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70-459: The term tākultu is derived from the Akkadian verb akālu , "to eat", and can be literally translated as "banquet" or "festive meal". The corresponding Sumerian term is gišbun , a possible loanword (from Akkadian kispum ), logographically written as KI.KAŠ.GAR (literally "place where beer is put"). The ceremony designated by it has accordingly been characterized as a type of food offering,

140-691: A lingua franca of the empire, rather than it being eclipsed by Akkadian. Texts written 'exclusively' in Neo-Assyrian disappear within 10 years of Nineveh 's destruction in 612 BC. Under the Achaemenids , Aramaic continued to prosper, but Assyrian continued its decline. The language's final demise came about during the Hellenistic period when it was further marginalized by Koine Greek , even though Neo-Assyrian cuneiform remained in use in literary tradition well into Parthian times. Similarly,

210-608: A stele presumed to represent Ashurbanipal and a number of representations of unspecified kings and princes from the temple of Ashur in Assur. Furthermore, natural features could be included as well. In the Ashurbanipal tākultu celestial bodies are invoked, though it is not certain if this reflects an influence of similar passages in Assyrian treaties, or merely the personal preference of the tablet's copyist Issar-šumu-ēreš, who

280-650: A voiced alveolar trill /r/ but its pattern of alternation with ⟨ ḫ ⟩ suggests it was a fricative (either uvular /ʁ/ or velar /ɣ/ ). In the Hellenistic period, Akkadian ⟨ r ⟩ was transcribed using the Greek ρ, indicating it was pronounced similarly as an alveolar sound (though Greeks may also have perceived a uvular trill as ρ). Several Proto-Semitic phonemes are lost in Akkadian. The Proto-Semitic glottal stop *ʔ , as well as

350-467: A "banquet ritual". Neo-Assyrian sources indicate that it involved a king offering beverages to deities. William W. Hallo notes the development of the religious meaning of tākultu reflects a broader phenomenon of Mesopotamian cultic terms being derived from everyday language. According to Stefan Maul is possible that tākultu developed from earlier rituals focused on Enlil . The oldest references to it have been identified in texts from Babylonia from

420-517: A comparison with other Semitic languages, and the resulting picture was gradually amended using internal linguistic evidence from Akkadian sources, especially deriving from so-called plene spellings (spellings with an extra vowel). According to this widely accepted system, the place of stress in Akkadian is completely predictable and sensitive to syllable weight . There are three syllable weights: light (ending in -V); heavy (ending in -V̄ or -VC), and superheavy (ending in -V̂, -V̄C or -V̂C). If

490-687: A lengthy span of contact and the prestige held by the former, Sumerian significantly impacted Akkadian phonology, vocabulary and syntax. This mutual influence of Akkadian and Sumerian has also led scholars to describe the languages as a Sprachbund . Akkadian proper names are first attested in Sumerian texts in the mid-3rd millennium BC, and inscriptions ostensibly written in Sumerian but whose character order reveals that they were intended to be read in East Semitic (presumably early Akkadian) date back to as early as c.  2600 BC . From about

560-468: A locative ending in -um in the singular and the resulting forms serve as adverbials . These forms are generally not productive, but in the Neo-Babylonian the um -locative replaces several constructions with the preposition ina . In the later stages of Akkadian, the mimation (word-final -m ) and nunation (dual final -n ) that occurred at the end of most case endings disappeared, except in

630-481: A major centre of Mesopotamian civilization during the Akkadian Empire ( c.  2334 –2154 BC). It was written using the cuneiform script , originally used for Sumerian , but also used to write multiple languages in the region including Eblaite , Hurrian , Elamite , Old Persian and Hittite . The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian went beyond just the cuneiform script; owing to their close proximity,

700-403: A separate East Semitic language. Because Akkadian as a spoken language is extinct and no contemporary descriptions of the pronunciation are known, little can be said with certainty about the phonetics and phonology of Akkadian. Some conclusions can be made, however, due to the relationship to the other Semitic languages and variant spellings of Akkadian words. The following table presents

770-546: A set of incantations from Hattusa designated by the term babilili and focused on invoking Pinikir ( CTH 718), but concludes that this is insufficient to establish whether one of these ceremonies influenced the other. He notes that while written mostly in Akkadian, and presumably based on a Mesopotamian forerunners, the corpus of babilili texts is ultimately largely unique. Akkadian language Akkadian ( / ə ˈ k eɪ d i ən / ə- KAY -dee-ən ; Akkadian: 𒀝𒅗𒁺𒌑(𒌝) , romanized:  Akkadû(m) )

