The word “mesopotamia” is formed from the ancient words “meso,” meaning between or in the middle of, and “potamos,” meaning river. Situated in the fertile valleys between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the region is now home to modern-day Iraq, Kuwait, Turkey and Syria.

southwestern Asia

Euphrates River, Turkish Fırat Nehri, Arabic Nahr Al-Furāt, river, Middle East. The longest river in southwest Asia, it is 1,740 miles (2,800 km) long, and it is one of the two main constituents of the Tigris-Euphrates river system. The river rises in Turkey and flows southeast across Syria and through Iraq.

Euphrates: From the Caucasus Mtns of Armenia, it flows southwesterly across east-central Turkey, then generally southeast through Syria and Iraq, ending in the waters of the Persian Gulf. It joins with the Tigris in southern Iraq, and from that junction continues on as the Shatt al Arab.

In the earliest recorded times, the northern portion was included in Mesopotamia; it was marked off as Assyria after the rise of the Assyrian monarchy. Apart from Assur, the original capital of Assyria, the chief cities of the country, Nineveh, Kalaḫ and Arbela, were all on the east bank of the Tigris.

Babylonia was a state in ancient Mesopotamia. The city of Babylon, whose ruins are located in present-day Iraq, was founded more than 4,000 years ago as a small port town on the Euphrates River.

Mesopotamia

Later, the term Mesopotamia was more generally applied to all the lands between the Euphrates and the Tigris, thereby incorporating not only parts of Syria but also almost all of Iraq and southeastern Turkey.

The Akkadian Empire ruled over both the Akkadian and Sumerian speakers in Mesopotamia and the Levant—modern day Syria and Lebanon. The Empire of Akkad collapsed in 2154 BCE, within 180 years of its founding.

The principal languages of ancient Mesopotamia were Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian (together sometimes known as ‘Akkadian’), Amorite, and – later – Aramaic. They have come down to us in the “cuneiform” (i.e. wedge-shaped) script, deciphered by Henry Rawlinson and other scholars in the 1850s.

What are the World’s Oldest Languages?

• Korean.
• Hebrew.
• Aramaic.
• Chinese.
• Greek.
• Egyptian.
• Sanskrit.
• Tamil. By order of appearance, Tamil would be considered the world’s oldest language as it is over 5,000 years old, having made its first appearance in 3,000 BC.

Sumerian language

This page shows equivalents of ‘hello’ or similar general greetings in many languages. Note: some languages have different ways of saying hello on the telephone….Hello in many languages.

Babylonian was the ancient language during the time of the Mesopotamian empire which dominated vast swathes of the Middle east for two millennia. It went extinct around the time of Jesus and hasn’t been used for around 2,000 years but a University of Cambridge professor has revived the deceased dialect.

Habari means “hi” or “hello.” We use it when we meet people. We can use this greeting with friends or relatives, but also with people we don’t know. And the formal way of greeting people is Shikamoo! Jioni is Swahili for “evening,” so Habari ya jioni means “good evening.”

The traditional route to learning Sumerian is to learn Akkadian first. This helps overcome the first major hurdle in acquiring the language, namely, the cuneiform writing system. (Beginners may also find it helpful to look at J. L. Hayes’s Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts [Undena; Large PJ4013 .

How hard is the Sumerian language? The primary difficulty is learning the writing system (cuneiform), but that’s true of learning Egyptian or Chinese (and languages which adopted the Chinese system). As for grammar and syntax, Sumerian is no harder than, oh, Japanese.

Most experts agree that Sumerian is the oldest known written language. Sumerian was spoken in southern Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) from around the 4th millennium BC until 2,000 BC. The Sumerian language was not discovered until after its cuneiforms were deciphered.

As for Sumerian phonology, like the thread in r/linguistics suggests, we don’t really have a very clear idea on how it would’ve been pronounced. Scholars can make guesses on the basis of linguistic derivation in Akkadian dialects, but that’s an uncertain process at best.

Others have suggested that the Sumerians were a North African people who migrated from the Green Sahara into the Middle East and were responsible for the spread of farming in the Middle East.

77 The mortals were indeed the Sumerians, a non-Semitic racial type that conquered southern Babylonia, and the deities were Semitic, taken over by the newly arrived Sumerians from the indigenous Semites.

After Mesopotamia was occupied by the Amorites and Babylonians in the early second millennium B.C., the Sumerians gradually lost their cultural identity and ceased to exist as a political force. All knowledge of their history, language and technology—even their name—was eventually forgotten.

Sumer, site of the earliest known civilization, located in the southernmost part of Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in the area that later became Babylonia and is now southern Iraq, from around Baghdad to the Persian Gulf.

The civilizations that emerged around these rivers are among the earliest known non-nomadic agrarian societies. It is because of this that the Fertile Crescent region, and Mesopotamia in particular, are often referred to as the cradle of civilization.

Ethiopia