Everyone who is slightly interested in a relatively broad field has a specialization, even if it is only accidental. Because with the wealth of sources and scholarship that is fairly accessibly available to many, but far from enough, aficionados today, even an expert would struggle to study and read everything that is relevant to their personal quest for knowledge – barring them being exceptional and lucky enough to make their money through their preferred kind of research. And as the years have gone by, I have found that I almost absentmindedly stumbled into my own niche: the environmental humanities and therein the role of forests in ancient stories. But to find a specific natural phenomenon in those tales of the deep past that have come down to us is by no means easy.¹ Primarily because ancient languages can hardly ever be translated without caveats. And to illustrate these often inevitable difficulties when trying to scour our sources for the precise subject that we are interested in, I want to introduce you today to the conundrum of searching for forests in the tales that were written in the ancient Sumerian language.

We have of course run into this ancient tongue in earlier blogs on ancient Mesopotamia, which is the name we use for Iraq and the adjacent parts of Syria and Türkiye in the deep past. Sumerian was, as far as we can establish, one of the oldest languages ever written, and is not related to any other language – living or dead – that we know of.² Sumerian is still not entirely understood today and many of our troubles stem from the preferred writing system: the cuneiform script. Particularly, because cuneiform texts could have multiple meanings – tell various stories, even! – depending on all possible different readings of the cuneiform signs that were used.³ And all these peculiar characteristics of our ancient texts in Sumerian come to the fore when we are looking for forests.

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Straightforward Sumerian

Despite the strides made in our understanding of Sumerian over the last few decades, some nuances to the meanings that were once attributed to certain words may still elude us.⁴ We can nonetheless discern with some confidence at least one proper word that was used to denote forests. The word TIR, which was read as ‘forest’ but could also be translated as ‘mud’ or ‘wood’ more generally.⁵

I would be amiss, if I neglected to also mention the word GILIM, which can be translated as ‘foliage’.⁶ But this word is rare and it primarily appears in reference to bundles of reed.⁷ It is not strange that the term is associated with forests, though. Because some of the environments that we would not call forests today, like reed fields and thickets, could grow so large and impregnable in ancient West-Asia that a visit would have given a similar experience as exploring an actual forest!⁸

The Forests for the Trees

This leaves an apparently small arsenal when one wants to talk about forests. But there was an additional way to express that one was communicating about forests in Sumerian: forests are regularly indicated by mentioning the name of the trees that they consisted of. As such, the name of individual trees can be relevant if and when they are used to denote a forest. A reference to cedar trees could, for example, used to write about a cedar forest.⁹

Here the word ĜIŠ becomes important. This term denoted ‘tree’ and ‘wood’. But the cuneiform sign with which ĜIŠ was written, confusingly often referred to by that same word, also functioned as a determinative marker. That is to say, it signaled that the following word had to do with trees or that something was made of wood.¹⁰ The word for forest, TIR, was often preceded by the sign ĜIŠ as used in this capacity. Furthermore, there are alternative general words for tree or wood, like PEŠKAL. These could, at least in theory, be relevant when we want to read about forests or the trees that constitute them. But such alternative terms are mostly found in lexical or vocabulary lists and do not appear in any of the stories on forests that are known to me.¹¹ What’s more, it is debated whether such terms originated in everyday speech or that they were a scholarly invention that was used in the aforementioned lexical lists to explore the intricacies of language and the nature of the world.¹² As such, the trees denoted with these words were more of a philosophical construct!

