On Learning Akkadian

Assyrian king from
the British Museum

For the past year or so, I've been trying to learn Biblical Hebrew. It's definitely worth the effort to be able to read the Bible in the original. Having mastered reading backwards and the aleph-bet, what is more natural than to want to learn Akkadian too?

Akkadian is the language of ancient Mesopotamia and the earliest-attested language of the Semitic family. Evidence of Akkadian is found in names as early as the 26^th century BCE.  It probably dropped out of spoken use around in the mid first millennium BCE, being replaced by Aramaic. It was still used as a written language until the first century CE. 

Classics students who rejoice in having read all of Sappho, or dodging the lost books of Livy, might be dismayed to learn that there are hundreds of thousands of extant Akkadian texts to be read.  Unlike papyrus,  baked clay is nearly indestructible. On the bright side, if you’re worried about the meaning of a mongoose running under the king’s chariot, you’re in luck.

Important Mongoose Update:  You'll have to go here: http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/saa10/corpus and go to page 2 to learn about A Mongoose Under the King's Chariot.  Thank you to the brilliant and talented Jennifer Nicole Roman!