The Sumerians referred to themselves as the ùĝ saĝ gíg ga or ‘black-headed people’, while their land was called the ki-en-gi(-r) – which roughly translates to the ‘place of the noble lords’ or ‘land of the civilized lords’.
Now the Akkadian word Shumer may have represented this term in its own Semitic dialect, although historians are not sure about the phonological development of šumerû or Shumeru (or why such a term was used to designate the southern part of Mesopotamia). In turn, the ancient Hebrew Shinar, Egyptian Sngr, and Hittite Šanhar(a) might be the variants of the Akkadian Šumer – as opposed to what the Sumerians called their native domain.

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