Why is Archaic Sumerian difficult for scholars to understand?

Archaic Sumerian, which dates from approximately 3100 to 2500 BCE, is considered difficult for scholars to understand primarily due to two factors: the meagreness of available sources and the significant challenges involved in reading and interpreting early Sumerian writing.1

The difficulties in interpretation arise from several key areas:

• Limited and Specialized Content: The earliest texts are almost exclusively administrative or business-related records, along with simple school exercises, which provide a narrow view of the language.1
• Structural Complexity: Sumerian is a language isolate with a structure that is unrelated to other known languages, making its grammar and vocabulary difficult to reconstruct.12
• Evolution of Script: The earliest writing was a logographic system that underwent significant changes as it evolved into cuneiform. Scholars must navigate the transition from stylized, picturelike graphs to more conventionalized wedge-shaped symbols.3
• Lack of Context: Because the language died out as a living tongue around 2000 BCE, scholars lack native speakers or direct linguistic descendants to aid in decipherment, relying instead on later grammatical lists and bilingual texts compiled by ancient scribes to penetrate the meaning of earlier, unilingual records.12