February 14, 2022

Language Death—The Case of Akkadian

February 2022 | Vol. 10.2

By Johannes Hackl

The phenomenon of language death is as old as the recorded history of the world’s languages, if not as old as language itself. Languages affected by this phenomenon are usually referred to as dead or extinct languages, depending on whether or not they morphed into a different language or several daughter languages through normal development, with the historically older form left without native or fluent speakers.

The most prominent Western example of a dead language is Latin, which eventually developed into the Romance languages. Akkadian, the earliest attested Semitic language, on the other hand, is an extinct language—from which it follows that there are no known languages that descended from it. The most common explanation for the absence of daughter languages is that Akkadian, the language of the Assyrians and Babylonians, was eclipsed by Aramaic (i.e., Old and Official Aramaic) rather early during the first millennium BCE.

Map of Assyria and Babylonia. Image by FDRMRZUSA via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

The rapid proliferation of Aramaic can be traced back to the advent of Aramaic-speaking people in Mesopotamia, first recorded in Akkadian sources from the reign of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I (1115–1077 BCE). Its growing popularity and eventual role as lingua franca in much of the Ancient Near East are neatly encapsulated in some of the surviving sources.

In a letter found at Nineveh, for instance, the Assyrian king Sargon II (721–705 BCE) reiterates an earlier request voiced by the addressee who happens to be an official from Ur with an impeccably Akkadian name, and then quashes it with a dose of scornfulness: [As to what you wrote]: “(…) If it is accep[table] to the king, [let] me write and send my messages to the king on Aram[aic] parchment sheets”—why would you not write and send me messages in Akkadian? Really, the message which you write on it must be drawn up in this very manner—this is a fixed regulation!

While this episode sheds light on the rise of Aramaic within the realm of the Assyrian state administration, the Biblical Book of Isaiah (36: 11–12) shows that Aramaic already served as a bridge language across regional boundaries by the time the Assyrian king Sennacherib laid siege to Jerusalem (701 BCE): Then Eliakim, Shebna, and Joah said to the Rabshakeh, “Please speak to your servants in Aramaic, for we understand it. Do not speak to us in the language of Judah within the hearing of the people who are on the wall.” But the Rabshakeh said, “Has my master sent me to speak these words to your master and to you, and not to the men sitting on the wall, who are doomed with you to eat their own dung and drink their own urine?” Furthermore, mention should be made of the famous Assyrian bas-reliefs, some of which depict Aramean scribes together with Akkadian scribes, thus attesting to the ever-increasing importance of Aramaic as an administrative (or chancellery) language.

Neo-Assyrian letter SAA 17 no 2. Currently in the British Museum. Photo from Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) P237990. © The Trustees of the British Museum

These few examples may suffice to show that Aramaic constantly gained ground at the expense of Akkadian until it had an unassailable foothold amongst Assyrians and Babylonians. So, while it is clear that Aramaic eventually eclipsed Akkadian, the final act of this prolonged language contact hinges on the answers to two crucial questions: First, when were there no Akkadian native speakers left, even though Akkadian may still have been taught in school and used for scientific and liturgical functions? And second, when did traditional cuneiform schooling and cuneiform writing, in general, cease?

Assyrian and Aramaic scribes on Neo-Assyrian bas-reliefs. © The Trustees of the British Museum

To answer these questions, commentators often draw on observations such as those outlined above as well as on linguistic phenomena that are commonly held to reflect growing Aramaic influence or limited knowledge—if not significantly reduced competence—of Akkadian. As a result, many argue that the last historical form of Akkadian ceased to be an everyday spoken language somewhere between 620 and 480 BCE (i.e., in the long sixth century), with Akkadian speakers shifting to Aramaic. Concepts and models borrowed from contact linguistics, however, show that such an approach falls short in that it fails to acknowledge other important factors that encourage language maintenance despite strong cultural pressure on borrowing-language speakers. These factors include the history of the speakers (i.e., their group vitality), the development of ‘distance’ and standardized languages, linguistic typology, and ideologies and attitudes that govern linguistic choices.

