THE SUMERIAN QUESTION: REVIEWING THE ISSUES

Gordon Whittaker, Göttingen1

The Sumerian Question, also known as the Sumerian Problem, revolves around the oft all too
emotional debate with regard to the make-up of the ethnic landscape in Southern Mesopotamia
during the 4th millennium B.C. The juiciest bones of contention, as it were, remain to this day,
on the one hand, the spurious issue of the alleged linguistic purity and isolation of Sumerian at
the dawn of history and, on the other, the issue as to what language or languages may lie behind
the writing system and archaic texts of the Late Uruk period.
To a large extent the controversy swirling from time to time around Sumerian owes its exis-
tence to the programmatic 1944 and 1968 essays of Benno Landsberger and Armas Salonen
respectively, concerning alleged substrate influence on the Sumerian lexicon. Neither of these
influential essays was ever reworked systematically in the form of carefully enunciated and rigor-
ously defended theses. The key flaws in the 1944 essay, although long evident, have now been
partially documented in Gonzalo Rubio’s 1999 Journal of Cuneiform Studies article on the
alleged substratum in Sumerian.2
Although Rubio’s important article might seem to some like a mild case of overkill, coming
as it does more than half a century after Landsberger made his case, and benefiting from decades of
further progress in our understanding of Sumerian, it was nevertheless helpful in sharpening the
focus on the linguistic aspects of the Sumerian Question, an area not covered in Jones’ (1969)
valuable history of the controversy. But far from “slaying the substrate dragon,” as Piotr
Michalowski (in press) has put it, Rubio’s abundant use of the modifiers ‘perhaps’ and ‘probably’
in proposing alternative etymologies for Landsberger’s terms underscores the fact that only spe-
cific details, not the structure of the argument itself, have been countered and – in some instances
– successfully refuted.3 For, like Landsberger before him, Rubio contents himself all too fre-

1
The Sumerian Question was the focus of an all-day session which I organized for the 2002 Rencontre
Assyriologique in Leiden. Papers were presented by experts on various aspects of the controversy, with
particular emphasis on the writing system and on the evaluation of Sumerian lexical data. I would like
to express my gratitude to Jean-Jacques Glassner and Cale Johnson for kindly allowing me to benefit
from written versions of the papers they delivered at the Rencontre. I am particularly indebted to Frank
Kammerzell for his detailed comments on all aspects relating to Afroasiatic.
2
This article, although primarily addressing Landsberger (1944) and the latter’s 1974 revision, also
deals, but in summary fashion, with a number of more recent contact theses, all of them subsumed under
the misleading label ‘substrate theory,’ which Rubio then proceeds to criticize as inconsistent.
Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995), however, to name but one example, discuss only language contact with
Mesopotamia, not the possibility of a substrate in Sumerian.
3
In contrast to Rubio’s critical stance, Liverani (1991, 165; cf. 168-169) faithfully tabulates Landsberger’s
Proto-Euphratic terms as “termini del sostrato” without any cautionary comments as to the source and
nature of the material. The false impression is given that the listing is factual and reflects the scholarly
consensus in Assyriology on the matter.

van Soldt, W. H. (ed.), ETHNICITY IN ANCIENT

MESOPOTAMIA. Papers Read at the 48th
Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale. Lei-
den, 1-4 July 2002. Leiden: Nederlands Insti-
tuut voor het Nabije Oosten 2005, 409-429.
410 G. WHITTAKER

quently with an unbuttressed assertion in favour of an alternative etymology, 4 rather than with a
carefully laid-out counter-argument. This will be discussed in detail below.

For much – indeed most – of its history the controversy over the Sumerian Question has cen-
tred on the issue as to whether the Sumerians were the autochthonous inhabitants of Southern
Mesopotamia or whether they were late (predynastic) arrivals in the region and, if the latter, from
where (see Jones 1969 for a summary of this debate). The prevailing view is the former. The focal
areas, or sub-questions, of this long-running controversy can be outlined as follows:

1. a. From what period on are Sumerians present in Southern Mesopotamia?

b. Are they the original settlers or did they enter an already populated land?
c. If they are not the original population, which society or societies preceded them?
2. From what period on are Sumerians in close contact with Semitic-speaking groups?
3. Are the genetic affiliations of the Sumerian language identifiable?
4. Until when was Sumerian spoken as the living language of a society?

Arguments pertaining to area (1a) have usually been based on archaeological and art-historical
analysis. Almost all books and articles cited in Jones (1969) draw solely or primarily from these
two fields. Unfortunately, this is rather like chasing a chimaera. It is simply not possible to iden-
tify an ethnic group on the basis of archaeology and art history alone – unless the evidence takes
the form of written documents such as inscriptions and administrative records. In the past, conti-
nuity in the archaeological record was often seen as an indicator of ethnic continuity, just as a
break was seen as an indicator of the arrival of a new people or peoples. Although Assyriologists
even today frequently point to archaeological continuity in arguing for a Sumerian presence from
the very beginnings of settlement in Southern Mesopotamia, archaeologists are all too aware of
the weakness of such assumptions.
As Mesopotamia itself so clearly demonstrates, the bones, home, and personal effects of a
Sumerian speaker cannot be distinguished in the archaeological record from those of an Akkadian
speaker, despite the many attempts right down to the present day to do precisely that. We are deal-
ing here with two speech communities sharing a common culture to which they both contributed
substantially. Language data are thus fundamental to a solution of these questions.
In the case of area (1b) those arguing for an autochthonous Sumerian population rely on
evidence from archaeology and art history, and in recent years on the evidence of the proto-

4
One example of this is his derivation, following a suggestion by Piotr Michalowski, of Sumerian
urud ‘copper,’ and its Early Dynastic counterpart a-ru 12 - da, from an unattested (and unwarranted)
Semitic feminine *warūtum (Rubio 1999, 9 fn. 20). Akkadian werium ‘copper,’ an isolate in Semitic, is
never found with the feminine suffix. The “good Semitic origin” cited by Rubio is based entirely on the
fact that a completely unrelated term for ‘copper’ in Northwest Semitic is feminine. Furthermore, Rubio
alleges that the root of the Akkadian term “seems to be attested in other Afroasiatic branches, especially
Chadic,” with the meaning ‘iron.’ In fact, it is found only in (Central and East) Chadic, and the vocalism
of the Akkadian and Chadic terms cannot be reconciled without a feat of linguistic gymnastics. Here,
and on five other occasions in his paper, Rubio relies uncritically on Orel and Stolbova (1995), whose
Hamito-Semitic Etymological Dictionary has been roundly criticized by reviewers as highly untrust-
worthy and indeed “recht dilettantisch” (Peust 1997, 272; see also Kammerzell 1996; Diakonoff and
Kogan 1996). For Weninger (1996, 61) this work “is unreliable to a hitherto unknown degree. … It is
uncritically and carelessly compiled.” Rubio fails to note that a period “not later than 10,000 – 9,000
B.C.E.” (Orel and Stolbova (1995, i) for Afroasiatic is hardly compatible with reconstructed words for
metals (Weninger 1996, 57).
 THE SUMERIAN QUESTION: REVIEWING THE ISSUES 411

cuneiform
writing system, whereas those arguing for a multiethnic landscape in predynastic Mesopotamia
glean their evidence from language data, here too including evidence from the writing system.
Areas (1c) to (4) can only be discussed on the basis of such data. Evidence of this kind is sought
in:

i. the language of written documents (as an indicator of the society’s identity and as a
source for morphological analysis in comparative studies)
ii. the contents of written documents (in statements referring to one or more speech commu-
nities and perhaps to traditions concerning origins)
iii. lexical analysis (as a key element in the search for cognates or loanwords)
iv. names (of local deities and places as evidence of settlement prehistory)
v. the writing system (where unmotivated sign values and instances of phoneticism can
shed light on speech communities involved in its development)