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840-520: A translation of tākultu . A single text from the Sealand refers to preparation of food for a tākultu , though Odette Boivin notes there is no evidence that a distinct festival is meant, and assumes the passage deals with nindabû , a well attested monthly food offering. Only three attestations of the term tākultu have been identified in Middle Babylonian texts, and it is not clear if

910-555: A vast textual tradition of religious and mythological narrative, legal texts, scientific works, personal correspondence, political, civil and military events, economic tracts and many other examples. Centuries after the fall of the Akkadian Empire, Akkadian, in its Assyrian and Babylonian varieties, was the native language of the Mesopotamian empires ( Old Assyrian Empire , Babylonia , Middle Assyrian Empire ) throughout

980-463: A whole. In contrast with many other Neo-Assyrian ritual texts, surviving tākultu copies do not contain detailed performance instructions, save for the version from the reign of Sennacherib. Neo-Assyrian tākultu texts contain long lists of invoked deities. They are considered an important source of information about the pantheons of Assyrian cities, though John MacGinnis stresses they do not mention every single deity worshiped in this area. Most of

1050-499: A written language, adapting Sumerian cuneiform orthography for the purpose. During the Middle Bronze Age (Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian period), the language virtually displaced Sumerian, which is assumed to have been extinct as a living language by the 18th century BC. Old Akkadian, which was used until the end of the 3rd millennium BC, differed from both Babylonian and Assyrian, and was displaced by these dialects. By

1120-609: Is PaRiStum (< *PaRiS-at-um ). Additionally there is a general tendency of syncope of short vowels in the later stages of Akkadian. Most roots of the Akkadian language consist of three consonants, called the radicals, but some roots are composed of four consonants, so-called quadriradicals. The radicals are occasionally represented in transcription in upper-case letters, for example PRS (to decide). Between and around these radicals various infixes , suffixes and prefixes , having word generating or grammatical functions, are inserted. The resulting consonant-vowel pattern differentiates

1190-403: Is an extinct East Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia ( Akkad , Assyria , Isin , Larsa , Babylonia and perhaps Dilmun ) from the third millennium BC until its gradual replacement in common use by Old Aramaic among Assyrians and Babylonians from the 8th century BC. Akkadian, which is the earliest documented Semitic language , is named after the city of Akkad ,

1260-442: Is divided into several varieties based on geography and historical period : One of the earliest known Akkadian inscriptions was found on a bowl at Ur , addressed to the very early pre-Sargonic king Meskiagnunna of Ur ( c.  2485 –2450 BC) by his queen Gan-saman, who is thought to have been from Akkad. The Akkadian Empire , established by Sargon of Akkad , introduced the Akkadian language (the "language of Akkad ") as

1330-463: Is marked by the Kassite invasion of Babylonia around 1550 BC. The Kassites, who reigned for 300 years, gave up their own language in favor of Akkadian, but they had little influence on the language. At its apogee, Middle Babylonian was the written language of diplomacy of the entire Ancient Near East , including Egypt ( Amarna Period ). During this period, a large number of loan words were included in

1400-507: Is preserved on clay tablets dating back to c.  2500 BC . It was written using cuneiform , a script adopted from the Sumerians using wedge-shaped symbols pressed in wet clay. As employed by Akkadian scribes, the adapted cuneiform script could represent either (a) Sumerian logograms ( i.e. , picture-based characters representing entire words), (b) Sumerian syllables, (c) Akkadian syllables, or (d) phonetic complements . In Akkadian

1470-501: Is then [awat+su] > /awatt͡su/ . In this vein, an alternative transcription of ⟨ š ⟩ is ⟨ s̱ ⟩, with the macron below indicating a soft (lenis) articulation in Semitic transcription. Other interpretations are possible. /ʃ/ could have been assimilated to the preceding /t/ , yielding /ts/ , which would later have been simplified to /ss/ . The rhotic ⟨ r ⟩ has traditionally been interpreted as

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1540-542: The Northwest Semitic languages and South Semitic languages in its subject–object–verb word order, while the other Semitic languages usually have either a verb–subject–object or subject–verb–object order. Additionally Akkadian is the only Semitic language to use the prepositions ina and ana ( locative case , English in / on / with , and dative -locative case, for / to , respectively). Other Semitic languages like Arabic , Hebrew and Aramaic have

