![]() ![]() The last known Akkadian cuneiform document dates from the 1st century AD. By the Hellenistic period, the language was largely confined to scholars and priests working in temples in Assyria and Babylonia. Its gradual decline began in the Iron Age, during the Neo-Assyrian Empire when in the mid-eighth century BC Tiglath-Pileser III introduced Imperial Aramaic as a lingua franca of the Assyrian empire. 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.Ĭenturies 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. The bulk of preserved material is from this later period, corresponding to the Near Eastern Iron Age. 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. From about the 25th century BC, texts fully written in Akkadian begin to appear. Īkkadian proper names were first attested in Sumerian texts from around the mid-3rd millennium BC. The mutual influence between Sumerian and Akkadian had led scholars to describe the languages as a Sprachbund. Akkadian is named after the city of Akkad, a major centre of Mesopotamian civilization during the Akkadian Empire (c. 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. It is the earliest documented Semitic language. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.Īkkadian ( / ə ˈ k eɪ d i ən/ Akkadian: □□□□ akkadû) 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. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Initially Akkad (central Mesopotamia) lingua franca of the Middle East and Egypt in the late Bronze and early Iron Ages. ![]()
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