Reproduction of a hand-held carved stone that served as a real estate contract in ancient Sumeria circa 3000 BC. This reproduction was used in the instruction of museum curation.

About Sumerian Language and Cuneform:
During the 3rd millennium BC, an intimate cultural symbiosis developed between the Sumerians and the Semitic-speaking Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism. Sumerian and the East Semitic language Akkadian shared a mutual influence from lexical borrowing on a substantial scale to syntactic, morphological, and phonological convergence.

Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language around 2000 BC, but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary, and scientific language in Akkadian-speaking Mesopotamian states such as Assyria and Babylonia until the 1st century AD. Thereafter, it was likely forgotten until the 19th century, when Assyriologists began deciphering the cuneiform inscriptions and excavated tablets from archaeological sites.