#sumerian numbers

Hello, and thank you for the kind words! Unfortunately, both of these translations are a bit complicated in Sumerian.

"Dragon" is easy, ushumgal 𒃲𒁔, and "year" is mu 𒈬. The issue is with "thousand", which is not a nice round number in Sumerian like it is in English. Precisely, it'd be ngeshu-ngesh-ash-nimin - 600 + 60 x 6 + 40. Instead, I'd just use ngeshu 𒐞 "600" to make either ushumgalmungeshu 𒃲𒁔𒈬𒐞 "dragon of 600 years" or ushumgal mungeshua 𒃲𒁔𒈬𒐞𒀀 "dragon in (i.e. during) 600 years".

The basic word for "sand" is sahar 𒅖. The word for "time" is a 𒀉, though it more often means "a specific/set time" or "an instance". Instead, I'd use ul 𒌌 "distant time; old ancient" to make saharula 𒅖𒌌𒆷 "sands of distant time".

Oh, I understand! (Original reply here.) Yes, people in Mesopotamia used base 6x10 in regular life, there was no "other" system recorded anywhere. Use of base 10, in particular, is nowhere near as universal as modern standardized systems spread by European colonial powers would make it seem.

Hello! "Base 60" is a simplification of how Sumerian place value worked - really it's more an alternation of base 10 and base 6. In English, our "round numbers" are multiples of ten, so hundred, thousand, million etc.

The Sumerian round numbers are 10 u, then 10x6 = 60 ngesh, then 60x10 = 600 ngeshu, then 600x6 = 3600 shar, then 3600x10 = 36,000 sharu, then 36,000x6 = 216,000 sharngesh. This pattern may have continued, but I don't know the names for any bigger place values until 12,960,000, shargalshunutagga "untouchable number", which was basically used to mean "infinity, number too large to matter" rather than in actual mathematics.

Unfortunately, how exactly the specific numbers between these would be named is somewhat unclear, and they may not have had fixed names for each number up to 216,000 and beyond. For example, 36,000 is sharu, but that's also how 3,610 would be said (shar + u).

If you mean grammatically, numbers are treated like any other adjective, following the noun they modify: uduu "ten sheep", udusharngesh "216,000 sheep". By and large, if a nonhuman noun is modified by a number, it is not marked as plural in any other way, with the number making obvious that it's plural.

Hello! Plurality in Sumerian is a little more complicated than you might at first expect.

For person nouns, like son/daughter or the like, there is a plural suffix -(e)ne. It appears as -ene after a consonant (ninene "sisters") and just -ne after a vowel (dumune "children"). However, this only appears in certain cases, like the ergative case (subject of a transitive sentence); it doesn't appear in the absolutive case (the base case), in which case plurality is generally unmarked on the noun, but can be indicated by verb conjugation instead (dumu shir "the child sings", dumu shiresh "the children sing").

And -(e)ne can't be used at all for non-person-class nouns, like objects, plants and animals, ideas, etc. Instead, plurality is most often just implied: ab "cow" or "cows". You can pluralize by reduplicating the noun, i.e. saying it twice, but this generally emphasizes the plurality in some way. So abab would mean "lots of cows". (This type of pluralization is also used occasionally for person nouns - dumudumu "numerous children" - but I wouldn't use it if I could instead use -(e)ne).

Hello, and thanks for the kind words!

You're on the right track. Kaskal 𒆜 is "way, journey, caravan" and kur 𒆳 is "underworld" (as well as "mountain"), and these two words appear in the opening lines of Inanna's Descent, the primary story of such a journey in Sumerian literature. To put them together into "journey to the underworld", we'd have to put kur in the terminative case, equivalent to "to, towards, into" in English - so the phrase would be kaskal kurshe 𒆜 𒆳𒂠.

Here's where we run into a tricky spot. In English, cardinal numbers (one, two, three...) and ordinal numbers (first, second, third...) are very different. But in Sumerian, they generally look identical - the counting number for "one" and the word for "first" are both dish 𒁹. (Some theorize that they were pronounced differently, but they were always written identically so our best guess is that they were the same.) "Two" and "second" are both min(a) 𒈫.

I know there's Sharur which means Smasher of Thousands but what about the other big numbers like Smasher of Tens, Thousands etc? Can I get a translation please? 🥺

Silim! Sharur 𒊹𒃡 is the name of a divine weapon owned by the god Ninurta, derived from ur 𒃡 "to destroy, mow down, erase, clear away" and shar 𒊹, literally the number 3,600 but also used to mean "a lot, totality, all". The Sumerian number system operated very differently from our own, but you could presumably swap in other round numbers, as in uur 𒌋𒃡 "smasher of ten", ngeshur 𒁹𒃡 "smasher of sixty", shargalur 𒐲𒃡 "smasher of 216,000".

Hello! (Here’s the prior ask.) 3600 in Sumerian is anything but an arbitrary number! But to explain why, I have to give a little more information on the Sumerian number system.

In our era, we use a base-ten number system, where the big, round numbers (place values) are ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, etc. Sumerians used a different system, with alternating base 10 and base 6. So their first round number was 10 (u 𒌋), but the next was 10x6 = 60 (ngesh 𒐕), then 60x10 = 600 (ngeshu 𒐞), then 600x6 = 3600 (shar 𒊹). The system continued on up, with sharu 36,000, shargal 216,000, etc.

Why would they use a number system like this? Well, it has a major advantage over our system, which is that 60 has a lot of factors. You can divide it by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30 - very useful for dividing something up into any number of groups you want. By comparison, 100 can only be divided by 2, 5, 10, 20, 25 and 50, a paltry set of options!

For most people, it’s rare they’d encounter a number as big as 3600, so it was useful as a term for “big number”, eventually coming to mean “all, totality”. Other ancient languages did similarly, as in ancient Greek, which used μυριάς “ten thousand” to mean “a whole lot, more than anyone needs to count” (and the origin of our word myriad). In English we often use “a million” this way, with “one in a million” meaning “a very tiny chance”.