Ancient Babylonia Glossary - Akkadian
A language belonging to the Northeast Semitic subdivision of the Semitic
subfamily of the Hamito-Semitic family of languages (see Hamito-Semitic languages).
Also called Assyro-Babylonian, Akkadian (or Accadian) was current in ancient
Mesopotamia (now Iraq) from about 3,000 B.C. until the time of Christ. The
earliest surviving inscriptions in the language go back to about 2,500 B.C. and are
the oldest known written records in a Semitic tongue. Old Akkadian is the
earliest period of the language and can be dated from its appearance in Mesopotamia
3000 B.C. to 1950 B.C., when the 3d dynasty of Ur fell. Thereafter, Akkadian
evolved into two dialects, Assyrian, the tongue of ancient Assyria, and
Babylonian, the language of ancient Babylonia. The history of both Assyrian and
Babylonian can be roughly divided into three successive periods designated as Old
(beginning c.1950 B.C.), Middle (c.1500-1000 B.C.), and New or Late (after 1000
B.C.). Around 1500 B.C., Babylonian began to be widely used, both in the Middle East
and in international diplomacy. As time went on, Babylonian even replaced
Assyrian to a large extent in the written records and literature of the Assyrian
civilization. By the beginning of the Christian era, however, Babylonian had died
out, and it remained a lost language until modern times, when it was
deciphered during the first half of the 19th cent. Unlike the other Semitic languages,
which employed an alphabetic writing system, Akkadian and its later forms,
Assyrian and Babylonian, were written in cuneiform. The Akkadians adopted cuneiform
2500 B.C. from the Sumerians, a non-Semitic people who are believed to have
invented it. See Akkad.
Ancient Babylonia
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