The Akkadian Language
1. Akkadian (Babylonian-Assyrian) is the most significant language of the Ancient Near East and one of the most important languages of antiquity overall. The size and diversity of its text corpus, as well as its chronological and geographical distribution, are enormous. Akkadian was written from the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE through the 1st century CE in Mesopotamia, the land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers (today Iraq and northeastern Syria). Presumably, the language was also spoken there until the final centuries of this period. Mesopotamia included the regions of Babylonia (in southern Mesopotamia) and Assyria (in northern Mesopotamia). Babylonian and Assyrian are the two most important dialects of the language, which is today referred to in scholarship, for the sake of brevity, by the emic term “Akkadian” rather than “Babylonian-Assyrian”. This term derives from the city of Akkad, whose kings first composed inscriptions in the Akkadian language during the second half of the 3rd millennium BCE.1
2. Beyond Mesopotamia, Akkadian served throughout the Ancient Near East at various times at least as a written language: in western Iran, Syria-Israel-Palestine, Asia Minor (present-day Turkey and Armenia), and Egypt. Here it was used in the administration of palaces and temples; in international diplomacy; in the monumental inscriptions of kings; in the training of scribes; and in various scholarly disciplines. Thus, Akkadian served as an important contact language for all other languages and cultures of the Ancient Near East, including those of the Sumerians, Hittites, Elamites, Hurrians, and the cultures of Syria-Palestine, and holds outstanding significance for them as a source and target of loanwords.2
3. Akkadian was written in cuneiform, a script developed in southern Mesopotamia at the end of the 4th millennium BCE. The name of the script derives from its characteristic sign element, the “cuneus” (wedge); various wedges combined form the sign. Cuneiform is a logographic-syllabic script comprising several hundred signs. It was primarily written with a reed stylus on clay tablets of varying sizes — mostly cushion-shaped — ranging from a few centimeters in size to over 40 cm in edge length. Other writing media include clay cylinders and prisms, statues and reliefs carved from stone or rock, metal tablets, and wood-wax tablets. With the exception of wood-and-wax tablets, which have hardly survived in the Near Eastern climate, these writing media are fragile but do not rot and have thus been preserved over the millennia. This is the reason why such a vast number of written records in cuneiform have survived.3
4. The Akkadian text corpus now comprises an estimated 10,800,000 text words (“tokens”) in over 160,000 cuneiform texts (not counting the extensive parallel tradition of literary and scholarly text genres). It now matches the size of the corpus of ancient Latin (up to ca. 300 CE). This makes Akkadian — after Ancient Greek, alongside Latin, and ahead of Ancient Egyptian — one of the three best-attested languages of antiquity. Unlike that of many other ancient languages, the Akkadian text corpus has proven to be highly dynamic in recent decades. Every year, hundreds — sometimes thousands — of new cuneiform texts have been edited; these were found during archaeological excavations or illegal excavations, or had been stored unedited in museums until now.4
5. The genres of Akkadian texts are extremely diverse. The Babylonian and Assyrian kings left behind an extensive corpus of monumental inscriptions containing accounts of construction projects and military campaigns; these also include the world’s oldest legal texts, such as the Code of Hammurapi. Scribes composed scholarly and literary texts of various genres: divinatory texts, such as those dealing with liver divination and astrology/astronomy; medical and mathematical texts; prayers, hymns, and laments for religious rituals; myths and epics recounting the deeds of gods and kings, including the famous Epic of Gilgamesh and the biblical story of the Flood rendered in cuneiform; and monolingual or multilingual lexical texts, which represent humanity’s oldest “dictionaries.”
Among the ancient text corpora, however, the Akkadian text corpus stands out in particular for its vast number of everyday texts, which document daily communication and administration in palaces, temples, and among private individuals such as merchants: there are well over one hundred thousand letters, legal documents, as well as accounts, receipts, memoranda, and inventories of all kinds. The diversity of this corpus has an impact on the lexicon: all areas of life, including numerous aspects of everyday life (the natural environment, agriculture, crafts), as well as specialized vocabulary from various disciplines (law, trade, the military, medicine, astronomy, religion, literature, etc.), are richly documented in the texts.
