For release 3 November 2026

The earliest known writers may not have spoken Sumerian, contrary to what the textbooks and most scholars say

Names on 5,000-year-old tablets from Uruk don't look like Sumerian names. Sumerian-style names only appear around 2800 BC, centuries after writing began.

The personal names recorded on some of the world's first written documents, clay tablets from Uruk in southern Iraq written around 3100 BC, do not follow the pattern of Sumerian names, according to an analysis published today by Mysteries Department, an open research platform for unsolved mysteries. Sumerian names use their stock parts, such as "king", "mother" and the names of gods, four to six times more often than ordinary words do. The Uruk names use them 1.35 times as often, barely more than chance.

The Sumerian pattern is fully present in the Archaic Ur texts of about 2800 BC, when the first spellings by sound also appear. An independent re-analysis, built from the raw data without access to the original code or results, reproduced the finding. The gap is not explained by the social class of the people named, by officials' names, or by an Akkadian naming pattern.

The result supports the view of Robert Englund, who edited most of these tablets, that the language of the first writers is unknown, against the long-standing assumption that they were Sumerian speakers. It does not identify their language, and no word of the tablets has yet been read as sound. The work is open research and has not been peer-reviewed; every test, dataset and result is public at mysteriesdept.com.