The most controversial area of the Sumerian Question today is area (1), the question as to
whether predynastic Mesopotamia of the Ubaid and Uruk periods was a mono- or multiethnic
landscape. Scholars who have recently speculated on these matters include Jean Bottéro (1992
[1987], 47), who conjectures incautiously,
“During the fourth millennium the Sumerians, who probably came from the southeast,
seemingly came to mingle with the first population of ‘natives’ about whom we know al-
most nothing, and with Semites who had left the seminomadic groups that led their flocks
of sheep and goats on the northern and eastern borders of the great Syro-Arabian desert, and
that never ceased to infiltrate among the sedentary people.”
Arguing more carefully on the basis of settlement-pattern analysis for the late 4th millennium,
Hans J. Nissen (1983, 75; 1988, 69), whose excavations at Uruk have shed so much light on the
Late Uruk period, ventures that
“… it is therefore likely that by the Late Uruk period other groups had also entered the area.
If there is any moment in time to which we can assign the arrival of the Sumerians with a
high degree of probability, it is this first period of settlements in large areas of the southern
Babylonian plain.”
Robert K. Englund (1998, 81), the foremost expert on the earliest period of writing in Meso-
potamia, argues for an even later arrival, citing the problem of sign values lacking an obvious
Sumerian motivation, and concluding:
“Accordingly, it would be reasonable to assume that, since only in the ED I texts … do we
find apparent evidence of Sumerian phonetic determinatives, and there at once in some
numbers, the Sumerians entered the southern alluvium shortly before the period represented
by those levels, bringing with them the diagnostic planoconvex brick.”
Since language data are the only positive and tangible evidence that can be brought to bear on
the controversy, let us now review the central elements of the Sumerian Question as they pertain
to language.
412 G. WHITTAKER

Identifying suspect terminology

The first problem is how to recognize possible loanwords in a given language, if no source is
immediately evident. For Sumerian the relevant criteria, which have never been systematically laid
out in the Assyriological literature, can be reduced to the following:

A. Criteria for identifying a nominal lexeme as a possible loanword:

1. Is the term polysyllabic, yet morphologically unsegmentable?
2. Does it contain a medial cluster?
3. Are the vowels in each syllable different (i.e. is there no vowel harmony)?
4. Are multiple variants known?

1. Civil (1996; 2002) has argued that Sumerian is basically monosyllabic in its lexemic struc-
ture. This conforms to the scholarly consensus that has prevailed in Assyriology on this issue
over many decades – and criticized as the “monosyllabic myth” by Edzard (2003, 4) without
counter-argument,5 but up to now it has been a matter of impressions rather than documented
fact. Civil has now shown that a large number of the proportionally few polysyllabic terms in
Sumerian can be derived from Semitic, though not necessarily from historically attested Akkadian
forms. On the basis of his study of the Sumerian lexicon Civil (2002) drew up a statistical classi-
fication of the set of words displaying the shape C1V1C2V2C3. Since he includes terms with an
initial vowel or medial nasal cluster and since one of his conditions is that V2 = V1, the requisite
shape can be described more precisely as (C1)V1(n)C2V1C3 or, better still, as (C)V1(n)CV1C.
Discounting words with the tell-tale Semitic suffix -um and monosyllabic compounds, he detects
the following subsets:
words
1. C1aC2aC3 nouns (professions); very few verbs 62
2. C1iC2iC3 and C1e(n)C2eC3 statives; nouns 65
3. (C1)uC2uC3 almost entirely verbs 87

Civil illustrates his argument with seven convincing Semitic etymologies for Subset 1 (none
of which, incidentally, is a term for a profession), eight for Subset 2, and thirteen for Subset 3.
Unfortunately, he neglects to say how many words in total (both monosyllabic and polysyllabic)
were counted in his lexicon sample.
The use of the label ‘monosyllabic’ with regard to Sumerian lexemes is, indeed, as Edzard
suggests, misleading. One must distinguish between two basic types of syllabic structure dis-
cernible in the lexical and textual data:

• Phonotactic Category A: (C)V1(C1)(C1(V1))

• Phonotactic Category B: (C)V(C)CVC(V(C))

Category A, by far the most common type, contains monosyllabic and sesquisyllabic (or open
disyllabic) words, whereas Category B consists of closed disyllabic and all polysyllabic words. A
minor – and extremely rare – type, Category C, is characterized by (C)V1(C1)C1V2 words, but its
intermediate status makes it susceptible to assimilation to the (C)V1(C1)C1V1 subset of Category

5
However, Edzard contradicts himself inadvertently (see the section The use and misuse of phonotac-
tics below for details).
 THE SUMERIAN QUESTION: REVIEWING THE ISSUES 413

A. The last two subsets of Category A, with a consistently rendered geminate medial, probably
derive from Category B by way of assimilation of medial C1C2 to C2C2 (as, e.g., in the case of
malla from madla ‘drinking vessel’ or ‘pole’; see Veldhuis (1997, 121) for form and mean-
ing). These may be further reduced by loss of gemination or of the final syllable (as in ad 6 from
adda ‘corpse’). Syllabic writing conventions tend to obscure the distinction between words with
true geminates, which appear to be rare, and those with single consonants in intervocalic position.
All subsets of Category A and the most common subsets of Category B are illustrated here:

Subset of Category A Example Subset of Category B Example

A1 V a ‘water’ B1 VCVC uraš ‘earth’
A2 CV šu ‘hand’ B2 CVCVC sudin ‘bat’
A3 CVC mud ‘blood’ B3 CVCVCV t abir a ‘artisan’
A4 VC ad ‘father’ B4 VCVCV asila ‘acclaim’
A5 CV1CV1 siki ‘hair’ B5 VC1C2V ugra ‘reed bundle’
A6 V1CV1 eme ‘tongue’ B6 CVC1C2V kešda ‘knot’
A7 CV1C1C1V1 sajja ‘sanga’ B7 VC1C2VC ugnim ‘army’
A8 V1C1C1V1 adda ‘corpse’ B8 CVC1C2VC siskur ‘prayer’

Civil’s subsets belong without exception to my Category B, as do all terms discussed in

Landsberger (1944) and Salonen (1968), and the vast majority of terms in Whittaker (1998; 2001).
Semitic loans in Sumerian – of which there are many – are attested, in fact, for all subsets of
Category B.
Taking the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary’s volume of words beginning with b (Sjöberg
1984) as a very rough indicator of the proportions involved, I count the following:

Category A entries:
(a) monosyllabic lexemes with structure CV(C): 64
(b) sesqui- or open disyllabic lexemes with structure CV1CV1: 24

Category B (all polysyllabic) entries:

