Akkadian language
Akkadian is an extinct East Semitic language that is attested in ancient Mesopotamia from the mid-third millennium BC until its gradual replacement in common use by Old Aramaic among Mesopotamians by the 8th century BC.
Akkadian, which is the earliest documented Semitic language, is named after the city of Akkad, a major centre of Mesopotamian civilization during the Akkadian Empire. It was written using the cuneiform script, originally used for Sumerian, but also used to write multiple languages in the region including Eblaite, Hurrian, Elamite, Old Persian and Hittite. The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian went beyond just the cuneiform script; owing to their close proximity, a lengthy span of contact and the prestige held by the former, Sumerian significantly influenced Akkadian phonology, vocabulary and syntax. This mutual influence of Akkadian and Sumerian has also led scholars to describe the languages as a sprachbund.
Akkadian proper names are first attested in Sumerian texts in the mid-3rd millennium BC, and inscriptions ostensibly written in Sumerian but whose character order reveals that they were intended to be read in East Semitic date back to as early as. From about the 24th century BC, texts fully written in Akkadian begin to appear. By the 20th century BC, two variant forms of the same language were in use in Assyria and Babylonia, known as Assyrian and Babylonian respectively. The bulk of preserved material is from this later period, corresponding to the Near Eastern Iron Age. In total, hundreds of thousands of texts and text fragments have been excavated, covering a vast textual tradition of religious and mythological narrative, legal texts, scientific works, personal correspondence, political, civil and military events, economic tracts and many other examples.
Centuries after the fall of the Akkadian Empire, Akkadian, in its Assyrian and Babylonian varieties, was the native language of the Mesopotamian empires throughout the later Bronze Age, and became the lingua franca of much of the Ancient Near East by the time of the Bronze Age collapse. However, its decline began in the Iron Age, during the Neo-Assyrian Empire, by about the 8th century BC, in favour of Old Aramaic. By the Hellenistic period, the language was largely confined to scholars and priests working in temples in Assyria and Babylonia. The last known Akkadian cuneiform document dates from the 1st century AD.
Mandaic and Suret are two Neo-Aramaic languages that retain some Akkadian vocabulary and grammatical features.
Akkadian is a fusional language with grammatical case. Like all Semitic languages, Akkadian uses the system of consonantal roots. The Kültepe texts, which were written in Old Assyrian, include Hittite loanwords and names, which constitute the oldest record of any Indo-European language.
Classification
Akkadian is a Semitic language of the East Semitic branch. Its relatives in the East Semitic branch include Eblaite. This group differs from the Northwest Semitic languages and South Semitic languages in its subject–object–verb word order, while the other Semitic languages usually have either a verb–subject–object or subject–verb–object order.In contrast to most other Semitic languages, Akkadian has only one non-sibilant fricative: ḫ. Akkadian lost both the glottal and pharyngeal fricatives, which are characteristic of the other Semitic languages. Until the Old Babylonian period, the Akkadian sibilants were exclusively affricated.
Additionally Akkadian is the only Semitic language to use the prepositions ina and ana. Other Semitic languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic have the prepositions bi/bə and li/lə. The origin of the Akkadian spatial prepositions is unknown.
The Semitic languages are further grouped by most linguists into the Afroasiatic macrofamily of languages, meaning that Akkadian is distantly related to Ancient Egyptian, as well as many other languages spoken historically and currently across northern and western Africa and West Asia.
History and writing
Writing
Old Akkadian is preserved on clay tablets dating back to. It was written using cuneiform, a script adopted from the Sumerians using wedge-shaped symbols pressed in wet clay. As employed by Akkadian scribes, the adapted cuneiform script could represent either Sumerian logograms, Sumerian syllables, Akkadian syllables, or phonetic complements. In Akkadian the script practically became a fully fledged syllabic script, and the original logographic nature of cuneiform became secondary, though logograms for frequent words such as 'god' and 'temple' continued to be used. For this reason, the sign AN can on the one hand be a logogram for the word ilum and on the other signify the god Anu or even the syllable -an-. Additionally, this sign was used as a determinative for divine names.Another peculiarity of Akkadian cuneiform is that many signs do not have a well defined phonetic value. Certain signs, such as ', do not distinguish between the different vowel qualities. Nor is there any coordination in the other direction; the syllable ', for example, is rendered by the sign ', but also by the sign '. Both of these are often used for the same syllable in the same text.
Cuneiform was in many ways unsuited to Akkadian: among its flaws was its inability to represent important phonemes in Semitic, including a glottal stop, pharyngeals, and emphatic consonants. In addition, cuneiform was a syllabary writing system—i.e., a consonant plus vowel comprised one writing unit—frequently inappropriate for a Semitic language made up of triconsonantal roots.
