Many Languages of Mesopotamia, Along With Hebrew and Arabic, Belong to What Language Family?

The master languages of aboriginal Mesopotamia were Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian (together sometimes known equally 'Akkadian'), Amorite, and - later on - Aramaic.  They have come down to u.s.a. in the "cuneiform" (i.due east. wedge-shaped) script, deciphered by Henry Rawlinson and other scholars in the 1850s.  The subject which studies Mesopotamian languages and the sources written in them is chosen Assyriology.

Mesopotamian languages in the cuneiform script are mostly written on clay tablets, though they could too exist carved on stone (instance here).  Being incredibly durable, clay tablets have been recovered in thousands at archaeological sites from the Mediterranean to Bahrain to Iran.  More are plant by the year.

Every bit well every bit records of daily life and administration, they include religious, mathematical, musical and astronomical texts, the earliest known laws, and a rich literature that includes the Epic of Gilgamesh and the oldest versions of the Flood Story also known from the Bible.

Every bit the globe's first fully urban club, ancient Mesopotamia is of paramount interest to world archaeology, and its art, architecture and technology were the rival, and indeed ofttimes the precursors, of Arab republic of egypt'south. Mesopotamia was open up on all sides to its neighbours, and its influence can be traced from India to Greece: the Pharaoh's scribes used cuneiform script to represent with the Groovy Kings of the Hittites in Turkey, at Ugarit on the Syrian coast the forerunners of the Phoenicians kept their legal and commercial records on cuneiform tablets in Babylonian, and afterwards the Biblical and Classical worlds grew upwards in the shadow of these ancient cultures to the due east (and sometimes under their straight political domination).

The Cuneiform script

... is and so called considering each private stroke (several of which might exist used to form a sign) has the shape of a wedge.  This is the shape which occurs naturally when i impresses a stylus (writing implement) with a triangular cross-section into a flat surface of dirt.

The script was invented before 3000 BC.  Information technology started out as pictures (a flake like Egyptian hieroglyphs), but these quickly became so stylised as to be unrecognisable.  Thus cuneiform signs were born. When they are kickoff used there is so little grammar it is incommunicable to tell which language is existence written.  The starting time language they exercise write is Sumerian.

With possible exceptions in the belatedly first millennium BC, the cuneiform script only writes syllables (a, ba, al, bal).  It thus cannot exist used to write individual consonants.

To attempt converting modern text into cuneiform, click the link to the transliteration tool or follow the instructions at the bottom of this page.

Sumerian

Sumerian is an "agglutinating" language with no known relatives. Information technology was spoken in South Republic of iraq until information technology died out, probably effectually 2000 BC, giving style to Babylonianian; just it survived every bit a scholarly and liturgical language, much like mediaeval Latin, until the very stop of cuneiform in the belatedly 1st millennium BC.

In the absence of related languages, Sumerian has had to exist learned through the filter of Babylonian and Assyrian.  At that place are all the same many disagreements about what words mean, and how the verb behaves, but our cognition of it is growing past the year.  There is  still no total dictionary of Sumerian, though the Sumerian-French dictionary recently posted online by the Swiss scholar Pascal Attinger is very useful.

There is no learner's grammar of Sumerian that can straightforwardly exist recommended.  Non-specialists may observe the excellent grammar of tertiary-millennium BC Sumerian by the Dutch scholar Bram Jagersma heavy-going.  The open-access publication Introduction to the Grammer of Sumerian by Gábor Zólyomi is more than accessible.

(Akkadian) Babylonian and Assyrian

Assyrian and Babylonian are members of the Semitic language family, like Arabic and Hebrew.  Because Babylonian and Assyrian are so similar – at least in writing – they are often regarded as varieties of a single language, today known every bit Akkadian.  How far they were mutually intelligible in ancient times is uncertain.

During the 2nd millennium BC, Babylonian was adopted all over the Near E as the language of scholarship, administration, commerce and diplomacy. Later in the 1st millennium BC it was gradually replaced past Aramaic, which is withal spoken in some parts of the Eye East today.

Babylonian was deciphered in the mid nineteenth century.  As there was controversy over whether the decipherment had been achieved or not, in 1857 the Royal Asiatic Society sent drawings of the aforementioned inscription to four unlike scholars, who were to translate without consulting one another.  A commission (including no less than the Dean of St Paul'south Cathedral) was prepare to compare the translations.  The committee's report, bachelor here, is still fascinating reading afterwards over 150 years.

Further online resources

You can listen to modernistic scholars reading Babylonian and Assyrian poetry here, a website prepare by Dr Martin Worthington when he was a British University Postdoctoral Research Beau at SOAS.

An excellent survey article on Babylonian and Assyrian past Andrew George (SOAS, University of London) is available here.

Several websites give original texts and English translations: Sources of Early Akkadian Literature, the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (not always reliable on a word-by-word basis, but first-class for an overview),

the Open up Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus.

Books

Irving Finkel and Jonathan Taylor, Cuneiform, London: The British Museum

Dominique Charpin, Reading and Writing in Babylon, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press

John Huehnergard, A Grammar of Akkadian (3rd ed.), Winona Lake IN: Eisenbrauns

Martin Worthington:Teach Yourself Consummate Babylonian(2nd ed.), London: John Murray.  The outset edition is attainable hither.

Associations

... for those interested in Mesopotamian languages include:

The International Association for Assyriology

The British Constitute for the Written report of Iraq

The London Heart for the Ancient Near East

Mesopotamian Languages at Cambridge

Undergraduates in the Department of Archeology tin study Babylonian in all three years, and Sumerian and Assyrian in their third year.  MPhil students can study Babylonian at introductory or avant-garde level, and also Sumerian (commonly only if they already have some Babylonian). After the introductory level information technology may also be possible to study Assyrian.

Babylonian set texts in previous years take included extracts from: the Cyrus Cylinder (pictured above), the Flood Story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Sennacherib's inscriptions describing the siege of Jerusalem, and the law code of Hammurapi.

You can see listings of set texts from previous years' courses here, equally a guide to the sort of things you might read yourself.

scherkherece41.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/about-us/mesopotamia/mesopotamia-history/mesopotamia-languages

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