Please read the text with an American Accent.
Archaeological discoveries have led some scholars to believe that the first Mesopotamian inventors of
writing may have been people the later Babylonians called Subarians. According to tradition, they came from
the north and moved into Uruk in the south. By about 3100 B.C, they were apparently subjugated in southern
Mesopotamia by the Sumerians, whose name became synonymous with the region immediately north of the
Persian Gulf, in the fertile lower valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. Here the Sumerians were already well
established by the year 3000B.C. They had invented bronze, an alloy that could be cast in molds, out of which
they made tools and weapons. They lived in cities, and they had begun to acquire and use capital. Perhaps
most important, the Sumerians adapted writing (probably from the Subarians) into a flexible tool of
communication.
Archacologists have known about the Sumerians for over 150 years. Archacologists working at Nineveh in
northern Mesopotamia in the mid-nineteenth century found many inscribed clay tablets. Some they could
decipher because the language was a Semitic one (Akkadian), on which scholars had already been working for
a generation. But other tablets were inscribed in another language that was not Semitic and previously
unknown. Because these inscriptions mad reference to the king of Sumer and Akkad, a scholar suggested that
the mew language be called Sumerian. But it was not until the 1890's that archaeologists excavating in
city-states well to the south of Nieveh found many thousands of tablets inscribed in Sumerian only. Because
the Akkadians thought of Sumerian as a classical language (as ancient Greek and Latin are considered today),
they taught it to educated persons and they inscribed vocabulary, translation exercised, and other study aids
on tablets. Working from known Akkadian to previously unknown Sumerian, scholars since the 1890's have
learned how to read the Sumerian language moderately well. Vast quantities of tablets in Sumerian have been
unearthed during the intervening years from numerous sites.
