World history: Ancient Babylonian language’s revival 2000 years later

For the first time in 2000 years people will have a chance to listen to the Akkadian or Assyro-Babylonian language spoken in Babylon. University of Cambridge researchers have released the recordings with Babylonian epic online.

Akkadian language was the chief language in ancient Mesopotamia. It was circa second millennium B.C. that it was spoken everywhere, but at the turn of epochs it became an extinct language. Historians from Cambridge succeeded to reconstruct sounding of an ancient language, and they are now recording poetry and law texts found on clay tablets in Mesopotamia and make them accessible online.

The project on reconstruction of Babylonian poems, myths and other texts is headed by Dr. Martin Worthington, who compares his studies on phonetic transcription with detective work. Inscriptions found on clay tablets have not sounded for more than 2 thousand years. To work out how Babylonian sounded scientists relied on a variety of strategies and techniques. In some cases, researchers are aided by later transcriptions into other languages, but often the sound is deduced through the careful study of letter combinations and spelling patterns.

“Whenever I tell people what I do, the first question they ask is what did Babylonian sound like, and how do I know?” — Dr. Worthington said. “We will never know for sure that a Babylonian would have approved of our attempts at pronunciation, but by looking at the original sources closely, we can make a pretty good guess” — he added.

Dr. Worthington has recorded around 30 fragments from the Babylonian texts, including excerpts from the earliest known works of world literature, known to scientists. All these texts are cuneiform inscriptions found on clay tablets in the area that was once Mesopotamia (now Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran). Among the highlights of recorded texts is a piece of The Epic of Gilgamesh and those from Codex Hammurabi, the ancient law code from 1790 BC.

The results are being compiled in an audio library, made publically available and completely free on the website, where users can stream Babylonian while reading English translations.