Cuneiform – Cracking lost scripts

30/12/202312/03/2025

The Rediscovery of Ugaritic

Author: Marie Young (Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne)

Ugarit was an ancient Syrian city, capital of a kingdom which reached its peak from the fourteenth to the early twelfth centuries BCE. Archaeological excavations have found its vestiges at Ras Shamra in the Syrian province of Latakia. The Ugaritic state was a major centre of exchange in the Mediterranean during the Bronze Age. Its population spoke the Ugaritic language, a Semitic language written in Cuneiform. The scribes of this Syrian “periphery” adapted the Sumero-Akkadian syllabic cuneiform to make it an alphabet.

Picture: Wikimedia. View of the ruins of the Royal Palace of Ugarit 2005.

Discovery

In March 1928, a ploughman discovered by surprise a stone tomb built with much pottery towards the old seaport of the city of Ugarit. This immediately aroused the curiosity of the French administration which ruled the region. Indeed, Syria had been under a French mandate granted by the League of Nations since 1918. The Louvre Museum chose Claude F.-A. Schaeffer (1898-1982) to lead the first excavation campaigns. He led the excavation team from May 14, 1929, until 1969, with an interruption during the Second World War. His team uncovered this city at the heart of trade in the eastern Mediterranean. Ugarit was in the fertile plain of the Syrian city of Latakia, not far from the sea cove of Minet El Beida. It enjoyed a strategic position in the Levant that lets it develop a prosperous economy.

Since 1999, a Syrian and French team of archaeologists has been in place, and since 2011, a Syrian archaeological team. The first farmers occupied Ugarit from the Neolitich (c. 7500 BCE), and there were human settlements until the end of the Bronze Age. The city was destroyed around 1180 BCE, when the Middle East was facing economic and political upheavals.

Stele of Baal with a thunderbolt. Baal was the main god of Ugarit, he was a weather god. (Louvre Museum, RMN-Grand Palais 2006 / Franck Raux, AO 15775)

During the excavation campaigns, many texts were discovered in a writing system that resembled the cuneiform used to write Akkadian and Sumerian. The inhabitants of Ugarit had adapted this writing to mark better the Semitic dialect they spoke.

From 1929 onwards, mainly three researchers were deciphering the Ugaritic alphabet: Hans Bauer (1878-1937), Edouard Dhorme (1881-1966) and Charles Virolleaud (1879-1968). The first two, Hans Bauer and Edouard Dhorme have worked in the cryptography department during the First World War. Hans Bauer had been employed in the German army and Edouard Dhorme in the French one. The methods of decoding encrypted systems used during the First World War helped them undoubtedly to decipher the Ugaritic alphabet. Former enemies of war, they did not stop their communications to unveil the mystery of the Ugaritic between the two World Wars.

Charles Virolleaud was the first epigraphist of the excavation site in 1929. He was the first to see Ugaritic texts. Ugaritic scribes used vertical separators to individualise each word. After having understood this, Charles Virolleaud had no difficulty in observing that most of the words were short, they mostly contained one letter, sometimes two or three, and at most four. Only twenty-six or twenty-seven signs seemed to appear in the texts. This led him to believe that the script was an alphabet. After this discovery, he started to find the letters corresponding to each sign.

He began his study of the Ugaritic language by analysing a short inscription appearing on a tablet, and on metal adzes.

The adzes were part of a depot of seventy-four bronze weapons and tools that belonged to the house of a high priest of Ugarit between the Ba’al and Dagan temples (discovered at the beginning of the excavations in 1929). They were agricultural tools. Picture: C. Schaeffer 1956, Ugaritica III, p. 255 fig. 219.

On some of them, appeared the inscription: ”rb khnm”, (property) of the high priest, and on one of them a word seemed to designate the object itself: “ḫrṣn”, for adze. (on the right). A sign composed of three vertical wedges was on the cuneiform tablet which bore the same inscription. A word separator followed the sign. Ch. Virolleaud had the intuition that this first sign was the equivalent of the Akkadian “ana” preposition which serves to design the owner of the adze. Ch. Virolleaud made it the letter l, the translation of “ana” in West Semitic. (Picture: C. F-A. Schaeffer 1956, Ugaritica III, p. 264, fig. 229).

Plan of the high priest’s house, Ugarit. The yellow circle shows the storeroom of the bronze weapons and bronze tools. Source : C. Schaeffer 1956, Ugaritica III, p. 252, fig. 216.

Ch. Virolleaud thought that the inscription found referred to the object and his owner. This allowed him to start the identification of the letters belonging to the Ugaritic alphabet. Further studies confirmed the meaning of the inscription “adze of the high priest”, and the other one “(property) of the high priest”.

The exchanges between the three researchers made it possible to identify all the letters of the Ugaritic alphabet. Hans Bauer and Edouard Dhorme perfectly master other Semitic languages, which facilitated the deciphering of the Ugaritic alphabet. Hans Bauer had published a grammar of ancient Hebrew, which became a canon (Historische Grammatik der hebraïschen Sprache des Alten Testamentes, Halle 1922). E. Dhorme had been teaching Semitic languages at the Ecole Biblique of Jerusalem since 1905. Furthermore, Charles Virolleaud knew well Arabic, Akkadian and Sumerian. Before 1929, he made a big name for his translations of many texts written in Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform. After the scholars understood that they were dealing with a Semitic language, they tried to decipher the letters by drawing parallels with the other Semitic languages they knew, and which shared many common roots with Ugaritic.

Thus, in November 1929, shortly after the excavations began, Charles Virolleaud succeeded in identifying three letters of Ugarit’s main god: b’l. The 26^th of April 1930, Hans Bauer proposed in a message to the Director of Oriental Antiquities of the Louvre, René Dussaud, the identification of fourteen letters of the Ugaritic alphabet: ā, ī, b, b, g, d, h, w, w, y, k, l, l, n,’, r, š, t, and ś. From that moment on, he suggested the western Semitic character of the texts newly discovered. Edouard Dhorme completed the deciphering, identifying at the same times eighteen of the twenty-nine letters. H. Bauer after receiving these results corrects the errors made. The debates between the three researchers permit to discover the other letters. Furthermore, one must mention Marcel Cohen (1884-1974), a famous linguist, who also contributed to the deciphering of the alphabet. He actively advised Charles Virolleaud in the thirties to identify certain consonant values of the Ugaritic alphabet.

Nevertheless, the confirmation of their deciphering came only twenty-five years later in 1955. The excavations of the royal palace of Ugarit uncovered a mutilated text and this school text contained a synoptic table of the Ugarit alphabet, and its phonetic equivalents in Akkadian cuneiform. This discovery made it possible to understand the vocalisation of the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet.

Copy of Charles Virolleaud, Royal Palace of Ugarit II, Textes en cunéiforme alphabétique des archives est, ouest et centrales, N. 189 (Damascus Museum, RS 19.159). Synoptic table of the Ugaritic alphabet with its Akkadian cuneiform equivalents for the first and last ten letters of the alphabet. The fire of the palace destroyed the rest of the text. Claude F.-A. Schaeffer discovered this document in 1955 in the ashes covering the ground of the south-western archives of the Royal Palace. The table originally contained four columns. The apprentice scribe has to learn both the Sumerian-Akkadian syllabary and the Ugaritic alphabet. He adopts in the tablet presented above the classic presentation of the Sumero-Akkadian sign lists, vertically in columns, whereas he normally writes the Ugaritic alphabet horizontally in landscape format. This table made it possible to translate texts and switch from one writing system to another.

The syllable “ḫa” in Akkadian is equivalent to ḫ (o.4) and ġ (r. 21). Indeed, the Sumero-Akkadian syllabary has no sign of responding to the Semitic ġ. H is also unknown in Akkadian, it has been replaced here by ú (o.6). ḥ becomes in Akkadian ku (o.9), but the sound is often rendered in names or words by ḫ in Sumerian-Akkadian. ś is equivalent to zu (r.30) showing that the traditional samekh was closer to z than to s in the old Semitic languages.

Charles Virolleaud is particularly to be thanked for translating important parts of Ugaritic literature into French. He published the first edition of the Phoenician legend of Danel in 1936, then the legend of Keret, king of the Sidonians in 1936, and the poem to the goddess Anat in 1938. He also faced another important problem in Ras Shamra’s sources: there were not only documents written in Ugaritic. After renewing efforts on a sixty-two lines literary text, he concluded that it was written in another language. It is clear now that Hurrian was the language of the text. Ugaritic society spoke different languages and mastered different mythologies.

Tablet of the legend of Danel (picture: RMN-Grand Palais 2014 / Mathieu Rabeau, No. AO 17323). A poem in verse discovered in 1930-31. A certain Ilimilk may have composed the text in the fourteenth century BCE. The legend told the adventures of King Danel and his son Aqhat, related to the agrarian rites of ancient Phoenicia. The myth highlights the opposition between wisdom and power and warns against a lack of moderation.

Type of Sources

Texts in the Ugaritic language are documented from the fourteenth to the twelfth century BCE. Since 1929, nearly five thousand objects and fragments inscribed in some form of cuneiform writing have been discovered in Ras Shamra. Eight languages were used in the city: the Ugaritic language, the Akkadian Babylonian dialect, the Sumerian, the Hittite, the Luwian, the Hurrian, the Egyptian hieroglyphic and the Cyprominoan. Five writing systems recorded these languages: alphabetic cuneiform, the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, Luwian hieroglyphic, Egyptian hieroglyphic, and finally Cyprian-Minoan writing. Most of the texts were incised on clay tablets. A small number were engraved on ivory or metal objects, and no inscribed wood was found until now.

The Akkadian had a central role in Ugaritic society. It was the language of diplomatic and economic exchanges, and three thousand texts and fragments in the Babylonian Akkadian dialect were discovered. They were some classical texts of the Sumero-Akkadian literature, but also letters sent to the Egyptian Pharaoh.

The archaeologists found the house of a high priest and its library between the two main temples of the city. Many school texts and literary texts were exhumed inside, among them the legend of Keret, the legend of Danel, and other myths written around the figure of the god Baal.

The archaeologists found the tablet in the house of the high priest. It told the conflict between Baal and Mot, the god of death. The tablet had three columns, a part of the text is still missing. It described an agrarian myth: the heat of summer causes the god Baal to vanish, and at the end of the myth, Baal returns as a tempest bringing the rains of autumn. The image of Baal’s annual disappearance symbolised the forces of nature. (Louvre Museum, Museum Number: AO 16636. Picture: Musée du Louvre 2011 / Thierry Ollivier, cf. https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010141546)

Over two thousand items written in Ugaritic are known, and the majority comes from the excavations at Ras Shamra, whereas a smaller corpus comes from later excavations made at Ras ibn Hani. The biggest part of the text belongs to the palatial administration and allows a reconstruction of the daily life of the city (1000 tablets and fragments), another important corpus concerns the cultic economies of temples (100 documents).

