The Making of Sumerians: Language, literature, and politics

There was no such a thing as a Sumerian ethnic identity in the third millennium BCE. There was a language called Sumerian, which was spoken in the southernmost region of Mesopotamia (Sumer). It is after this language ceased to be anyone's mother tongue, by the end of the third millennium, that a concerted process of cultural production of Sumerian literature began. This scenario coincides with the displacement of the centers of power towards the north, outside Sumer.
The rather systematic and curricular textualization of preexisting literary and scholastic traditions, as well as the creation of new compositions, might have started already in the early second millennium, during the Isin period. However, a particular impetus seems to lie behind the texts found at sites like Nippur, Larsa, and Ur. This was the impetus to help create a southern identity, rooted in the Sumerian literary tradition, as part of the growing political discontent that eventually led to the southern rebellion against Samsu-iluna (ca. 1742 BCE).
The writing and transmission of Sumerian literature in the Old Babylonian period was part of an ideological project to reclaim a Southern polity that preceded the Dynasty of Hammurabi and Samsu-iluna in Babylon. Southern elites must have felt compelled to assert their Sumerianness precisely after the Sumerian language had died out and the center of power had shifted from the south to Babylon in the early second millennium. By doing so, they were forging a Sumerian identity of sorts. Those Southern Mesopotamian elites four millennia ago were essentializing a set of linguistic and geographical variables and thus making Sumerian into a metaphor for a bygone glory that endured only on the surface of clay tablets.

Dr. Rubio is an Assyriologist whose work focuses on the languages and literatures of Ancient Mesopotamia (Sumerian & Akkadian). He has published a number of scholarly contributions on Sumerian grammar and literature, early Semitic languages (including Eblaite), comparative Semitic linguistics, and various linguistic, literary, and historical aspects of Ancient Mesopotamia, as well as the Ancient Near East in general. His interests also cover cultural contacts in the Ancient Mediterranean, Anatolian studies, and comparative literature.

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