Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [33]
Yet at its acme, Akkadian was pre-eminently a language of power and influence. If Sumerian had spread beyond Sumer as the touchstone of an educational standard, Akkadian spread through economic and political prestige.
Akkadian is named after Agade or Akkad, once the major city of southern Mesopotamia but whose location is now a mystery. (It was possibly not far from Babylon.) Records of the language begin in earnest with the middle of the third millennium, with an early climax in those conquests by Sargon (whose long reign centred on the turn of the twenty-fourth and twenty-third centuries BC). He campaigned successfully in all directions, thus not only spreading the official use of Akkadian in the north (Mari and Ebla), but also beginning a millennium-long official dominance of the language in Elam to the west. We have seen that this first fit of imperial exuberance was followed by a collapse in the fourth generation (end of the twenty-second century BC), and a brief linguistic resurgence of the subject populations, with the return of Sumerian and Elamite to official use for a century or so. Soon, however, the Amorites, Semitic-speaking ‘Westerners’, began to make their appearance all over Mesopotamia.* Their movements did not strengthen Akkad politically, but did seem to crowd out the wide-scale use of anything but Akkadian as a means of communication; and the written record (outside literature) from the beginning of the second millennium is exclusively in this language.
In the early days, there was some parity, and perhaps some specialisation of function, as between Akkadian and Sumerian: we have already noted that Sargon’s own daughter had been an accomplished poetess in Sumerian. But the bilingualism proved unstable. While Akkadian was fortified as the major language of the Fertile Crescent by its everyday use for all literate purposes, and some degree of mutual intelligibility with the Semitic languages of the west, Sumerian was guaranteed only by its role in education and culture. The period of the rise of Babylon (2000-1600 BC) still fostered this, but when the power bases were shattered, and foreign rulers (the Kassites) took over, serious learning in Sumerian must have seemed an irrelevance. It was retained merely as an adjunct to Akkadian studies, in the same spirit as the list of Latin tags sometimes still found at the end of an English dictionary.
This ‘Old Babylonian’ period turned out to be as significant for Akkadian as it was for Sumerian, but in a different way. It was in this period that some fairly slight dialect differences are first noticeable between the south (Babylonian) and the north (Assyrian). Different dialects of Akkadian also become visible farther afield, in Mari, in Susa and to the east in the valley of the Diyala. Letters are extant from all periods, and provide the best evidence for spoken language.
At the same time, the dialect of Babylon (which even the Babylonians still called Akkadū) became established as the literary standard, the classic version of which would be used for official purposes throughout Mesopotamia. This privileged position endured for the rest of the language’s history, essentially regardless of whether Babylon, Assyria or neither of them was the current centre of political power. The great model of classic Babylonian is the Laws of Hammurabi, compiled in the eighteenth century BC when this dialect was still the vernacular. But the best-known literary texts, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and Enuma eliš (’When on high …’, the Creation Epic), are also