The Alphabet

In Ugarit the scribes used an alphabetic cuneiform. It is one of the oldest alphabets in the World. They started to use it in the fifteenth century BCE, it was used from Bet Shemesh in the South Levant to Cyprus. Each sign stands for a consonant, and the reader has to supply the court vowel like in Aramaean or Arabic. The reading direction was left to right like Sumerian or Akkadian. Clay was the principal support to write, but some Ugaritic inscriptions on metal were also exhumed. The scribes made a distinction between long and short vowels: a/ā, i/ī, u/ū, ē and ō

“Alphabet book” of Ugarit. Scribes started their formation, learning how to write and read. The Schaeffer’s excavation discovered this text in 1938. The tablet seems to be the teacher’s model version, while the student’s exercise which should have been below it seems to have been removed with a cutting tool. Traces of cuts are visible on the lower part of the edge. It was the first alphabet book exhumed nine years after the first discoveries of Ugarit (Picture: CDLI, Museum Number: RS 12.063).

Sources: Wikimedia. The Alphabet of Ugarit. The “a”, “i”, “u” are long vowels. The s₂ is the equivalent of the samekh letter in ancient Hebrew.

Scholarly documents discovered in the ruins of the Ugarit palace in November 1955. The last studies show that the teacher wrote the first line and seven scribes seem to have copied the teacher’s model of the ten first letters of the alphabet carefully, except for the last scribe who completed the list and wrote all the thirty letters of the alphabet on three lines. (Excavation Number: RS 19.040, Copy of Charles Virolleaud, PRU II, no. 188.)

Some details about the Ugaritic language:

The grammar of Ugaritic is like classical Arabic or Akkadian, it belongs to the “West Semitic” branch, and Ugaritic is the earliest known West Semitic language for which a corpus of literary texts has been discovered. It possesses two genders: masculine and feminine, three cases: nominative, accusative and genitive, and three numbers: singular, dual and plural. The word order is verb-subject-object and subject-object-verb like in Akkadian. It is a Semitic language, linguists assert that Ugaritic is conservative because it retains most of the phonemes, the case system and the word order.

Introduction in the Verbal Morphology

Ugaritic verbal morphology may be characterised as a combination of two elements: a “verbal base” (consonantal root and a vowel pattern), and a collection of “grammatical affixes”. One finds in all verbs morphological marks of the gender (masculine, feminine) and number (singular, dual, plural) of the verb’s grammatical subject. Furthermore, Ugaritic verbs always distinguish three categories of “person” for the grammatical subject: first, second and third. This language possesses two verbal conjugations, each with its peculiar morphological features. One can designate them as the “suffixing conjugation (SC), and the “prefixing conjugation” (PC).

The Suffixing Conjugation and the Prefixing Conjugation

The Ugaritic Suffixing Conjugation mainly served as a tense noting action having occurred in the past, whereas the Prefixing Conjugation has a very extensive spectrum of semantic functions than the Suffixing Conjugation. The Prefixing Conjugation possesses both prefixes and suffixes, it may form the indicative mood to express present or future action. Also, the scribes used Prefixing Conjugation as a “narrative tense” in poetry.

singular
3ms	base=a
3fs	base=at
2ms	base=(ā)ta
2fs	base=(ā)ti
1cs	base=(ā)tu
Dual
3md	base=ā
3fd	base=(a)tā
2md	base=(ā)tumā
1cd	base=(ā)nayā^?
Plural
3mp	base=ū
3fp	base=ā^?
2mp	base=(ā)tumu
2fp	base=(ā)tina
1cp	base=(ā)nu^?

The Ugaritic suffixing conjugation

singular
3ms	y=base=u
3fs	t=base=u
2ms	t=base=u
2fs	t=base=īna
1cs	̕ =base=u
Dual
3md	t=base=āna
3fd	t=base=āna
2md	t=base=āna
1cd	n=base=āna
Plural
3mp	t=base=ūna
3fp	t=base=na
2mp	t=base=ūna
2fp	t=base=na
1cp	n=base=u

The Ugaritic prefixing conjugation

The Ugaritic Divination

The Ugaritic scribes’ apprentices had to learn some basics of divination, before to choose to become a priest in the temple, or a scribe in the administration. Divination was used in all the spheres of the society but had different forms. One of the most widespread forms of divination in the Ancient Near East was the inspections of the entrails of a sacrificed sheep, a method called hepatoscopy. To teach this subject to the apprentice scribes, the overseer produced clay models of liver or lungs. Excavations found these types of school’s tools everywhere in Mesopotamia, and in Ugarit.

The liver model in the red circle had two sides with notations: one side is deeply incised, the other has three lines of an Ugaritic inscription beginning with the word “kbd”: liver. The object was found among five other livers models together with a model of a lung in the house of a priest. (Picture: Jacques-Claude Courtois, Ugaritica VI, 1969, Photo fig. 14, Excavation Number: RS 24.326 from the fourteenth-thirteenth century BCE.)

An inscription on the liver:

Kbd dt jpt
Bn jkn’
K jptḫ jrk[t]
Hnd

¹ kbd means “Liver”

¹dt jpt means “Of Jpt”, which is a personal name

²bn jkn’ means “Son of Jkn”, which is a personal name

³ k means “when”

³ jptḫ means “He opens (3sg.p.)”

⁴hnd means “This (determinative)”

³jrkt means “Entrails”

To sum up: “Liver of Jpt, son of Jkn, when he opens these entrails.“

Bibliography

Tools to learn Ugaritic:

John Huehnergaard 2012, An Introduction to Ugaritic, Peabody, Hendrickson Publishers.

Pierre Bordreuil and Dennis Pardee 2009, A Manual of Ugaritic, Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic 3, Winona Lake, Eisenbrauns.

Joseph Tropper 2000, Ugaritische Grammatik, AOAT 273, Münster, Ugarit Verlag.

Roger D. Woodard (ed.) 2008, The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia, Cambridge, Cambridge/New York, Cambridge University Press.

Robert Hawley 2020, “Ugaritic”, in a Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages, by Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee (ed.), John Wiley & Sons.

Text editions:

André Caquot et al. 1989, Textes ougaritiques : tome 2, Textes religieux et rituels, correspondance, Paris, Éditions du Cerf.

Charles Virolleaud 1957, Textes alphabétiques des archives Est, Ouest et Centrales, in Le palais Royal d’Ugarit, Paris, Geuthner (Abbreviation: PRU II).

Manfried Dietrich et al. 1976, Die keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit, I, AOAT 24/1, Kevelaer/Neukirchen, Neukirchener Verlag (Abbreviation: KTU).

Archaeological reports:

Jacques-Claude Courtois 1969, Ugaritica VI, Paris, Geuthner.

Ugaritic Culture and Literature:

John Gibson 1977, Canaanite Myths and Legends, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark.

Marguerite Yon 2006, The city of Ugarit at Tell Ras Shamra, Winona Lake, Eisenbrauns.

Robert Hawley 2008, “Apprendre à écrire à Ougarit : une typologie des abécédaires”, in Carole Roche (ed.), D’Ougarit à Jérusalem, Recueil d’études épigraphiques et archéologiques offert à Pierre Bordreuil, Paris, De Boccard.

Website:

http://archeologie.culture.fr/proche-orient/fr/a-propos/ougarit-ras-shamra

Cite this article as: M. Young, “The Rediscovery of Ugaritic”, in N. Moncunill (ed.), Cracking lost scripts, 29/12/2023, https://doi.org/10.58079/vf2e.

19/04/202330/12/2023

THE REDISCOVERY OF SUMERIAN

Author: Marie Young (Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne)

1. A short history of the Sumerology

In the second half of the nineteenth century, after Akkadian and Persian cuneiform had been deciphered, Assyriologists discovered bilingual texts that revealed yet another language written in cuneiform. During the excavations of Nineveh in 1849, Henry C. Rawlinson identified Sumerian among the clay tablets found in the ancient Neo-Assyrian libraries, and got in touch with European colleagues to understand the language. In 1850, Irish preacher Edward Hinks already sensed that the writing system used by Akkadians had its source in an older language, because it was not well suited to the structure of a Semitic dialect. As he wrote in a letter:

“I accompanied the announcement with what I considered a necessary consequence of this newly discovered fact, that this mode of writing must have originated with a non-Semitic people; as non-Semitic peoples could have invented a system of writing so uncongenial to their language.”

Cathcart, K.J. (ed.), 2007, The Correspondence of Edward Hincks, II. Dublin, 297.

As he continued his study, Rawlinson’s discoveries enabled a systematic observation of the language. Sumerian was initially called “Scythian”, or sometimes “Turanian”, as scholars thought it was related to the Ural-Altaic languages. It was then called “Accadian” for twenty years, at a time when what is now known as Akkadian had been named Assyrian by young Assyriologists.

The existence of Sumerian was confirmed when Henry C. Rawlinson published non-Semitic inscriptions found on bricks and clay tablets in southern Babylonia (from the cities of Larsa, Nippur, and Uruk). It was one of the first publications of Sumerian texts, and as such, provided the means to develop the analysis of the language. Edward Hincks was the one who established its agglutinating character, one of the first significant discoveries about the morphology of Sumerian language.

In 1868, Jules Oppert suggested that the language should be called “Sumerian”, from the title of the “king of Sumer and Accad”, featured on some royal inscriptions written in this language. He set out his arguments in an extended study published in 1875: “Sumérien ou accadien?”. At the time, acrimonious debates about Sumerian were emerging in scientific circles. For example, the French orientalist Joseph Halévy (1827-1917) argued in an article published in 1874 that Sumerian was only a cryptographic system invented by Babylonian priests and scribes and not a language in itself (Observations critiques sur les prétendus Touraniens de la Babylonie). Although Jules Oppert made a solid case for the existence of Sumerian in an 1875 article titled “Sumérien ou rien?” (“Sumerian or nothing?”), Halévy, undeterred, kept defending his point of view for forty more years, even after Carl Bezold had published a glossary containing the Akkadian expression lišan šumeri “Sumerian tongue” in 1889. Bezold’s paper displayed clear evidence that Sumerian was indeed a language, and not just a hieratic writing system. It is worth nothing that this controversy appeared in a context where the anti-Semitic ideas of Aryanism were fairly widespread in Europe. Halévy wanted to defend the idea of a Semitic origin of writing, while Aryanists began to view Sumerian as a superior Indo-Aryan civilization.

The deciphering of Sumerian was mostly made possible by bilingual texts. Among them were clay tablets inscribed with a sort of “dictionary”; they were divided into three columns, with the middle one bearing Sumerian words, the left one their phonological writing, and the right one their Akkadian translation. This type of object is now called a “vocabulary”. François Lenormant was one of the first scholars to study these documents in Lettres assyriologiques (1871-72), and La langue primitive de Chaldée et les idiomes touraniens (1875), and to publish a Sumerian grammar, Études accadiennes, dedicated to his friend Jules Oppert, in 1873.

In 1884, Paul Haupt was the first one to theorise the existence of two Sumerian dialects: eme-gir and eme-sal. He characterized Emesal as a feminine language (The Babylonian’s woman language, 1884), an idea that long held true in the field of Sumerology.

Figure 1: Syllabary B vocabulary from Nineveh (1st millennium). Photo: Trustees of the British Museum. CDLI no. P365229

Meanwhile, from 1877 onwards, archaeological excavations in Tell Telloh, Southern Iraq, uncovered many texts and objects written in Sumerian and dating from the second half of the third millennium BCE. It was the first Sumerian archaeological site to be extensively excavated. Eleven campaigns took place in the city of Girsu/Tell Telloh, initially supervised by Ernest de Sarzec, the French vice-consul at Basra. French archaeologists excavated large diorite statues of Girsu’s former leaders as well as historical Sumerian texts on clay, stone and metal. Prior to this, scholars were aware of only a few resources written solely in Sumerian, and these excavations brought about a major change. In 1888, archaeological campaigns started in Nippur, the ancient religious capital of Sumer, where inscribed objects from the same period as the Tell Telloh artefacts were discovered.