6. The following table presents a survey of Akkadian dialects and periods:
| Dialect, Period, Register | Time (BC) | Area | Text genres | Number of texts | Estimated number of words of text |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-Sargonic Akkadian | 2650–2350 | Fāra, Abū Ṣalābīḫ, etc., Mari, Tall Baydar | loanwords, personal names, hymns | ? | ? |
| Eblaite | 2350 | Ebla (northern Syria) | administrative, letters, lexical, literary | ca. 4,250 | ca. 300,000 |
| Sargonic Akkadian | 2350–2150 | Babylonia, Diyāla, Elam | administrative, letters, monumental, incantations | ca. 1,575 | ca. 35,000 |
| Old Babylonian | 2100–1500 | Babylonia, Diyāla, Upper Mesopotamia, Elam | administrative, letters, monumental, laws, scholarly, literary | ca. 50,000 | ca. 3,100,000 |
| Middle Babylonian | 1500–1000 | Babylonia, esp. Nippur | administrative, letters, kudurrus (land deed documents) | ca. 12,200 | ca. 660,000 |
| Peripheral Akkadian | 1500–1200 | Nuzi, Emar, Ugarit, Amarna, Hattuša | administrative, letters | ca. 5,300 | ca. 340,000 |
| Neo-/Late Babylonian | 1000–1st. c. AD | Babylonia | administrative, letters | ca. 47,500 | ca. 3,460,000 |
| Old Assyrian | 1900–1700 | Anatolia (Kaneš, Hattuša, Alişar Höyük), Aššur | administrative, letters, monumental, rarely literary | ca. 22,300 | ca. 1,311,000 |
| Middle Assyrian | 1500–1000 | Assyria, Upper Mesopotamia (Dūr-Katlimmu, Ḫarbe, Tall Ṣabīy Abyaḍ) | administrative, letters, laws, edicts | ca. 2,700 | ca. 220,000 |
| Neo-Assyrian | 1000–600 | Assyria | administrative, letters, rarely literary | ca. 7,100 | ca. 500,000 |
| Literary Akkadian | 2000–0 (for older periods, see above under Pre-Sargonic and Sargonic) | Babylonia, Assyria, periphery (Emar, Ugarit, Amarna, Hattuša) | scholarly, personal names, monumental, literary | ? | ca. 820,000 |
This is a model of the History of Akkadian:
7. Akkadian and Eblaite exclusively share several important isoglosses:5
- Eblaite and Akkadian both have a present tense (j)iPaRRaS.
- Eblaite and Akkadian both have independent dative pronouns and dative suffixes.
- Adjectives in Eblaite and Akkadian both have a masculine plural ending in -ūtu.
- Eblaite and Akkadian (only literary) both have infinitives of the ta-stems with pattern taPtaRS.6
- Eblaite and Akkadian both have four-radical verbs with N-stem inflection (type naBaLKuTu).
In contrast, there are only a few innovations specific to Eblaite vis-à-vis Akkadian:
- ʾantanu “you” (2nd person plural masculine).
- t-prefixes (alongside j-prefixes) in the 3rd person plural of verbs (shared with Ugaritic).
Eblaite is no more distant from Babylonian and Assyrian than these two dialects are from each other. For these reasons, the LAD classifies Eblaite as an Akkadian dialect and includes the Eblaite lexicon.
8. Akkadian is not an isolated language, but rather by far the oldest attested language of the Semitic language family, which includes, among others, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, Old South Arabian (including Sabaean), and various Ethiopian languages (Ge’ez, Amharic, etc.). Akkadian therefore plays a prominent role in comparative Semitic studies. The Semitic languages, along with other major language branches located in Africa (including Ancient Egyptian), belong to the Afro-Asiatic language family, making Akkadian important for comparative Afro-Asiatic research.
According to the most widespread traditional family tree model, Akkadian (including the language of Ebla) is the only member of the eastern branch of the Semitic language family. East Semitic is opposed to West Semitic. West Semitic consists of the subgroups Central Semitic, Modern South Arabian, and Ethiopian. Central Semitic includes Northwest Semitic (Amorite, Ugaritic, Canaanite [Phoenician, Hebrew], Aramaic), North Arabian, and Old South Arabian:7
