Irving Finkel

law, working for the king, working for the church, I mean the priesthood, so all those things which were dependent upon archives and writing, they would find their NIVO, and also architecture, because if a big building had to be built, then somebody had to know about load-bearing things and brick measurements, and so some of them went into that kind of work, and also probably some of them went into running the army, and you had to move stores and animals and

So they found their NIVO, and some of them were intellectually very able indeed, and they went into the disciplines of, on the one hand, astrology, but more seriously into astronomy.

And theoretical grammar, because they had treatises about the relationship between the two languages and how they worked and different parts of speech.

And they wrote learned commentaries as well, what words meant.

So there was an intellectual tradition.

high-level, top, and then there were lots of professional scribes, and then the kids who left school as soon as possible and did all that, like today.

That's a really interesting question.

In terms of richness of vocabulary and richness of verbal subtlety,

I think Babylonian rivals Arabic and, of course, English.

In other words, you can say whatever you want in English, however subtle it might be, even if people don't understand the subtlety.

You can, because the tools are fantastic.

And Arabic has lots of synonyms and lots of devices.

Same in Babylonian.

It was a fully-fledged literary language.

The question about whether the language put a stop to further things, which is basically what you're asking, is immensely complicated.

But the one thing that strikes me as relevant is that a very huge proportion of

scholarly literature in mesopotamia it takes the form of omens because they believe that events accidental or deliberately stimulated had implications for what was going to happen and they took omens from things in the sky and things in the street and every single thing if you were a well-qualified diviner would have this significance right

Now, there are thousands of lines of omens of all different kinds.

And in Akkadian, it says, for example, if a lizard runs across the breakfast table, the queen will die.

So if you translate the Akkadian this way, the word if, verb and everything, if that, then this.