If applied to the Akkadian-Aramaic contact situation in Babylonia during the long sixth century, the following observations can be made: first, the use of Akkadian is still documented in all the relevant sociolinguistic domains (i.e., specific social contexts of interaction). Second, the traditional urban elites of the old Babylonian cities (e.g., Babylon, Borsippa and Uruk) set themselves apart from other social strata in terms of ancestry, wealth, status, access to offices, active participation in cult worship, marital practices, and language use. The ensuing social cohesion of this group presumably promoted the use of Akkadian in in-group interaction, and as a marker of identity, and thus ensured a certain stability of form and breadth of function. Third, Akkadian was accorded high prestige as a result of its rich literary heritage and the prestige of its speakers. Its use in religious contexts and degree of institutionalization within the legal sphere presumably increased positive attitudes and motivation to maintain competence in Akkadian. Fourth, the degree of contact-induced language change suggests more intense contact and moderate bilingualism among Akkadian speakers.

The Assyrian Rabshakeh addressing the besieged Jerusalemites. Mezzotint by G. Sanders, 1845, after E. Taylor. Public Domain.

In the period after the failed Babylonian revolts against the Achaemenid king Xerxes (484 BCE), a somewhat different picture emerges. First, not only were many members of the traditional urban elites deprived of their economic means and removed from their positions of power, they were also probably ousted from the cities at that time. The subsequent collapse of the age-old priestly ‘clan system’ and the abolishment of the prebend or stipend system resulted in an abrupt lack of temple personnel which required the integration of outsiders of different social strata and thus disrupted the social cohesion of the Akkadian-speaking community. Second, other sociolinguistic changes that were not directly linked to the revolts seem to have gained momentum afterwards. These changes include the formation of Official Aramaic towards the end of the sixth century BCE that provided the local Babylonian variety of Aramaic with a standardized lingua franca.

It follows that the aftermath of the rebellions against Xerxes delivered a severe blow to the group vitality of native (northern) Babylonian urban elites. The surviving sources, however, show that a sizeable group of speakers—or, rather, several geographically isolated groups in urban settings—continued to rely on Akkadian for communication into the second century BCE. This much is clear from the continued use of Akkadian in literary, scholarly, liturgical, school, administrative, legal, and epistolary texts, and, more importantly, the association of Akkadian with all the domains represented by these texts (education, religion, business and work, family, and others).

By the time the latest administrative documents known to us were drafted (c. 90 BCE), at least some scribes had retained sufficient knowledge of Akkadian to continue writing such texts properly, suggesting that the entire Akkadian speech community had not already shifted to Aramaic. It therefore can be argued that their language died with its morphological boots on—to use the felicitous expression coined by the American linguist Nancy Dorian. From the following decades, more Akkadian texts survive, but they are restricted to the domain of scholarship and are thus not informative on the vitality of Akkadian.

Rock relief of an Achaemenid king, most likely Xerxes. Photo by Darafsh via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).

The latest advanced astronomical and non-astronomical texts suggest that the last generation of (temple-linked) scholars capable of producing such texts in cuneiform died around the end of the first century BCE. What little is preserved from the first century CE seems to be the work of ‘astrologers’ with reduced scribal competence who continued to draw up simple alamanacs, while horoscopes and other astronomical-astrological texts were no longer written in cuneiform. Whether written Akkadian outlived the demise of cuneiform on other media (e.g., parchment) for some time, remains an open question. What is clear, though, is that it ceased to be used in any form early in the first millennium CE—at a time when the descendants of the Assyrians and Babylonians had shifted to Aramaic or other languages long before.

Johannes Hackl is Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Indo-European Studies and the Archaeology of Prehistory to the Early Middle Ages at the University of Jena.

Further reading:

Beaulieu, P.-A., 2006, “Official and Vernacular Languages: The Shifting Sands of Imperial and Cultural Identities in First-Millennium B.C. Mesopotamia,” In: S. L. Sanders (ed.), Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures. Oriental Institute Seminars 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 187-216.

Hackl, J. 2021, “The Death of Akkadian as Written and Spoken Language,” In: J.-P. Vita (ed.), A History of the Akkadian Language. Handbook of Oriental Studies. Leiden: Brill, 1459-1477.

How to cite this article

Hackl, J. 2022. “Language Death—The Case of Akkadian.” The Ancient Near East Today 10.2. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/hackl-akkadian-death/.