Akkadian is an extinct East Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia (Akkad, Assyria, Isin, Larsa and Babylonia) from the 30th century BC until its gradual replacement by East Aramaic around in the 8th century BC. Its final disappearance occurred during the 1st-3rd centuries. ad. This article will tell you about this ancient oriental language.
Development history
This is the oldest written Semitic language using cuneiform script, which was originally used to write the unrelated and also extinct Sumerian language. Akkadian was named after the city of the same name, a major center of Mesopotamian civilization during the period of the Akkadian kingdom (circa 2334-2154 BC). However, the language itself had already existed before the founding of this state for many centuries. It was first mentioned in the 29th century BC.
The mutual influence between Sumerian and Akkadian prompted scholars to unite them into a linguistic union. From the second half of the third millennium BC. e. (about 2500 BC) texts written entirely in Akkadian begin to appear. This is evidencednumerous 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.
Due to the power of various state formations of the Ancient East, such as the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, Akkadian became the native language for most of the population of this region.
The inevitable sunset
Akkadian began to lose its influence during the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the 8th century BC. In distribution, it gave way to Aramaic during the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III. By the Hellenistic period, this language was largely used only by scholars and priests who performed rites in the temples of Assyria and Babylon. The last known Akkadian cuneiform document dates back to the 1st century AD.
Mandaean, spoken by the Mandaeans in Iraq and Iran, and New Aramaic used today in northern Iraq, southeast Turkey, northeast Syria, and northwest Iran are two of the few modern Semitic languages, which retained some Akkadian vocabulary and grammatical features.
General characteristics
According to its characteristics, Akkadian is an inflectional language that has a developed case systemendings.
It belongs to the Semitic group of the Middle Eastern branch of the Afroasian language family. It is distributed in the Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula, parts of the regions of Asia Minor, North Africa, M alta, the Canary Islands and the Horn of Africa.
Within the Middle Eastern Semitic languages, Akkadian forms an East Semitic subgroup (together with Eblaite). It differs from Northwestern and South Semitic groups in its word order in a sentence. For example, its grammatical structure is: 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 such an order. Like all Semitic languages, Akkadian had a strong presence of words with three root consonants.
Research
Akkadian was re-learned when Carsten Niebuhr was able to make extensive copies of the cuneiform texts in 1767 and published them in Denmark. Their deciphering began immediately, and the bilingual inhabitants of the Middle East, in particular the speakers of the ancient Persian-Akkadian dialect, were of great help in this matter. Because the texts contained several royal names, isolated signs could be identified. The research results were published in 1802 by Georg Friedrich Grotefend. By this time it was already obvious that this language belongs to the Semitic. The ultimate breakthrough in decipheringtexts 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 a dictionary of the Akkadian language (volume 21).
Cuneiform writing system
Ancient Akkadian script preserved on clay tablets dating back to 2500 BC. The inscriptions were created using cuneiform, a method adopted by the Sumerians, using cuneiform symbols. All records were made on tablets of pressed wet clay. The adapted cuneiform script used by the Akkadian scribes contained Sumerian logograms (i.e. images based on symbols representing whole words), Sumerian syllables, Akkadian syllables, and phonetic additions. Akkadian textbooks published today contain many of the grammatical features of this ancient dialect, once common in the Middle East.
