Tuesday - June 07, 2011

Oh so you thought your life was dull?

Akkadian cuneiform finally deciphered after an amazing 90 year effort.

A dictionary of a dead language not used for two millenia has finally been completed after academics spent 90 years painstakingly deciphering ancient words scrawled on clay and stone tablets.

As decades came and went generations of scholars travelled from across the world to the University of Chicago to work on the monumental Chicago Assyrian Dictionary project.

It is now officially complete and contains 21 volumes devoted to Akkadian, a Semitic language with several dialects including Assyrian, that endured between 2500 BC and AD 100 and was recorded on tablets in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey.

The dictionary was begun in 1921 by James Henry Breasted, an American archaeologist who wanted to “recover the lost story of the rise of man.” He died 14 years later, by which point one million index cards had already been compiled.

Robert Biggs, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, later devoted half a century to the dictionary, uncovering tablets in the desert and poring over texts in museums in London and Baghdad as he tried to translate the wedge-shaped letters.

For almost an entire year he studied thousands of references to sheep livers, the shapes of which were believed to contain omens.

Prof Biggs admitted: “Sometimes it got to be very tedious. Other times, there was a sense of exhilaration if you could solve some problem or figure out what a rare word means.

“You always saw the light at the end of the tunnel, but the end of the tunnel kept getting further and further away.”

During their marathon academic quest the Chicago scholars battled problems with the ancient Assyrian lack of punctuation, and the propensity of the tablets to crumble. They were joined at various times by experts from Vienna, Paris, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, Berlin, Helsinki, Baghdad and London. Martha Roth, the dictionary’s current editor, spent 32 years on it, four years of that working on a single word.

She said: “It’s hard for many people to understand the kind of stick-to-it this kind of project takes.”

The 28,000-word dictionary, which will cost $1,400 (£850) to buy, is more like and encyclopaedia and offers a window into the ancient society of Mesopotamia, including recipes, love letters and ancient poems.

There is even a 4,400-year-old letter from a teenager at boarding school who wrote to his mother: “From year to year, the clothes of the gentlemen here become better, but you let my clothes get worse.”

It figures that academics in Chicago would want to sell their research. Anybody else would have just published it for the greater good of mankind.

The Assyrian dialect of Akkadian was spoken in the Northern areas of Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq. The Babylonian dialect was spoken in central and southern Mesopotamia, Mariotic in the central Euphrates, and Tell Beydar in northern Syria.

There have been different phases in Assyrian’s development. Old Assyrian was spoken between1950–1530 BC, Middle Assyrian between 1530–1000 BC, and Neo-Assyrian between the years 1000–600 BC. Assyrian served as the lingua franca during much of the Old and Middle times, and was extremely popular.

It was in use for 2,500 years but has not been spoken for more than 2,000 years.

Now, why should anyone give a darn? Because Akkadia and Assyria are OLDER THAN EGYPT. This is the Cradle of Civilization stuff you learned about in grade school; the rise of the very first city states in the Fertile Crescent. Mesopotamia>. This language and this civilization go back to the very beginnings of the Bronze Age. In other words, they are a late Neolithic group, and that means New Stone Age. They invented things like towns. And the wheel. That’s right, they invented the bloody wheel. So just think what one of their history books must be like; their great-great-great-grandparents hadn’t even invented animals yet! (well, domesticated ones)
The proto-city of UR was far far in the future to these people. They may not have known Adam personally, but they knew where he used to live ... which was a few days walk down towards the beach. Down under the mud.

This is awesome, and I hope reams of translations are soon published. I have no idea how many of these old clay tablets are still around, but it would be so cool to think of reading something written so long ago that there were only 3 recipes for chicken in all the world.

h/t to Peiper

Posted by Drew458     on 06/07/2011 at 02:12 PM   
Filed Under: • Archeology / Anthropology •  
• Comments (4) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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