopolize our identities and manipulate them as they see fit.

FIGHT BACK.

inspired by the works of @/mischievousdog (both on tumblr and twitter)

"Oh hell yeah finally some good information about Pythagoras and Goetia, this is really interes- what the fuck is snake-blasting."

Where do you learn about sumerian magic? I'm really interested but can't find anything about it! thanks in advance!

Hell yeah, another Sumerian magic lover! I actually pulled out my notes for this one, because you're right. Sumerian sources are very hard to find because, well...they're so old.

Few written records on Sumerian magic have survived. Much of what we know comes from excavated clay figures and jewelry, most of which were protective. The Met has a lot of great articles about the ancient Sumerians.

But in terms of funerary rites and death spells, historians know quite a bit! The Sumerians believed that the dead should be consistently fed and nurtured. They had temporary spirit houses between the death and the funeral, extensive divination methods, and even funerary water pipes for their offerings.

The article "Soul Emplacements in Ancient Mesopotamian Funerary Rites" by JoAnn Scurlock details a lot of this. If you want to learn about afterlife beliefs and mythos, read Dina Katz's The Image of the Netherworld in Sumerian Sources. Dion Fortune's Through the Gates of Death has some info on Sumerian beliefs as well.

For first-hand accounts, we don't have a lot. The Maqlû tablets are the biggest, baddest, most well-known Akkadian magic source. Most of its contents are chants to guard one against malicious magic (often translated to "witchcraft").

Šumma ālu ina mēlê šakin are a serious of cuneiform tablets that list omens, along with some divination tips. It's harder to find online, but researchers have translated it.

I hope this helps! Good luck!