Did Sumerians (and other Mesopotamian empires) have middle and last names? or: Was the Roman tradition of having both personal and family names essentially a constant throughout antiquity, or essentially an outlier? I'm mostly curious about Sumerian culture's answer to the name question, as it relates directly to the research I tried to do for the book I'm writing. However, the only other early societies I know of with last/family names were the Norse, who postdate antiquity by...well, a lot, and the Chinese and Japanese. I know the Chinese had dynastic names, although I don't know how they used their names in law or conversation. Google was supremely unhelpful on the subject, and I'm eager to learn whatever seems relevant. I've always been curious about Sumerian culture. Minor addendum, for clarity: It's my understanding that certain civilizations, like African or Native American civs, tend to use names as descriptors, and each name translates into a phrase that describes the person or something about them. English peasants ended up with names relative to their profession, like Butcher, Baker, or Carpenter. Italians seemed to like foregoing family names entirely and using 'of [hometown]'. Were any of these naming conventions in use in Mesopotamia at large?
I'm actually not sure (despite have extensive reading on sumeria), though I will consult a couple books of mine I have on Sumeria, though it is possible we don't rightly know how they structured their names.
So I have found that at least in ancient babylonia they had family names, though it does not seem to be a readily used practice ( Lu-Amar-Suen h.G. Pinches: PSBA, 39 (1917), Plate IX, seal a, with n° 17:16.) They may also have used some kind of related word e.g: "Jane, wife of John" The babylonians also have personal familial gods which may also have been used in a function similar to family names. This seems to corrolate with the personal names of the akkadian peoples whom may have used hyphons. for example John Smith might be written as 'john-smith' or 'smith-john'. It is hard to tell which is which and mostly it is guesswork. This isn't my field of history i specialised in though, so feel free to (anyone) correct me if i'm wrong one thing to remember, is that they didn't have personal names like "John", "Richard", "Louise" or "Nancy". Often, they were named after gods -- the egyptians did a similar thing, e.g: Tutankhamun meant "living image of Amun". I can't find anything right now on sumerian names, but i've only done a quick search in my own books and other stuff. J. J Stemms's book on sumerian onomastics and partially Anthroponomastics may be of help. It is still the leading book on names we have though much has changed since. It is in german though. Sprichst du Deutsch? There is a book written by Samuel Noah Kramer called "The Sumerians: Their History, Culture and Character" (University of Chicago Press, London, 1963) which is a good starting place for sumerian culture and very well written and informative. I believe Amazon has a few copies available. edit: clarification: As far as I am aware (see post by Beloved of Assur below) they did not have family names the way we do in our current society, but they did have names that fullfilled a fairly similar function.
I am pretty sure they did not have any surnames. Its more like X of Y, X son of Z, X the U or something like that. I did try to make research on Mesopotamian names back in the day and mostly came up blank. But from what I remember home place, father or ethnicity or profession would seem to be the primary tools used to differentiate between people with the same name.
Well, unless I'm mistaken, they sometimes used the name of the city as a descriptor. So Ur-Nammu was king of Ur, for example. Here's the Sumerian King List that could be a good source of names for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_King_List
Almost all cultures did this. A lot of English names describe the place where the person is from, for example Underhill. Japanese is the same - the equivalent of Underhill is Yamashita. And of course, you have names like Anderson or Johnson. There's at least one king on the list above referred to as "The Shepherd", but that may be an epithet.
Thank you all for your answers, I really appreciate the effort you've put in to answering the question fully.