Thanks to these new excavations, academics published a lot of writings on the structure of the Sumerian language, and translated new resources at the start of the twentieth century. François Thureau-Dangin, a former student of Jules Oppert, offered a reliable translation of a corpus of Sumerian inscriptions from Tell Telloh. In 1895, he translated the first part of Cylinder A of Gudea with a commentary, a first grammar, and a vocabulary. His project was completed in 1905, with the publications of all of Gudea’s cylinders. Thureau-Dangin was one of the first Sumerologists to study the objects from the ancient city of Girsu/Lagaš.

Figure 2: Statue of Gudea, Prince of Lagash. The French excavations discovered several inscribed statues of the Sumerian ruler during the excavations of Tell Telloh. A part of them was already exposed in the palace of a Hellenistic ruler: Adad-nadin-ahhe. Object now in Louvre. Credits: Musée du Louvre / Maurice et Pierre Chuzeville, Museum number : AO 3293.

He produced many transcriptions, copies, and translations during his career in the Louvre. His work Les inscriptions de Sumer et d’Akkad, published in 1905, was a great success, and was later translated in German. His correspondence with German Sumerologist Arno Pöbel on Sumerian grammar is well documented. Arno Pöbel wrote many articles on Sumerian. His first piece, Das Verbum im Sumerischen, published in 1908, was a response to François Thureau-Dangin’s 1907 article on the syntax of Sumerian verbs, La syntaxe du verbe Sumérien. In 1923, he published the first systematic description of Sumerian in German: Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik (translated in English in 2005), which became a precious tool to understand the newly discovered Sumerian tongue. In the early twentieth century, Arno Pöbel and François Thureau-Dangin were the leading figures of the flourishing discipline of Sumerology.

The number of Sumerian text editions continued to grow, facilitating the understanding of the Sumerian language and its grammar. Benno Landsberger launched the project of a first Sumerian dictionary: Materialen zum šumerisches Lexikon, whose first volume was published in 1937, while he was in Ankara. He had been dismissed from Leipzig University as a result of the Nazi regime’s anti-Jewish policy.

After the second world war, Adam Falkenstein‘s works in Germany dominated the discipline. A former student of Benno Landsberger, he published a new grammar of Sumerian as well as several studies on the Sumerian legal system (1956-1957). His Grammatik der Sprache Gudea von Lagaš became a reference in the field. Samuel N. Kramer and Thorkild Jacobsen in the United States, who were also following in the footsteps of Benno Landsberger, issued a great number of publications on the Sumerian language, literature and religion, and started popularising Sumerian literature.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, Sumerology was enriched by debates between linguists on the structure of the language. Later on, the development of the Internet enabled the publication of entire corpora of Sumerian texts online. The project initiated by Jeremy Black at the University of Oxford, The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, aims to provide a digital library of all Sumerian literary compositions. Similarly, the Database of Neo-Sumerian Texts has made over 86,000 administrative documents from the third millennium BCE accessible online. The discipline is still young, and even though excavations have become scarce over the last few years due to tragic events in the region, a lot of texts currently in private collections or Museum are yet to be made public.

2. Sumerian Language in the Ancient Near East

Sumerians lived in southern Iraq, in the Euphrates and Tigris plain on the Persian Gulf, around the fourth and third millennium BCE. The first engraved clay tablets dated from the fourth millennium BCE and came from Uruk. They showed pictograms representing lexemes instead of phonemes, hence the term of proto-cuneiform. But whether they actually were written by Sumerians is still uncertain.

Figure 3: Proto-cuneiform tablet from Uruk, fourth millennium BCE, Louvre Museum AO 19936. Credits: 2011 Musée du Louvre / Thierry Ollivier.

The oldest texts known to have been written in Sumerian date back to 2800 BCE and were found in the city of Ur. They present grammatical elements that can easily be described as Sumerian. These texts are of administrative and lexical nature. Indeed, the script was initially invented to manage a state economy that was growing more complex.

Sumerian is an isolated language. Though it has no known relationship to any other language, many attempts have been made to draw links to Hungarian, Turkish, or Oral-Altaic. Mesopotamians stopped speaking Sumerian at the beginning of the second millennium BCE, as Akkadian established itself in Mesopotamia around 2600 BCE. It was initially spoken upstream on the Euphrates and Tigris, before spreading to the south of present-day Iraq. As a result of Akkadian’s expansion, Sumerian eventually died down, as was likely the case for neighbouring languages such as Eblaite or Amorite.

Sumerian thereafter became a language of culture and cult, similar to Latin in the Middle Ages. It continued to be used until the end of the first millennium BCE, particularly in religious, legal and scholarly circles. From the end of the third millennium BCE onwards, Akkadian scribes had to create educational tools to teach and learn Sumerian, such as lists of words and conjugation tables written in both Sumerian and Akkadian. Those documents conditioned the contemporary approach to the Sumerian language, and scholars consequently theorised Sumerian though an Akkadian lens. Linguistic and cultural exchanges between Akkadian and Sumerian were such that we now speak of a Sumero-Akkadian culture. Bilingualism was widespread in Mesopotamia, where phonological, grammatical or lexical exchanges took place.

Though Sumerian has often been studied as a homogeneous block, it underwent numerous linguistic evolutions during the long period it was in use, from the end of the fourth millennium to the first century BCE. The Sumerian spoken under Gudea (ca. 2120 BCE), often described as classical Sumerian, was certainly different from that used in Babylon under Hammurabi (1792-1752 BCE) for instance.

Figure 4. Map of the areas or cities where cuneiform tablets were found. Source: Cécile Michel and Martin Sauvage.

3. The different phases of the Sumerian language

Within the long history of cuneiform writing, different periods for the use of Sumerian can be distinguished:

The first era, from 3300 to 2350 BCE, is that of Sumerian archaic, also called the Pre-Sargonid period, when Sumerians already existed alongside Akkadian populations. There are many texts, mainly administrative documents, from Uruk, and, in chronological order, from Jemdet Nasr, Ur, Fara/Shuruppak, Abu ṣalabikh, and Telloh. The first lexical and literary tablets appeared around 2600 BCE. More than 10,000 texts from this period are known to exist.

Figure 5: This artefact is the so-called standard of Ur. During the archaeological campaign of 1927-1928, L. Woolley found it in the royal tombs of the city of Ur. The Sumerian king Ur-Pabilsag, who died around 2550 BC, possibly kept it in his grave. Credits: Wikimedia, British Museum: Museum number BM 121201.

Around 2350 BCE, an Akkadian state emerged under Sargon of Akkad, choosing Akkadian, a Semitic language, as its official language. The northern Babylonian communities started using Akkadian in writing, whereas southern cities continued to employ Sumerian as a prestige language and for local accounting. It was under the Sargonic kings that Akkadian was first used in place of Sumerian to write royal inscriptions. A minority of inscriptions were written in Sumerian or were bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian. The Cuneiform sign forms used on these inscriptions lived on, and considerably inspired the inscriptions of the kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur and their successors.

Figure 6: This stela celebrates the victory of the king of Naram-Sîn (2254-2218 BC) against the Guti. He was the grandson of Sargon. The text described his military success, but was erased by the later Elamite king Shutruk-nahhunte who brought this artefact to Susa as a trophy. Credits: Wikimedia, Louvre Museum.

The period from 2150 to 2000 BCE is described as the Sumerian Renaissance. Ur-Namma unified most of Babylonia. Around 100,000 published administrative texts testify of his activities and those of his four successors (ca. 2110-2003 BCE). A lot of documents are still in the ground or unpublished. Although the dynasty was using Sumerian, rare Akkadian documents found in peripheral sites indicate that Sumerian was not the only official language of the time. The reign of Gudea in Lagash and the empire of Ur (UR III) left their mark on this period. A lot of new compositions were written in Sumerian back then, as shown by later copies, when the hymns, epics, and other compositions entered the main curriculum of scribal education.

Figure 7: Gudea cylinder. Louvre Museum. The object explained the construction of the Eninnu temple, built for the god Ningirsu, whom Gudea saw in a dream, telling him to build his temple. It is one of the longest royal inscriptions in Sumerian (picture: 2011 Musée du Louvre / Chipault / Soligny, museum number: MNB 1512).

The period from 2000 to 1600 BCE marks the Old Babylonian Period, during which people gradually stopped speaking Sumerian. By the nineteenth century, the Sumerian language was no longer used for administrative purpose in Babylonia, with the exception of the city of Nippur, where the language survived. Sumerian documents from this period were mostly produced in school context. The canonisation of Sumerian literature seems to have taken place during this period. Most available Sumerian literary sources date back to this time, with a majority of them coming from Nippur and Ur, and were written by scribes whose mother tongue was Akkadian but who learnt Sumerian in a bilingual pedagogical environment. The corpus from this period is heterogeneous, and is composed of Sumerian literature as well as religious or legal texts. Akkadian scribes created and used various tools to perpetuate the teaching of Sumerian. Even so, sources show that the spread of Sumerian differed from one region and era to another, as indicated by this letter to the Kind of Mari Yasmah-Addu (1795-1776 BCE):

“You wrote me to send you a man who deciphers the Sumerian in these terms: “Take for me a man who deciphers the Sumerian and speaks Amorite”. Who deciphers Sumerian and lives close to me? Well, should I send to you Šu-Ea who deciphers the Sumerian? […] Iškur-zi-kalama deciphers the Sumerian, but he holds a position in the administration. Should he leave and come to your house? Nanna-palil deciphers the Sumerian, but I must send him to Qabra. You wrote me this: “May someone send me a man from Rapiqum who can decipher the Sumerian!” There is no one here who reads Sumerian!”

(English translation by Marie Young from D. Charpin).

This letter attests that finding someone who spoke Sumerian in North Mesopotamia during the eighteenth century BCE may have been a challenge. Yasmah-Addu affirmed that only three officials could read Sumerian!

Fig. 8: This tablet from the Old Babylonian Period perpetuated the myth of Enmerkar and the lord of Aratta. The myth tells the story of a war between Enmerkar and Aratta and explained how writing came to be. The messenger of Enmerkar was too tired to deliver messages between the two rulers, and Enmerkar, king of Uruk, created the script to facilitate his work: “The messenger, whose mouth was heavy, was not able to repeat it. Because the messenger, whose mouth was tired, was not able to repeat it, the lord of Kulaba patted some clay and wrote the message as if on a tablet. Formerly, the writing of messages on clay was not established. Now, under that sun and on that day, it was indeed so. The lord of Kulaba inscribed the message like a tablet. It was just like that.” (translation ETCSL). Credits: CDLI no. P346132, Trustees of the British Museum.

From 1600 to the first century BCE, traditional Sumerian texts continued to be reproduced, but in an artificial language. Sumerian was used to write the prayers or hymns of the cult or the divination score. Prayers in the Sumerian dialect of Emesal are particularly well documented. Some literary works are also bilingual: an Akkadian translation or commentary could follow the Sumerian composition. Sumerian became a language of culture learned by scholars working in temples until the first century BCE. Greek-speaking scholars in the first century BCE could even transcribe Sumerian prayers into Greek characters to facilitate their apprenticeship.