The Emesal-dialect

As if the preceding was not complicated enough, not uncommon when it comes to Sumerian, there is also the matter of the Emesal-dialect. This form of the Sumerian language is, if we confine ourselves to relative certainties, is textually attested from roughly the beginning of the second millennium BCE onward. At first Emesal appears to have been primarily used for lamentations and for rendering passages with divine speech. During the first millennium BCE the dialect is employed more broadly and became more generally seen as the language of the gods.¹³

In the Emesal-dialect, among other characteristics, many expected Sumerian words are substituted with other words. Thus Emesal had a different vocabulary than ‘standard’ Sumerian. The aforementioned Sumerian word ĜIŠ has a cognate in the Emesal-dialect of that language: MU. When we encounter the phrase ĜIŠ in Emesal, it is therefore probably just a syllable in a longer word and not the word for ‘tree’ and ‘wood’, nor a determinative for trees and wooden objects!¹⁴ In addition, some trees also have names in this dialect. Like MAŠ.GURUM, maybe a tree or bush with edible fruits.¹⁵ The existence of these words and names tells us that we can establish when in (fragments of) stories in the Emesal-dialect we encounter trees, both in general and specific species, which may point us to a forest.

Mind the Vowels

When you, after being inspired by the foregoing, pick up your nearest Sumerian dictionary or word list – which one should always keep close, after all – you may be in for a nasty surprise: the words that I discussed above are sometimes not in their expected place! And this is not your fault, nor mine for that matter. But as different scholars of Sumerian diverge in their reading of the cuneiform script when it comes to this language, the way they transliterate the words that have to do with forests in the Latin alphabet can also be distinctive. Especially when it comes to vowels. And in their defense, vowels were sometimes ambiguously written as well as regularly adjusted to the other vowels in a given word.¹⁶ And this vowel viscosity also has consequences for our words for forests, trees, and wood.

Because no scholarly debate on this matter is perhaps as contentious as the discussion on when we should read certain vowels as /i/ or /e/. As you might have guessed, this specifically makes the words TIR and ĜIŠ sometimes hard to find when they are rendered as TER and ĜEŠ.¹⁷ Mark Cohen explains his decision to transliterate these kinds of words with /e/ instead of /i/ primarily with reference to the aforementioned lexical or vocabulary lists. And especially those wherein the vowels are spelled pleene – that is, with extra clarification. Though he also notes that these lists can be contradictory, represent merely the views in certain specific times, places, and traditions, and are mostly not from the period that Sumerian was still spoken but from the time that it was a dead language utilized in ancient scholarship.¹⁸ As many of the scribes of these lexical lists, which primarily provide our knowledge of Sumerian phonemes, spoke the unrelated Akkadian as their first language, we are dependent on the way /i/ and /e/ were treated in the various phases and dialects of the Akkadian language for their rendering of Sumerian vowels.¹⁹ In this blog, I have opted to retain the /i/ for relevant Sumerian words, because of how /i/ and /e/ are mostly treated in Akkadian – it is sadly inevitable – and to connect readers better to the already existing secondary literature.

Conclusion: All Data Matters

Let me divulge to you the least surprising secret in the world: I really like reading dictionaries of ancient languages, especially those with copious examples from actual texts. And as an excuse to do so this week, I decided to provide an older blog on the words for forest in the venerable Ugaritic language with the present sequel on the difficulties when trying to find words for ‘forest’ in ancient Sumerian. But our search for forests in Sumerian was no mere intellectual exercise. It showed us part of the methodology modern scholars and scientists use when trying to establish ancient biomes.

When it comes to looking for the forests of antiquity, our texts are naturally – pun intended – only one of the avenues available to contemporary researchers. There is also the hard data, which modern technology helps us to collect. Through the observed connections between, for example, contemporary ice cores and pollen with our modern day environments, we can find information about the forests of antiquity by dissecting ancient ice cones and pollen.²⁰ And while studying Sumerian, we do something similar. We use modern linguistic insights and ditto comparisons in order to find the words for the ancient biomes that we want to gather knowledge about, like forests. As such, I hope that even those who do not read dictionaries for fun have learned something valuable and exciting today!