(a) incl. all compounds, reduplications, Sem. loans: 264
(b) excl. compounds, reduplications, Sem. loans: 67
(c) = (b) excl. terms with possible mono- or sesquisyllabic structure: 53
(d) = (c) excl. terms with possible compound structure: 25

Category C entries:
Open disyllabic lexemes with structure (C)V1CV2: 2

Some 14 of the 67 polysyllabic entries remaining after compounds and Semitic loans are
removed are possibly mono- or sesquisyllabic in structure (e.g. ba-ra-ah, balag, bi-r i- ig,
b u - l u - u h , b u l u g ), and 28 others (e.g. b a r - d i b , b a r - s a g 5 , b a r - š u ) may, in fact, be
compounds, leaving us with only 25 unsegmentable polysyllabic terms that defy such classifica-
tion.
More significant is the proportion of Category B to Category A terms in actual literature. If
we take Enheduanna of Agade’s composition, the Ninmešarra (Hallo and van Dijk 1968), we find
that there are only 54 occurrences of Category B lexemes out of a total of some 864 words. These
414 G. WHITTAKER

54 occurrences include proper nouns (Uraš, Iškur, Ašnan, Suen) and Semitic loanwords
(abu l, silim). If we exclude names and repetitions we are left with a mere 28 Category B
words. There is only one instance of Category C (za 3 -mi 2 ), if the word is not a compound.
The results of this analysis suggest strongly that polysyllabic structure is indeed often an indicator
of loan status, but more so when coupled with other criteria.

2. Medial clusters may be an indicator of borrowing, since there are very few examples of such
clusters in the already restricted category of Sumerian polysyllabic words, and these are mostly
limited to proper nouns (Iškur), names of fauna (ešt ub ‘carp’), flora (hašhur ‘apple’), cul-
tural objects of various kinds (banšur ‘table’), and terms for societal and professional categories
(mud na ‘spouse’; ašgab ‘cobbler, leatherworker’). Initial clusters, with the exception in my
opinion of s clusters, and perhaps r and l clusters, are difficult to prove for Sumerian. The exam-
ples cited in the literature are characteristically found in morpheme sequences where a reduction to
schwa or even loss of an unaccented vowel between stressed syllables may create a conditioned
medial cluster. Final clusters (despite Rubio 1999, 4) are no less problematical.

3. Disparate vowels in polysyllabic words are suspect because the great majority of such terms
in this limited category have the same vowel in both syllables, and because words with disparate
vowels frequently have variants in which one vowel has been assimilated to that of a neighbouring
syllable, suggesting a process of adaptation to Sumerian phonotactics. Thus, the trisyllabic term
t abir a ‘artisan, joiner’ (not ‘metalworker’;6 see Waetzoldt 1997), a word generally regarded as a
loan in Sumerian, has a variant t ibira illustrating this process.

4. Multiple variants, especially if irregular, are highly suggestive of foreign borrowing. Thus,
the term for ‘brewer’ is regarded by Civil (1964, 88) as a “foreign word” because of its irregular
variants: e.g. lu - u m - g i, l u - u n- g a , nu - u n- g i, n i - i n - g i ( - i n ) . Civil (1964, 85), fol-
lowed unquestioningly by Rubio (1999, 6), regards “practically all” (cf. Rubio: “all”) brewing
terms as foreign.

B. Criteria for postulating a source for suspected loanwords:

1. Phonetic plausibility
2. Semantic plausibility
3. Areal plausibility
4. Temporal plausibility

1. Phonetic and semantic plausibility are essential requirements for a defensible comparison of
terms in one language with those in another. This is the bread-and-butter of the comparative
method, tried and tested in language-family reconstruction and contact studies around the world.
Phonetic plausibility requires regularity of correspondences, particularly when a genetic link is
being proposed. Even in the case of loanwords there should be a discernible, albeit somewhat
6
And, thus, not of Hurrian origin. Wilhelm’s (1988, 50-52) interesting suggestion that t a b i r a
derives from Hurrian tab-iri ‘Metallgießer’ presents phonetic (harmonized final iri to disparate i r a ),
semantic (‘pourer of metal’ to ‘joiner’ of various materials), and chronological difficulties (Hurrian
attested no earlier than 2250 B.C.; see Wegner 2000, 15). A better fit is provided by Indo-European
*dhabh-ro- ‘joiner, artisan’ (> Latin faber ‘joiner, artisan’; Armenian darbin ‘smith’) both in form and
meaning. Note that the Sumerian term is recorded as d a b 5 -r a in Ur III spellings of the place name
Badtibira (Remco de Maaijer, personal communication, 8 July 2002).
 THE SUMERIAN QUESTION: REVIEWING THE ISSUES 415

looser, pattern of relationship due to the fact that the adaptation of borrowed terms to the phonol-
ogy of the host language still involves a systematic correlation of sound structure to sound struc-
ture.

2. Semantic plausibility cannot be measured in a comparable fashion, but there should, never-
theless, be a demonstrable relationship in the real world between the semantic fields involved.
Exceptional developments can hardly be cited as arguments when supporting data are lacking.

3. Areal plausibility means that, in the absence of other evidence, the language being put forth
as a possible source should be in the general geographical region or reach of the borrower. Thus, a
suggestion that Old Chinese could be the source for Greek substrate terms would fail on this crite-
rion alone.

4. And, finally, temporal plausibility requires a chronological proximity of the donor, whether
reconstructed or attested, to the borrowing language. For this reason, Hattic would be – to put it
mildly – an unlikely source for Turkish terms of unknown origin.

Linguistic strata in Assyriological thought

Discussions of possible linguistic influence on Sumerian tend to make free use of the term
‘substrate.’ This is one of a set of three terms currently used in linguistics for different types of
linguistic interference: substrate, superstrate and adstrate. These terms, which are of dubious value,
have been misused in the context of the Sumerian Question. Substrate influence properly refers to
non-lexical structural influence on an adopted language, reflecting the characteristics of a lower-
status speech community. Relatively few loanwords are usually acquired from a substrate.
Superstrate influence, on the other hand, is characterized by extensive lexical borrowing, including
technical terminology and elite terms, from a language viewed by the borrowing community as
more prestigious than its own. This prestige need have nothing to do with political dominance, as
illustrated by Greek influence on Latin. The less loaded term ‘adstrate’ is often used as a general
and non-committal label for the influence of a speech community on its neighbour, without the
judgemental implications of the other two terms.

