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Concept
Akkadian language
Summary
Akkadian (əˈkeɪdiən; Akkadian: ) is an extinct East Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia (Akkad, Assyria, Isin, Larsa, Babylonia and perhaps Dilmun) from the third millennium BC until its gradual replacement in common use by Old Aramaic among Assyrians and Babylonians from the 8th century BC.
It is the earliest documented Semitic language. It used the cuneiform script, which was originally used to write the unrelated, and also extinct, Sumerian (which is a language isolate), as well as the fellow East Semitic language Eblaite, the Hurro-Urartian language Hurrian, Elamite (another language isolate) and the Indo-European language Hittite. Akkadian is named after the city of Akkad, a major centre of Mesopotamian civilization during the Akkadian Empire (c. 2334–2154 BC). The mutual influence between Sumerian and Akkadian had led scholars to describe the languages as a Sprachbund.
Akkadian proper names were first attested in Sumerian texts from around the mid-3rd millennium BC. From about the 25th century BC, texts fully written in Akkadian begin to appear. By the 10th century BC, two variant dialectic forms of the same language were in use in Assyria and Babylonia, known as Assyrian and Babylonian respectively. The bulk of preserved material is from this later period, corresponding to the Near Eastern Iron Age. In total, hundreds of thousands of texts and text fragments have been excavated, covering a vast textual tradition of religious and mythological narrative, legal texts, scientific works, personal correspondence, political, civil and military events, economic tracts and many other examples.
Centuries after the fall of the Akkadian Empire, Akkadian (in its Assyrian and Babylonian varieties) was the native language of the Mesopotamian empires (Old Assyrian Empire, Babylonia, Middle Assyrian Empire) throughout the later Bronze Age, and became the lingua franca of much of the Ancient Near East by the time of the Bronze Age collapse c. 1150 BC.
Official source
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