Akkadian is the disappeared East Semitic language that was used in ancient Mesopotamia (Akkad, Assyria, Isin, Lars and Babylonia) from the 30th century BC until its gradual replacement with the East Aramaic dialect around the 8th century BC. Its final disappearance occurred during the 1-3 centuries. ad. This article will tell you about this ancient oriental language.
History of development
This is the oldest written Semitic language using cuneiform, which was originally used to record the unrelated and also extinct Sumerian language. Akkad was named after the city of the same name, a major center of civilization of Mesopotamia during the period of the Akkadian kingdom (about 2334-2154 BC). However, the language itself already existed before the founding of this state for many centuries. The first mention of it is found in the 29th century BC.
The mutual influence between the Sumerian and Akkadian prompted scientists to unite them into a linguistic union. From the second half of the third millennium BC. e. (around 2500 BC) texts begin to appear that are completely written in Akkadian. This is evidenced by numerous finds. Hundreds of thousands of these texts and their fragments have been discovered to date by archaeologists. They cover extensive traditional mythological narratives, legal acts, scientific observations, correspondence, reports on political and military events. By the second millennium BC in Mesopotamia, two dialects of the Akkadian language were used: Assyrian and Babylonian.
Thanks to the power of various state entities of the Ancient East, such as the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, Akkadian became the native language for most of the population of this region.
Inevitable sunset
The Akkadian language began to lose its influence during the New Assyrian Empire in the 8th century BC. In terms of distribution, it gave way to the Aramaic during the reign of Tiglathpalasar III. By the Hellenistic period, this language was largely used only by scholars and priests who performed rituals in the temples of Assyria and Babylon. The last known cuneiform document, compiled in Akkadian, dates back to the 1st century AD.
The Mandean language spoken by the Mandean people in Iraq and Iran, as well as New Aramaic, used today in northern Iraq, southeast Turkey, northeast Syria and northwest Iran are two of the few modern Semitic languages that have preserved some Akkadian vocabulary and grammatical features.
general characteristics
According to its characteristics, Akkadian is an inflective language that has a developed system of case endings.
It belongs to the Semitic group of the Middle East branch of the Afrasian language family. It is common in the Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula, parts of the regions of Asia Minor, North Africa, Malta, the Canary Islands and the states of the Horn of Africa.
Within the framework of the Middle East Semitic languages, Akkadian forms the East Semitic subgroup (together with the Eblaite). It differs from the north-western and southern-Semitic groups in its word order in the sentence. For example, its grammatical construction looks like this: subject-object-verb, while in other Semitic dialects the following order is usually observed: verb-subject-object or subject-verb-object. This phenomenon in the grammar of the Akkadian language is due to the influence of the Sumerian dialect, which just had this order. As in all Semitic languages, Akkadian words were widely represented with three consonants in the root.
Research
The Akkadian language began to be studied again when Karsten Niebuhr in 1767 was able to make extensive copies of cuneiform texts and published them in Denmark. Deciphering them began immediately, and bilingual residents of the Middle East, in particular, carriers of the ancient Persian-Akkadian dialect, greatly helped in this matter. Since the texts contained several royal names, isolated signs could be identified. The research results were published in 1802 by Georg Friedrich Grothefend. By this time, it was already obvious that this language belongs to the Semitic. The final breakthrough in the decoding of the texts is associated with the names of Edward Hinks, Henry Rawlinson and Jules Oppert (mid-19th century). The Institute of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago recently completed the compilation of an Akkadian language dictionary (21 volumes).
Cuneiform writing system
The ancient Akkadian script was preserved on clay tablets dating back to 2500 BC. The inscriptions were created using cuneiform writing - a method adopted by the Sumerians, using wedge-shaped characters. All records were kept on pressed wet clay tablets. The adapted cuneiform script used by Akkadian scribes contained Sumerian logograms (i.e. images based on characters representing whole words), Sumerian syllables, Akkadian syllables and phonetic additions. Textbooks of Akkadian language published today contain many grammatical features of this ancient dialect, once widespread in the Middle East.