Fig. 9: Emesal vocabulary of the Neo-Assyrian Period. This document displays a list of words in Emesal with their translation in Akkadian. It was a precious composition to understand the Emesal dialect. Tablet no. K.171 (Trustees of the British Museum).

4. Some characteristics of the Sumerian Language

4.1. An agglutinative and ergative language

This means that pre- or post-posted elements (morphemes) are permanently added to invariable roots to create a noun or a verb. Sumerian makes no distinction between nouns and verbs. For instance, the du₁₀sign 𒄭 could be used to signify either the adjective “good”, or the verb “to be good”.

The word order follows a subject-object-verb structure. The verb is normally placed at the end of sentences. Sumerian makes a distinction between verbal stems known in Akkadian as hamṭu and marû forms. Akkadian scribes would use either of them in accordance with their specific linguistic characteristics. The term hamṭu refers to a literally fast, past action; whereas marû indicates a slow, “fat”,present or future action. How Sumerians characterised these different verbal stems is still unknown.

Sumerian is also an ergative language. The transitive subject is in the ergative case and takes the suffix “-e”, whereas the direct object and intransitive subject are in the absolutive case. No graphic element denotes the absolutive.

Examples of sentences:

Lugal
i₃-ku₄
𒈗 𒉌 𒆭

Translation: the king entered. The subject of intransitive clauses is in the absolutive case. Here, the subject is “Lugal”, the king. The intransitive subject isn’t marked in the verbal scheme by a morpheme. The prefix “i₃-” is a preformative vocal prefix. It is always the first prefix of a verbal form. It is mostly used in South Sumer, and seems to express a past action.

Lugal-e bad₃ mu-un-du₃ 𒈗 𒂊 𒂦 𒈬 𒌦 𒆕

Translation: the king built the wall. The suffix -e indicates the ergative case in transitive sentences. In this instance, the word in the ergative case is “king”. The subject is also rendered in the verbal scheme by the infix -n- before the verb form hamtu, which describes a past action. The prefix mu- is a ventive. It means “here”, but is often left untranslated to lighten the translation. With verbs expressing a motion, the ventive case describes an action made “in direction of the speaker”.

A characteristic of ergative languages is the cross-references between three elements: the subject of the action, the object of the transitive verb and the verbal form itself.

– If the transitive subject is a person, a pronominal infix -n- is used before the hamṭu stem, while a pronominal infix -b- is used for an object or impersonal element. The object of a transitive action is expressed after the hamṭu stem with a suffix.

– When there is a marû verbal stem marking the present and future, the -n- or -b- infix placed before the verb refers to the direct object of the transitive verb. The transitive subject is indicated by an -e suffix after the verb root.

4.2. The Sumerian Consonants and Vowels

Sumerian uses the following standard consonants:

Consonants phonemes
plosive	p/b/t/d/k/g
nasal	m/n/ĝ
fricative	s, z, š, h
liquid	l, r

And as vowels: /a/, /e/, /i/, /u/. The existence of /o/ remains debated.

4.3. The cases in Sumerian

Sumerian has twelve different cases. They help understand how the noun relates to the verb or to other parts of the sentence. For example, they can indicate the subject and object. Other cases can bear specific meanings like “in”, “from”, “with” and “like”. They are signaled by final clitics located after a noun or nominal phrase. Several can be used in a row. However, some cases are reserved for either human and animate objects or non-human and inanimate objects. For instance, the dative is only used for human and animate objects.

4.4. Sumerian dialects

The word Sumerian itself comes from the Akkadian term šumeru, but the etymology of this Akkadian translation remains unknown. Šumeru is a translation of the Sumerian term eme-gi₇.r used to describe the Sumerian language. The original Sumerian term comes from eme: language and gi₇.r, which could mean “native”. The term eme-gi₇.r was mainly encountered during the Old Babylonian period, when Sumerian was no longer spoken but still used as a language of culture. Sumerian was divided into two dialects: Emegir, the main dialect, and Emesal, which first appeared in texts dating back to the Old Babylonian period. While the meaning of the word Emesal is uncertain, some academics argue that “sal” means “thin”, and consequently translate Emesal as “ thin/fine language”.

Paul Haupt was the first to write a solid analysis of Emesal. He characterised it as a women’s language, partly because of the sign form of sal 𒊩 which could also be read as munus, woman (The Babylonian’s woman language, 1884). Since then, the state of research on the subject has evolved, and it seems that Emesal is only considered a language of cult, an idea already put forward by Fr. Delitzsch in 1914 (Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik). Emesal made phonetical changes to some terms of Eme-gi₇.r, and some of its words had different stems.

Eme-gi₇.r	Emesal
Diĝir, the god	Dimer
Kalam, the land	Kanaĝ
Nin, the queen	gašan

The hymns and laments sung by lamentation priests in temples (the kalû) were often written in this dialect. Emesal texts are attested from the Old Babylonian Period until the first millennium. Priests still sung them during the first centuries BCE, which marked the very end of cuneiform culture.

5. Writing Sumerian in Cuneiform

The cuneiform signs used by Sumerian could be either logograms or phonograms. A logogram is a sign (grapheme) bearing a sound and a meaning.

Ex. KA means the mouth. 𒅗

In the case of a phonogram, a sign (grapheme) represents a phonetic syllable (phoneme) of a verbal or nominal stem. The sign KA, could also mean the syllable with the sound / ka / 𒅗

Homonyms were common in Sumerian: different words could have the same sounds, and conversely, the same sign could represent several sounds. Scribes often used glosses to help them read texts.

For example, the phoneme DUG could be used to write several words. Sumerologists signal the difference between homophones by using numbers or accents after the word:

Dug, the jar : 𒂁

Dug₃/dùg, to be good : 𒄭

Dug₄, to speak : 𒅗

A sign could also have several meanings and several readings:

For example, the sign KA 𒅗 could be read as:

ka: the mouth
inim: the word
dug₄: to speak
gu₃/gù: the voice
kir₄: the nose
zu₂/zú: the tooth

Although there is a relative semantic coherence here between all the words written with the sign KA, it is important to note that it was not always so.

Scribes also used what we call determinatives to help them read texts. These signs were not meant to be pronounced.

For instance, the sign meaning “wood”, giš could be placed before all wooden objects. i.e., ^gi^štukul: a (wooden) weapon 𒄑 𒆪.

The sign meaning “the place”, ki, 𒆠 could be placed after city names.

i.e., Unug^ki-ga : in the city of Uruk.

In this example, the suffix -a marks the locative case. The scribe repeated the last consonant of the word before the case ending, in order to help the reader to recognise the correct lecture of the sign UNUG.

i.e., if the sign KA is read as KA, for “the mouth”, in the locative case it should be written: KA + a, “in the mouth”: 𒅗 𒀀

i.e, if the sign KA is read INIM, for “the word”, in the locative case it should be written: KA+m+a 𒅗 𒈠 , “in the word”.

The syllable -ma shows the reader that the KA sign is to be read as INIM.

If the sign KA is read kir₄, for “the nose”: in the locative case, the scribe writes KA+r+a : kir₄-ra, for “in the nose”. 𒅗 𒊏

6. Sumerian Proverbs

Texts of every type were written in Sumerian: administrative, literary, divination, lexical, juridical, royal inscriptions, rituals et cetera. Apprentice scribes were particularly fond of proverbs, which they often learned to write during their education in Sumerian school, the é-dub-ba (“the house of the tablets”). These proverbs helped them memorise brief stories as well as the grammatical or lexical content of their sentences. They had a certain didactical accuracy and enabled schoolchildren to learn important moral rules of Sumerian society. While some of these proverbs are difficult to understand nowadays, others offer a clear reflection of Sumerian life, or illustrate clichés that still prevail today:

lul dug₄-ga-ab zid dug₄-ga-ab lul ba-e-sig₁₀-ge₅

Tell a lie and then tell the truth: it will be considered (as) a lie.

dam nu-ĝar-ra e₂-a til₃-la-am_3;a₂-sag₃-a₂-sag₃-e dirig-ga-am₃

A malicious wife living in the house is worse than all diseases.

dub-sar-re mu 1-am₃ he₂-en-zu; šu-ni he₂-sag₉-sag₉ e-ne-am₃ dub-sar-re

If a scribe knows only a single line but his handwriting is good, he is indeed a scribe!

dub-sar eme-gir₁₅ nu-mu-un-zu-a a-na-am₃ nam-dub-sar-ra-ni

What kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?

Fig. 10: School tablet with a proverb in Sumerian and translated in Akkadian: One who does not love the (art of the scribe) will not pay attention to Sumerian: lu₂ dub-sar nu-da-ki-ag₂ eme-gi geštu₂ nu-ga₂-ga₂-e. (MS 3370: Schoyen collection, Oslo, CDLI no. P252311).

Bibliography

Philippe Abrahami, “Un système d’idéogrammes, « Sumérien ou rien ? »” in Histoires des déchiffrements, les écritures du Proche-Orient à l’Egée, Paris, Errance, 2009, 111-128.

Jeremy Black (ed), The literature of ancient Sumer, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005.

Irving Finkel and Jonathan Taylor, Cuneiform, London, The British Museum, 2015.

Uri Gabbay, Pacifying the Hearts of the Gods, Sumerian Emesal Prayers in the First Millennium BC, Wiesbaden, Heidelberg Emesal Studies, 1, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 2014

Samuel Noah Kramer, History begins at Sumer, London, Thames and Hudson, 1958.

Erika Marsal, “The beginnings of Sumerology (I). From early first sketches to a first complete grammar”, Aula Orientalis 32/2 (2014), 2014, pp. 283-297.

Willem H. Ph. Römer, Die Sumerologie. Einführung in die Forschung und Bibliographie in Auswahl, Münster, Ugarit-Verlag, 1999.

Konrad Volk, A Sumerian Chrestomathy, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 2012.

Konrad Volk (ed.), Erzählung aus dem Land Sumer, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 2015.

Grammar

Pascal Attinger, Éléments de linguistique sumérienne. La construction de du₁₁/e/di « dire », Fribourg/Göttingen, Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 1993.

Dietz O. Edzard, Sumerian Grammar, Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2003.

Abraham H. Jagersma, A Descriptive Grammar of Sumerian, Leiden, Leiden University,1999.

Marie-Louise Thomsen, The Sumerian Language. An Introduction to its History and Grammatical Structure, Copenhague, Akad. Forlag, 1984.

Gábor Zolyomi, An Introduction to Sumerian Grammar, Budapest, Eötvös University Press, 2017.

Web sites:

The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature: http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/

The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary: http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/

The Database of Neo-Sumerian texts: http://bdtns.filol.csic.es/

The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative: https://cdli.ucla.edu/

Cite this article as: M. Young, “The rediscovery of Sumerian”, in N. Moncunill (ed.), Cracking lost scripts, 19/04/2023, https://lostscripts.hypotheses.org/1306.

10/11/202230/12/2023

EL DESCIFRAMIENTO DEL PERSA ANTIGUO

Autor: Bartomeu Obrador Cursach (IPOA-UB)

Aunque la rama persa de las lenguas indoeuropeas se sigue hablando todavía, tras la conquista de Alejandro Magno el antiguo persa dejó de escribirse y esta lengua, que había sido usada en las inscripciones de los emperadores aqueménidas (entre el 522 a.C. y el 338 a.C.), fue substituida en la esfera pública por diversas variantes de arameo, lengua semítica que ya se usaba en la administración aqueménida, y el griego koiné, la lengua introducida por los conquistadores macedonios. Los posteriores hablantes de farsī (el persa clásico) identificaban vagamente las ruinas de Persépolis, aunque las vinculaban a los emperadores sasánidas (226–651) y no a los aqueménidas. En este contexto, no es de extrañar que a pesar de la íntima relación con su lengua, la antigua escritura, una drástica simplificación del cuneiforme, quedara totalmente olvidada.

