How appropriate! I have recently (4 months?) started studying Akkadian. Just an intellectual curiosity. I don't really expect to get far. But it has been fascinating. Let me tell you the factoid that got me started down this road:
More writings survive in Akkadian than from the classical Latin world.
The entire output in Latin from c. 400 BC - 300 AD pales in comparison to what we've dug up out of burned royal libraries. This surprised me to learn, though it shouldn't be when you consider the durability of clay vs. papyrus and other paper-like materials.
And unlike Latin, we know almost none of it. It's completely alien to us culturally. The civilization that gave rise to it was so completely supplanted and forgotten about, no one recognized the writing system when finally back dug up. Which was less than 200 years ago. Being able to competently read Mesopotamian texts is less than a century old. And there are only a few hundred really competent Assyriologists in the world.
This means that the vast majority of texts, stockpiled by the crates in the tens of thousands in museums and archives, have still not yet been read by anyone -- in more than 3000 - 4000 years. If you want to read some new (in a relative sense) classical literature, Akkadian is one of your few hopes.
Not that most of those tablets rival Gilgamesh -- most are shipping receipts, tax records, legal contracts and court decisions. Though honestly even though can be captivating in their own way. Consider the picture of life we get from a man in Sippar 3400 years ago just from his records and letters. His house was excavated with all his claywork in situ, giving an insight into his life we often lack even with the ancient Romans and ancient Chinese:
> "After a forty-one-year career, at the end of 1643 (Aṣ 4), Inana-mansum handed over his role as chief dirge singer, head of the ain temple of Sippar-Amnanum, to his son Ur-Utu and donated a number of fields and house plots to him (for a full account of this section, see Janssen 1992). The fact that Ur-Utu was already receiving (part of) his inheritance provoked the jealousy of his three brothers, who also claimed their shares. Inana-mansum refused to give them anything during his lifetime, infuriating them even more. [...] Kubburum (the only son who was completely adopted) was the most vehement concerning the inheritance, no doubt because he felt his position to be least assured. He managed to persuade his ‘brothers’ (since they had received nothing from their father either) to manipulate their father into giving them their shares and to litigate against Inana-mansum’s wife for the property she had received from him. [...] A supplementary difficulty for the mother was that she had lost the sealed document stipulating the gift. Officials came to Ur-Utu’s house, where his mother was living, examined the property deeds, and concluded that she had indeed rightfully received the gift from her husband. [...] Finally, after years of dispute and lawsuits, all was well that ended well: Ur-Utu became chief dirge singer and received a large part of his inheritance at the same time, while his father was still living. The brothers protested and lost but finally got their share of the inheritance after their father died.
-- from (2011) Michel Tanret, Learned, Rich, Famous, and Unhappy: Ur-Utu of Sippar, The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture
As you can see while much has changed in the years between, much has not. And it's all coming alive again right now in the previous and this generation, for the first time in millennia.
> most are shipping receipts, tax records, legal contracts and court decisions.
I've been reading about origins of money and so came across reference to clay tablet writings by Syrian traders. Most of them are about mundane day-to-day life as you say but it's fascinating to just learn about life from days long past and forgotten. What's also interesting, to me, is the matters they bring up don't strike as alien but in fact can be related to by anyone even to this day. For instance this passage, taken from a paper[1]:
“As to the textiles about which you wrote to me in the following terms: “they are (too) small, they are not good’; was it not on your own request that I reduced the size? And now you write (again), saying: “process half a mina (of wool) more in your textiles”. Well, I have done it.”
You're making a good pitch for learning Akkadian! I wish you were there when I was a freshman in college idling flipping through the foreign language offerings to fill a requirement. Akkadian was towards the front of some alphabetical listing and I was idly wondering whether to try it or stick with the language I studied in high school.
I still wish my school didn't have a foreign language requirement at all, but I feel like this pitch would have converted more people scrolling through that alphabetical section of the course catalog.
I wonder if many of these more transactional tablets would be amenable to automated transcription/translation. I imagine that names would be rough, but lists of goods and prices
seem manageable.
I've dabbled a little in Akkadian languages but gave up because the time commitment seemed too massive.
Yes, I imagine it would be. I suspect a lot of insights can be made from extensive digitization of the materials. Statistical studies of records over time. Finding what fragments may fit with others.
See https://github.com/gaigutherz/Akkademia which is a deep-learning based approach to OCR and word segmentation in Akkadian. Early days. I wish I knew enough ML (or Akkadian) to contribute.
It would seem the language is understood quite well, but the cultural context of its use not so much.
Akkadian is a Semitic language, quite distantly related to Arabic and Hebrew, etc. So we know what its siblings turned into, and we have a vague guess for what its unwritten ancestor was like. There are also some surviving bilingual and trilingual Akkadian texts especially in the later period. That includes with Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, Old Persian, Aramaic, etc., which are all understood to varying degrees.
It's interesting to compare to Sumerian, the language of the people who the Akkadians learned writing from. It's not related to anything else known. We only know it through Akkadian bilingual texts, and texts teaching Akkadians how to read and write Sumerian. (Sumerian went extinct by around 2000 BC.) Now Sumerian is much more poorly understood.
