<P> The earliest language written in Mesopotamia was Sumerian, an agglutinative language isolate . Along with Sumerian, Semitic languages were also spoken in early Mesopotamia . Subartuan a language of the Zagros, perhaps related to the Hurro - Urartuan language family is attested in personal names, rivers and mountains and in various crafts . Akkadian came to be the dominant language during the Akkadian Empire and the Assyrian empires, but Sumerian was retained for administrative, religious, literary and scientific purposes . Different varieties of Akkadian were used until the end of the Neo-Babylonian period . Old Aramaic, which had already become common in Mesopotamia, then became the official provincial administration language of first the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and then the Achaemenid Empire: the official lect is called Imperial Aramaic . Akkadian fell into disuse, but both it and Sumerian were still used in temples for some centuries . The last Akkadian texts date from the late 1st century AD . </P> <P> Early in Mesopotamia's history (around the mid-4th millennium BC) cuneiform was invented for the Sumerian language . Cuneiform literally means "wedge - shaped", due to the triangular tip of the stylus used for impressing signs on wet clay . The standardized form of each cuneiform sign appears to have been developed from pictograms . The earliest texts (7 archaic tablets) come from the É, a temple dedicated to the goddess Inanna at Uruk, from a building labeled as Temple C by its excavators . </P> <P> The early logographic system of cuneiform script took many years to master . Thus, only a limited number of individuals were hired as scribes to be trained in its use . It was not until the widespread use of a syllabic script was adopted under Sargon's rule that significant portions of Mesopotamian population became literate . Massive archives of texts were recovered from the archaeological contexts of Old Babylonian scribal schools, through which literacy was disseminated . </P> <P> During the third millennium BC, there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerian and the Akkadian language users, which included widespread bilingualism . The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian (and vice versa) is evident in all areas, from lexical borrowing on a massive scale, to syntactic, morphological, and phonological convergence . This has prompted scholars to refer to Sumerian and Akkadian in the third millennium as a sprachbund . Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as the spoken language of Mesopotamia somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BC (the exact dating being a matter of debate), but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary, and scientific language in Mesopotamia until the 1st century AD . </P>

Which of the following was a city state in ancient mesopotamia