While Sorosoro usually concentrates on modern languages, we couldn’t resist but to share with out readers this amazing story of an extinct language…

Akkadian is a Semitic language of ancient Mesopotamia, with its Babylonian and Assyrian dialects, spoken between 2500 BC and 100 AD. Though extinct for two millennia, Akkadian had been preserved on clay and stone tablets in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, and deciphered by researchers for two centuries…

In 1921, an American archeologist of the University of Chicago, James Henry Breasted, started a project not quite expecting how titanic it would turn out to be: assembling a complete dictionary of the language based on the few traces of script that had survived the passing of time! He died 14 years later, by which point he had compiled a significant amount of data, yet would never be around to see the outcome of his major endeavor.

But the seed had been sown and many scholars from Vienna, Paris, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, Berlin, Helsinki, Baghdad and London joined him along the decades, some of whom devoted their entire career to the ambitious project…

It finally took 90 years, and the 21st and ultimate volume of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary has just been published. The work spans a total of 10,000 pages and 28,000 words in cuneiform writing; a script invented four millennia BC, the world’s earliest as far as we know.

The outcome is more encyclopedia than glossary, offering all sorts of cultural, societal and historical information on the ancient society of Mesopotamia, now modern-day Iraq: love letters, recipes, tax records, medical prescriptions, astronomical observations, religious texts, contracts, epics, poems, etc.

The work also includes a number of texts on ways to foresee the future: in smoke, stars, the moon, or sheep livers: for instance, if a sheep’s gallbladder was long and pointed, it meant the defeat of the enemy king; if there was a certain kind of crease on the liver, it could mean the king was going on a journey…

When the question was put to Gil Stein, director of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, about the point of a dictionary on a language that was last written 2000 years ago and that only a few scholars know of, he had a ready answer: “The Assyrian Dictionary gives us the key into the world’s first urban civilization. Virtually everything that we take for granted (…) has its origins in Mesopotamia, whether it’s the origins of cities, of state societies, the invention of the wheel, the way we measure time, and most important the invention of writing.”

Besides, the emotion must have been enormous for the researchers who worked on the language that Sargon the Great, king of Akkad in the 24th century B.C. spoke to command what is reputed to be the world’s first empire, the language that Hammurabi used around 1700 B.C. to proclaim the first known code of laws, and the language of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first masterpiece of world literature…

Chicago Assyrian Dictionary Project website

CBS News article

New York Times article

Telegraph article