NEJS 202b · Brandeis University · Spring 2015
Epistolary texts form one of the largest corpora of Akkadian writings that have survived to the present day. They provide a special avenue of access to various segments of Mesopotamian societies in a number of Akkadian dialects from the Sargonic period to the Hellenistic. We will have two main aims in this course: 1) gaining a better understanding of Akkadian dialects through epistolary texts, and 2) an exploration of the areas of ancient Mesopotamian studies that can be elucidated by the Akkadian epistolary corpus.
Students are expected to have completed introductory Akkadian; they should also have a grasp of scholarly German since many resources for the class will be in that language.