Development
Akkadian is divided into several varieties based on geography and historical period:- Old Akkadian, 2500–1950 BC
- Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian, 1950–1530 BC
- Middle Babylonian and Middle Assyrian, 1530–1000 BC
- Neo-Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian, 1000–600 BC
- Late Babylonian, 600 BC–100 AD
Old Akkadian, which was used until the end of the 3rd millennium BC, differed from both Babylonian and Assyrian, and was displaced by these dialects. By the 21st century BC Babylonian and Assyrian, which were to become the primary dialects, were easily distinguishable. Old Babylonian, along with the closely related dialect Mariotic, is clearly more innovative than the Old Assyrian dialect and the more distantly related Eblaite language. For this reason, forms like lu-prus were first encountered in Old Babylonian instead of the older la-prus.
While generally more archaic, Assyrian developed certain innovations as well, such as the "Assyrian vowel harmony". Eblaite was even more so, retaining a productive dual and a relative pronoun declined in case, number and gender. Both of these had already disappeared in Old Akkadian. Over 20,000 cuneiform tablets in Old Assyrian have been recovered from the Kültepe site in Anatolia.
Most of the archaeological evidence is typical of Anatolia rather than of Assyria, but the use both of cuneiform and the dialect is the best indication of Assyrian presence.
Old Babylonian was the language of king Hammurabi and his code, which is one of the oldest collections of laws in the world. Old Assyrian developed as well during the second millennium BC, but because it was a purely popular language—kings wrote in Babylonian—few long texts are preserved. It was, however, notably used in the correspondence of Assyrian traders in Anatolia in the 20th–18th centuries BC and that even led to its temporary adoption as a diplomatic language by various local Anatolian polities during that time.
The Middle Babylonian period started in the 16th century BC. The division is marked by the Kassite invasion of Babylonia around 1550 BC. The Kassites, who reigned for 300 years, gave up their own language in favor of Akkadian, but they had little influence on the language. At its apogee, Middle Babylonian was the written language of diplomacy of the entire Ancient Near East, including Egypt. During this period, a large number of loan words were included in the language from Northwest Semitic languages and Hurrian. However, the use of these words was confined to the fringes of the Akkadian-speaking territory.
From 1500 BC onwards, the Assyrian language is termed Middle Assyrian. It was the language of the Middle Assyrian Empire. However, the Babylonian cultural influence was strong and the Assyrians wrote royal inscriptions, religious and most scholarly texts in Middle Babylonian, whereas Middle Assyrian was used mostly in letters and administrative documents.
During the first millennium BC, Akkadian progressively lost its status as a lingua franca. In the beginning, from around 1000 BC, Akkadian and Aramaic were of equal status, as can be seen in the number of copied texts: clay tablets were written in Akkadian, while scribes writing on papyrus and leather used Aramaic. From this period on, one speaks of Neo-Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian.
Neo-Assyrian experienced an upswing in popularity in the 10th century BC when the Assyrian kingdom became a major power with the Neo-Assyrian Empire. During the existence of that empire, however, Neo-Assyrian began to turn into a chancellery language, being marginalized by Old Aramaic. The dominance of the Neo-Assyrian Empire under Tiglath-Pileser III over Aram-Damascus in the middle of the 8th century led to the establishment of Aramaic as a lingua franca of the empire, rather than it being eclipsed by Akkadian. Texts written 'exclusively' in Neo-Assyrian disappear within 10 years of Nineveh's destruction in 612 BC. Under the Achaemenids, Aramaic continued to prosper, but Assyrian continued its decline. The language's final demise came about during the Hellenistic period when it was further marginalized by Koine Greek, even though Neo-Assyrian cuneiform remained in use in literary tradition well into Parthian times.
Neo-Assyrian was used in some surviving tablets containing poetry and also more prominently in surviving letters of royal correspondence. Because of the multilingual nature of the empire, many loan words are attested as entering the Assyrian language during the Neo-Assyrian period. The number of surviving documents written in cuneiform grew considerably fewer in the late reign of Ashurbanipal, which suggests that the language was declining since it is probably attributable to an increased use of Aramaic, often written on perishable materials like leather scrolls or papyrus. The Neo-Assyrian Akkadian language did not disappear completely until around the end of the 6th century BC however, well into the subsequent post-imperial period.
Similarly, the Persian conquest of the Mesopotamian kingdoms contributed to the decline of Babylonian, from that point on known as Late Babylonian, as a popular language. However, the language was still used in its written form. Even after the Greek invasion under Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, Akkadian was still a contender as a written language, but spoken Akkadian was likely extinct by this time, or at least rarely used. The last positively identified Akkadian text comes from the 1st century AD. The latest known text in cuneiform Babylonian is an astronomical almanac dated to 79/80 AD. However, the latest cuneiform texts are almost entirely written in Sumerian logograms. Iamblichus, a 2nd century Syrian novelist, may have been one of the last known people to know Babylonian.