Sumerian Translator

What is Sumerian?

Sumerian is the oldest written language we know. It was spoken in southern Mesopotamia, in what is now southern Iraq, and written in cuneiform from about 3200 BC. The Sumerians built the first cities, among them Uruk, Ur and Lagash, and their scribes recorded everything from beer rations to hymns and the first law codes.

Sumerian is a language isolate: it is not related to Akkadian, Hebrew, Arabic or any living language. It stopped being spoken around 2000–1800 BC but stayed in use as a language of religion and scholarship for nearly two thousand years, much as Latin did in Europe.

This translator turns English words and set phrases into Sumerian and shows each one in cuneiform signs with the standard transliteration, so you can see both the wedges and how scholars read them.

How to use the Sumerian translator

1. Type or paste English. Up to 500 characters per translation on the free credits: a name, a motto, a message or a short passage.
2. Pick the direction. English → Sumerian is the default. Press ⇄ to read Sumerian words back into English.
3. Press Translate (or Ctrl + Enter). The result appears at once, with a reading line where the script needs one.
4. Listen. Press 🔊 Listen to hear it. Where your device has no voice for this language, it reads the transliteration with the closest voice and says “approximate”.
5. Copy it and read the notes under the result: they name any word we kept in English.

How the Sumerian translator works

This translator runs on our own server from a Sumerian dictionary and a set of grammar rules written for this language. It does not send your text to an outside service or an AI model, so results are instant and the same every time. The dictionary holds 120 words, 55 set phrases.

For each sentence it first looks for the longest known phrase, then translates word by word and applies the rules below:

• Sumerian words in cuneiform signs with the standard transliteration
• divine names marked with the 𒀭 (dingir) sign
• set phrases and royal titles from real inscriptions (lugal kur-kur)
• grammatical affixes are not added, so sentences read as a word list

Examples: real Sumerian output

These results come straight from the tool, unedited:

Names, and any word the dictionary does not have, are kept as you wrote them and listed in the notes, so you never get an invented word.

Is this the best Sumerian translator?

Google Translate and DeepL do not offer Sumerian. General AI chatbots can produce text that looks right but contains invented words. This tool takes the opposite approach: every word comes from a checked dictionary entry, every ending from a written rule, and anything unknown is flagged instead of guessed. Short phrases, names, mottos and greetings come out best. For long passages, poetry or anything permanent such as a tattoo, use the result as a solid first draft and have it checked by someone who reads the language.

Common Sumerian words and phrases

Core Sumerian words with their cuneiform signs. Transliterations follow the conventions of the electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary (ePSD).

History and origins

The first proto-cuneiform tablets, from Uruk around 3300–3200 BC, are accounts of grain, sheep and workers. Over the next centuries the pictures turned into wedge-shaped signs that could write sounds as well as words, and Sumerian scribes began to record royal inscriptions, letters, proverbs and literature.

After about 2350 BC the Akkadian Empire brought a Semitic language, Akkadian, into everyday use. Sumerian slowly died out as a spoken language, but scribes kept copying and studying it. The famous bilingual word lists that Babylonian scribes compiled are one reason we can read Sumerian today. The last cuneiform tablets date from the 1st century AD.

Writing system

Cuneiform was written by pressing a cut reed into wet clay. Each sign is made of wedges, and a sign can stand for a whole word (a logogram), a syllable, or a silent classifier called a determinative. The star-shaped sign 𒀭 placed before a name, for example, marks it as a god.

Scholars transliterate signs in lower case with numbers to tell apart signs that sound alike: du₃ (to build) and du (to go) are different signs. Our Cuneiform Translator spells names sign by sign; this translator gives real Sumerian words.

How Sumerian sounded

We know Sumerian sounds only through later Akkadian scribes and loanwords, so pronunciation is a reconstruction. It probably had the vowels a, e, i and u, and consonants including ĝ (the ng sound in “sing”) and ḫ (like the ch in Scottish “loch”). Words were built by adding many prefixes and suffixes to a root, and the verb came at the end of the sentence.

Famous texts

• The Kesh Temple Hymn and the Instructions of Shuruppak, among the oldest literature on Earth (about 2600 BC).
• The Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, which later fed into the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh.
• The hymns of Enheduanna, priestess of Ur and the first author known by name.
• The Code of Ur-Nammu (about 2100 BC), the oldest surviving law code.
• The Sumerian King List.

Is Sumerian still used today?

No. Sumerian has had no native speakers for about 4,000 years. It is studied at universities, and a handful of English words may go back to it through Akkadian and Greek: “abyss” is often linked to Sumerian abzu, the freshwater ocean of Enki.

How to learn Sumerian

Start with the signs: John Halloran’s Sumerian Lexicon and the ePSD list words with their cuneiform. Then use a grammar such as Dietz Otto Edzard’s Sumerian Grammar (2003). The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL, University of Oxford) has hundreds of texts with English translations.

Before you use a translation for a tattoo, motto or gift

• Expect a word list, not a sentence. Sumerian grammar lives in prefixes and suffixes that this tool does not build, so a sentence comes out as its key words.
• Keep the dingir sign 𒀭 before gods’ names; it is part of how they were written.
• Check the signs against the ePSD before carving or tattooing them. Many signs look alike.
• See boxes? Your device lacks a cuneiform font; the page loads one for the result, and you can install the free Noto Sans Cuneiform.

Sources

Electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary (ePSD); Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, University of Oxford; John A. Halloran, Sumerian Lexicon (2006); Dietz Otto Edzard, Sumerian Grammar (2003).