Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon. Lesley Adkins

and Sumer. The city of Akkad has not yet been discovered, but it probably lay north of Babylon.

      Most Akkadian words had more than one syllable, and the cuneiform signs used to spell out words phonetically were either single vowels such as a, consonant-vowels such as tu, vowel-consonants such as an or consonant-vowel-consonants such as nim – never single consonants. Sumerian signs were frequently adopted as syllables or to represent entire Akkadian words. For example, the Sumerian sign an, meant ‘sky’ or ‘heaven’, and this same sign was adopted for Akkadian, but in that language was pronounced as shamu. The same Sumerian sign could mean a god, dingir, which was also adopted in Akkadian, but pronounced ilu. Signs taken from Sumerian are now called Sumerograms. Cuneiform scholars today write Sumerian words in lower-case Roman script, Akkadian words borrowed from Sumerian in UPPER-CASE Roman script and Akkadian words in italics in an attempt to lessen the confusion.

      As in Sumerian, a few Akkadian signs were used as determinatives and placed before or after words to clarify the type of word (such as a place, woman, god), and these signs were not pronounced. Phonetic complements functioned in a similar way to those of Sumerian cuneiform, but were not so widely used.

      By 2000 BC about six hundred Akkadian signs were used, but most signs had two or more values or readings, representing a syllable, an entire word or a determinative. Some signs (the polyphones) had more than one phonetic value or syllable, such as the sign , which can represent the syllables ur, lig or tash, and several different signs (the homophones) shared the same sound, such as which all represent the sound ur. As with Sumerian, scholars today show a sign’s value by a system of accents and numbers: the most common homophone in a group has no notation, the second an acute accent over the vowel, the third a grave accent, and the fourth and following have numbers, as in ur, úr, ùr, ur₄ and ur₅, called ur-one, ur-two, ur-three, ur-four, ur-five and so on. They are all pronounced in the same way.

      Sumerian had a great influence on the written form of Akkadian, such as the verb occurring at the end of the sentence, which does not happen in other Semitic languages. However, verbs in Akkadian were not constructed like those of Sumerian (which had a fixed root word to which prefixes or suffixes were added). Instead, they had a root of three consonants (triliterals), which changed internally according to the meaning, mainly with the addition of different vowels. This is similar to English: the verb ‘to write’ can have various forms, such as written, writes and wrote – but w, r and t remain constant. Many Akkadian nouns ended in ‘m’, such as sharrum (king), but this ending was dropped towards the end of Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian, so that the word became sharru. There were no spaces between words, but there was occasional punctuation, such as an upright wedge to indicate the beginning of a sentence. The writing was read from left to right, and larger clay tablets could be divided into columns, like a modern newspaper, which were also read from left to right. On the reverse of tablets, though, the order of the columns could be left to right or right to left. Horizontal lines often separated each line of cuneiform writing.

      There were three main Akkadian dialects, known today as Old Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian, and all used slightly different cuneiform scripts. In reality they were so similar that the terms tend to be interchangeable, and today they are studied as a single language. As with any other language though, Akkadian changed over the centuries. The Old Akkadian dialect dates to 2500–2000 BC, and under King Sargon it replaced Sumerian as the official language of administration. Only a century after its foundation, the Akkadian Empire collapsed, and for the next few centuries southern Mesopotamia experienced incursions from neighbouring tribes and was ruled by dynasties from cities such as Ur and Babylon, even though the kings still described themselves as rulers of the lands of Sumer and Akkad.

      From 2000 BC it is possible to distinguish between the dialects of southern Mesopotamia (Babylonia) and northern Mesopotamia (Assyria). Babylonia incorporated what was formerly Sumer and stretched from the Persian Gulf northwards to the present city of Baghdad. Babylonian, the dialect of this region, is usually subdivided into Old Babylonian (2000–1600 BC), Middle Babylonian (1600–1000 BC), Neo-Babylonian (1000–600 BC) and Late Babylonian (600 BC to AD 75), while the term Standard Babylonian is used for the version of Old Babylonian that was preserved after 1500 BC by scribes in Babylonia and Assyria. From 1400 BC cuneiform, especially Babylonian, became the international language, the lingua franca, of diplomatic relations and trade over a vast area from Asia Minor to Egypt. Literacy rates within the population were still low, as the written language remained difficult.

      The Assyrian dialect of the Akkadian language was contemporary with Babylonian, but was spoken in northern Mesopotamia. This region, known as Assyria (after the town of Ashur or Assur), stretched from what is now Baghdad northwards to the Anatolian mountains. Its main towns were Ashur, Nineveh, Nimrud, Khorsabad and Arbela, and at first Assyria was a collection of independent city-states. It became a powerful military state, expanding its territories and even invading Babylonia and sacking Babylon in 1235 BC. After 1100 BC Assyria went into decline, but from 930 BC the Neo-Assyrian Empire emerged as the dominant force in the region, conquering and annexing territory as far as Israel, Judah and Egypt. Many cuneiform inscriptions from this period have been found in vast library archives of clay tablets. In 612 BC the empire collapsed when Nineveh fell to the Babylonians and Medes.

      The Assyrian dialect is usually subdivided into Old Assyrian (2000–1500 BC), Middle Assyrian (1500–1000 BC) and Neo-Assyrian (1000–600 BC). From the eighth century BC, Aramaic – the Semitic language of the Aramaeans, a nomadic tribe from the Syrian desert – became widespread as a spoken language, gradually replacing languages such as Akkadian. Scribes of cuneiform and Aramaic are depicted in sculptured reliefs working side by side at this time. The Aramaic writing system, based on the Phoenician alphabet, was much more simple and could be written with pen and ink on materials such as parchment and papyrus. It soon began to be adopted in place of cuneiform, and Aramaic became the international language of diplomacy and administration, while Akkadian became a literary and scholarly language.

      From the sixth century BC Persia (modern-day Iran) began to expand its already immense empire westwards, first into areas like Elam and Babylonia where cuneiform was used and later as far as Egypt and Greece. Elamite, a non-Semitic language not closely related to any other, is first seen around 2300 BC and became an official language of the Persian Empire. It is known mainly from hundreds of clay tablets found at Susa, the city that became the summer capital of Darius the Great, and also at his new capital Persepolis, as well as on monumental inscriptions such as at Bisitun. Not content with adopting Babylonian and Elamite cuneiform, Darius also invented a system of cuneiform for writing down his own language of Old Persian, which had never before been written down. This was the first time in antiquity that a complete writing system had been invented, rather than gradually evolved. Old Persian cuneiform began to be used from early 520 BC in the inscription at Bisitun, and Darius and his successor Xerxes had many of their achievements recorded in other trilingual inscriptions in Elamite, Babylonian and the newly invented Old Persian cuneiform.

      Loosely based on the signs used for Sumerian and Akkadian, Old Persian cuneiform was a far simpler system, since it followed the alphabetical principles of Aramaic. There were thirty-six signs in all – signs for the three vowels a, i and u, twenty-two signs for consonants usually linked to the vowel a, four linked to the vowel i and seven to the vowel u. Two simple signs were used as word dividers, which was to prove a valuable aid to decipherment, and single signs represented the words king, land, earth, god and Ahuramazda, as well as numerals. Unlike other types of cuneiform, the invented Old Persian cuneiform is rarely found on clay tablets, but normally as inscriptions on rock faces, metal plaques, vases, stone buildings and stone monuments. Old Persian cuneiform was in use for less than two centuries, having been abandoned by the time the Macedonian Greek conqueror Alexander the Great defeated Darius III in 333 BC, overran the Persian Empire and sacked