Imagen 1. Inscripción trilingüe (en persa antiguo, elamita y babilonio) recientemente documentada en Naqsh-e Rustam, cerca de la tumba de Darío I. El nombre del personaje al que se refiere se ha perdido en las tres lenguas. Fotografía: © M.A. Mosallanezhad.

No sería hasta el siglo XVII en que viajeros y diplomáticos europeos, como García de Siva y Figueroa (ver Imagen 2) y Pietro Della Valle, empezarían a fijarse en los signos cuneiformes procedentes de Persia y que sus crónicas despertarían el interés de la academia europea. Sin embargo, el pequeñísimo corpus textual que estos autores transmitían era insuficiente para adentrase en el funcionamiento de esta posible escritura (cuyo estatus fue incluso puesto en duda). Publicaciones como las de Jean Chardin (1674), Engelbert Kaempfer (1683), Cornelis de Bruijn (1711) o Carsten Nieburh (1788) aumentaron considerablemente el pequeño número de textos cuneiformes conocidos mediante copias en Europa. Gracias a la observación de dicha acumulación se fue consolidando la idea de que en realidad había diferentes escrituras cuneiformes , algo que terminaría siendo clave para el efectivo desciframiento. De hecho, Friedrich Münter en 1800 publicó un importante trabajo sobre las inscripciones cuneiformes de Persépolis, la antigua capital del imperio aqueménida, en el que concluyó que había tres tipos de escritura cuneiforme: alfabética, silábica e ideográfica. Asimismo, intuyó que los tres tipos de escritura se corresponderían a tres lenguas diferente. Advirtió además que la primera escritura, que correctamente identificó como persa (zend en sus palabras, nótese Anquetil-Duperron había publicado algunas décadas antes fragmentos del Zend Avesta), tenía un signo para separar palabras, algo que sería fundamental para su desciframiento, y que la escritura ideográfica tenía que ser la misma de las tablillas mesopotámicas.

Imagen 2. Copia de los signos cuneiformes de García de Silva Figueroa en sus *Comentarios* (1614-1624), Biblioteca Nacional de España, Manuscrito 552.

Sólo dos años después de esta publicación, en tres conferencias pronunciadas en 1802 (aunque no publicadas hasta 1893), Georg Friedrich Grotefend asumía las conclusiones de sus predecesores y tuvo éxito en la interpretación del cuneiforme persa. Su razonamiento se basaba en considerar que la lengua que notaba esta escritura era una forma antigua de persa usada por la dinastía aqueménida y por tanto emparentada con las inscripciones persas más recientes de la dinastía sasánida, en pahlavi, descifradas desde hacía poco por Silvestre de Sacy. Tras estas premisas y conociendo los nombres de los reyes y la fraseología de la dinastía aqueménida documentados en las fuentes griegas, no le costó identificar la secuencia silábica para ‘rey’ y los títulos ‘gran rey’ (griego μέγας βασιλεύς mégas basileús, persa xšāyaϑiya vazraka) y ‘rey de reyes’ (griego βασιλεὺς βασιλέων basileùs basiléōn, persa xšāyaθiya xšāyaθiyānām). En efecto, a pesar del pequeño corpus con el que trabajaba, percibió que esta secuencia siempre se daba tras otras concretas y que en la inscripción DPa (de Darío, procedente de Persépolis, Imagen 3) llegaba a aparecer hasta tres ocasiones y una cuarta con un final diferente (por tratarse de un genitivo plural). Especialmente útil en este punto fue también la inscripción XPe (de Jerjes, también procedente de Persépolis; Imagen 4) puesto que la secuencia aparecía hasta cuatro veces. Una vez identificada como ‘rey’, era lógico considerar la palabra anterior como el nombre del rey en cuestión seguido de un patronímico. En el caso de XPe y otras inscripciones, podía inferirse de la posición de esta palabra que en el corpus conocido hasta el momento había tres personajes: un rey, un segundo rey padre del primero y un tercer personaje, abuelo del primero y padre del segundo que no fue rey. En este punto, Grotefend sólo tuvo que consultar las fuentes en pahlavi, griego, hebreo y arameo para saber de quiénes se trataban: Jerjes, Darío e Histaspes. Con esto ello pudo leer dichos nombres en las inscripciones persas a partir del testimonio en otras lenguas y, de paso, a identificar el valor de una gran parte de los signos: x-š-y-a-r-š-a /Xšayāršā/ ‘Jerjes’ (griego Xérxēs, arameo ḥšy’rš), hijo de d-a-r-y-v-u-š /Dārayavauš/ ‘Darío (griego Dareîos, arameo dr(y)wš) y nieto de h-x-a-m-n-i-š /Haxāmaniš/ (griego Achaiménēs, quien en efecto no fue rey de Persia, véase Tabla 1). Llegados a este punto, con una lectura fiable de muchos de los signos de esta escritura confirmada por transcripciones en otras lenguas de dichos nombres, el camino para el desciframiento total del corpus estaba abierto.

Imagen 3. Copia de la inscripción B de Carsten Niebuhr 1788 (= DPa, inscripción “a” de Darío en Persépolis): en rojo la secuencia *x-š-a-y-ϑ-i-y* (*xšāyaϑiya* ‘rey’ en nominativo singular), en verde *x-š-a-|y-ϑ-i-y-a-n-a-m* (*xšāyaϑiyānām* ‘de reyes’, en genitivo plural), en azul *d-a-r-y-v-u-š* (*Dārayavauš* ‘Darío’) y en amarillo *vi-i-š-t-a-s-p-h-y-|a* (*Vištāspahyā* ‘(hijo) de Histaspes’, en genitivo como patronímico).

Imagen 4. Copia de la inscripción G de Carsten Niebuhr 1788 (= XPe, inscripción “e” de Jerjes en persépolis): en rojo la palabra para ‘rey’ (en diversos casos). El contenido de esta inscripción fue clave para el desciframiento del persa antiguo: ‘Jerjes, el gran rey, rey de reyes, hijo del rey Darío el aqueménida’.

Tabla 1. Primeros nombres de la dinastía aqueménida (ordenados cronológicamente) en persa antiguo (forma cuneiforme, transliteración y transcripción) y en griego (documentados principalmente por Heródoto). Ni Aquémenes ni Teispes fueron reyes de Persia.

Henry Rawlinson culminaría en 1846 el proceso de desciframiento del antiguo persa, tras haber vivido en Persia durante años y haber estudiado en profundidad la fundamental inscripción trilingüe de Behistún (Imagen 5). Gracias a él los investigadores tenían una trilingüe en cuneiforme que contaba con una de las versiones plenamente descifrada. El mismo estudioso continuó con la copia y calco de la parte que hoy en día sabemos que está redactada en elamita y la acadia, la más deteriorada. Observó que en estas había más variedad de signos que en la versión persa y que, desgraciadamente, no había ningún signo que separase las palabras en esas otras partes. En el mismo momento se producían los hallazgos de numerosas inscripciones monumentales y tablillas cuneiformes en las antiguas Dur-Šarrukin y Nínive, las cuales Rawlinson pudo consultar cuando camino a Inglaterra pasaban por Bagdad (vid. el post sobre el acadio en este mismo blog).

Imagen 5. Detalle de la inscripción de Behistún. En la parte inferior del relieve se encuentra el texto en persa antiguo. A la izquierda del relieve (fuera de la fotografía) se encuentra el texto babilonio, mientras que el elamita está debajo de este último y a la izquierda del texto en persa antiguo.

Volviendo al cuneiforme persa, aunque pocos signos coinciden con los de la escritura sumero-acadia (y ninguno con el elamita), quedó claro que se trata de un sistema de escritura basado en un semi-silabario: hay 3 signos puramente vocálicos y 33 signos que sirven para notar una consonante más una vocal, si bien es cierto que los que afectan a la vocal /a/ (22 signos) pueden representar simplemente la consonante (véase Tabla 2). Osea, un signo ⟨pa⟩ puede representar tanto /pa/ como simplemente /p/. Sin embargo, la tendencia para estos signos es a transliterar simplemente la consonante. A este repertorio debe añadirse la presencia de algunos logogramas, transliterados con una abreviatura en mayúscula (Tabla 3), y numerales (que no son otra cosa que logogramas).

Tabla 2. Signos fonéticos del cuneiforme persa. Nótese que los signos con –a pueden tener el valor de consonante sola o de consonante más vocal –a.

Tabla 3. Logogramas del cuneiforme persa (excluyendo numerales).

Recursos:

Achemenet. L’empire perse achéménide du Bosphore à l’Indus de 550 à 330 avant notre ère. Disponible en: <http://www.achemenet.com/> [Fecha de consulta: 8/04/2019].

Asatrian, Garnik, 2010, Etymological Dictionary of Persian, Leiden – Boston, Brill Academic Publishers.

de Silva y Figueroa, G., Comentarios de don García de Silva que contienen su viaje a la India y de ella a Persia, cosas notables que vió en él y los sucesos de la embajada al Sophi, Biblioteca Nacional de España, manuscrito 553. Disponible en: <http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000135558&page=1> [Fecha de consulta: 24/04/2019].

Harvey, Scott L., y Slocum, Jonathan, Old Iranian Online. Series Introduction. Disponible en: <https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/aveol/00> [Fecha de consulta: 8/04/2019].

Schmitt, R., 2008, “Old Persian”, en Roger D. Woodard (ed.), The Ancient Languages of Asia and the Americas, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 76–100.

Skjærvø, Prods Oktor, 2016, An Introduction to Old Persian. [Curso introductorio de Persa antiguo en lecciones progresivas], Disponible en: <https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~iranian/OldPersian/opcomplete.pdf>[Fecha de consulta: 8/04/2019].

TITUS – OPers. = Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien, Old Persian Corpus. Disponible en: <http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/etcs/iran/airan/apers/apers.htm> [Fecha de consulta: 8/04/2019].

Yarshater, Ehsan (dir.), 1985–, Encyclopædia Iranica. Disponible en: <http://www.iranicaonline.org/> [Fecha de consulta: 8/04/2019].

Cite this article as: T. Obrador Cursach, “El desciframiento del persa antiguo”, in N. Moncunill (ed.), Cracking lost scripts, 10/11/2022, https://lostscripts.hypotheses.org/1159.

06/01/202230/12/2023

THE REDISCOVERY OF ANCIENT AKKADIAN

Author: Marie Young (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)

In the nineteenth century, archaeological excavations uncovered hundreds of thousands of clay tablets written in one of the oldest Semitic languages: Akkadian. Akkadian is written in what is called “cuneiform” script. The name of this type of writing comes from the Latin cuneus (i.e. wedge), referring to each sign being “wedge-shaped” (see T. Obrador’s introduction in this same blog). Cuneiform was used to write in several languages across the Near East until the first century AD. After it was later abandoned, only the Bible and classical authors remained as testimonies of cuneiform writing’s existence. Even if they mentioned the ancient cities of Babylon and Nineveh, or Babylonian physicians and astronomers, they never specifically referred to the aspect of the languages and writing of the Mesopotamians. Cast into oblivion, Akkadian cuneiform was yet to be rediscovered and deciphered.

