Akkadian?

[Hermanubis]

Paging Leo I guess (and anyone else who might know anything about it), but I've been reading up on Ancient Mesopotamia (trying to write a paper) and was wondering when exactly Akkadian went extinct? I know it became a minority language second to Aramaic in Iraq after the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire, but were their any traces left of it by say, the Islamic Conquest?

For AH, what can we do with this? What would you need to do to save Akkadian? And how much of Akkadian is known today? Would it be possible to revive it as a living language in some fashion?

 

[robertp6165]

Paging Leo I guess (and anyone else who might know anything about it), but I've been reading up on Ancient Mesopotamia (trying to write a paper) and was wondering when exactly Akkadian went extinct? I know it became a minority language second to Aramaic in Iraq after the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire, but were their any traces left of it by say, the Islamic Conquest?

For AH, what can we do with this? What would you need to do to save Akkadian? And how much of Akkadian is known today? Would it be possible to revive it as a living language in some fashion?

Akkadian went extinct around 100 AD. The factors which killed it were...

1) The rise of Aramaic as a universal language of trade in the Middle East. Aramaic had begun to replace Akkadian in its homeland of Mesopotamia even during the Assyrian Empire era. The process continued through the Neo-Babylonian era and was accellerated during the Achaemenid era.

2) The conquest of the Middle East by Alexander, which introduced Greek Koine as another competing language, further marginalizing Akkadian.

The fact that it was apparently never adapted for alphabetic writing didn't help, either.

To save Akkadian, especially as anything other than a non-living language of liturgy and scholarship (which it had already been for a long time before it finally went completely extinct), you basically have to get rid of one or both of the above.

One possibility...there was a time when Akkadian (specifically Middle Assyrian/Middle Babylonian) was the lingua franca of the Middle East, both for diplomacy and trade. If you had the Assyrians be a bit less militaristic and more interested in trading, perhaps they can outcompete the Aramaeans in that arena. Perhaps they completely wipe the Aramaeans out...along with their language...in an effort to get rid of a major trade rival, and somewhere along the way, some Assyrian genius adapts Aramaean alphabetic characters to Akkadian. Akkadian thus becomes the language of trade and commerce throughout the middle east during the Persian Empire era.

By the time the Greeks come, Akkadian is so well entrenched...as Aramaean was in OTL...that the Greek Koine barely affects it. By this time almost everyone in the middle east west of Iran speaks Akkadian as either a first or second language.

However, when the Arabs come boiling out of the Arabian Peninsula, this version of Akkadian is going to face the same pressures that Aramaean faced when it found itself in competition with Arabic, most likely with the same result...the language dies out almost everywhere, but several hundred thousand native speakers survive in isolated areas to the present day.

 

[Leo Caesius]

The last cuneiform tablet discovered in a datable archaeological context (an astronomical almanac from Uruk) was clearly written in 75 AD, but already in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods most cuneiform texts were already being written largely by people who spoke Aramaic in the home (which is evident from their poor command of the language). These astronomical texts were often copied and recopied, so there's really no evidence that Akkadian was actually a spoken language at this time; it likely had gone extinct long before. For example, no private legal documents ("living" documents such as deeds, marriage contracts, etc.) are attested in Akkadian after the mid-2nd c. BC. Effectively, 75 AD marks the terminus post quem for the obsolescence of the cuneiform script; it is possible that the temples and schools continued to teach cuneiform learning into the 2nd century, and perhaps even up to the Sassanian conquest, but with the triumph of Christianity in Mesopotamia, these temples and schools closed, and cuneiform learning died with them.

It's not entirely true that Akkadian was never adapted to an alphabetic script. Intriguingly, between these two dates (the mid-2nd c. BC and the 1st c. AD), a group of 17 Akkadian school texts were written in cuneiform on one side and transliterations in the Greek script on the reverse (I'm attaching an example of one to this post). These are all the more remarkable when you consider that the authors of these texts must have been Aramaic speakers, but they used the Greek script to represent Akkadian nonetheless because its phonology was more suitable (neither of the two learned languages possessed the harsh gutturals characteristic of Aramaic, and the Greek script indicated vowels where the Aramaic did not). It wouldn't be impossible to adapt the Aramaic script to Akkadian, as the result would be something very much like Mandaic, which has basically the same phonology as Akkadian. My own research, the results of which were published in BASOR 341 (pp. 53-62), demonstrates that speakers of a number of Aramaic dialects adapted the Parthian chancery script for their own use, among them the Mandaeans, sometime around the same time (second half of the 1st c. to the end of the 2nd c. AD).