1610-540: The Old Babylonian period . William W. Hallo suggested that the myth Lugalbanda in the Mountain Cave describes a tākultu . In the relevant passage, Lugalbanda prepares a feast consisting of the meat of goats and aurochs and various alcoholic beverages, and invites An , Enlil, Enki and Ninhursag to partake in it. The term used to designate it is Sumerian gišbun , known from other sources to be

1680-402: The Old Babylonian period . The following table shows Proto-Semitic phonemes and their correspondences among Akkadian, Modern Standard Arabic and Tiberian Hebrew : The existence of a back mid-vowel /o/ has been proposed, but the cuneiform writing gives no good proof for this. There is limited contrast between different u-signs in lexical texts, but this scribal differentiation may reflect

1750-595: The Persian conquest of the Mesopotamian kingdoms contributed to the decline of Babylonian, from that point on known as Late Babylonian, as a popular language. However, the language was still used in its written form. Even after the Greek invasion under Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, Akkadian was still a contender as a written language, but spoken Akkadian was likely extinct by this time, or at least rarely used. The last positively identified Akkadian text comes from

1820-598: The consonants of the Akkadian language, as distinguished in Akkadian cuneiform. The reconstructed phonetic value of a phoneme is given in IPA transcription, alongside its standard ( DMG-Umschrift ) transliteration in angle brackets ⟨ ⟩ . Evidence from borrowings from and to Sumerian has been interpreted as indicating that the Akkadian voiceless non-emphatic stops were originally unaspirated, but became aspirated around 2000 BCE. Akkadian emphatic consonants are typically reconstructed as ejectives , which are thought to be

1890-503: The exorcist Kiṣir-Aššur , advisors of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal. Pongratz-Leisten notes that the Neo-Assyrian tākultu texts do not focus on ritual consumption. However, the new form of the ritual added a distinct spatial dimension to it, with binding the peripheries of the Neo-Assyrian Empire to its center as a primary goal. Deities from various areas were invoked to bless the king , the city of Assur and Assyria as

1960-400: The status absolutus (the absolute state ) and the status constructus ( construct state ). The latter is found in all other Semitic languages, while the former appears only in Akkadian and some dialects of Aramaic. The status absolutus is characterised by the loss of a noun's case ending (e.g. awīl < awīlum , šar < šarrum ). It is relatively uncommon, and is used chiefly to mark

2030-469: The 10th century BC when the Assyrian kingdom became a major power with the Neo-Assyrian Empire . During the existence of that empire, however, Neo-Assyrian began to turn into a chancellery language, being marginalized by Old Aramaic . The dominance of the Neo-Assyrian Empire under Tiglath-Pileser III over Aram-Damascus in the middle of the 8th century led to the establishment of Aramaic as

2100-561: The 1st century AD. The latest known text in cuneiform Babylonian is an astronomical almanac dated to 79/80 AD. However, the latest cuneiform texts are almost entirely written in Sumerian logograms. The Akkadian language began to be rediscovered when Carsten Niebuhr in 1767 was able to make extensive copies of cuneiform texts and published them in Denmark. The deciphering of the texts started immediately, and bilinguals, in particular Old Persian -Akkadian bilinguals, were of great help. Since

2170-524: The 21st century BC Babylonian and Assyrian, which were to become the primary dialects, were easily distinguishable. Old Babylonian, along with the closely related dialect Mariotic , is clearly more innovative than the Old Assyrian dialect and the more distantly related Eblaite language . For this reason, forms like lu-prus ('I will decide') were first encountered in Old Babylonian instead of

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2240-555: The 25th century BC, texts fully written in Akkadian begin to appear. By the 20th century BC, two variant dialectic forms of the same language were in use in Assyria and Babylonia, known as Assyrian and Babylonian respectively. The bulk of preserved material is from this later period, corresponding to the Near Eastern Iron Age . In total, hundreds of thousands of texts and text fragments have been excavated, covering

2310-404: The archaeological evidence is typical of Anatolia rather than of Assyria, but the use both of cuneiform and the dialect is the best indication of Assyrian presence. Old Babylonian was the language of king Hammurabi and his code , which is one of the oldest collections of laws in the world. (see Code of Ur-Nammu .) Old Assyrian developed as well during the second millennium BC, but because it