1. The European explorers looking for Babylon

In the seventeenth century, European explorers’ interest in ancient Mesopotamian civilisations started to grow.

*Map of the Ancient Near East in the seventeenth century AD. Nicolas Sanson, cartographe*r.

In 1621, Pietro della Valle, an Italian explorer, travelled to the Persian empire, looking to find the ancient toponyms cited in the Bible. He identified the original site of ancient Babylon and brought back to Italy the first bricks inscribed with “unknown characters”.

*Portrait of Pietro della Valle (1586-1652)*

Della Valle also found royal inscriptions in Persepolis and copied them for the first time in modern history. He had a good intuition: his assumption was that the reading direction of these mysterious signs was analogous to the Latin alphabet, which is written and read from left to right. Following his experience, the ancient cultures of the East started to pique the curiosity of scholars the world over. A long period of discoveries was about to begin. Click here to read more about the discovery of cuneiform in the 17^thand 18^th centuries.

The Michaux Stone

After Pietro della Valle’s excursions, further inscribed objects were brought to Europe. In 1784 André Michaux (1746-1802), a French botanist and explorer, embarked on a trip to Persia, seeking new plant species for the garden of the French king, Louis XVI. He discovered a curious stele in Iraq, in the South of the ancient city of Ctesiphon, the capital of the Parthian Empire. In 1786, this artefact entered the royal collection of coins, gems, and antiquities — le Cabinet des Médailles — where it aroused curiosity and admiration. A complete presentation of this object and its history can be found on a website of the French ministry of culture: http://archeologie.culture.fr/orient-cuneiforme/fr/raconte-caillou-michaux

*Michaux Stone, Cabinet des Médailles, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.* *The images of the gods above the text protect Ms. Dur-Šarrukinaia’itu from any expropriation of her land. The stele commemorates her father’s donation of a field for her wedding*.

Though there were several attempts at translating the text engraved on the Michaux Stone, these were mostly fanciful. Due to a lack of comparable objects, the writing system featured on the stele long remained a mystery, and the Michaux Stone was seen as a unique curiosity in Europe. It has since become apparent that the stele dates back to the reign of the Babylonian king Marduk-nadin-ahhe (1100-1083 BCE). It is a land grant stone commemorating a father’s gift of land to his daughter. In Akkadian, this type of object is called kudurru.

Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, a professor of Semitic languages, testified of the first attempts to decipher cuneiform in the beginning of the nineteenth century in an article of the Magasin encyclopédique (1803, Millin, tome 5, p. 450ff.). In 1803, he sharply criticised a first uncertain translation of the Michaux stone’s cuneiform inscription.

Excerpt of a first fanciful translation of the Michaux Stone by Anton August Heinrich Lichtenstein:

Heaven’s army only gives us vinegar to provide us with the remedies that bring us healing. Though it often pulls so many faithful friends apart, it then reunites them forever.

Modern understanding of the text has now considerably improved, and a 3D modelling of the Michaux Stone, with translation of the mains sections, can be seen on a website of the French Ministry of Culture.

Caillou Michaux “Kudurru”. BnF by Grands sites archéologiques on Sketchfab

2. The decipherment of Akkadian and the Persepolis Inscriptions

While André Michaux was bringing his sibylline stone back to France, other European travellers continued to discover more archaeological objects. Danish mathematician and voyager Carsten Niebuhr, the only surviving member of an expedition crew headed for Arabia and decimated by an epidemic, found cuneiform inscriptions in the ancient royal city of Persepolis in 1763, thus completing the work that Pietro della Valle had begun a century before him.

His research was fundamental to the history of cuneiform decipherment. Indeed, he was the first person to distinguish in the Persepolis inscriptions different signs corresponding to three distinct systems, writing down three languages, all read from left to right. Different languages written on a same monument were often separated by parallel columns. One of the writings was alphabetical and composed of about forty signs.

*Illustration from Carsten Niebuhr’s book: Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und andern umliegender Ländern (Travel Writing from Arabia and other neighbouring lands) Amsterdam, 1779.*

After him, a German scholar Georg Friedrich Grotefend was the first to attempt to translate the alphabetical language of Niebuhr’s inscriptions. He took on the challenge he had set with a friend to “find the meaning of written documents whose alphabet and language was initially totally unknown.” Armed with genius and patience, Grotefend, then a high school teaching assistant in Göttingen, Germany, who was less than thirty years old, succeeded in unlocking the secrets of Old Persian. He assumed that the language that looked alphabetical was the ancestor of Persian, and his idea was proven right. In 1802, he then translated two short “Persepolitan” inscriptions that Carsten Niebuhr had found a few years earlier, and which praised the names of two great Achaemenid kings made famous by Herodotus. It is the identification of these proper nouns, those of Darius and Xerxes, well-known Persian kings fought by the Greek armies and made popular in Europe thanks to Herodotus’s accounts, that allowed Grotefend to accomplish his extraordinary feat.

Click here for more information.

3. The discovery of cuneiform texts in the age of empires

Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, an army officer in the British East India Company, took up the torch of Georg F. Grotefend and turned this decipherment into a legendary story. The English soldier and diplomat arrived in the Near East in 1827, where he was quickly noticed for his excellent mastery of Persian and sent to coach the Shah’s military troops.

It was during this time that he discovered a remarkable cliff at Mount Behistun in the Kirmanshah Province, close to the border between Iran and Iraq. This colossal multilingual rock inscription celebrates the feats of the Achaemenid king Darius I (521-486 BCE).

In 1835, his passion drove him to take considerable risks to copy these inscriptions. Hanging by a cord 70 metres above the ground, he managed to make a papier-mâché imprint of the text from the rock, enabling him to study it closely.

*The Behistun Inscription in Old Persian cuneiform.* *Copy of H.C. Rawlinson”I’m Darius, the great king, the king of kings, the king of Persia, the king of peoples, the son of Vištâspa, the grandson of Arsamès, the Achaemenid.”*

His work served as a gateway into the previously uniform block of cuneiform. On the rock relief were three versions of the same inscription, written in three different cuneiform languages: Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian. It was the “Rosetta stone of cuneiform”.

Henry C. Rawlinson started to study the Old Persian version of the inscription. He was able to decipher the entire Old Persian cuneiform alphabet, thus completing the work initiated by G. F. Grotefend.

As early as 1851, he proposed a translation and transcription into Latin characters of the third column of the Behistun Inscription of Darius I: the Akkadian version of one hundred and twelve lines. Aside from this, he also had to grapple with numerous new objects arriving from all over the Near East as the rate of archaeological discoveries in the region was accelerating.

Photo of the Cliff bearing the Behistun Inscription, Iran. (source: Wikimedia)

*Illustration of two philologists reading an inscription on a cave relief.* *E. Flandin and P. Coste were two French painters and architects who made a trip to Persia. They published their drawings in their travel writing: Voyage en Perse, 1843.*

4. The archaeological competition between European empires

The archaeological race was raging between European powers. The first translations of Old Persian documents created a desire to find other remains of these exotic cultures from the past. Archaeologists were exhuming more and more texts written in what seemed to be the same language as that of the third column of the Behistun Inscription. Philologists were rushing from all sides to unravel its mysteries.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Paul-Emile Botta, the first French consul in Mosul, discovered the city of Sargon II (721-705 BCE) in Khorsabad, Northern Iraq. The French diplomat initially thought that it was the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh. Many of the objects unearthed during his excavations were inscribed. The Louvre exhibited them in the first collection of oriental antiquities in Europe, which opened on the 1^st of May 1847. In 1849-50, Austen Henry Layard, an English archaeologist, managed to finally locate the true Nineveh, to the great displeasure of the French, and found thousands of tablets in the city’s ruins. Many of them came from the first ever known royal library in the history of humanity: the one built by Assurbanipal (669-627 BCE), one of the last kings of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

Austen H. Layard (1817-1894) in Kuyunjik (the Tell of Nineveh). Drawing by Solomon Caesar Malan (1812–1894), 1850.

After the texts arrived at the British Museum, Henry C. Rawlinson started focusing on their study. His successful experiences encouraged him to take part in a “test case”, now recognised in history as marking the official creation of Oriental philology.

Paul-Emile Botta (1802-1870) published Monument de Ninive in 1849 and 1850. He presented the discoveries made in Khorsabad, which he wrongly identified as the city of Nineveh. In fact, he had already, but unknowingly, done excavations in Nineveh a few years prior. He brought back to Paris some inscribed bricks from his discoveries in Nineveh, but cuneiform had not yet been deciphered. It was therefore impossible for him to know that the bricks he found were referencing the famous palace of Sennacherib or the temple built by Assurbanipal in the Neo-Assyrian capital.

5. The adventure of 1857 and the birth of Assyriology

In 1857, the Royal Asiatic Society of London submitted an unpublished text to the best Assyriologists of the time who boasted being able to read Assyrian. The aim of this test case was to prove that Akkadian cuneiform had truly been deciphered.

Participants had to send their translations to the learned society in sealed envelopes. The text was an inscription of Tiglath-Pileser I (1113-1074 BCE) discovered a few years earlier in Assur by the prominent archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam.

The Prism of Tiglath-Pileser I (British Museum No. BM 91033). Covering eight faces over eight hundred and nine lines, the inscription is a historical account of the military and civil achievements of the king. “I wrote on my monumental and clay inscriptions my heroic victories, my successful battles, (and) the suppression of the enemies, foes of the god Assur, that the gods Anu and Adad granted me. I deposited (them) in the temple of the gods Anu and Adad, the great gods, my lords, forever. In addition, the monumental inscriptions of Shamshi-Adad my forefather I anointed with oil, made sacrifices, returned them to their places.”(Translation by A.K. Grayson, Col. viii, 39-49)

William Henry Fox Talbot, an English polymath, was the first to send his translation to the Royal Asiatic Society. He was followed by Henry C. Rawlinson, Jules Oppert, a Franco-German scholar, and Edward Hincks, an Irish preacher. Geniuses from all over Europe took part in this intellectual competition.

The test was a real success. Except for a few divergences, all the translations concurred. After more than half a century of persistence, and with the help of great talent, the immense secret that the Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions had guarded for two thousand years was finally revealed.

Found to be related to Hebrew, Aramaic or Arabic, the language of this inscription is now known as Akkadian, but was initially described as Assyrian, in memory of the Mesopotamian rulers known in the Bible, and of the former royal capital of Assur.

Click here for more information about the history of cuneiform decipherment.

The first assyriologists of the Royal Asiatic Society’s experience. From left to right: Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810-1895), Jules Oppert (1825-1905), William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), Edward Hincks (1792-1866)

6. The Akkadian language

Further research later showed that Akkadian dating from the beginning of the second millennium BCE was divided into two dialects spoken in Mesopotamia: Assyrian in the North and Babylonian in the South. The Kingdom of Akkad, spanning from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea, was the first known empire in the Near East during the third millennium BCE. Akkadian, a Semitic language, was its official tongue, and the city of Akkad its capital. Founded by King Sargon I (2334-2279 BCE), this kingdom was yet to be uncovered by archaeological excavations at the time.

