NEJS 101a · Brandeis University · Fall 2015
Akkadian is an ancient, long dead, language from the same family as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. It was at home in and around the area of modern-day Iraq, but was also the international language of diplomacy throughout the ancient world in the second and early first millennium BCE. Its corpus contains everything from receipts and legal documents to grand royal inscriptions, literary compositions, and religious texts. Cuneiform, the writing system with which the language was recorded, utilized various groups of wedge-shaped impressions made in clay and stone (as well as a few other materials) to record both sounds and whole words. This course in elementary Akkadian is an introduction to the fundamentals of Old Babylonian grammar and a large number of the commonest Neo-Assyrian cuneiform signs. No prior knowledge of other Semitic languages is required.