Akkadian revealed

For a period of 32 years, Prof. Martha Roth and a team of more than 80 experts have been working on a 21 volume dictionary. It is of the Assyrian and Babylonian dialects of the Akkadian language, which has not been spoken for nearly 2,000 years. The texts they used to understand the language are in cuneiform script – little hieroglyphic-type composite letters made up of wedge shaped characters – which had been scratched on to clay and baked in the sun.

The work in fact began 90 years ago in 1921, and made slow progress because no one knew how to understand the wealth of information available to them from excavations in Mesopotamia, which comprised Iraq, with parts of Turkey and Syria.

Now, as Dr Irving Finkel of the British Museum’s Middle East Department says, ‘"We can read the ancient words of poets, philosophers, magicians and astronomers as if they were writing to us in English’.

This blog salutes a marvellous achievement. Scholarship at its best.