In the second half of the third millennium BCE, Akkadian started to be the most commonly used language in the written documentation of the Ancient Near East. One of its dialectal forms, the Babylonian dialect, different to the Assyrian dialect, was especially widespread during the second millennium BCE.

Several thousand texts written in it are known to exist, and archaeologists are still discovering new texts today.

Documents on every topic were written in the Akkadian Babylonian dialect: literature, divination, medicine, astronomy, royal inscriptions, legal documents, economic texts, letters, geographical maps, mathematics, proverbs… There is a rich corpus, and a long training is required to enjoy all of its aspects.

The Babylonian Akkadian language became the lingua franca of the Ancient Near East in the second millennium BCE, and was even used in diplomacy and trade. By the fourteenth century BCE, even the pharaoh’s administration was using it. In the ancient city of Tell el-Amarna in Egypt, around three hundred and eighty letters were unearthed. They constituted the diplomatic correspondence of the pharaoh Amenhotep III (1388-1351 BCE) and his son Akhenaten (1353-1336 BCE) with the other great powers of the region: Assyria, Babylonia, the Hittite Empire, Mitanni, Cyprus, as well as all the kingdoms in the Canaan land.

But Akkadian started to decline during the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Around the ninth century BCE, Aramaic, with its alphabetic system, was growing more prominent, and was supplanting Akkadian cuneiform on clay. It became the official language of the Persian Empire after 539 BCE. After the conquest of Alexander the Great and the installations of Greek monarchies in the region, Akkadian was used only by the temples’ administration, priests and scholars. They did, however, speak Greek or Aramaic at home. The last known Akkadian cuneiform texts date from the first century CE, and are astronomical documents. The practicality of the numerological system of Akkadian cuneiform made it a precious tool for the study of astronomy. After the first century CE, it is possible that Akkadian was still being used on skin or papyrus, but no such document has been discovered so far. Akkadian cuneiform was used as a written language for more than three thousand years, which explains its variety. It was in use for longer than the Latin alphabet has been around!

A Cuneiform scribe holding a clay-tablet in his left, the stylus in his right hand and an Aramaic scribe writing on a roll of leather. They are writing the spoil made by Tiglath-Pileser III (745-727 BCE)’s campaigns in Southern Iraq (ca. 728 BCE). Relief from the Central Palace of Nimrud (British Museum No. 1848,1104.5).

Akkadian cuneiform was written from the top to the bottom of clay tablets, and from left to right, like the Latin alphabet. Since clay tablets are three-dimensional objects, scribes had to incise the signs into the clay, instead of merely tracing them. They did not only write on the face and reverse of clay tablets, but could write on the edges too.

Clay tablet from the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin (Object Number: VAT 335). It comes from Tell el-Amarna. Labaya, a ruler of southern Canaan sent it to the pharaoh Akhenaten. The scribes used all the surface of the clay tablet to write their letters. The red arrow indicates the direction of reading. (CDLI : P271197)

Cuneiform was mostly written on clay, but could also be written on metal, stone, and even wax.

Gold tablet from Khorsabad shaped as a clay tablet, and commemorating the foundation of the city of Khorsabad by Sargon II (721-705 BCE). Photo: 2011 RMN – Grand Palais / Franck Raux, Museum Number: AO 19933

Akkadian cuneiform royal inscription under the body of this protective genius. Photo: Marie Young

Akkadian scribes adapted Sumerian cuneiform to their language, and used for it a multi-system, meaning that a sign could either represent:

1) a Sumerian logogram: a sign (grapheme) representing an entire word

2) a syllable

3) a phonetic complement: a sign that helps the scribe understand the nature of the word before or after it, and can disambiguate word characters. An example is the “st” of 1^st “first”, which avoids ambiguity with “1” standing for the word “one”.

The relation between syllable and Sumerian logogram depends on the type of text. The Assyrian traders of the second millennium BCE mostly used phonetic values, where a sign represents a syllable, whereas the use of logograms was more common in medical texts or divination.

A peculiarity of Akkadian cuneiform is that signs can be polyphonic, meaning that they have several phonetic values.

For example, the sound -sha- can be written with either the “ša” 𒊭 sign or the “gar” sign 𒃻. In the same way, the “ri” sign 𒊑 can be read as “ri” or “tal”.

The sign “an” 𒀭, used to write the word “god”, can also refer to the god Anu and, consequently, can be used to write the sound “an”. Because it could also be read like the DINGIR logogram in Sumerian, also used to write “god”, it was then attributed the phonetic value of “il”, from that logogram into Akkadian: ilum.

Like all Semitic languages, Akkadian words had mostly three-consonant roots. But some roots could have four consonants. Adding vowels between the consonants allowed for the formation of nouns, verbs or adjectives as well as their declinations and conjugations. There are many similarities between the roots of Akkadian words and that of Hebrew or Arabic words. Verb conjugation differed depending on the grammatical person (first, second, or third; plural, singular, or dual), whether it is masculine, feminine or dual, and whether the action has been completed or not. Akkadian scribes would write sentences starting with the subject and ending with the verb, with all the complements traditionally placed in between, thereby adapting the grammatical structure of Sumerian to Akkadian.

Below is an example of an Akkadian sentence from the code of Hammurabi (1792-1752 BCE), one of the first law codes written in history. Its scribe deliberately used archaic signs from the time of Sargon I, king of Akkad (2334-2279 BCE).

The stele of the Hammurabi code is in the Louvre Museum. It is 2.25 m tall and inscribed with 282 laws. It was discovered in 1901 in the city of Susa by French archaeologists. The king of Elam, Šutruk-Nahhunte brought the stele to Susa, after he plundered the city of Babylon in the twelfth century BCE. (picture: 2009 RMN- Grand Palais / Franck Raux

The following Akkadian paragraph is found under the 128^th law:

Line 35 :

šum – ma a – wi – lum

Šumma: if

Awilum: a man

Line 36:

aš – ša – tam

Aššatam: a wife

Line 37:

i – hu – uz – ma

iḫuzma: took (third person singular preterite = past tense)

–ma: and (if)

Line 38:

ri – ik – sa – ti – ša

riksātīša: a contract

Line 39:

la iš – ku – un

lā serves to negate the verb: he didn’t

iškun: verb: draft (third person singular preterite)

Line 40:

MUNUS ši – i

MUNUS: Akkadian used the Sumerian logogram MUNUS to write the Akkadian word woman: sinništum

MUNUS šī: sinništum šī : this woman

Line 41:

u₂– ul aš – ša – at

Ul aššat: it is a nominal sentence: ul serves to negate the substantive after it: aššatu, the wife.

She is not a wife.

To sum up:

Šumma awīlum aššatam īḫuzma riksātīša lā iškun, sinništum šī ul aššat

If a man espoused a woman, and didn’t draft a contract, this woman isn’t (his) wife.

This small extract shows the importance of the writing and drawing of contracts in Sumero-Akkadian culture. You could not marry in Babylonia without writing a contract!

To learn how to write your own clay tablet, watch this film of Irving Finkel, curator of the Ancient Near East Department at the British Museum:

After the discovery of Akkadian and initial studies on the language, scholars understood that the hundreds of thousands of documents excavated in the Near East during the nineteenth century had more surprises in store. In 1850, Edward Hinks was the first to propose the hypothesis of a non-Semitic origin of Akkadian cuneiform, which was then confirmed by further studies. The language that Akkadian had originated from was initially called “Scythic” or, confusingly, “Akkadian”, before the name of Sumerian was later accepted. As an isolated language, its decipherment was a challenge for linguists. Although the “cascading decipherment” of the Ancient Near Eastern languages continued along a path full of obstacles, the new literary, religious, and economic texts discovered in Sumerian made its decipherment possible.

Bibliography

Jean Bottéro 1997, “Les déchiffrements “en cascade” dans le Proche-Orient ancient entre 1800 et 1930” in Mésopotamie, L’écriture, la raison et les dieux, Gallimard, pp. 109-129.

Xavier Faivre, “Voyageurs et Archéologues”, in Brigitte Lion and Cécile Michel (eds), Histoires de déchiffrements: Les écritures du Proche-Orient à l’Egée, Paris, Errance, pp. 15-33.

Irving Finkel and Jonathan Taylor, 2015, Cuneiform, London, The British Museum Press.

Brigitte Lion and Cécile Michel, 2009, “Jules Oppert et le syllabaire akkadien”, in Brigitte Lion and Cécile Michel (eds), Histoires de déchiffrements : Les écritures du Proche-Orient à l’Egée, Paris, Errance, pp. 81-94.

Brigitte Lion and Cécile Michel, 2007, Les écritures cunéiformes et leur déchiffrement, de Broccard, Paris.

Andrea Seri 2010, “Adaptation of Cuneiform to Write Akkadian”, in Christopher Woods (ed.), Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond. OIMP 32, Chicago, Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, pp. 85-98.

Michael P. Streck, 2007, “Akkadisch”, in Sprachen des Alten Orients, M. P. Streck (ed), Darmstadt, Wiss. Buchges, pp. 44-73.

Aline Tenu 2009, “Les déchiffreurs britanniques du syllabaire akkadien”, in Brigitte Lion and Cécile Michel (eds), Histoires de déchiffrements : Les écritures du Proche-Orient à l’Egée, Paris, Errance, pp. 95-110.

Websites

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/knpp/cuneiformrevealed/

Tools to learn Akkadian:

John Huehnergard, A grammar of Akkadian, Winoka Lake, Eisenbrauns, 2011.

Michael P. Streck, Altbabylonisches Lehrbuch, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 2014.

M. Worthington, Complete Babylonian, London, Teach Yourself, 2010.

Cite this article as: M. Young, “The rediscovery of ancient Akkadian”, in N. Moncunill (ed.), Cracking lost scripts, 06/01/2022, https://lostscripts.hypotheses.org/242.

06/12/202130/12/2023

DIFUSIÓN Y CARACTERÍSTICAS DE LA ESCRITURA CUNEIFORME

Autor: Bartomeu Obrador Cursach (IPOA-UB)

La escritura cuneiforme se desarrolló ca. 3300 a.C. en el sur de Mesopotamia para notar la lengua sumeria. Sus orígenes se pueden rastrear bien en documentos contables en los que se usaban signos pictográficos y fichas que servían de cuentas (protocuneiforme). Aunque hay una gran tipología de materiales, el soporte principal de esta escritura son las tablillas de arcilla, muy abundante en las marismas del sur de Mesopotamia (actual Irak), que tras ser usadas eran secadas al sol o cocidas para endurecerlas y así poderlas archivar. También abundantes en las marismas son las cañas usadas para hacer los cálamos con los que se hacían las cuñas (𒀸) y los ganchos (𒌋), en cuya combinación se basan los diferentes signos (Vídeo 1) y que da nombre a esta escritura, cuneiforme ‘en forma de cuña’, a partir de la influyente obra Historia religionis veterum Persarum (1700, ‘Historia de la religión de los antiguos persas) de Thomas Hyde, profesor de hebreo y árabe de Oxford. Sin embargo, esta característica formal es el resultado de la esquematización de los signos desarrollada con el tiempo por los escribas (Imagen 1, compárese también Imagen 2 y 3) y, de hecho, los documentos más antiguos contienen pictogramas mucho más reconocibles y curvilíneos (Imagen 1).

