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| This is a letter to a king |
In case you are asking yourself "What the heck's Akkadian? I thought she was supposed to blog about Assyria," I will explain. Akkadian is the written language of Assyria. It also the written language of Babylon, but they are slightly different dialects.
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| This is a marriage contract |
The first written language in Mesopotamia was Sumerian. The Assyrians and Babylonians adopted the use of cuneiform from the Sumerians and then altered it to better serve their needs, thereby creating Akkadian.
Akkadian is a cuneiform language, so it's made up of wedges arranged in different patterns. These wedges were usually crafted into clay with a stylus, but they were also carved into stone, metal and wax.
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| Part of a religious text |
Akkadian used roots to which they would ad prefixes, suffixes and different vowels in between the consonants to slightly change the meaning of the word. (In English, bicycle and tricycle have the same root, but they are different things) In Akkadian, the root is solely made up of consonants.
Ancient Scripts uses this example to illustrate how this works with the root ktb:
/kitāb/ "book", /kutub/ "books", /ketib/ "writer", /kataba/ "he writes"
Phonetic symbols were grouped together to created syllables such as:
Akkadian defers from Sumerian in that Sumerian focuses on the meaning of words strung together to clarify meaning, while Akkadian uses phonetic symbols to allow more meaning within a single word. To accomplish this, Akkadian makes use of logograms (word signs), syllables and classifiers.
The total number of signs in Akkadian is somewhere between 700 and 800. Scholars st the University of Chicago recently completed a dictionary of Akkadian.
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| A scholarly text |
They used their written language for business, law, religion, history, politics, scholarly texts, and literature. This is all from 2500 to 900 BC.
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| This one's about barley loans |
So the Assyrians wrote a lot of stuff down. They really valued knowledge. It makes me think about the importance of the knowledge I have gained, and how little of it I have actually recorded. My medium for writing down knowledge is faster than their medium was, and yet they took the time to write down what they thought was important, and I can't even make the time to write in my journal everyday. I have come to take knowledge for granted instead of valuing its immense significance.
It's so funny that you started to mention your journal at the end because right when you said "So the Assyrians wrote a lot of stuff down," my mind immediately jumped to journal writing. Just as the prophets have instructed, I think journal writing is so important! It gives you someone to talk to. It allows you to express yourself! It helps you record your personal history to be preserved and remembered forever!
ReplyDeleteJust as we are our own institutions of knowledge, we are also our own walking history books. Even if we feel insignificant, we are making history every moment of our lives! So we need to make then best of each moment. Make it something worth remembering, and then go record it!
Yes, the people did take great care to record things. But were these the common people recording the things they learn--journaling, as it were? I doubt it! These people had to be highly trained, and I dont' think that "common" members of the society had that type of training!
ReplyDeleteYes, we should journal, but don't beat yourself up about it just because they took more care than you did. We are lucky to have the resources we have that allow us to record-keep so easily.
Thanks for making Akkadian so easy to understand--or at least for simply explaning it. :)
I think it's interesting that every one of the characters is based on either a triangle or a line, then everything from there is built on that framework. After seeing the clay tablet in class yesterday with the purchase agreement, I have a lot more respect for the effort that it took in order to write so long ago. Furthermore, I thought the means of preserving authenticity was ingenious - molding a copy of the writings on an outer shell of the original! It must have been a very noble practice to be able to write.
ReplyDeleteWell, as Akkadian was written down by royally commissioned scribes, you could call it noble. Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria from 668-627BC, prided himself on his ability to write. He was one of the only, if not the only, Assyrian kings who learned to read and write. I'll talk more about him next week.
ReplyDelete700-800 signs seems like a lot to memorize. Do you think they learned them all individually, or were there perhaps patterns and general rules to make things easier?
ReplyDelete