 Hebrew שנער "Šin`ar", Egyptian "Sngr", and Hittite "Šanhar(a)", all referring to southern Mesopotamia, could be western variants of "Sumer".Most historians have suggested that Sumer was first permanently settled between c. 5500 and 4000 BC by a West Asian people who spoke the Sumerian language (pointing to the names of cities, rivers, basic occupations, etc., as evidence), a non-Semitic and non-Indo-European agglutinative language isolate.In contrast to its Semitic neighbours, it was not an inflected language.