Sumerian Cuneiform English Dictionary Paperback – August 30, 2014

Cuneiform is a fascinating script beginning in ancient Mesopotamia. It is difficult to find books on translation and this is a cheap and usable book.

Ok so learning a new language takes work. But a simple quick start would be helpful and motivating. Think learning music- a simple song. Since you are learning pictographic meaning it would be nice to give a few quick read symbols and then the grammar etc

Nonconformist through and through, this dictionary - among very few to offer Sumerian roots and words not only in their transliterated form but together with their cuneiform written original form - gives a lesson to etymologists who too often state that the etymology they analyze is obscure. The obscurity is most of the times due to the fact that Western lexicographers stop their search to the Latin and Greek etyma. This dictionary goes all the way down to very ancient roots, showing that living languages spoken in the West (including English) today have their origin in the language(s) spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, the territory defined by one of the best sumerologist to date, Samuel Noah Kramer, as being the cradle of civilization. I hope that this is only the beginning of a much larger work, that could integrate the entire vast Sumero-Akkadian heritage (to note is in this sense that the monumental Assyrian Dictionary, published by the Oriental Institute of Chicago University Press, whose 26th final volume was finished just a few years ago, has no cuneiforms in it, which makes it rather impossible for any one who is interested to bring in any way contributions to the field in the sense of improvements)

It's not so much a book as a printed out website. It has a table of contents but no page numbers to speak of. There seems to be random paragraphs inserted here and there, from whoever, that ramble about political and unrelated cultural opinions that do not belong at all. Do not buy this "book".

I think he pulled a lot of stuff together and provided something that could be used for insight into a very difficult subject. The fact that the author is Afro-centric doesn’t bother me at all. Afro-centrism can provide motivation and, by the way, I haven’t encountered any explanations to discount the idea that the Sumerians may have been racially close to Black Africa, though we are I think, far from proof either way. Yes: they were called “black heads”. No one can deny that. There is so much we still don’t know. I’m quite willing to cut some slack. As for the author, he did this all on his own. It has clearly been a labor of love. I respect everything about his dedication. By the way: I think his dictionary is a useful tool. I’m waiting for someone to do better!

Very informative

It is a text book for introducing you to Sumerian and Acadian writing, you can see the same text online for free but still it lets you write in cuneiform since it is a text book with lots of exercises.

This book is a fairly comprehensive lexicon though lacking in some aspects of what could be considered orderly, I will say that I enjoy books who's agenda aligns with the information. Perhaps the writer should instead write a commentary explaining their afrocentric thesis of sumer instead of a dictionary that too excitedly steals the moment from the reader who may be simply searching for definition instead of connotation. For the price I can wade through interpretation, yet fact and truth are not 1 in the same; philosophy is the love of knowledge not always the possession of it

Nice read giving way to understand the past.

I wish I had read the other reviews of this book before ordering it. It is self-published with a terrible lack of editorial input. There are no page numbers despite the Contents page giving page numbers. The printing is not centred vertically properly on the page... the first line on some pages is barely 3mm from the top of the page.There are some poor quality illustrations whose sources are not always attributed... I’m sure the British Museum will be unhappy about that.The text is not exactly skilfully executed, and goes way off-topic, especially when promoting some very strange ideas such as the Imposter Exposer Calculator where the author gives vent to his dislike of Bill Clinton and Einstein (go figure!).However the premise of the organising principle for a compilation of Sumerian words is actually good...Standard Cuneiform Unicode, Sign, Transliteration/Lemma, Translation. A better explanation of how the word list is used would help, but still, it is a step up from the alternatives which do not include all four of these elements.Also inclusion of exercises is a good idea (I haven’t tried them yet)So despite my gripes there is some value to this book.If you want to be sure this book is for you it is available for free on the Internet Archive under the name Sumerian Cuneiform English Dictionary for you to check out.Just as an aside, the internet archive lists the authors as Peter Hogan, Tara Hogan, not Ed Peter...

BUYER BEWARE. I bought the paperback version and immediately discovered that it's neither a dictionary nor, except in the most limited sense, a 'book'. It appears to have been thrown together from some kind of web project. Very little thought has been given to the needs of the hard-copy reader, and that extends to the basics. Having been initially confused by the first fifteen pages or so of preliminary matter, I discovered, with some relief, a detailed list of CONTENTS. However, I was quickly disappointed. Although the CONTENTS pages give page number references for each listed section, as they should, there are no actual numbers on pages throughout the 'book'. Finding any specific section therefore requires one to leaf through almost every individual page. This is clearly not a handy reference work, despite the implications of the word 'dictionary' in its title.To be fair, there is something called a 'MUSGAR Quick Finder' towards the end, which makes it possible to identify individual signs and then trace their main entries through a Unicode reference - the main organisational principle of the book, in so far as there appears to be one - but finding sign entries is by no means a straightforward process. Perhaps that's to some extent inevitable when dealing with cuneiform, but more careful organization on the author's part would certainly have helped the reader.This is also by no means a conventional academic work in other respects. The author or editor (I'm not entirely sure who did what) seems to have a number of chips on his/her shoulder, which s/he gives full rein to in the text. The result is an odd mixture of opinionated rant and rather juvenile sneering, which may be intended as 'humour', mixed in with the information one is actually searching for. And, as a result of the 'book's' odd tone, I'm not at all confident of the accuracy of the information even when I do eventually find some.I'm sorry I made the mistake of buying this arrogant muddle of a book. I suggest others don't fall into the same trap without at least finding a full copy to look at in a real bookshop first. What's shown in the LOOK INSIDE feature on Amazon is, in fact, representative of the whole. Unfortunately, I didn't heed the warning signs and assumed that the parts that aren't available for inspection on Amazon would constitute a proper dictionary. But, in fact, they don't - as I now know to my cost.An indulgent assessment might describe this ‘book’ as eccentric. Unfortunately, I’m not feeling indulgent at the moment.