Ancient Assyrian Language

The Assyrians were Semitic people who lived in the northern region of Mesopotamia. Assyria itself was located in a mountainous region extending along the Tigris River, the term Assyria was derived from the name of their original capital city Assur. The Assyrians first consisted of small independent states and kingdoms but eventually grew with the increase of wealth from trade into an expanding empire. Their obsession with war and invasion helped them in their advances in both the sciences and mathematics. The Assyrians are known to be among the first to navigate using longitude and latitude and made significant breakthroughs in sophisticated medical science.

As the empire grew its territories included Mesopotamia and all of Syria and Palestine, all of Armenia, and Babylon itself eventually fell under the rule of the Assyrians and its new capital became Nineveh. As with all empires the great Assyrian empire began to crumble after the last of its great monarchs Ashurbanipal. The old enemy eventually conquered the Assyrians and the Babylonians ended the Assyrian dominance. However it was the ruler Ashurbanipal who began assembling a library of tablets of all the literature of Mesopotamia. Thousands of tablets have survived from this great library in the city of Nineveh and these tablets are a great source of knowledge to modern scholars of the Mesopotamian culture, myth, and literature.

As for language the Assyrians have used two different forms throughout their long and turbulent history, one of which is the Ancient Assyrian, this was an Assyrian dialect of the older Akkadian language, and later came the Modern Assyrian, which with Aramaic influence produced what is now known as Neo-Assyrian. Although not used in a spoken form the Sumerian language was also used in their literature.

The written form of Assyrian was firstly Akkadian and was inscribed using the cuneiform writing system on clay tablets. However a new way of writing was being developed and the use of parchment, leather and papyrus outdated the clay tablets. The people who brought this method of writing with them were the Arameans and their own spoken language known as Aramaic, would eventually supplant the Ancient Assyrian tongue because of the technological breakthrough in writing and the ever expanding use of Aramaic as a language for trade. Although Aramaic became the second official language of the Assyrians it was heavily infused with Akkadian.