Let us now examine Assyriological statements on the so-called substrate – properly superstrate
or adstrate – issue.
The philological debate was opened by Landsberger (1974 [1944], 9), who asked:
“At what point in this early period, in terms of culture strata, did the Sumerians enter
Mesopotamia? That they were neither the oldest settlers nor the creators of the urban civilization
may be proved by analysis of the Sumerian language. None of the ancient cities had a Sumerian
name. On the basis of old city names such as Urim, Uruk, Larsam, Adab, Lagaš, and Zimbir we
may reconstruct a substrate language, which we call ‘Proto-Euphratic.’ Moreover, the correspon-
dence of city name and cult symbol in such cases as Urim and Uruk makes it appear probable
that the name of an ancient tribal totem was utilized for the designation of the city, and conse-
quently, that the cities were founded by Proto-Euphratic settlers. In northern Babylonia, on the
other hand, there is evidence, particularly from divine names such as Dagan, Zambamba, the sun
god Amba, but also Ištar and Adad, that before the area was settled by the Semites there was
another original population, different from the Proto-Euphratians. These people I hold to be
identical with the original population of Assyria, northern Mesopotamia, and possibly also
Syria, whom I call ‘Proto-Tigridians’.”
416 G. WHITTAKER

Landsberger’s alleged Proto-Tigridian substrate has no direct bearing on the Sumerian

Question. It is his Proto-Euphratic that concerns us here. According to Landsberger, the old city
names of Southern Mesopotamia, together with their cult symbols (“totems”), derive from this
pre-Sumerian language of the first settlers. His statement that “[N]one of the ancient cities had a
Sumerian name” implies that they are not recognizable as Sumerian compounds nor are related
lexemes known. His claim is, however, untenable as it stands.
Although he makes no reference to Landsberger’s essay, Jacobsen (1967) attempts to counter
the latter’s claim while accepting in principle his thesis of a relationship between city name and
symbol. In reference to Lagaš, Jacobsen (1967, 103) concludes,
“It is possible, of course, that as with Adab and Girgilu there was identity of name, that is to say,
that the name of the particular species or subspecies of raven that was the clan-symbol of the
Lagash clan and gave its name to the settlement was lagas h. But so far we have no evidence
whatever to support such a conjecture. It is equally possible that in this case name of settlement
and name of clan-bird were entirely different and separate.”
In this brief article on Sumerian city names, Jacobsen examines two instances (Jir su, Er idug)
in which a name appears composed of two morphemes and two instances (Adab, Girgilu) in which
a polysyllabic city name is identical to the name of a bird. The name Lagaš remains opaque,7
although Jacobsen is able to show that the Old Sumerian (Fara) spelling ŠIR-BUR-MUŠENki-la
and its variants include the name of a bird, conventionally written ŠIR-BURmušen and read buru 4
‘raven’ (1967, 101), hypothesizing in this case that the bird name has only a symbolic relationship
to the city name: that is, that the raven was simply the totem of Lagaš. For Jirsu he postulates a
meaning ‘naked (su) captives (jir 2 ),’ venturing that Jirsu might have been “originally founded
as a settlement of prisoners of war” (Jacobsen 1967, 100). This, too, is not implausible, but there
is no substantiating evidence as yet for it. Finally, Jacobsen (1967, 102) documents abundantly
the evidence for interpreting the name of the city Eridu as spelled: that is, as er i 4 -dug 3 in
Emegir, ir i x -ze 2 -eb in Emesal, both dialect forms meaning ‘the good (dug 3 ) city (er i 4 ).’
Nevertheless, names of other cities listed by Landsberger, and indeed those of a good many other
primary centres of early date, fail to yield to such analysis; and Jacobsen remains silent on this
point. As Rubio (1999, 6) admits, such toponyms “do not present any coherent pattern, and little
can be deduced from their existence.”
Landsberger does not limit himself to identifying possible pre-Sumerian place names. He also
lists some 30 polysyllabic terms that he suspects of being loans from Proto-Euphratic. These have
been re-examined by Rubio (1999, 3-6) and will be referred to below. A far more ambitious under-
taking, however, is that of Salonen (1968), who strives to identify different strata of substrate
loans into Sumerian. He distinguishes the following chronological layers and loanword categories:

Late Neolithic:
A: (C)VC(C) + -ar
Chalcolithic:
Ba: (C)VC(C) + -ab/-ib/-ub
Bb: (C)VC(C) + -ag/-ig/-ug

7
Rubio (1999, 6) asserts that Jacobsen provides a Sumerian etymology for Lagaš, but this is not the
case.
 THE SUMERIAN QUESTION: REVIEWING THE ISSUES 417

Bc: (C)VC(C) + -al/(-il)/-ul

Bd: (C)VC(C) + -an/-in and -im/-un

In all five categories Salonen regards the particular formative suffix as marking nouns for (1)
tools, (2) products, and (3) professions. The suffix -il is included by Salonen apparently for rea-
sons of paradigmatic aesthetics, since he supplies no examples of terms carrying it. His underly-
ing, but unstated, thesis is that polysyllabic words that cannot be demonstrated to be Sumerian
compounds or broken down into monosyllabic morphemes are probable loans from a substrate
language. Thus, Salonen implicitly adheres to what Edzard calls the “monosyllabic myth.” Given
the fact that many polysyllabic terms can be shown to end in the sequences listed above, Salonen
draws the conclusion that these must be nominal suffixes in the donor language. This is in itself a
good working hypothesis, but since he is unable to identify the source of the alleged loans, in
which such suffixes can be found, he is consequently unable to provide a convincing argument for
regarding these word endings as suffixes rather than simply as coincidental phonetic sequences
terminating monolexemic polysyllabic words.
Salonen’s strata are problematical. Leaving aside the question as to whether professional spe-
cialization is characteristic of Neolithic societies or not, it must still be regarded as imprudent to
date a series of polysyllabic terms on the basis of their meanings. The inherent danger in this can
be recognized if one ponders the fact that the majority of Salonen’s Neolithic professional terms
(farmer, miller, carpenter, potter) turn up in English as words composed of non-native mor-
phemes sharing a common suffix (-er), which – if we knew nothing of English history – could
lead us, following Salonen’s example, to create a Neolithic substrate category of professions
marked by the suffix -er (like Salonen’s -ar). Fortunately, we have sufficient documentation to
know that none of these terms predates the Norman Conquest, although the professions of course
do.
Like Landsberger, but in far greater degree, Salonen fails to check his lists carefully for trans-
parent Sumerian compounds and, through this omission, weakens his case considerably. Thus,
such examples as gukkal, gakkul, durgul, gaggal, sukka l, and burgul should
have been caught early and removed.
Oppenheim (1977 [1964], 33-34) avoids these pitfalls by dispensing with specifics when he
writes that
“a considerable section of the Sumerian vocabulary bearing on the material culture of
Mesopotamia contains terms and designations that do not seem to be Sumerian and do not
belong to any early Semitic (proto-Akkadian) language. These words may conceivably echo one
or more much older language substrata and thus relate to the previous carriers of what we pro-
pose to term Euphrates Valley civilization.”
He adds (Oppenheim 1977 [1964], 49),
“It is quite likely that the Sumerians had adapted for their own use an already existing system
and technique of writing. This seems to have been the creation of a lost and earlier, either native
or alien, civilization, which may or may not have had some relation to the foreign elements in
the Sumerian vocabulary, the topographical names of the region, and, possibly, the names of the
gods worshiped there. The Sumerians were only one of several ethnic groups … ”
Black (2000, 280) agrees and, noting the “(almost certain) existence of non-Sumerian-
speaking substrate populations,” contends that
418 G. WHITTAKER