Getting back to the Graeco-Babyloniaca, I find it hard to believe that these were the only 17 attempts made. Part of my research also involves the adaptation of the Latin script to represent Punic during the same period of time (and up to the 4th or 5th century) and I suspect that the same could possibly have happened for Akkadian. The difference is that these other languages were spoken at the time, whereas Akkadian was basically like Church Latin, a learned language used only by pagan scholasts and clerics. If you want to save Akkadian as a (dead) language of learning, you need to butterfly Christianity away; if you want to save it as a living language, you need to butterfly the Aramaeans away. Unfortunately there's no simple way to do it - it's a bit like using a shotgun to kill a fly. It would seem that it just wasn't in the cards for Akkadian.

 

[Hermanubis]

Very interesting, thanks for responding guys.

 

[robertp6165]

The last cuneiform tablet discovered in a datable archaeological context (an astronomical almanac from Uruk) was clearly written in 75 AD, but already in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods most cuneiform texts were already being written largely by people who spoke Aramaic in the home (which is evident from their poor command of the language). These astronomical texts were often copied and recopied, so there's really no evidence that Akkadian was actually a spoken language at this time; it likely had gone extinct long before. For example, no private legal documents ("living" documents such as deeds, marriage contracts, etc.) are attested in Akkadian after the mid-2nd c. BC. Effectively, 75 AD marks the terminus post quem for the obsolescence of the cuneiform script; it is possible that the temples and schools continued to teach cuneiform learning into the 2nd century, and perhaps even up to the Sassanian conquest, but with the triumph of Christianity in Mesopotamia, these temples and schools closed, and cuneiform learning died with them.

It's not entirely true that Akkadian was never adapted to an alphabetic script. Intriguingly, between these two dates (the mid-2nd c. BC and the 1st c. AD), a group of 17 Akkadian school texts were written in cuneiform on one side and transliterations in the Greek script on the reverse (I'm attaching an example of one to this post). These are all the more remarkable when you consider that the authors of these texts must have been Aramaic speakers, but they used the Greek script to represent Akkadian nonetheless because its phonology was more suitable (neither of the two learned languages possessed the harsh gutturals characteristic of Aramaic, and the Greek script indicated vowels where the Aramaic did not). It wouldn't be impossible to adapt the Aramaic script to Akkadian, as the result would be something very much like Mandaic, which has basically the same phonology as Akkadian. My own research, the results of which were published in BASOR 341 (pp. 53-62), demonstrates that speakers of a number of Aramaic dialects adapted the Parthian chancery script for their own use, among them the Mandaeans, sometime around the same time (second half of the 1st c. to the end of the 2nd c. AD).

Getting back to the Graeco-Babyloniaca, I find it hard to believe that these were the only 17 attempts made. Part of my research also involves the adaptation of the Latin script to represent Punic during the same period of time (and up to the 4th or 5th century) and I suspect that the same could possibly have happened for Akkadian. The difference is that these other languages were spoken at the time, whereas Akkadian was basically like Church Latin, a learned language used only by pagan scholasts and clerics. If you want to save Akkadian as a (dead) language of learning, you need to butterfly Christianity away; if you want to save it as a living language, you need to butterfly the Aramaeans away. Unfortunately there's no simple way to do it - it's a bit like using a shotgun to kill a fly. It would seem that it just wasn't in the cards for Akkadian.

That's interesting about the attempted adaptation of the Greek alphabet to the Akkadian language. To save Akkadian, though, I think you need a much earlier and more successful attempt. As stated in my earlier post, Akkadian was the lingua franca of the near east during the Middle Akkadian period (c. 1500-c. 1000 BC). The people of Ugarit developed a cuneiform alphabetic script for writing their own language before their destruction in c. 1200 BC...I wonder if that could not have been adopted in Mesopotamia, easing the transition to an easier-to-write alphabet at a later date?

