Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Nicholas Ostler

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      In fact the king who had achieved the conquest of Elam and Anshan had been Gudea of Lagash (2141–2122 BC): and he served the god Ningirsu, not Ninurta. Still, Ninurta was the god of Nippur, which later became the cultural centre of the Sumerian cities, and so the change of central god would have given the piece a certain disinterested grandeur, which fitted it to be the literary classic it became.

       Akkadian—world-beating technology: A model of literacy

      Now all the earth had one language and words in common. And moving east, people found a plain in Shinar and settled there. And they said to each other: ‘Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly!’ They used brick instead of stone, and tar instead of mortar. Then they said: ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’ But Yahweh came down to see the city that the sons of man were building. And Yahweh said: ‘So this is what they can do when all share one language! There will be no limit on what they can accomplish if they have a mind for it. I shall go down and stupefy their languages so that they may not understand one another.’ So Yahweh scattered them from there all over the earth. And they stopped building the city. That is why it is called Babylon (bābšl) because there he mixed up (bālăl) the language of all the earth. And from there Yahweh scattered them all over the earth.

      Hebrew scriptures, Genesis x

      This Jewish myth, evidently inspired by the stupendous architecture on show in the cosmopolitan city of Babylon, and the polyphony of languages to be

       The Fertile Crescent Range of Akkadian

      heard on its streets, is still deeply symbolic for European culture. But somehow the central mechanism of conflict between an arrogant superpower and a jealous god has been lost. It is now taken as a story of how a single language can give unity, the kind of unity that is necessary to bring off a magnificent enterprise: just confound their languages, and cooperation becomes impossible. As such, it is bizarrely ill placed as a fable of Babylon, which was notable throughout its history for the leading role of a single language. For almost two thousand years this language was Akkadian, although in the last few centuries of its empire, as already seen, it yielded to Aramaic.

      Perhaps the dream of Babylonians scattered and disorganised was a comforting exercise in wish fulfilment for the sixth-century Jews who had been shattered and driven from their homeland by the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadrezzar II. Perhaps it might even be taken as an ironic comment on how the Assyrian Asshurbanipal had been able to sack Babylon in the seventh century: many Babylonian traditionalists must after all have questioned the spreading influence of those rough-talking Aramaeans, and speculated that no good would come of it. But although Babylon was to lose its glory in time—indeed, very soon after Nebuchadrezzar—its decline cannot be blamed on language decadence, or some failure in communication. People went on speaking Aramaic, and studying Akkadian, for many centuries after the Persians, and then the Greeks, had taken away all their power.

      Yet at its acme, Akkadian was pre-eminently a language of power and influence. If Sumerian had spread beyond Sumer as the touchstone of an educational standard, Akkadian spread through economic and political prestige.

      Akkadian is named after Agade or Akkad, once the major city of southern Mesopotamia but whose location is now a mystery. (It was possibly not far from Babylon.) Records of the language begin in earnest with the middle of the third millennium, with an early climax in those conquests by Sargon (whose long reign centred on the turn of the twenty-fouth and twenty-third centuries BC). He campaigned successfully in all directions, thus not only spreading the official use of Akkadian in the north (Mari and Ebla), but also beginning a millennium-long official dominance of the language in Elam to the west. We have seen that this first fit of imperial exuberance was followed by a collapse in the fourth generation (end of the twenty-second century BC), and a brief linguistic resurgence of the subject populations, with the return of Sumerian and Elamite to official use for a century or so. Soon, however, the Amorites, Semitic-speaking ‘Westerners’, began to make their appearance all over Mesopotamia.* Their movements did not strengthen Akkad politically, but did seem to crowd out the wide-scale use of anything but Akkadian as a means of communication; and the written record (outside literature) from the beginning of the second millennium is exclusively in this language.

      In the early days, there was some parity, and perhaps some specialisation of function, as between Akkadian and Sumerian: we have already noted that Sargon’s own daughter had been an accomplished poetess in Sumerian. But the bilingualism proved unstable. While Akkadian was fortified as the major language of the Fertile Crescent by its everyday use for all literate purposes, and some degree of mutual intelligibility with the Semitic languages of the west, Sumerian was guaranteed only by its role in education and culture. The period of the rise of Babylon (2000–1600 BC) still fostered this, but when the power bases were shattered, and foreign rulers (the Kassites) took over, serious learning in Sumerian must have seemed an irrelevance. It was retained merely as an adjunct to Akkadian studies, in the same spirit as the list of Latin tags sometimes still found at the end of an English dictionary.

      This ‘Old Babylonian’ period turned out to be as significant for Akkadian as it was for Sumerian, but in a different way. It was in this period that some fairly slight dialect differences are first noticeable between the south (Baby-lonian) and the north (Assyrian). Different dialects of Akkadian also become visible farther afield, in Mari, in Susa and to the east in the valley of the Diyala. Letters are extant from all periods, and provide the best evidence for spoken language.

      At the same time, the dialect of Babylon (which even the Babylonians still called Akkadū) became established as the literary standard, the classic version of which would be used for official purposes throughout Mesopotamia. This privileged position endured for the rest of the language’s history, essentially regardless of whether Babylon, Assyria or neither of them was the current centre of political power. The great model of classic Babylonian is the Laws of Hammurabi, compiled in the eighteenth century BC when this dialect was still the vernacular. But the best-known literary texts, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and Enuma eliš (‘When on high...’, the Creation Epic), are also in this dialect, written down when it was no longer current.

      In the north, the use of Akkadian was to die out about 600 BC, fully replaced by Aramaic. But use of the language persisted in Babylon till the beginning of the first century AD; it seems that by this stage most of the knowledge of the language was in the hands of professional scribes, who would read, write and translate even personal letters—but not without interference from the Aramaic in which they were actually thinking and talking.

      Besides its use as a native language by most of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, and its historic role as the first language of literacy for Semites anywhere, Akkadian also came to achieve a wider role as a lingua franca among utter foreigners. How was this possible? Ultimately, it was due to its association with the most sophisticated technology of its day, writing.

      The first evidence of this cosmopolitan spread is the activity of Assyrian merchants in central Anatolia far to the north of the Taurus mountains, in a complex of market centres or karum set up between Nesas and Hattusas (Kültepe and Boğaz Köy on modern maps). This was in the first quarter of the second millennium, 1950–1750 BC. The merchants came from rich families of Asshur, and used donkey caravans for transport through the Taurus mountains. Their motive was trade in metals: they had found a source of silver, gold and copper. In the reverse direction, they brought tin, goat-hair felt, woven textiles and perfumes. The traders were apparently ready to pay duties to the local Hatti authorities. This is known from the trading correspondence (on clay tablets in clay envelopes) which they left behind, written in Old Assyrian, a dialect of Akkadian.

      The trade seems to have been ended around 1750, perhaps by Hurrian incursions, perhaps by the first stirrings