Tablets is are sometimes found when cities fell or buildings were abandoned, basically frozen in context. In this case, the letters were excavated from one of the large homes in Sippur near the temple, which had three rooms full of clay archival tablets seemingly related to the life of an important, sometimes-wealthy priest-administrator, descended from a line of them. Chief dirge singer was indeed some priestly office related to public performances of ritual song.
For a beginner, I would recommend "Complete Babylonian" (Teach Yourself) by Martin Worthington.
It is very accessible. After having some basic knowledge, there are more complete grammars and dictionaries.
The reason for learning an ancient language is reading the original texts. There is no need to become an expert, because there are bilingual editions for most ancient texts.
In my experience, no matter how good the translator is, you can find much more interesting information in the original text, but using a bilingual edition spares you 99% of the time you would have needed to read unaided when that is not your base profession.
For Akkadian, the best text for beginners is the bilingual edition of the code of laws of Hammurabi, which is very clear and easy to read (There is a better modern edition by M. E. J. Richardson, "Hammurabi's Laws", but also an 1904 edition at archive.org, "The Code of Hammurabi").
After that, the bilingual edition of Gilgamesh is recommended, with both the Old Babylonian version and with the later versions.
Unfortunately, the bilingual edition of Gilgamesh (A. R. George, "The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic" in 2 volumes) is quite expensive (though there are pirated copies on the Web).
Thank you for the recommendations. That's very helpful. I'm less bullish on bilingual editions (I know Ancient Greek well, and Latin a little less well, so I'm not totally uninformed) but I'm unlikely to ever be as proficient at Akkadian as I am at the languages I studied in college so I'm glad to know those exist.
John Huehnergard's A Grammar of Akkadian: https://brill.com/view/title/38184 seems to be well-respected. It's a grammar textbook that goes through the usual topics (nouns, verbs, etc.) Teaches the dialect of the Old Babylonian Empire and should be approachable for someone who has studied another language before.
A History of the Akkadian Language: https://brill.com/view/title/21744 was just published. It's monumental and eclectic. All sorts of topics related to Akkadian. Its internal history, changes, as well as recent history of its deciphering. I've been skimming that, using that as a sort of backgrounder. Some of it's over my head, and I took a few semesters of linguistics once upon a time.
The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary has been fully published and digitized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Assyrian_Dictionary But it's like the OED and I think at the start you would want a wordbook or wordlist with your reading materials, that matches the dialect/era you're working with. A variety of those floating around.
While the written form was pretty fossilized (like Latin or English spelling) it was used for ~3000 years and changed a great deal over time like any language. Old Babylonian seems to be a common starting point. I think probably because it's well-attested, was some of the first material discovered, and because it's the language of (the most complete version of) Gilgamesh, and also Hammurabi's law codes.
More writings survive in Akkadian than from the classical Latin world.
The entire output in Latin from c. 400 BC - 300 AD pales in comparison to what we've dug up out of burned royal libraries. This surprised me to learn, though it shouldn't be when you consider the durability of clay vs. papyrus and other paper-like materials.
And unlike Latin, we know almost none of it. It's completely alien to us culturally. The civilization that gave rise to it was so completely supplanted and forgotten about, no one recognized the writing system when finally back dug up. Which was less than 200 years ago. Being able to competently read Mesopotamian texts is less than a century old. And there are only a few hundred really competent Assyriologists in the world.
This means that the vast majority of texts, stockpiled by the crates in the tens of thousands in museums and archives, have still not yet been read by anyone -- in more than 3000 - 4000 years. If you want to read some new (in a relative sense) classical literature, Akkadian is one of your few hopes.
Not that most of those tablets rival Gilgamesh -- most are shipping receipts, tax records, legal contracts and court decisions. Though honestly even though can be captivating in their own way. Consider the picture of life we get from a man in Sippar 3400 years ago just from his records and letters. His house was excavated with all his claywork in situ, giving an insight into his life we often lack even with the ancient Romans and ancient Chinese:
> "After a forty-one-year career, at the end of 1643 (Aṣ 4), Inana-mansum handed over his role as chief dirge singer, head of the ain temple of Sippar-Amnanum, to his son Ur-Utu and donated a number of fields and house plots to him (for a full account of this section, see Janssen 1992). The fact that Ur-Utu was already receiving (part of) his inheritance provoked the jealousy of his three brothers, who also claimed their shares. Inana-mansum refused to give them anything during his lifetime, infuriating them even more. [...] Kubburum (the only son who was completely adopted) was the most vehement concerning the inheritance, no doubt because he felt his position to be least assured. He managed to persuade his ‘brothers’ (since they had received nothing from their father either) to manipulate their father into giving them their shares and to litigate against Inana-mansum’s wife for the property she had received from him. [...] A supplementary difficulty for the mother was that she had lost the sealed document stipulating the gift. Officials came to Ur-Utu’s house, where his mother was living, examined the property deeds, and concluded that she had indeed rightfully received the gift from her husband. [...] Finally, after years of dispute and lawsuits, all was well that ended well: Ur-Utu became chief dirge singer and received a large part of his inheritance at the same time, while his father was still living. The brothers protested and lost but finally got their share of the inheritance after their father died.
-- from (2011) Michel Tanret, Learned, Rich, Famous, and Unhappy: Ur-Utu of Sippar, The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture
As you can see while much has changed in the years between, much has not. And it's all coming alive again right now in the previous and this generation, for the first time in millennia.