2380-440: The deities listed were associated with Assur. In some cases, their groupings reflect traditions of this city dating back as early as to the reign of Erishum I ; for example, a group of divine judges from the temple of Ashur first mentioned in his inscriptions still appears in Neo-Assyrian tākultu . Deities from other major Assyrian cities (for example Nineveh, Kurbail  [ pl ] or Arbail ) are also enumerated, and near

2450-546: The deity Iblaītu might be Išḫara invoked under a title stressing her association with Ebla , which he assumes the Assyrians might have been aware of because of contact with Hurrians. In some cases, such as those of Narundi and the Hurrian deities , it is not certain if the inclusion in tākultu reflected the existence of contemporary Assyrian cults, or only constituted a reference to earlier accounts. In addition to gods,

2520-485: The dialects of Akkadian identified with certainty so far. Some researchers (such as W. Sommerfeld 2003) believe that the Old Akkadian variant used in the older texts is not an ancestor of the later Assyrian and Babylonian dialects, but rather a separate dialect that was replaced by these two dialects and which died out early. Eblaite , formerly thought of as yet another Akkadian dialect, is now generally considered

2590-401: The earlier stages of the language, the dual number is vestigial, and its use is largely confined to natural pairs (eyes, ears, etc.). Adjectives are never found in the dual. In the dual and plural, the accusative and genitive are merged into a single oblique case . Akkadian, unlike Arabic , has only "sound" plurals formed by means of a plural ending. Broken plurals are not formed by changing

2660-453: The end of a list these worshiped in more remote parts of the empire could be mentioned too. For example, the tākultu from the reign of Sennacherib mentions deities from Babylonia , such as Ištaran and Šarrat-Deri from Der . More than one manifestation of a deity could be mentioned in the same text, for example different manifestations of Ashur, some of which constitute examples of syncretism between him and other deities. A tākultu from

2730-420: The first one bears stress. A rule of Akkadian phonology is that certain short (and probably unstressed) vowels are dropped. The rule is that the last vowel of a succession of syllables that end in a short vowel is dropped, for example the declinational root of the verbal adjective of a root PRS is PaRiS- . Thus the masculine singular nominative is PaRS-um (< *PaRiS-um ) but the feminine singular nominative

2800-471: The formula was also inscribed on votive objects mentioned in it. References to tākultu held in Assur, specifically in the temple of Ashur, reappear in Middle Assyrian texts from the reigns of Adad-nirari I and his successor Shalmaneser I . Inscriptions on fragments of pots and jars indicate it was held at least three or four times during the reign of the former and at least three times during

2870-540: The fricatives *ʕ , *h , *ḥ are lost as consonants, either by sound change or orthographically, but they gave rise to the vowel quality e not exhibited in Proto-Semitic. The voiceless lateral fricatives ( *ś , *ṣ́ ) merged with the sibilants as in Canaanite , leaving 19 consonantal phonemes. Old Akkadian preserved the /*ś/ phoneme longest but it eventually merged with /*š/ , beginning in

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2940-732: The language from Northwest Semitic languages and Hurrian . However, the use of these words was confined to the fringes of the Akkadian-speaking territory. From 1500 BC onwards, the Assyrian language is termed Middle Assyrian. It was the language of the Middle Assyrian Empire . However, the Babylonian cultural influence was strong and the Assyrians wrote royal inscriptions, religious and most scholarly texts in Middle Babylonian, whereas Middle Assyrian

3010-454: The last syllable is superheavy, it is stressed, otherwise the rightmost heavy non-final syllable is stressed. If a word contains only light syllables, the first syllable is stressed. It has also been argued that monosyllabic words generally are not stressed but rather function as clitics . The special behaviour of /V̂/ syllables is explained by their functioning, in accordance with their historical origin, as sequences of two syllables, of which

3080-591: The later Bronze Age, and became the lingua franca of much of the Ancient Near East by the time of the Bronze Age collapse c.  1150 BC . However, its gradual decline began in the Iron Age, during the Neo-Assyrian Empire when in the mid-eighth century BC Tiglath-Pileser III introduced Imperial Aramaic as a lingua franca of the Assyrian empire. By the Hellenistic period , the language

