The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago has completed its dictionary of the Assyrian language:
Some might wonder if it is a bit late in the game, but scholars at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute have finally completed the Assyrian Dictionary, listing 28,000 words of a language that hasn’t been used for more than 2,000 years.
Published in 21 volumes, the dictionary project was started in 1921. In all, 88 scholars worked 90 years to compile it.
Thank God they were working on deadline! 😉
If you’ve got $1,400 sitting around gathering dust you can buy your very own copy.
The total number of cuneiform tablets that have been found isn’t unimaginably vast—they number in the hundreds of thousands—and only a fraction of the cuneiform tablets found have been in the Assyrian language, an extinct Semitic language apparently descended from Akkadian. I would guess their total number to be in the tens of thousands. I know that about 30,000 tablets in the Assyrian language were found in Nineveh. The total number of distinct works (many works have been found in multiples) included transactions, laws, marriages, divorces, legal disputes, literature, religious texts and personal correspondence among which was a note from a bratty rich kid. Here’s a quotation:
“From year to year, the clothes of the (young) gentlemen here become better, but you let my clothes get worse.
“The son of Adad-iddinam, whose father is only an assistant to my father, (has) two new sets of clothes . . . while you fuss even about a single set of clothes for me. In spite of the fact that you bore me and his mother only adopted him, his mother loves him, while you, you do not love me!”
Definitely a daunting task.
I love how this type of writing really shows the continuity of humanity throughout the ages, in addition to being an amusing anecdote of a rich kid complaining that another boy’s step-mother dotes on him.