Dr. Irving Finkel

We have the first glimpse of what must have been, in my opinion, a whole family of languages, older languages, which simply never got recorded or we don't know anything about.

Because you're never going to get a language, a complete functioning, literally spoken language, in a balloon of its own creation.

It must be an amalgamation, a descendant, all that sort of thing.

So when you think about the beginning of writing with the Sumerian business, you have a horizon, and Sumerian is rescued by the invention of script or the use of script just in time before it vanished.

So the cuneiform writing system...

which was used to write Sumerian, was quite early on, and this is a strange thing in the history of the world, the writing system, which was well used to express Sumerian, was also used for another language at the same time, which was unrelated to Sumerian.

So this is what we call Akkadian, or sometimes Babylonian or Assyrian.

They're the dialects of the Akkadian language.

And the Akkadian language, spoken like by King Sargon I, for example, is a Semitic tongue, a dead and ancient Semitic tongue, but strongly related to other ancient Semitic tongues and modern surviving Semitic tongues.

So if you ever look into a text written in Babylonian or Syrian dialect...

in cuneiform, and you have a look at it written out in a typescript or something, and you know a bit of Semitic, like Arabic, or Hebrew, or Ethiopic, or Aramaic, or any of those languages, you know a bit of them, you will see in this ancient script put into English writing, familiar things that you can see.

That must be a verb, that must be a preposition, that must be the feminine.

You can tell something.

So even though it's dead and buried...

The Akkadian language, if we call it the Akkadian language, is a language which is accessible to us intellectually and in a comforting sort of way.

It's a language that we know what it's like.

And the Sumerian one is really strongly in contrast.

And after this big step, when the two of them were written, as history progressed, the writing system, which was a proper writing system, was pressed into use to write other, even more unrelated languages around the Middle Eastern world.

So, for example, Old Persian and, let me think,

Canaanite kind of languages, Elamite language, Ugaritic language, some Semitic, some not.