91探花视频

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The principal languages of ancient Mesopotamia were Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian (together sometimes known as 'Akkadian'), Amorite, and - later - Aramaic. 听They have come down to us in the "cuneiform" (i.e. wedge-shaped) script, deciphered by Henry Rawlinson and other scholars in the 1850s. 听The subject which studies Mesopotamian languages and the sources written in them is called Assyriology.

Mesopotamian languages in the cuneiform script are mostly written on clay tablets, though they could also be carved on stone (example听). 听Being incredibly durable, clay tablets have been recovered in thousands at archaeological sites from the Mediterranean to Bahrain to Iran. 听More are found by the year.

As well as 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.

As the world's first fully urban society, ancient Mesopotamia is of paramount interest to world archaeology, and its art, architecture and technology were the rival, and indeed often the precursors, of Egypt's. Mesopotamia was open on all sides to its neighbours, and its influence can be traced from India to Greece: the Pharaoh's scribes used cuneiform script to correspond with the Great 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 later the Biblical and Classical worlds grew up in the shadow of these ancient cultures to the east (and sometimes under their direct political domination).

The Cuneiform script

... is so called because each individual stroke (several of which might be used to form a sign) has the shape of a wedge. 听This is the shape which occurs naturally when one impresses a stylus (writing implement) with a triangular cross-section into a flat surface of clay.

The script was invented before 3000 BC. 听It started out as pictures (a bit like Egyptian hieroglyphs), but these quickly became so stylised as to be unrecognisable. 听Thus cuneiform signs were born. When they are first used there is so little grammar it is impossible to tell which language is being written. 听The first language they do write is Sumerian.

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

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

Sumerian

Sumerian is an "agglutinating" language with no known relatives. It was spoken in South Iraq until it died out, probably around 2000 BC, giving way to Babylonianian; but it survived as a scholarly and liturgical language, much like mediaeval Latin, until the very end of cuneiform in the late 1st millennium BC.

In the absence of related languages, Sumerian has had to be learned through the filter of Babylonian and Assyrian. 听There are still many disagreements about what words mean, and how the verb behaves, but our knowledge of it is growing by the year. 听There is 听still no full dictionary of Sumerian, though the recently posted online by the Swiss scholar Pascal Attinger is very useful.

There is no learner's grammar of Sumerian that can straightforwardly be recommended. 听Non-specialists may find the excellent by the Dutch scholar Bram Jagersma heavy-going.听听The open-access publication听听by G谩bor Z贸lyomi is more accessible.

(Akkadian) Babylonian and Assyrian

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

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

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

Further online resources

You can listen to modern scholars reading Babylonian and Assyrian poetry听, a website set up by Dr Martin Worthington when he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at SOAS.

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

Several websites give original texts and English translations: , the (not always reliable on a word-by-word basis, but excellent for an overview),

the.

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Books

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

Dominique Charpin, , Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press

John Huehnergard, (3rd ed.), Winona Lake IN: Eisenbrauns

Martin Worthington:听听(2nd ed.), London: John Murray. 听The first edition is accessible听.

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Associations

... for those interested in Mesopotamian languages include:

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Mesopotamian Languages at Cambridge

Undergraduates in the Department of 91探花视频 can study Babylonian in all three years, and Sumerian and Assyrian in their third year. 听MPhil students can study Babylonian at introductory or advanced level, and also Sumerian听(normally only if they already have some Babylonian). After the introductory level it may also be possible to study Assyrian.

Babylonian set texts in previous years have 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, as a guide to the sort of things you might read yourself.