Ancient languages of Mesopotamia

3 min readJun 5, 2023

Akkadian is one of the oldest written languages. Akkadian is the language of the people of the civilizations of Akkad, Assyria and Babylon in modern Iraq, and Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic languages are similar to it.

Sumerian is considered to be the first written language. This language was common in southern Iraq today and before Akkadian. Sumerian is an isolated language, that is, it is not related to any other language in ancient times and today. (But Akkadian, Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic are all Semitic languages).

Are Sumerian and Akkadian two languages the same?

Sumerian and Akkadian are two completely different languages. The Sumerian language was spoken by people in southern Mesopotamia, before people who spoke Akkadian entered the Mesopotamia region. This language was alive almost until the second millennium BC, but almost 4000 years ago, due to a 200-year drought, the Sumerian language disappeared as a spoken monolingual language.

What is the origin of the Sumerian term?

In fact, the Sumerian term is a universal term among the Akkadians to refer to the people who lived in the south of Mesopotamia and whose language was not Akkadian. In fact, the Akkadians used this term to refer to non-Semitic peoples in the Mesopotamia region. The terms “Shumeru” and “Shumeri” both refer to the Sumerians in the Akkadian language.

But the question is, what did the Sumerians call themselves? The Sumerians did not call themselves “Shumeru” but they called themselves “ug sag gig ga”. (I must say that this is a little different from their dialect). The Sumerians called themselves “the black-headed people”.

The Sumerian word “Ug” (which is precisely represented by “ùĝ”), meaning “people”, the word “Sag” (which is precisely represented by “saĝ”) meaning “head”, The word “Gig Ga” (which is precisely represented by “gíg ga”) means “black”.

𒌦 ug [ùĝ].

𒊕 sag [saĝ].

𒈪 𒂵 gig ga [gíg ga].

The word “gig” also means “night”.

𒌦 𒊕 𒈪 𒂵 ug sag gig ga [ùĝ saĝ gíg ga].

Akkadians and their language

Sumerian is the first language that was written in cuneiform. The Sumerians are considered to be the creators of the world’s first line, so they can be considered the first people who created the line. (Of course, with caution, because there is evidence in this too).

After Sumerian, the second language with a long history of writing is Akkadian. As I said, Sumerian is an isolated language, which means that there is no language in common with Sumerian, neither in ancient times nor today.

But Akkadian is not like that, because Akkadian is one of the languages of the Semitic family, which has many languages in ancient times and today which are related to the Akkadian language.

Among the ancient languages, Eblaite, Ugaritic and Amorite and today, Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic languages are the same family of Akkadian language.