“Southern Mesopotamia was a bilingual culture from virtually the earliest period from which
written records can be read, with Semites living among and alongside Sumerians. How much ear-
lier a distinct ‘Sumerian’ people existed is a matter for speculation; there is a danger in project-
ing a discrete ethnolinguistic group called ‘the Sumerians’ indefinitely far back into history.”
It should be noted that, despite the precise wording and implications of his first statement,
Black has assured me (July 2002) that he in no way intended to convey the impression that he
accepts the broad idea of “substrate populations” in Mesopotamia. He was referring exclusively to
a probable early Semitic presence.
Another recent addition to the literature comes from Michalowski (in press), who, in a some-
what convoluted statement, writes,
“I would argue that several unrelated sets of data support the view that Sumerian was one, if not
the major[,] spoken language in Mesopotamia from very early on. The relatively late human oc-
cupation of the southern Mesopotamian alluvium does not leave very much room for too much
linguistic history. We must also accept that there is at present no evidence at all for any other
early language in the area …”
It would be interesting to learn just what these “several unrelated sets of data” might be, but
we are left in the dark on this point. Intriguingly, while Michalowski professes that the data sup-
port the view that Sumerian was only one – and not necessarily even the major one – of the lan-
guages of Mesopotamia in the archaic period, he goes on to say that “there is at present no evi-
dence at all” for any other language in the area. If, however, independent sets of data demonstrate
that Sumerian was not alone in the land, how then can one reconcile his assertion that “there is no
evidence at all” for another language? Furthermore, we must ask ourselves how Michalowski
draws his conclusion that the entire span of time from the Ubaid period down to the beginnings of
syllabic writing in the Early Dynastic period – a stretch of almost three thousand years – leaves
insufficient room for “too much linguistic history.” How does one measure “room” requirements
for linguistic history? The 3rd and 2nd millennia alone yield ample instances of speech communi-
ties establishing themselves in Mesopotamia, such as the Gutians, the Hurrians, and the Kassites,
to name but three.
A further inconsistency in Michalowski’s position is revealed when he touches on the matter
of toponyms. Where Landsberger (1974 [1944], 9) before him had declared, “None of the ancient
cities had a Sumerian name” – neglecting, however, to explain why the name of the ancient city of
Eridu (the ‘good city’) makes such good sense in Sumerian –, Michalowski adopts a more moder-
ate (but, nonetheless, surprisingly liberal) stance, confessing,
“One must admit, however, that most of the toponyms in Southern Mesopotamia are neither
Sumerian nor Semitic.”
In so doing, Michalowski undermines further the already shaky foundations of his case against
‘substrate populations.’ For if, as he claims, most place names in the land of Sumer are neither
Sumerian nor Semitic, then what are they? And from what language or languages can they come?
Since Michalowski is clearly not suggesting that the toponyms are indeed Sumerian but have
simply become morphologically opaque in the course of time, as Edzard (2003, 4; quoted below)
now suggests, the implications are unavoidable that another speech community must have been
resident in the area at the time of naming. And yet to turn around after making such a case and
proclaim that there is “no evidence at all” for such a community is to invite the charge that he is
 THE SUMERIAN QUESTION: REVIEWING THE ISSUES 419

somewhat less than consistent in his weighing of the data or, worse, that he is unfamiliar with the
kinds of linguistic evidence utilized in reconstructing linguistic prehistory.
Even Gerd Steiner, who in his paper at the 2002 Leiden Rencontre echoed Rubio in arguing
passionately against Landsberger’s substrate heresies, stumbled in his closing statement, admit-
ting that beside Sumerian there may well have been other languages in archaic Mesopotamia of
which we know nothing. When I pointed out in the public discussion that this contradicted all
that he had just said, Steiner responded tellingly, “Es mag ein logischer Fehler gewesen sein, aber
kein wirklicher.” Logic, indeed, plays no crucial role in an issue of ideological import.
In the opening chapter of his Sumerian Grammar Edzard (2003, 4) provides us now with the
last word in print on this subject to date:
“It cannot be excluded that, within Mesopotamia proper, Sumerian had neighbours who spoke a
language—or languages—that were, step by step, superseded by Sumerian, but which left their
traces in Sumerian proper names (gods, places) and vocabulary. Thus, e.g., divine names such as
Nanše or Ĝatumdu, goddesses at home in the Ĝirsu/Lagaš region, may belong to a substratum, or
adstratum, because these names defy all efforts to explain them by way of Sumerian etymol-
ogy.8 Our judgement in this matter is, however, highly subjective because we know nothing of
the early history of Sumerian and its sound structure. …

Nanše and Ĝatumdu (and others) may be pre-Sumerian names, as may many place names. But
we have no means at our disposal to prove such a supposition. It is a well known fact that proper
names are specially prone to changes of all kind (slurring, abbreviation, deformation by anal-
ogy, popular etymology).”
Native Old English and Classic Maya place names lie at a distance of some one-and-a-half
millennia from their present-day descendants, roughly equivalent to the time-span from the begin-
ning of the Late Uruk period down to Ur III, and have been subject to all the processes mentioned
by Edzard, and yet the overwhelming majority of these toponyms are still recognizable as related,
no matter how distantly, to the morphology of Modern English and Cholan Maya. The same can-
not be said, and indeed (despite Jacobsen 1967) has not been said, for Sumerian.
Edzard (2003, 4) concludes,
“In general, it may be said that the Mesopotamian plain was not conducive to a great variety of
languages, as against Iran, Anatolia or the Caucasus which, until our days, has been a veritable
language museum.”
This is rather surprising. Mesopotamia is known to have been host to such diverse languages
as Sumerian, Akkadian, Gutian, Hurrian, Kassite, Aramaic, and Old Persian in approximately the
same time-frame, little more than one-and-a-half millennia from the end of Agade down to the
Achaemenid Empire. It is questionable whether Iran’s linguistic diversity can be contrasted so
sharply with the variety of languages Mesopotamia has to offer.

Landsberger reassessed
For well over half a century after Landsberger wrote his essay on possible substrate loans in
Sumerian no Assyriologist took up the gauntlet he threw down. Then in 1999 Rubio published

8
In this Edzard is following Heimpel (1998, 152), who states that Nanš e “has no obvious Sumerian
etymology.”
420 G. WHITTAKER

his brief JCS article on the substrate issue, devoting most space to a review of Landsberger’s pro-
posed Proto-Euphratic loanwords and of my own recent (Whittaker 1998) paper discussing possi-
ble Indo-European loans into Sumerian from a language which for the sake of convenience I have
dubbed Euphratic – not to be confused with Landsberger’s term, nor with Oppenheim’s
“Euphrates Valley” language. Since its appearance Rubio’s article has been repeatedly, but uncriti-
cally, hailed in print as the death knell of “the substrate theory” (Black and Zólyomi in press;
Michalowski in press; Edzard 2003, 4). The neutral observer would be forgiven for wondering just
why, after a half-century of silence on the matter, it has become so important that four leading
Sumerologists in quick succession should deem its passing worthy of comment. All the more
striking is that only one of the four (Edzard) felt it necessary to mention, and only in part, who
Rubio was actually attempting to bury at this late date, naming only Landsberger and Salonen,
and none referred to the actual circumstances of the recent revival of the Sumerian Question.
Given the continued prevalence of a Sumerocentric bias in Assyriology that largely precludes a
thorough and unemotional discussion of the Sumerian Question’s thorny issues, it might be in-
structive to assess the status of Landsberger’s proposed loans in the wake of Rubio’s review.
Below are listed Landsberger’s individual terms, followed by Rubio’s commentary and the term’s
subsequent status today.

