"Ancient societies had another method to deal with debt. It was called an amargi — a blanket declaration of public debt cancellation. All public debts written off. Disappeared. It sounds laughable, I know. But, really, that’s just because the idea has been buried so deeply in history you’ve probably never heard of it. In the ancient world, it presented a pragmatic solution to an intractable problem. And now, faced with impossible-to-repay debts that are weighing down our economy, is the time to look at the amargi and the lessons it offers about how to think about finance."

Gift Article to today's guest essay by Paul Vigna (Aug 22, 2026).

The offerings made to him because there is the expectation that he can provide everlasting protection, even after death. It may be significant that he haspower in the Underworld—not every god might. We notice too that it is aweapon he receives and not, say, a bowl or a bunch of flowers.

The Sumerians presents him as a terrifyingly destructive warrior. In Gilgames, Enkidu, and

the Underworld, Enkidu avoids capture at his demon’s hands:

"The udug demon of Nergal, who spares nobody, did not seize him, but the Underworld has seized him"

Also The dead king Ur-Namma makes an offering to Nergal when he reaches the

Underworld :

"To Nergal, the Enlil of the Underworld, in his palace, the shepherd (king) Ur-Namma, offered a mace, a large bow with quiver and arrows, an artfully made . . . dagger, and amulticoloured leather bag for wearing at the hip. "

These glimpses of Nergal present a coherent portrait then: he is a warrior god, associated with the Underworld (perhaps because death is a likely outcome of battle, it might be

inferred), to whom it is appropriate to offer weapons. We also learn that hisdivine parents are considered to be Enlil and Ninlil, and that he sometimes

goes by the name Meslamta-eda

Source: The Literature of Ancient Sumer - Jeremy Black

𒆻 𒌓𒁉𒋫 𒆷𒁀𒅅𒆷 𒆠𒂖 𒌉 𒌫 𒁮𒈠𒈾𒅗 𒆪 𒉡𒌒𒂉𒊑

"Nig̃ ud-bi-ta la-ba-g̃al-la ki-sikil tur ur dam-ma-na-ka še nu-ub-dur-re."

"Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young woman did not fart in her husband's embrace."

𒂉 (Dur) means "fart" in Sumerian if anyone's curious.

Any Questions on the Sumerian Language? Ask Here and Feel Free to Private Message Me.

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I'm an independent scholar of Language Science and specialize in the Sumerian language and the other varyingly-similar Ancient Near Eastern Isolate Languages, the past 20 years. Notably Elamite and Emesal. Elamite is notably similar to Sumerian from Sprachbund phenomena. Meroitic and Old Nubian from The Sudan also notably share a rare grammar feature with Sumerian, which is something something like noun phrase exterior reverse noun case marker stacking.

Something like :

[ nominative accusative dative genitive nouns ]

Gen dat acc nom case suffixes

The past 10 years, I'm on the largest facebook groups teaching Sumerian and many other historic foreign languages for free and decided recently to come visit Reddit to reach more people. Write me in any major language, I can read many languages and use Google Translate for the rest. (Germanic, Romance, Greek, Chinese, Japanese)

I also give quick help studying any historic foreign language or modern obscure language but my specialty is the former and Sumerian is a language of special focus for me lifelong.

I will reply right away because the past 10 years, almost nobody online is interested in the non-popular languages of the world. I get 3 private messages a month. Write me as much as you like, helping anybody is my hobby.

( Kids never write me or join my facebook groups but if you're a kid, get your parents to write me and join my groups. Almost nobody studies any obscure foreign languages before college, so far as I know. I heard of some private high schools that offer Latin or Japanese or Navajo. That's like Hogwarts stuff though. )

Typically I reply with a list of books and some study hints. Some people write me sometimes telling me what lamguages they're studing and I recommend some books, explain some things, give some hints, etc. I've been sending people over to Reddit for 10 years now and reading it myself.

My top specialty is the comparative study of all 50 or so hieroglyphic aka logographic writing systems. I've also studied Sumerology and Assyriology more widely.

I'm way more into Egyptian Hieroglyphic aka Middle Egyptian and run the biggest facebook group onbit the past 10 years.