3150-404: The latter being used for long vowels arising from the contraction of vowels in hiatus. The distinction between long and short is phonemic , and is used in the grammar; for example, iprusu ('that he decided') versus iprusū ('they decided'). There is broad agreement among most Assyriologists about Akkadian stress patterns. The rules of Akkadian stress were originally reconstructed by means of

3220-503: The lists in tākultu could also include deified cultic paraphernalia such as standards ( šurinnu ; one example is the standard of Ashur mentioned in the Sennacherib tākultu ) and statues representing apotropaic creatures, including lions, leopards, bulls, anzû birds, lahmu and kurību (griffins). Representations of kings placed in temples could also be mentioned, including depictions of Tiglath-Pileser III and Eriba-Adad ,

3290-434: The locative. Later, the nominative and accusative singular of masculine nouns collapsed to -u and in Neo-Babylonian most word-final short vowels were dropped. As a result, case differentiation disappeared from all forms except masculine plural nouns. However, many texts continued the practice of writing the case endings, although often sporadically and incorrectly. As the most important contact language throughout this period

3360-536: The older la-prus . While generally more archaic, Assyrian developed certain innovations as well, such as the "Assyrian vowel harmony ". Eblaite was even more so, retaining a productive dual and a relative pronoun declined in case, number and gender. Both of these had already disappeared in Old Akkadian. Over 20,000 cuneiform tablets in Old Assyrian have been recovered from the Kültepe site in Anatolia . Most of

3430-516: The oldest realization of emphatics across the Semitic languages. One piece of evidence for this is that Akkadian shows a development known as Geers's law , where one of two emphatic consonants dissimilates to the corresponding non-emphatic consonant. For the sibilants, traditionally ⟨ š ⟩ has been held to be postalveolar /ʃ/ , and ⟨ s ⟩, ⟨ z ⟩, ⟨ ṣ ⟩ analyzed as fricatives; but attested assimilations in Akkadian suggest otherwise. For example, when

3500-464: The original meaning of the root. The middle radical can be geminated, which is represented by a doubled consonant in transcription, and sometimes in the cuneiform writing itself. The consonants ʔ , w , j and n are termed "weak radicals" and roots containing these radicals give rise to irregular forms. Formally, Akkadian has three numbers (singular, dual and plural) and three cases ( nominative , accusative and genitive ). However, even in

3570-877: The other Semitic languages in the Near Eastern branch of the Afroasiatic languages , a family native to Middle East , Arabian Peninsula , parts of Anatolia , parts of the Horn of Africa , North Africa , Malta , Canary Islands and parts of West Africa ( Hausa ). Akkadian is only ever attested in Mesopotamia and neighboring regions in the Near East. Within the Near Eastern Semitic languages, Akkadian forms an East Semitic subgroup (with Eblaite and perhaps Dilmunite ). This group differs from

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3640-463: The possessive suffix -šu is added to the root awat ('word'), it is written awassu ('his word') even though šš would be expected. The most straightforward interpretation of this shift from tš to ss , is that ⟨ s, ṣ ⟩ form a pair of voiceless alveolar affricates /t͡s/ /t͡sʼ/ , ⟨ š ⟩ is a voiceless alveolar sibilant /s/ , and ⟨ z ⟩ is a voiced alveolar affricate or fricative /d͡z/~/z/ . The assimilation

3710-461: The prepositions bi/bə and li/lə (locative and dative, respectively). The origin of the Akkadian spatial prepositions is unknown. In contrast to most other Semitic languages, Akkadian has only one non-sibilant fricative : ḫ [x] . Akkadian lost both the glottal and pharyngeal fricatives, which are characteristic of the other Semitic languages. Until the Old Babylonian period, the Akkadian sibilants were exclusively affricated . Old Akkadian

3780-520: The reign of Ashurbanipal Ishtar, Ishtar of Arbela and "Lady of Nineveh" (Ishtar of Nineveh) are treated as separate. Foreign deities could be mentioned in tākultu alongside Mesopotamian ones. The tākultu from the reign of Ashurbanipal includes Hurrian Kumarbi , Nabarbi , Samnuha , Nupatik ("Umbidaki"), Ninatta and Kulitta , Hittite Pirwa ("Birua"), Urartian Haldi-aṣira, Elamite Napriš , Iabrītu and Narundi , and Iranian Ahura Mazda ("Assara-maza"). Alfonso Archi additionally argues that

