Word: akkadian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...onward. For someone who is interested in improving American relations with both China and Russia, it is necessary to know at least the languages and literatures to be found in Central Asia, all of which predate American literature by several centuries. And to keep Rosenthal's soul at peace, Akkadian was there long before even Europe was discovered, and is a major source of our knowledge of the ancient history of the Near East, predating even the founding of the kingdom of Solomon...
Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations offers nine classes in Akkadian. The only Akkadian I have ever heard of is the instrument played at Italian weddings. The Turkic department offers two courses in Elementary Uzbek, and a course in both Old or Modern Uighur. I don't know what Uzbek is, and I can't even pronounce Uighur...
...reigning cuneiform expert at the University of Chicago, Ignace J. Gelb, who classifies the Eblaite tongue as most akin to the Mesopotamian languages of Old Akkadian and Amorite, and thus distant from Hebrew, believes that the discoveries at Ebla add "nothing directly to biblical scholarship." But Pettinato, who first deciphered Eblaite, considers it an early Canaanite language closest to the northwestern Semitic languages of Hebrew and Ugaritic (the latter was discovered in 1929 at an earlier dig in Ugarit, Syria). One specialist in Ugaritic and Hebrew, American Jesuit Mitchell Dahood of Rome's Pontifical Biblical Institute, goes further...
...significant library of the ancient world ever found. "My first impression," he says, "was that I was looking at a sea of clay tablets." Most were in piles on the floor where they had crashed down as the city was sacked in 2250 B.C. Ironically, the fire of the Akkadian conquerers ensured that the tablets would survive the passage of centuries, baking them to a stonelike hardness...