Akkadian

ubut bīta bini eleppa makkûra zēr-ma napišta bulliṭ

Destroy the house, build a boat, spurn property, and preserve life!

Akkadian (wikipedia) was the main language of Mesopotamia from around 2500BC to 500BC (though it continued to be used as a scholarly language until around 100AD). They wrote on clay tablets which they baked beneath the sun, so today we have hundreds of thousands of preserved documents: administrative texts, medical texts, religious texts, literature, personal letters… so much! It's not quite the first written language (they copied their writing system from the Sumerians, who came before), but it's up there.

Akkadian is the language which gave us the Epic of Gilgameš and the Enuma Eliš; Hammurabi's law code and Nanni's letter about bad copper to Ea-Nāṣir. It was the language of Babylon, spoken in Biblical times. It was the diplomatic lingua franca of the Bronze Age Ancient Near East. It's got an incredible historical legacy, and the impact of those who spoke it is still being felt today.

I decided to try learning it because I've always had a casual interest in ancient history and mythology, in the cradles of civilisation and the Ancient Near East specifically, and one day I figured that I could put my mind to it and make something of it!

This page has my own translations of ancient texts, some info on what Akkadian is like, and also some learning resources should you too develop an interest.

Complaint Tablet to Ea-Nasir coming soon: The Descent of Ištar into the Netherworld

Reading Akkadian

Akkadian is written in cuneiform, a system of wedge-shaped signs developed by the Sumerians.

Here is "Akkadian" in cuneiform: 𒀝𒅗𒁺𒌑𒌝

Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic writing system: some signs refer to words and some refer to syllables. Akkadian is primarily written with the syllable-signs (syllabograms), but they also use a lot of word-signs (logograms) when they want to appear erudite or poetic.

Sometimes a sign is used as neither a syllabogram nor a logogram, but as a "determinative" that indicates how the following word is read. This is especially common with the personal names of gods, which are always prefixed with the 𒀭 (DINGIR, "god") sign.

Depending on the context, the same sign could be a logogram, a syllabogram, or a determinative.

Here is the divine name "barrucadu" in cuneiform: 𒀭𒁀𒊒𒅗𒁺

Translation

Translating Akkadian cuneiform has three steps:

  1. Transliteration: Cuneiform signs are transformed into the Latin alphabet (with a few extra letters), with the division between signs clearly marked, and indicating which are syllabograms, which are logograms, and which are determinatives.
  2. Normalisation: The rules of Akkadian grammar, plus a dictionary, are applied to transform the transliterated list of signs into actual sentences. Normalised Akkadian looks like any other Latin-alphabet-using foreign language.
  3. Translation: Finally, the Akkadian text can be turned into English, again by using a dictionary and grammatical rules. As with many languages, Akkadian grammar is quite different to English grammar, so a translator necessarily has to take some liberties.

There are some annoyances with cuneiform. Firstly, one sign can have multiple readings, so there might be multiple potential transliterations of a text. Secondly, the cuneiform often doesn't indicate if a sound is long or short, which then leads to multiple potential grammatical interpretations. These cases have to be disambiguated based on the surrounding context.

Here is an example from the Enuma Eliš, the story of creation:

  1. 𒅁𒁀𒉡𒌑𒈠𒀭𒀭𒆠𒄨𒋙𒌦
  2. ib-ba-nu-ú-ma DINGIR.DINGIR qí-rib-šú-un
  3. ibbanū-ma ilāni qirib-šun
  4. The gods were created within them

Here 𒀭, DINGIR, is the logogram for "god". Repeating the sign, DINGIR.DINGIR, is a poetic way to indicate emphasis or plurality, so it's normalised as "ilāni", which means "the gods".

Pronunciation

Scholars have reconstructed how Akkadian probably sounded, based on other similar languages.

Vowels

There are four short vowels—'a', 'e', 'i', 'u'—and four corresponding long vowels.

Long vowels are written with either a macron—'ā', 'ē', 'ī', 'ū'—or a circumflex—'â', 'ê', 'î', 'û'—depending on why they're long. But both cases are pronounced the same.

Consonants

Most consonants sound more-or-less like they do in English: 'b', 'd', 'g', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'p', 'r', 's', 't', 'w', 'y', 'z'.

There are a few changes:

  • 'q' is a hard 'k'
  • 'h' (sometimes written 'ḫ') is the 'ch' in "loch"
  • 'j' (sometimes written 'y') is 'y'
  • 'š' is 'sh'
  • 'ṣ' is 'ts'
  • 'ṭ' is an emphatic 't'

Doubled consonants are pronounced long.

Stress

First, break a word into syllables based on the following rules:

  • Every syllable has exactly one vowel.
  • Except for at the beginning of a word, or when there are two vowels in a row, a syllable may not begin with a vowel.
  • No syllable may begin or end with two consonants.

Then categorise each syllable like so:

  • Light: ends with a short vowel.
  • Heavy: ends with a long vowel with a macron, or a consonant preceded by a short vowel.
  • Ultraheavy: ends with a long vowel with a circumflex, or a consonant preceded by any long vowel.

If the last syllable of a word is ultraheavy, it is stressed. Otherwise, the last non-final heavy or ultraheavy syllable is stressed. If all the syllables are light, the first one is stressed.

ibnû: ib / nû (ib / noo)

iparras: i / par / ras

šarratum: šar / ra / tum (shar / ra / tum)

Learning Akkadian

I hated languages in school. French, German, Spanish, all dull. My school forced me to take one of them for GCSE and I picked as the best of a bad bunch French, but it was my worst grade.

For a long time I assumed I just wasn't good at learning languages, that something about my brain made them just not click. But there was always a niggling feeling that it wasn't the language itself so much as how it was taught, with the focus on rote memorisation and contrived exercises. I had no need or desire to learn French, or German, or Spanish. I had no motivation to push through the tedium. Nothing about them excited me.

All that is to say, if someone like me who failed at classroom-based language learning can learn a meaningful amount of Akkadian, so can you!

Coping Techniques

It's important to foster motivation and discipline. Here's some techniques that have worked for me:

Study Materials

Books are the best resources. The main reference grammar and dictionary are both in German, but there are good English resources too. I am using:

Complete Babylonian covers the three dialects of Old, Middle, and Standard Babylonian, and gets you translating real sentences from historical texts from the very beginning: it's quite fun when you're doing an exercise and realise that it's a line from the flood! However, I have been caught out by the occasional formatting error (e.g. two exercises smushed into one), and its explanations of most topics are a bit brief.

A Grammar of Akkadian is more of a traditional classroom textbook (and is intended to be used as such), it's drier and more difficult, but overall I think it's more effective at teaching so long as you're enjoying it enough to stick with it. It only covers Old Babylonian, but it does have a short appendix summarising the main changes in Standard Babylonian.

I switch between the two based on my mood.

If you get A Grammar of Akkadian you will want the Key, as that has the answers to the exercises. Complete Babylonian has an appendix with the answers to its exercies.

A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian isn't exactly a book you study, but it (or another dictionary) is indispensible for translating texts outside the exercises in the other books.

Other Resources

I like to keep my studying analogue, sitting at a desk with the book, some paper, and a pen. But there are some useful online resources:

I also have some more books, but I haven't used them yet. If they're useful I'll add them here.