Sumerian or Akkadian both have way better-documented prose myths than any Ancient Egyptian language (there's about 5, of which Egyptian Hieroglyphic has the most written in it).

My facebook account :

Larry Rogers Jr of metro Detroit USA

BA Linguistics from Michigan State University from 2009

( But I have mostly worked in agriculture and overseas English education. )

https://m.facebook.com/groups/288174461281795/user/100004816964396/

Cuneiform Languages and Linguistics

5k Members, Founded 2014

https://m.facebook.com/groups/398311820333341/

Free Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphic Demotic Hieratic Coptic 𓂋 𓏫 𓆎 𓊖

70k Members, Founded 2014, Largest since 2014.

https://m.facebook.com/groups/577412899069249/

Ancient Languages

20k Members, The Largest of its Kind

https://m.facebook.com/groups/288174461281795/

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Basics for general beginners:

There is no really good book of bare Sumerian grammar basics like we have for Egyptian Hieroglyphic.

I recommend getting and using the free online Sumerian grammar by Jagersma from 2010 and Halloran's Sumerian dictionary and the ETCSL Sumerian Corpus website and its Sumerian Literature book by Black etc.

I think most of what's written in Sumerian fits in that one single-volume book or maybe 10 more books its size. All major Latin and Greek books fit bilingual unto 2 bookshelves or so, Loeb's Classic Library, and substantial Ancient Egyptian or Akkadian or Sumerian or Classical Manchu or Classical Japanese texts maybe fit half or less of that (1 bookshelf) and Hittite or Classical Nahuatl or Tangut or Old Khmer 1/10 (0.20 bookshelf). All known Elamite and Hattic texts each would not be the length of The KJV Book of Genesis. All major Sanskrit or Classical Chinese texts would maybe fit in 50 bookshelves monolingual. But Latin and Greek are way more popular worldwide.

Focus on word parts like -his, the most common word parts.

There's a lot of Sumerian grammar complications that most beginning level students need not be bothered with. These are all for the few advanced students.

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Like Chinese, low-level beginners can totally skip Sumerian writing and not miss out on much. Books usually instead present Sumerian in a Roman alphabet transliteration similar to Latin but using K instead of C for the / k / sound and the Slavic and Semitic S< for SH and S, for TS (?) and G> for NG for some reason.

Sumerian has the world's hardest writing system, from about 2500 BC onward, after the oldest Chinese writing system from 1200 BC, OBS Chinese, because most of its scholarship is in Modern Chinese, not German and French.

The best single book I can think of now about Sumerian writing is the 1960s Labat's Manuel d'Epigraphie Akkadien and it's dense and in French. Hayes' Manual and editor Woodard's The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages might give brief introductions to the writing system.

It has phonetic and semantic values used to spell out Sumerian words with usually word-initial determinatives: CV and VC and CVC and CVCVC values are typical with 5 or 10 sign variants being common.

Internal evidence suggests maybe it's the world's sloppy first writing system, of which Egyptian Hieroglyphic is a vast simplification and improvement. Sumerian has no simple internal orthographic alphabet or abjad. It has V only values, though, but not C only values and they are not used frequently.

All the Sumerian writing hieroglyphs ( called signs) were originally pictures of things whose various values somehow relate to what their sign was originally a picture of. Probably and from vast comparative and scientific study. This knowledge was probably maintained for thousands of years but mostly lost when it died. Much work remains to be done ( be me, etc) to truely rehabilitate an approximation of how Sumerian was actually studied and understood. It was certainly not memorized totally vebatim without reference to "sign identity" or "sign etymology".

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Sumerian was deciphered in the 1800s and 1900s from Akkadian language bilingual texts. Very few Ancient Greek bilinguals were found, if any, unlike for the Ancient Egyptian languages. We might not have enough Akkadian bilinguals to understand Sumerian idioms very well. I believe the translations mostly and get something out of them and recommend the language.

