Sumerian

The civilization we call Sumerian never used that name for itself. The people who built Ur, Uruk, and Nippur called their land kalam, a word meaning roughly the civilized land, and themselves sag-gig-ga, a phrase meaning the black-headed people. Their northern neighbors, the Akkadians, called the southern region Sumeru, a name of uncertain meaning that may derive from an earlier toponym. This Akkadian word is the direct ancestor of every modern use of Sumer and Sumerian.

After Sumer's political dominance ended around 2000 BCE, the name survived in Akkadian administrative texts as a geographic and historical reference. The Babylonians and Assyrians continued to use the formula mat Sumeri u Akkadi, land of Sumer and Akkad, long after anyone still spoke Sumerian as a living language. Sumerian itself became a prestige tongue for scribal schools, studied and written by Babylonian scribes much as medieval European monks studied Latin centuries after it ceased to be spoken.

In 1869, the French Assyriologist Jules Oppert proposed to colleagues at the Congres International des Orientalistes in Paris that the unknown language appearing alongside Akkadian in cuneiform tablets should be called Sumerian, after the Akkadian toponym. The proposal was adopted within a decade. It gave European scholars a name for a civilization that would prove to be older than Egypt, with the earliest known writing system and the world's first identifiable literary tradition.

The word Sumerian thus has a layered origin: a place named in a language no longer recoverable, renamed by Akkadians as Sumeru, preserved in later Mesopotamian administrative writing, then recovered by French philologists in 1869 and anglicized with the suffix -ian. The civilization it names is the source of the 60-second minute and the 360-degree circle. It also left the oldest surviving flood narrative, the story that predates Noah by more than a thousand years.