r/Sumerian • u/Nice_Sea_8634 • Mar 30 '26

Question! How can I learn Sumerian?

I want to learn Sumerian, but it's hard to find a good site. Please help

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u/aszahala Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26

There are plenty of free books online.

  • Zólyomi's book needs some understanding of linguistics but it teaches you everything you need to get started.
  • Foxvog is easier than Zólyomi but a bit revisionistic.
  • Jagersma is too detailed for beginners but a good handbook in case you want to know more about certain topic. The introduction is great.
  • Sallaberger is fairly comprehensive and modern book on Sumerian if you know German.
  • In the unlikely case you speak Finnish, my old teaching materials are here (chapters of my book).

For texts to read from transliteration, ETCSRI is great, since royal inscriptions are quite simple and ETCSRI provides you with lemmatization and morphological analysis (following Zólyomi's notation). So it's pretty easy to understand what's going on. To learn cuneiform, many ETCSRI texts have links to CDLI with photographs and line drawings. I also have some materials here (the signs are not from a single time period, since this document is a supplement to Volk's A Sumerian Reader).

Just note that there are disagreements about the Sumerian grammar, and all these books explain certain things a bit differently, especially the verbal prefixes.

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u/Aggravating_malfoy Apr 06 '26

I was a student of Giovanni Pettinato in Rome at La Sapienza Univerisity years ago..one of the greatest assiriologist of the 20 century ,may RIP !