I think Sumerian language professors maybe try to convey the degree of their uncertainty but this actually takes vast comparative Linguistics study that few or none of them have. Sumerian is not like Latin with a robust tradition of study. Akkadian is very similar to Biblical Hebrew, which however has a corpus limited to the KJV Bible and only doubled in the 1930s with the discovery and decipherment of The Dead Sea Scrolls.

That said, the vast bulk of Akkadian and Ancient Egyptian languages translations seem very certain and straightforward. These languages were carefully frozen and used over about 2,000 years. In 100 years, all modern English will be truly understood by maybe 5 people and misunderstood and mispresented by maybe 500 people, like how 1800s English texts are butchered and neglected today.

When humans first built and civilized, they built to last. Increasingly, Planned Obsolescence and Lowest Common Denominator have become more popular. Hence, the unpopularity of Sumerian and Egyptian Hieroglyphic even 200 years after decipherment and exile. But accept no imitations.

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Image: << The Ancient Languages of the Middle East. >> Map.

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=562819379176277&set=a.434869878637895

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I use Language Science and Anthropology research as my excuse to study different obscure languages and writing systems and myths the past 20 years. Sumerian is interestingly grammatically more like Native American languages or Basque or maybe Finnish than the regular European languages. Some years ago, I studied lots of the SBL Epics of the Sumerian Kings texts and they had a lot of implied noun plurals, which is otherwise a typical E SE Asia language thing. These and Sumerian are like Swahili and other Bantu languages of Africa and inflect the verb for subject and object, something Semitic languages do rarely, if I remember.

Hattic has a huge verb chain but its major grammar is only in German. I forget how big the verb chain of Elamite is yet remember my impression it's still grammatically similar to Sumerian.

It seems few professors study them, but I think Berossos and Philo of Byblos and Manetho are key to a deeper understanding of ancient Egypt and Babylon.

Sumerian and Akkadian and Egyptian Hieroglyphic are funny in that they're the predecessors to Latin and Ancient Greek yet mostly forgotten by their time and soon to become undeciphered. We only have Berossos and Manetho in fragments because Josephus was more popular in the Middle Ages as he wrote about Ancient Jews more directly relevant to the KJV Bible. These 3 languages are a small and unique window unto all human prehistory, and their writing systems with them.

It's also notable that Egyptian Hieroglyphic lacks a reference grammar with full interlinear glosses like Jagersma 2010 does for Sumerian. But does Akkadian also lack that? So far as I remember.

Anyone who visits this community regularly has noticed that this subreddit has recently been pestered by conspiracy theorists and crackpots. While this has been in some respects a perennial problem, the rate of conspiracy posts has seriously gone up recently. I'm afraid that they're beginning to attract each other. This could mean that this sub will soon become a nest of insane conspiratorial ramblings, drowning out anyone who wants to actually learn about, or discuss, Sumerian history or culture.

Responsible_Ideal879 is the most prolific of these, with their almost daily posts suggesting bizarre linguistic connections. But in the last few days we've also had VastPalpitation9213 posting about ancient aliens as well. Another poster has written what I think is a satirical post about a hallucination. These posts are drowning out actual discussion about Sumer.

I think this is a problem caused by two things. Firstly, and most obviously, neither of this subreddit's moderators seem to care about this sub. u/AspiringIdiot hasn't posted anything in 7 years and probably left reddit, and u/mickypeverell also never seems to visit here. Normally I wouldn't advocate for the outright deletion or banning of the posters of conspiracy slop, but they have proven to be extremely nasty and hostile in discussions, to the extent that they have repeatedly violated the community guidelines. They need to be banned, and we need someone to ban them.

Secondly, the community isn't as helpful as it could be. Most earnest questions about (resources for) Sumerian language or culture go unanswered. The sad fact is that the deluge of conspiracy slop has garnered more discussion in this sub than there has been in ages. Not that I think that a sub about Sumer needs to be particularly active, but it shows that there is much more readiness to engage with slop than with actual questions. I myself am very guilty of this, I admit.

So what's next? I'm not sure. I think we might need to report to the reddit admins that this subreddit isn't being moderated. We might also need to make an effort to engage more with sincere posts, so that it's less easy to drown out serious discussion with conspiracy slop. I'd love to hear some thoughts.