The key to a survival of the language is to prevent it from being supplanted by Aramaean.

Perhaps ironically, the Assyrians...under whose rule the OTL supplanting of Akkadian by Aramaean began...are the best option to do that. If they, as stated earlier, got more into trading (to the point where they considered the Aramaeans a trade rival, rather than just a resource to be exploited, as in OTL), then you might see Assyria come over, sack the Aramaean cities, and deport their populations like they did with the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Scattered in small groups all over the near east, the Aramaeans are assimilated into the surrounding cultures, lose their identity, and their language goes extinct. Meanwhile, the Assyrian military and trading empire spreads Akkadian all over the Near East.

 

[Leo Caesius]

The problem is that Akkadian speakers in this period were largely sedentary, and many of the Aramaean tribes were nomadic, like the Arabs that succeded them. The Assyrians did attempt to resettle them, all over their empire, but this didn't have the effect of assimilating them - quite the opposite, actually. There were already significant Aramaic-speaking populations across the north (including Assyria, especially in the Khabur river triangle), and these efforts just had the effect of spreading them out. Also, there was obviously a natural migration of the Aramaean tribes to more fertile grounds, such as Babylonia. Remember that Abraham, who lived in Ur, was an Aramaean. Before long, you find Aramaic inscriptions in the major cities of Assyria, especially incantations, reflecting the extent to which Aramaic had become the popular tongue. Then the Achaemenids came and basically just recognized the facts on the ground.

By the reign of Hezekiah (end of the 8th c.), Aramaic was already the international language of diplomacy and commerce, and any member of the elite (among the Assyrians and their subject peoples) could be expected to speak it, as the account in 2 Kings demonstrates.

How do we prevent this? I have a few ideas:

No policy of deportation. If the Assyrians don't resettle Aramaeans everywhere, Aramaic won't be spoken everywhere, and therefore its potential to be a surrogate for Akkadian will be much diminished. That still leaves the burgeoning Aramaean populations in Assyria and Babylonia, though. I could envision a policy of excluding nomadic Aramaean tribes from the Mesopotamian floodplain, which would be within the abilities of a powerful centralized state;

Language reform. Standardize the script, make the written language reflect the spoken language to a greater extent, develop a form more suited to parchment than clay tablets. These things periodically occurred in Egypt but Mesopotamia was rarely unified long enough for such reforms. One of Aramaic's comparative advantages to Akkadian was that it could be mastered fairly quickly and you could encode far more data using smaller, less bulky media. Akkadian has prestige, however. The example of China is instructive; the Chinese script shares many of the same deficiencies as cuneiform (it was adapted to paper, obviously, which was a comparative advantage, but it was also considerably more complex than cuneiform, with a much larger repertoire of signs) but never succumbed to the languages that were written in alphabetic scripts that it encountered by dint of sheer numbers and prestige.

A coordinated policy of assimilation. Adapt the cuneiform script to other languages of the empire, so that they are all using the same repertoire of signs (much like Hittite and other languages were written using the same script). Again, the example of Chinese is instructive, as the Chinese script unifies all of the languages conventionally called "Chinese dialects" as well as many other unrelated languages. Encourage a standardized form of Aramaic written in cuneiform and teach it alongside Akkadian in scribal schools in areas where Aramaic is spoken. Hopefully the prestige of the script and its utility in unifying the region will retard the progress of the alphabetic script (because once you strip Akkadian of its script, it loses its prestige, and will probably become replaced by the languages of exploding populations like the Aramaeans). Cuneiform has religious prestige and social cache, as well as an immense literature, and Akkadian will need to build these things in order to survive. One possibilty, to kill two birds with one stone, is the establishment of an empire-wide examination system for the scribal schools along the lines of the Confucian examination system in the Middle Kingdom, which would help create a uniform civil service thoroughly indoctrinated in the Akkadian classics, thus ensuring that Akkadian will remain THE prestige language for as long as the empire stands, and giving people a practical reason to learn it. If this happens, it won't matter even if Aramaic overtakes Akkadian, because the new Aramaean overlords of the empire will have a vested interest in perpetuation the system.

The end result? A stable (yet multilingual) empire, unified by the cuneiform script, the Akkadian "classics", and a professional civil service.