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Article

cuneiform  

Martin Worthington and Mark Chetwood

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Linguistics
  2. Near East

The cuneiform writing system originated in Southern Iraq in the mid-to-late 4th millennium bce and was used into the Common Era. Hence for over half of human history there were people writing in cuneiform. Extant sources suggest that it was the usual script for writing Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, and Elamite. Cuneiform documents, mostly consisting in clay tablets, are thus attested from Egypt and Turkey in the West to Iran in the East. The majority are written in Sumerian and/or Akkadian, and stem from ancient Iraq.

The cuneiform script1 has no punctuation, no equivalent of capital letters, and spaces are not normally left between words (though Old Assyrian frequently used a single vertical wedge as “word divider”). Sight-reading cuneiform, at least in Sumerian and Akkadian, and particularly for complex writings such as poetry, was probably a process of “fits and starts,” and not as smooth as sight-reading is for us today.

Article

Akkadian  

Martin Worthington

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Linguistics
  2. Near East
Akkadian—the umbrella term for Babylonian and Assyrian—is an ancient but well-understood Semitic language (or group of languages) with a documented history of more than two thousand years. It was normally written in the cuneiform script and offers a dizzying array of written sources, more of which appear by the year.Akkadian comprised four main varieties, often referred to as “dialects.” In the 3rd millennium bce, these were Eblaite (attested at the city of Ebla, in Syria) and Old Akkadian (attested in writings from the dynasty of Sargon of Akkad). In the second and first millennia bce, these were Babylonian and Assyrian (with their various subvarieties): Old Babylonian/Assyrian c. 1900–1500bce, Middle Babylonian/Assyrian c. 1500–1000, and Neo-Babylonian and Assyrian in the first millennium (Neo-Assyrian only until c. 600bce). Vernacular Babylonian of the later first millennium is sometimes called Late Babylonian.“Standard Babylonian” is the language of poetry in the first millennium .