Landsberger 1974, 9-11 Rubio 1999, 3-6 Current status of term

nimgir ‘herald’ cites literature without discussion unresolved

engar ‘ploughman’ listed but not discussed unresolved

apin ‘plough’ “it may be a Wanderwort” unresolved

apsin ‘seed-furrow’ listed but not discussed unresolved

šabr a ‘land registry official’ “Probably, it comes from Akk. despite Lieberman (1977, 614) a
šāpirum”, “borrowed, perhaps, in probable loan from Akkadian
the Old Akkadian period”

šasuk ‘land registry official’ not listed unresolved

uluš in ‘emmer beer’ listed but not discussed unresolved

nimbar ‘date tree’ Sem. etymology “rather unlikely” unresolved

sulu mb ‘date’ “The spelling of the word might
point to a loan, but it does not
really match the rest of
Landsberger’s list from the
phonotactic point of view”
contrast Rubio on kur uš d(a)
below: “a well-known pattern in
bisyllabic Sumerian words”;
unresolved

uhin ‘fresh date’ u 3 - hu - in (~ u 4 - hi- in) “probably unresolved

a Semitic word”; but cites
conflicting etymologies; structure
is “quite uncommon in Sumerian”
 THE SUMERIAN QUESTION: REVIEWING THE ISSUES 421

nu kar ib ‘gardener’ cites literature without discussion; Sumerian nu - compound

but cf. p. 6 on 2nd part of nu-
compounds: “which in several
cases seems not to be Sumerian”

sipa d ‘shepherd’ listed but not discussed unresolved

kabar ‘(kind of shepherd)’ notes Akkadian origin loan from Akkadian

udu l ‘(kind of shepherd)’ listed but not discussed unresolved

na gad ‘(kind of shepherd)’ listed but not discussed loan from Akkadian

nu ha ldim ‘cook’ cites literature without discussion; proper form according to Ea is

but cf. p. 6 on 2nd part of nu- mu haldim (wr. MU); unlikely
compounds: “which in several to be nu- compound, thus
cases seems not to be Sumerian” unresolved

šuha dak ‘fisherman’ “ŠU:HA seems to be šukux, unresolved

probably /šuku(dr)/”; otherwise
not discussed

simu g ‘smith’ syllabic structure of word is “not unresolved

unknown” in Sumerian

na ngar ‘carpenter’ lists various interpretations unresolved

without coming to his own
conclusions; but on p. 5:
example of “Arealwörter or
Wanderwörter”

tib ir a ‘metal worker’ “probably a Hurrian loanword” not Hurrian on phonological and
semantic grounds (cf. Waetzoldt
1997); unresolved

išbar ‘weaver’ listed but not discussed unresolved

ašgab ‘cobbler, leatherworker’ “not Semitic”, “uncertain origin” unresolved

ašlag ‘launderer’ adopts Steinkeller’s (folk) -šla g and -s la h both from

etymology: a + zalag, lit. ‘water zala g? — unresolved
brightener,’ but then contradicts
this with Steinkeller’s
phonologically divergent
explanation of kis lah as ki +
zala g; no discussion of conflict

adgub ‘reed weaver’ “uncertain origin” unresolved

pahar ‘potter’ Semitic etymology with irregular unresolved

reflex in Akkadian proposed;
422 G. WHITTAKER

semantics (< ‘dig’) problematical

šidim ‘mason’ “many [words with same unresolved

phonotactic pattern] are Semitic
loanwords”; but then he also
suggests it may be a Sumerian
compound with dim 2

kur uš da ‘fattener of oxen’ /kurušt/ “exhibits a well-known unresolved

pattern in bisyllabic Sumerian
words”

ugu la ‘supervisor’ “a clear Semitic loanword” loan from Akkadian

nuba nda ‘foreman’ nu- compound Sumerian nu - compound

da mgar ‘merchant’ “from Akkadian tamkāru” loan from Akkadian

Clearly, very few (only 7) of Landsberger’s 30 proposed substrate terms in Sumerian have
been shown to be Sumerian compounds or loans from Semitic. It is regrettable that Rubio largely
contents himself with offering more up-to-date literature tips and transliterations than those avail-
able to Landsberger, and seldom comments in detail on his reasons for regarding a term as native
or borrowed. Even by his own count, he is at a loss in the majority of instances to provide and
defend a Sumerian or Semitic etymology, a fact overlooked in his summary statement (Rubio
1999, 5-6), where he remarks,
“If one looks carefully at Landsberger’s list of substratum words, many of them happen to be
Semitic (báhar, ugu la, g a-ba-ra, sabra [sic], and perhaps ù- hu- in), Hurrian
(tib ira), Arealwörter or Wanderwörter (ap in, naĝ ar), have the /nu-/ prefix
(nu. g i š kir i 6 , nu-b ànd a, nu hald im), or exhibit well-attested Sumerian patterns
(simug, š id im).”
Of the above terms, which one would be hard put to regard as “many,” only two have uncon-
tested Semitic etymologies (ugula and ga- ba-ra, Landsberger’s kapar), while another two
(nu. g i š k ir i 6 , nu- bànda) are obvious Sumerian compounds. The remaining words either
have uncertain Semitic and Hurrian etymologies or are morphologically opaque within the con-
fines of Sumerian.

The use and misuse of phonotactics

As we have seen above in the discussion of Assyriological thought with regard to the question
of linguistic strata in Sumerian, Edzard (2003, 4) has speculated that
“divine names such as Nanše or Ĝatumdu … may belong to a substratum, or adstratum, because
these names defy all efforts to explain them by way of Sumerian etymology.”
Now what exactly does the phrase “explain them by way of Sumerian etymology” mean? The
contradictory premise underlying the phrase is that native polysyllabic words in Sumerian are
compounds fundamentally segmentable into monosyllabic morphemes. Contradictory, because
Edzard summarily dismisses what he calls the “monosyllabic myth” on the very same page. For,
if non-compound polysyllabic lexemes are native to Sumerian, as Edzard implies, why the effort
to etymologize them? This would be an exercise in futility, since a single morpheme, whether
 THE SUMERIAN QUESTION: REVIEWING THE ISSUES 423

mono-, di-, or polysyllabic, cannot by definition be further segmentable into smaller meaningful
units. Evidently, Edzard has himself fallen victim to the lure of the “monosyllabic myth.”
The deity name Nanše is not explainable “by way of Sumerian etymology” because it cannot
be broken down into smaller units. This lack of transparency is, of course, only troubling if one
expects the name to be a compound of monosyllables or a monosyllabic word base with monosyl-
labic suffix, as Edzard apparently does. The second deity name, Jat umdu(g), is a slightly dif-
ferent matter. There is no compelling reason to doubt (or, for that matter, assume) that the final
syllable represents the adjective dug 3 ~ du 1 1 ‘good, sweet,’ as suggested by the spelling conven-
tion for the name. Irrespective of the status of the final section, this would still leave the first two
syllables unexplained but, again, that is only a problem if a polysyllabic morpheme of this shape,
(disyllabic with varied, rather than like, vowels) is known to be rare or uncharacteristic of native
phonotactic patterns.
As with Edzard, much of both Landsberger’s and Rubio’s argumentation relies on an appeal to
phonotactics, i.e. to perceptions of what is, and is not, typical of Sumerian word structure. Each
of the positions is circular: without saying so explicitly, Landsberger regards unsegmentable,
varivocalic polysyllabic lexemes as (non-Semitic and) foreign to Sumerian structure, and identifies
loanwords accordingly, while Rubio divides unsegmentable polysyllabic terms into those match-
ing Semitic structure, which he accordingly attempts to relate to Semitic roots, and those that do
not, which he regards as native Sumerian if words of similar shape can be found, even if the shape
is identical to that of words he has just identified as Semitic in origin. Thus, he dismisses
Landsberger’s suggestion that Sumerian šidim might be a substrate loan, referring to it as an
example of words exhibiting “well-attested Sumerian patterns” (Rubio 1999, 5). But sili m
‘peace,’ a Semitic loan, has an identical syllable structure; and many, if not most, Semitic loans
exhibit such “well-attested Sumerian patterns.” On the other hand, to argue that simug cannot
be a substrate term because its syllable structure is “not unknown” (Rubio 1999, 4) in Sumerian is
like saying that English negligee cannot be a loanword because its phonotactic structure is also
“not unknown” in English (cf. protégé).
Each of the above positions is untenable, being basically an argumentum ex silentio. Apart
from words with an unusual phonotactic structure in the recipient language, which by their very
rarity may suggest a non-native origin, loans into a language isolate such as Sumerian from an
unknown language will usually betray little of their foreign origins due to (a) processes of assimi-
lation to the phonotactic structure of the borrowing language and (b) the fact that foreign phono-
tactic structures that are retained may eventually look native if a sufficient number of loans share
these features. The only way to clearly identify loanwords is to identify the language, or language
family, from which they come, and to demonstrate that the terms are segmentable in the latter or
otherwise more easily explained within its system. This has been attempted by Whittaker (1998;
2001; 2003).