1. Evolución del signo SAG ‘cabeza’, desde el 3000 (1) al 1000 a.C. (7). Nótese la iconicidad de los dos primeros estadios y el proceso de esquematización. Composición de D. A. Bachmann (CC-3.0) basada en Bottéro 1981³.

Vídeo 1. Irving Fink, conservador del British Museum, explica sucintamente cómo era el proceso de escritura en cuneiforme.

Aunque la escritura se creó para notar el sumerio, una lengua aislada, a partir del Periodo Dinástico Arcaico (2900–2350 BC) se empezó a usarla para escribir la lengua acadia, perteneciente a la bien conocida familia semítica. El cuneiforme también había servido para notar la lengua elamita, otra lengua aislada, y posteriormente se terminaría extendiendo por toda la órbita de influencia Mesopotamia. Así pues, se adaptó para notar, en el II milenio, el hurrita (una lengua de discutida clasificación, usada en Mitanni), las lenguas indoeuropeas de Anatolia (hitita, palaíta y luvita) y, ya en el I milenio a.C., el urarteo (lengua emparentada con el hurrita). En Siria se usó para notar el ugarítico, aunque para esta lengua semítica el sistema cuneiforme se simplificaría en un silabario. Finalmente, también se adaptó, en forma de semisilabario en este caso, para notar el persa antiguo.

Mapa 1. Mesopotamia en la actualidad, con los principales yacimientos. Autor: Goran Tek (CC 4.0).

El conocimiento de esta escritura, antaño tan extendida en el Próximo Oriente por haber sido el acadio lengua diplomática, desapareció entre el s. I y II d.C. tras un largo período de substitución progresiva en cuanto a su importancia pública por el arameo (otra lengua semítica) y su abjad (sistema de escritura que sólo nota las consonantes) y el griego y su alfabeto. De hecho, en los últimos siglos de documentación, apenas sobrevivía como lengua académica. A pesar de que esta escritura había interesado a los escritores griegos –Diógenes Laercio (9.49) atribuye al filósofo Demócrito un tomo titulado Περὶ τῶν ἐν Βαβυλῶνι ἱερῶν γραμμάτων ‘Sobre las letras sagradas de Babilonia’– son escasas las referencias proporcionadas por las fuentes griegas. De hecho, en la literatura griega transmitida apenas se mencionan unos “signos” o “letras asirias” que por sí mismas no permitían hacerse una idea de su aspecto y funcionamiento. Por estos motivos, los primeros viajeros y estudiosos del s. XVII y XVIII se encontraron con una escritura absolutamente ignota, cuya naturaleza fue incluso discutida, y sin herramientas para poder ser interpretada. De hecho, su desciframiento fue un proceso complejo y dilatado en el tiempo que avanzaba a medida que nuevos textos iban apareciendo.

En los primeros estadios de la escritura los signos tenían un valor puramente logográfico ya que representaban una (o más) palabra(s) específica(s). Este tipo de escritura no representa por si misma una lengua concreta, puesto que no nota realidades fonéticas. En nuestros sistemas de escritura alfabéticos, también tenemos algunos usos logográficos, especialmente en los numerales, que pueden ayudar a entender esta cuestión. Un hispanohablante leerá ‘nueve euros’ en un cartel en el que simplemente se ha escrito “9 €”, mientras que un hablante de euskera ‘bederatzi euro’ y un hablante de alemán ‘neun Euro’. Lo mismo ocurre en una secuencia más compleja, pongamos que tenemos un logograma para ‘rey’, ‘templo’ y otro para ‘erigir’, y que los encontramos seguidos, “REY ERIGIR TEMPLO”. Los mismos hablantes del ejemplo anterior lo podrían leer en sus respectivas lenguas: en castellano ‘el rey erigió el templo’, en euskera ‘erregeak tenplua eraiki zuen’ y en alemán ‘der König errichtete den Tempel’. Convencionalmente, cuando un signo tiene valor logográfico se transcribe en mayúscula usando su valor en sumerio. Por ejemplo, 𒌉 (tur) se translitera, en este uso, como DUMU ‘hijo’. En ocasiones, el plural se indica repitiendo el logograma. También puede ocurrir que dos logogramas se unan para formar un único significante, esto puede darse poniendo un signo tras otro (algo que suele transliterarse con el signo +, IGI+DUM = Ù) o uno dentro de otro (marcado con x, KA x ME indica que KA se escribió dentro de ME).

En torno al 3000 a.C., se empezó a dar un valor fonético o silábico a algunos signos (silabograma). Así pues, el antiguo logograma 𒀭 AN (en sumerio ‘cielo’) empezó a usarse para representar la sílaba /an/, por ejemplo en el verbo sumerio ba-an-dù ‘construyó’. Al adaptarse el sistema al acadio, también se añadieron nuevos valores. Para este mismo ejemplo (tomado de Caplice 2002⁴, 5), puesto que AN era también el logograma para ‘dios’ (sumerio dingir) y en acadio se leía como ilum, el mismo signo sirvió también para la sílaba /il/. Así aparece, por ejemplo, en el verbo acadio en il-qe ‘él tomó’. Como se puede observar, el uso silábico de los signos se translitera en minúscula y cursiva, separando los signos que componen una misma palabra mediante guiones.

Otro valor de los signos cuneiformes es el determinativo, que consiste en clasificar semánticamente la palabra que precede (hombre, dios, ciudad, planta, utensilio, etc.) y no representa una ninguna realidad fonética (no se “leía”). Se escriben en superíndice y mayúscula. Por ejemplo, ^URUAššur se refiere a una ciudad, puesto que lleva el determinativo URU ‘ciudad’ (𒌷), mientras que ^dAššur es una divinidad. Nótese que en este último ejemplo el determinativo ‘dios’ es en realidad otra vez el signo 𒀭 (AN).

Finalmente, los signos cuneiformes también pueden tener la función de complemento fonético, cuando se adjuntan a un logograma para especificar su lectura, algo que puede aclarar entre varios significados de un mismo logograma y también, en las lenguas flexivas, la desinencia de esa palabra, que da información gramatical. Así pues, É ‘casa’, puede aparecer en acadio como É-tum /bītum/ ‘casa’ (en nominativo) o como É-tim /bītim/ ‘de la casa’ (genitivo).

Imagen 3. Tablilla paleoasiria procedente de Kültepe, la antigua Kaneš, una colonia comercial asiria en Anatolia. El texto (1900-1800 a.C.) contiene los bienes transportados por una caravana comercial. Foto: Metropolitan Museum of Art (nº. inv. 1988.433.3).

Con todo, los signos cuneiformes son, como ocurre en las escrituras jeroglíficas, polivalentes. Un mismo signo, como se ha visto, puede ser un logograma, un determinativo o un silabograma. Además, un mismo signo puede representar varias sílabas (es el caso de AN, que puede servir para las sílabas /an/ y para /il/) y una misma sílaba puede ser representada por diversos signos, que en la transcripción se distinguen mediante el uso de acentos y números en subíndices que se fueron añadiendo a medida que se identificaba dicho valor para un signo (tu es el primer /tu/ que se identificó, tú el segundo, tù el tercero, tu₄ el cuarto, etc.).

Normalmente, el valor de los signos es de tipo CV (Consonante + Vocal), VC o CVC. Un dato a tener en cuenta es que normalmente no hay distinción de sordas y sonoras (ni enfáticas, para las lenguas semíticas) y los signos con e o i son intercambiables. A menudo, en un signo tipo CV va seguido de un signo V (sólo vocal) para marcar que se trata de una vocal larga, aunque su uso no es sistemático. Tampoco es sistemático, aunque frecuente, la notación de geminadas: išaqqal ‘él pesa’, puede aparecer como i-ša-qal o como i-ša-aq-qal.

Sucinta selección de recursos

Escritura cuneiforme y desciframiento:

Bottéro, J., 1981³, “The Origin and Development of the Cuneiform System of Writing” en S. N. Kramer, History begins at Sumer: Thirty Nine Firsts in Recorded History, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.

Gelb, I. J. 1961², Old Akkadian Writing and Grammar, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press. Disponible en <https://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/shared/docs/mad2.pdf?frbrVersion=2>.

Daniels, P., 1995, “The Decipherment of Ancient Near Eastern Scripts”, en Sasson (ed.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, New York, 81-83.

Daniels, P., “Methods of Decipherment”, en Daniels y Bright (eds.), The World’s Writing Systems, New York/Oxford, 141-159.

Feliu, Ll. 2007, L’escriptura cuneiforme, Barcelona, Editorial UOC (Vull Saber 53). [introductorio].

Torres Torres, E., 2007, “El desciframiento de la escritura cuneiforme: un hito que culminó hace 150 años”, Isimu 20, 77-97.

Volk, Konrad 1999², A Sumerian reader, Roma, Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico (Studia Pohl: Series Maior 18). [Ejercicios introductorios de lectura de textos sumerios. Disponible en <https://archive.org/details/ASumerianReader>].

Corpora textuales:

Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI). Disponible en: <https://cdli.ucla.edu/>

Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts: Sign lists. Disponible en: <http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt/signlists/index.html>.

KTU² = Dietrich, Mandfried, Loretz, Oswald y Sanmartín, Joaquín 1995, The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places, Münster, Ugarit-Verlag (Abhandlungen zur Literatur Alt-Syrien-Palästinas und Mesopotamiens).

TITUS – Corpus of Hittite Mythological Texts. Disponible en <http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/etcs/anatol/hittite/cthtx/cthtx.htm>.

TITUS – OPers. = Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien, Old Persian Corpus. Disponible en: <http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/etcs/iran/airan/apers/apers.htm>.

Gramáticas:

Sumerio

Jagersma, Abraham Hendrik 2010, A descriptive grammar of Sumerian, Leiden [tesis doctoral disponible en: <https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/16107>].

Acadio

Caplice, Richard 2002⁴, Introduction to Akkadian, Roma, Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico (Studia Pohl: Series Maior 9). [Gramática introductoria con ejercicios progresivos] Disponible en: <https://ia802708.us.archive.org/28/items/IntroductionToAkkadian2002/Introduction_to_Akkadian.pdf>.

Soden, Wolfram von 1995, Grundriss der akkadischen Grammatik, Roma, Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico (Analecta orientalia 33).

Hurrita

Campbell, Dennis 2015, Mood and Modality in Hurrian, Winona Lake, Ind., Eisenbrauns (Languages of the Ancient Near East 5), pp. 13–25.

Wegner, Ilse 2000, Einführung in die hurritische Sprache, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz Verlag. [Introducción al hurrita con lecciones progresivas].

Hitita

Hoffner, Harry A. y Melchert, H. Craig 200.9, A Grammar of the Hittite Language 2 vol., Winona Lake, Ind., Eisenbrauns. [El primer tomo contiene una gramática exhaustiva y el segundo contiene ejercicios progresivos].

Persa Antiguo

Skjærvø, Prods Oktor 2016, An Introduction to Old Persian. [Curso introductorio de Persa antiguo en lecciones progresivas], Disponible en: <https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~iranian/OldPersian/opcomplete.pdf>.

Ugarítico

Sivan, Daniel, 2002, A Grammar of the Ugaritic Language, Leiden, Brill Academic Publishers, (Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1 The Near and Middle East 28).

Cite this article as: T. Obrador Cursach, “Difusión y características de la escritura cuneiforme “, in N. Moncunill (ed.), Cracking lost scripts, 06/12/2021, https://lostscripts.hypotheses.org/104.