Ancient Akkadian Language

The Akkadians lived in the region of Mesopotamia an area between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, it is not known for sure how the civilisation began but the people who became known as the Akkadians could have been either immigrants or indigenous to that particular area.

The name Akkadian is derived from the city state of Akkad that became the capital of one of the great Mesopotamian civilizations of the ancient world. Although there is a lot we do not know about these people what we do know is that the language they spoke is one of the great cultural languages in the history of the old world.

The language Akkadian (sometimes called Assyro-Babylonian) is a Semitic language and is thought to be the oldest of the Semitic family. An inflected language it is believed to have been in the area of Mesopotamia before the arrival of the Sumerians. Akkadian is the collective name of many dialects and the languages spoken by many of the civilisations at that time. It was the universal language of the area for trade and for diplomatic purposes and lasted for many centuries. The sentence order for Akkadian was subject, object, and verb the same as the order in Sumerian, this was different to almost all other Semitic languages the other exception being Ethiopian. The influence it bears on other languages is impossible to ignore. Even today Akkadian has left its mark on modern society, not only in the survival of cuneiform scripts depicting its long history but its actual influence on modern day languages such as Assyrian. It is believed that such biblical words as Babel comes the Akkadian language Bab ilu (gate of god) meaning Babylon.

The Akkadian system of writing was a cuneiform script (wedge shaped symbols on clay tablets), which was devised from the Sumerians writing form. They adapted the cuneiform to represent their own language and its sounds but it was not actually ideally suited for the Akkadian language. The symbols they used consisted of logograms, syllables and phonograms. The script was adapted again later by both the Babylonians and Assyrians and survived until the middle of the first century AD; many samples of these scripts have been found, translated and preserved. Some of the inscriptions that survive date back to more than two thousand five hundred BC and are the oldest that have ever been found in the Semitic language. As with most ancient languages the conquest of territory by other tribes and civilisations brings about the destruction of other cultures and their languages, by the first century AD Akkadian had become another extinct tongue and was replaced as a spoken language by the popular spreading Aramaic of that time.

Although the language and sounds of Akkadian may be lost to us the survival of the written form helps us to understand these ancient people and their influence in shaping the world around them. Because we thrive to decipher our past and try to form an understanding of our place in the world in some way the language still lives on in the minds of modern scholars.