The Euphratic Question

In the same manner in which he deals with Landsberger, but in far more cursory fashion,
Rubio takes issue with the Euphratic thesis set out in Whittaker (1998). As already mentioned,
this is not to be confused with the case for Landsberger’s “Proto-Euphratic,” for which different
claims and a different list of loans have been put forward. On the basis of a series of regular corre-
spondences in form and meaning between unsegmentable polysyllabic terms in Sumerian and
segmentable polysyllabic stems in Indo-European, the hypothesis was formulated that Sumerian
424 G. WHITTAKER

was influenced at an early period, probably from the close of Uruk IV down into the Early
Dynastic period, by an early Indo-European language known for convenience as Euphratic. This
tongue, in all likelihood most closely related to what became the western dialects (Italic, Celtic,
and Germanic), appears to have left traces in the Sumerian (and, to a lesser extent, Akkadian) lexi-
con and writing system. Judging from the kinds of words involved, which include environmental
terms, and from the influence on the script, the Euphrateans, a pre-equestrian agricultural society
practising animal husbandry, lived in Southern Mesopotamia rather than surrounding regions.
The advantage of the Euphratic thesis over previous ones is its ability to provide an explana-
tory model for words long suspected by Assyriologists to be loans. Most often, such words have
been cited on the basis of phonotactics (unusual clusters or syllabic structure) and variant forms.
Thus, Lieberman (1977, 16 n. 38) drew attention to the following words, which he felt “simply
do not look like native Akkadian”:

elammakkum kusarikkum
elimakkum kusarakku
elumakkum kušarihhu
elamahhu husarikku
‘(a tree and precious wood)’ ‘bison’

The a ~ i ~ u fluctuation in the second syllable of the first term suggests that the donor term
had a schwa-like vowel, or even no vowel, in this position. Similarly, the fluctuation between s
and š in the second term, and between k and h in both, suggests that the corresponding phonemes
in the donor language were perceived by native speakers of Akkadian as lying between these
phoneme pairs. These two words bear comparison with Indo-European *h1elm-(ah2) ‘elm,’ as in
English elm (from *h1el-m-o-s), and *h2us-r-ah2 (~ -ih2) ‘dawn (i.e. red) cow,’ as in Vedic usrā
‘cow,’ respectively.9
Unlike previous hypotheses put forward by Assyriologists and others, the case for Euphratic
has been made by considering all the available evidence on language and script from the archaic
period down to the end of Sumerian as a language. It has entailed a comparative analysis of the
dialects Emegir and Emesal, for the purpose of reconstructing Old Sumerian forms closer to the
point of contact. This has never been attempted before, despite the obvious fact that Sumerian,
like all languages, must have evolved in the course of the one-and-a-half millennia from Late Uruk
times down into the Old Babylonian period. The results are, of course, highly tentative, but they
present a reasonable basis for discussion.
Rubio (1999, 7) has raised a number of objections to the Euphratic thesis. As was the case
with his criticism of Landsberger, most of these concern phonotactics. A representative example:
“Although [Whittaker] thinks that the nasal labial /mb/ (a perfectly common phoneme in, for
instance, Bantu languages) is a mere allophone of /m/, he does reconstruct palatalized conso-
nants for almost every single consonant.”
What Rubio is suggesting here is that, if a language has a set of palatalized consonants, it
stands to reason that it will also have the nasal labial /mb/. There is, however, no phonotactic rela

9
The ambiguous -o- stem feminine of the IE tree name (as seen in Latin ulmus), has been replaced in
Euphratic by the overt feminine marker -ah2-. The -ih2- suffix suggested by the Akkadian variants in
-ikk- ~ -ihh- of the animal name is, like -ah2-, historically a marker of feminine gender.
 THE SUMERIAN QUESTION: REVIEWING THE ISSUES 425

tionship whatsoever, not even in Bantu languages, between the one and the other and, therefore,
no basis for expecting Sumerian to have a nasal labial phoneme just because it has palatalized
consonants.
With regard to the substance of the thesis, Rubio comments,
“Among [Whittaker’s] proposed two hundred IE loanwords, only a few belong to what has been
called the pre-Sumerian substratum.”
This harks back to the point Rubio makes earlier in his review that “the substrate theory” as
proposed by various scholars is not consistent, but this overlooks the fact that there simply is no
single substrate theory, and that the Euphratic thesis makes no attempt to conform to previous
views. Nor is there an inherent reason why a new theory should conform to earlier ones.
Rubio follows on from this point by stating, that the “vast majority of Sumerian words in
[Whittaker’s] list are bisyllabic.” Curiously, however, he names only 10 words from this list, all
but three of which belong to Phonotactic Category A, with the structures CVC (6 words) and
V1CV1 (1 word). Of these 10 words, he discusses only five. It is difficult to escape the conclusion
that Rubio is trying to avoid an appraisal of the “vast majority,” which belong to Categories B
and C and are polysyllabic (i.e. di-, tri-, and even tetrasyllabic), choosing for convenience to
restrict himself to the few exceptions.
In his summation, Rubio (1999, 8) writes,
“One cannot rule out the possibility of some isolated IE loanwords in Sumerian, not as the result
of a direct early (too early) contact, but rather as scattered Wanderwörter or Kulturwörter.”
Interspersed throughout his paper are references to Wanderwörter, Kulturwörter, and
Arealwörter, which Rubio uses interchangeably as a vague catchall for technical terms borrowed
into Sumerian indirectly. These labels are traditionally used in the classical philologies to denote
seemingly related terms, the prehistory of which is obscure, that appear to have diffused over a
wide area from an unknown language or languages into other languages. Landsberger (1974, 8)
employs the term Wanderwörter inappropriately in reference to his entire set of substrate words,
while Rubio uses all three terms as a device for dismissing an argument for a direct relationship
between two specific languages – an argument based on stated sound correspondences and on the
segmentability of the words in the one language as opposed to their opaque character in the other.
The possibility that a small number of these words might also turn up in further languages does
not affect the viability of the specific relationship under examination.
By way of example, it is worthwhile to consider the case of the words Schokolade (German),
chocolate (Spanish), chocolātl (Nahuatl), chocolat (French), chocolade (Dutch), all meaning
‘chocolate.’ A careful analysis of these obviously related terms on the basis of phonological shape,
morphology and writing conventions (but ignoring historical data for the purpose of the exercise)
will establish the likelihood that the Spanish word was borrowed from the Nahuatl, the Dutch
from the Spanish, and the German from the Dutch. The French word is closest to both the
Nahuatl and the Spanish, but given the areal proximity of French to Spanish, one would have to
conclude that it came via the latter. Nahuatl must be the ultimate source because it is the only
language in which the word is segmentable (chocol- ‘?’ + ā- ‘water’ + absolutive suffix -tl; the
first element is obscure), and because the drink’s primary ingredient is native to the region
(Mesoamerica) in which Nahuatl is spoken. Thus, Wander-, Kultur- and Arealwörter must always
be subjected to analysis in order to see if patterns of relationship can be discerned or excluded.
426 G. WHITTAKER