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References

1. Daniel T. Potts, “Babylonian Sources of Exotic Raw Materials”, in: Gwendolyn Leick (ed.), The Babylonian World (Abbingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 131.
2. Piotr Michalowski, “Sumerian”, in: Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), p. 85-86.
3. Marc van de Mieroop, Philosophy before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia (PrincetonL Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 9-10.
4. Abraham H. Jagersma, A Descriptive Grammar of Sumerian (Leiden: Dissertation Leiden University, 2010), p. 10–11.
5. Mark E. Cohen, An Annotated Sumerian Dictionary (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2023), p. 1348; Pascal Attinger, Glossaire Sumérien-Français: Principalement Des Textes Littéraires Paléobabyloniens (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2021), p. 1038.
6. Cohen, An Annotated Sumerian Dictionary, p. 480.
7. A. Leo Oppenheim et al. (reds.), The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago – Volume 5 (G) (Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1995), p. 141.
8. Anna Perdibon, Mountains and Trees, Rivers and Springs: Animistic Beliefs and Practices in Ancient Mesopotamian Religion (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2019), p. 43; Julian Evans, God’s Trees: Trees, Forests and Wood in the Bible: An Illustrated Commentary and Compendium (Leominster: Day One Publications, 2014), p. 99, 103. And during autumn these reeds did develop wood-like stalks, see: Bhlahoslav Hruška, “Agricultural Techniques”, in: Gwendolyn Leick (ed.), The Babylonian World (Abbingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 56.
9. The phrase ‘cedar mountain’ is a clear example thereof, see: Perdibon, Mountains and Trees, Rivers and Springs, p. 44, 76-68.
10. Jagersma, A Descriptive Grammar of Sumerian, p. 16.
11. Cohen, An Annotated Sumerian Dictionary, p. 1069. It is tempting to make a connection with the word ^ĜIŠPEŠ₃, which means ‘fig tree’ or denotes a wooden container, see: John A. Halloran, Sumerian Lexicon: A Dictionary Guide to the Ancient Sumerian Language (Los Angeles: Logogram Publishing, 2006), p. 215. And perhaps this is the inspiration for the world PEŠKAL in our lexical lists. But note that the syllable PEŠ in PEŠKAL is written with the cuneiform sign GIR, while the syllable PEŠ₃ in ^ĜIŠPEŠ₃ is written with the rather different cuneiform sign MA, see: Rykle Borger, Mesopotamisches Zeichenlexikon (Münster: Ugarit Verlag, 2003), p. 361-362, 364. In addition, PEŠ₃ – particularly when it is written as MU-PEŠ₃ – may be an entry in the Emesal-dialect that I discuss below. But I could find no indication that PEŠKAL was (meant as) anything other than ‘standard’ Sumerian, see: Cohen, An Annotated Sumerian Dictionary, p. 1068-1069; Attinger, Glossaire Sumérien-Français, p. 495, note 1344.
12. Van de Mieroop, Philosophy before the Greeks, p. 37.
13. Van de Mieroop, Before and after Babel: Writing as Resistance in Ancient Near Eastern Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), p. 134.
14. Cohen, An Annotated Sumerian Dictionary, p. 909; Jagersma, A Descriptive Grammar of Sumerian, p. 9.
15. Cohen, An Annotated Sumerian Dictionary, p. 909; Halloran, Sumerian Lexicon, p. 170.
16. Jagersma, A Descriptive Grammar of Sumerian, p. 55-56.
17. Cohen, An Annotated Sumerian Dictionary, p. 377, 1348; Attinger, Glossaire Sumérien-Français, p. 489, 1038.
18. Cohen, An Annotated Sumerian Dictionary, p. vii. Zie ook: Attinger, Glossaire Sumérien-Français, p. 62.
19. Jagersma, A Descriptive Grammar of Sumerian, p. 56.
20. Simone Riehl, “Stable Isotope Analysis in the Middle East: Understanding the Reasons for Non-Sustainability in Past Agricultural Systems”, in: Susanne Kerner, Rachael J. Dann & Pernille Bangsgaard (eds.), Climate and Ancient Societies: Causes and Human Responses (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2015), p. 294; Paul Erdkamp, “A Historian’s Introduction to Paleoclimatology”, in: Paul Erdkamp, Joseph Gilbert Manning & Koenraad Verboven (eds.), Climate Change and Ancient Societies in Europe and the Near East: Diversity in Collapse and Resilience (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), p. 2-5,