Use of these labels does not free the scholar from the obligation to conduct an examination of
related terms on the basis of all available evidence and of standard linguistic methodology.
The other point made by Rubio is that a “direct early (too early) contact” with IE is being pos-
tulated. What is meant by “too early”? It will be recalled that similar protests were uttered when
Hittite was first identified as an Indo-European language, and when texts in Linear B were shown
to be in a pre-Classical dialect of Greek. Rubio’s (1999, 6) confusing subheading “Indo-European
before the Indo-Europeans?” illustrates clearly how ill at ease he is with the concept of an Indo-
European language earlier than the 2nd millennium B.C. And yet it must be borne in mind that
the proto-language is generally regarded to have begun the process of separation into daughter lan-
guages prior to 3000 B.C., and all three current theories on the location of the Proto-Indo-
European speech community place it in, or on the flanks of, the Ancient Near East. Thus, evi-
dence for the existence of a new IE language in this area and at this date (late 4th to early 3rd mil-
lennium) should not come as a total surprise.
Many of the words named in the Assyriological literature as probable “foreign” loans in
Sumerian and Akkadian can be shown to have counterparts in Indo-European. Not only word
stems but also complete lexemes with their derivational and occasionally even inflectional suffixes
intact are among the polysyllabic terms so far identified. One good example is Old Sumerian
nerah ~ nir ah ‘snake, adder,’ which is unsegmentable, compared with segmentable IE *neh1-
tr-ah2- ‘snake, adder,’ attested in Italic, Celtic and Germanic. The Emesal form, šerah, indicates
palatalization of the original /n/ before /e/. For further details, and a series of additional parallels
involving -ah2-, see especially Whittaker (2003).

The writing system

Landsberger (1974, 11) believed that “all that is connected with higher artistic activity, with
writing and scholarship, is Sumerian.” Oppenheim, on the other hand, viewed the Mesopotamian
writing system as a pre-Sumerian technological development. Present-day Assyriology is strongly
inclined to accept Landsberger’s judgement on this matter, though dissenting voices (see espe-
cially Englund 1998; Johnson 2002) are occasionally heard.
Several scholars (Krispijn 1992; Krebernik 1994; Steinkeller 1995) have attempted in recent
years to demonstrate the presence of Sumerian in the earliest stages of writing development, that
is, in the Late Uruk period of Southern Mesopotamia. All such attempts have involved identify-
ing phonetic elements in the complex graphemes found in archaic documents, using known
Sumerian sign values and comparing their occurrences with the Neo-Sumerian word values of
descendant logograms, despite a gap of a millennium between the date of the texts and the date of
most of the word values. No iron-clad cases have been found so far for the earliest stage, Uruk IV,
although a few plausible instances have been proposed for Uruk III (among them PIRIG + ZA for
az, better, aza z a , ‘bear’).
As Johnson (2002) has stressed, it is of the utmost importance to analyse the contexts of
complex graphemes in actual documents in order to determine whether we are indeed dealing with
combinations of semantic and phonetic elements. Johnson has examined a number of the most
prominent cases put forward as evidence of Sumerian phoneticism. In each instance he has shown
that the context does not warrant the phonetic interpretation proffered. A case in point is BUa +
BUa + NA2a, already present in Uruk IV, which Steinkeller (1995, 694, 699) equates with Sum.
 THE SUMERIAN QUESTION: REVIEWING THE ISSUES 427

ar ina x ~ er ina x ‘root(s).’ Johnson indicates that in several cases the meaning of the complex
grapheme is unclear but in at least one instance in the proto-cuneiform corpus the complex
grapheme must be a “geographical or institutional name.” In none of the archaic contexts does it
ever mean ‘root(s).’ Thus, it provides no evidence for the presence of Sumerian in the archaic
period.
Another of the most prominent cases – indeed, according to Johnson, the best candidate for
Sumerian phoneticism so far – is that of the grapheme AMAa, which co-occurs with SAL and MA.
AMAa, allegedly for Sum. ama ‘mother,’ is a high-frequency sign (93 occurrences) in the
archaic corpus. Its co-occurrence with SAL (if standing for FEMALE, rather than, for example, the
adjective ‘thin’) might suggest a meaning ‘mother,’ just as its co-occurrence with MA might sug-
gest the reading ama. The two complementary elements never occur together. Since AMAa co-
occurs with both MA and HAŠHUR (‘apple’), it is feasible that MA is simply to be understood as
‘fig.’ But, as Johnson notes, “of the 93 occurrences of AMAa and 163 occurrences of AMAb, not a
single one occurs in a context where it can be shown to mean ‘mother’.”
A further weakness in the case for Sumerian in the Uruk period is the fact that all proponents
of a Sumerian presence (most recently, Wilcke 2002 and Glassner, this volume) ignore the evi-
dence from dialectology. The – albeit late – evidence retrievable from the Emesal dialect reveals
the dangers of simply transporting Emegir values back more than a millennium in time to the
Late Uruk period. An important example of this danger is found in the different forms of the term
for ‘lord’ in each dialect: Emegir en, but Emesal umun. The Emesal form is more complex than
its Emegir cognate, and this certainly has to be taken into account in any scenario involving
the sign for ‘lord’ in the proto-cuneiform corpus. One must presume that the antecedent of the
dialect variants was disyllabic and that its vocalism may have differed from that of one or both
dialect descendants. For this very reason, it would be unwise to apply the Neo-Sumerian value e n
to the phonetic interpretation of complex graphemes containing the ancestor of the ‘lord’ sign. But
precisely this is frequently done (e.g. Krebernik 1994, 384; Steinkeller 1995, 694, 701, 704).

The purpose of this paper has been to draw attention to some of the theoretical and method-
ological weaknesses and inconsistencies that have become evident in the history of the debate on
the Sumerian Question, and to suggest ways in which further pursuit of the pertinent issues could
be refined productively and unemotionally. The question of Sumerian origins, and in particular of
the nature of the linguistic landscape in 4th-millennium Mesopotamia, is an intriguing and chal-
lenging one, but one that can be tackled – perhaps successfully in the end – with the scholarly
means and tools already available.

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