3850-403: The reign of Ashurbanipal lists both Sin and Shamash twice. In the Sennacherib tākultu Ebiḫ is listed thrice, twice as a personified deity and once as a mountain. However, Spencer L. Allen notes in some cases the same theonym is used multiple times to designate distinct deities, for example Ishtars associated with specific cities. Barbara Nevling Porter points out that in the version from

3920-732: The reign of the latter. No attestations of tākultu are available from between the reign of Shalmaneser I and the ascent of the Sargonid dynasty to the throne of the Neo-Assyrian Empire . Stefan Maul argues that it is nonetheless possible it continued to be performed through the rest of the Middle Assyrian period, and through the entire Neo-Assyrian period. Versions from the reigns of Sennacherib , Esarhaddon , Ashurbanipal , Aššur-etil-ilāni and Sîn-šar-iškun are known. Individual copies have been discovered during excavations in Assur, Nineveh and Sultantepe . While Maul states tākultu

3990-452: The religious ceremony or a regular banquet is meant in each of these cases. Tākultu was also incorporated into the traditions of Upper Mesopotamia . It is already mentioned in an inscription of Shamshi-Adad I , which seemingly indicates it was held in Assur during his reign. The surviving copy ( Louvre A 889) is a tablet discovered in the royal palace of Mari , though it is presumed that

4060-483: The same syllable in the same text. Cuneiform was in many ways unsuited to Akkadian: among its flaws was its inability to represent important phonemes in Semitic, including a glottal stop , pharyngeals , and emphatic consonants . In addition, cuneiform was a syllabary writing system—i.e., a consonant plus vowel comprised one writing unit—frequently inappropriate for a Semitic language made up of triconsonantal roots (i.e., three consonants plus any vowels). Akkadian

4130-404: The script practically became a fully fledged syllabic script , and the original logographic nature of cuneiform became secondary , though logograms for frequent words such as 'god' and 'temple' continued to be used. For this reason, the sign AN can on the one hand be a logogram for the word ilum ('god') and on the other signify the god Anu or even the syllable -an- . Additionally, this sign

4200-516: The southern Caucasus and by communities in the Assyrian diaspora . Akkadian is a fusional language with grammatical case . Like all Semitic languages, Akkadian uses the system of consonantal roots . The Kültepe texts , which were written in Old Assyrian , include Hittite loanwords and names, which constitute the oldest record of any Indo-European language . Akkadian belongs with

4270-407: The superimposition of the Sumerian phonological system (for which an /o/ phoneme has also been proposed), rather than a separate phoneme in Akkadian. All consonants and vowels appear in long and short forms. Long consonants are transliterated as double consonants, and inconsistently written as such in cuneiform. Long vowels are transliterated with a macron (ā, ē, ī, ū) or a circumflex (â, ê, î, û),

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4340-591: The texts contained several royal names, isolated signs could be identified, and were presented in 1802 by Georg Friedrich Grotefend . By this time it was already evident that Akkadian was a Semitic language, and the final breakthrough in deciphering the language came from Edward Hincks , Henry Rawlinson and Jules Oppert in the middle of the 19th century. In the early 21st century it was shown that automatic high-quality translation of Akkadian can be achieved using natural language processing methods such as convolutional neural networks . The following table summarises

4410-434: The word stem. As in all Semitic languages, some masculine nouns take the prototypically feminine plural ending ( -āt ). The nouns šarrum (king) and šarratum (queen) and the adjective dannum (strong) will serve to illustrate the case system of Akkadian. As is clear from the above table, the adjective and noun endings differ only in the masculine plural. Certain nouns, primarily those referring to geography, can also form

4480-476: Was Aramaic , which itself lacks case distinctions, it is possible that Akkadian's loss of cases was an areal as well as phonological phenomenon. As is also the case in other Semitic languages, Akkadian nouns may appear in a variety of "states" depending on their grammatical function in a sentence. The basic form of the noun is the status rectus (the governed state), which is the form as described above, complete with case endings. In addition to this, Akkadian has

4550-461: Was a purely popular language — kings wrote in Babylonian — few long texts are preserved. It was, however, notably used in the correspondence of Assyrian traders in Anatolia in the 20th-18th centuries BC and that even led to its temporary adoption as a diplomatic language by various local Anatolian polities during that time. The Middle Babylonian period started in the 16th century BC. The division

4620-991: Was an astrologer. Other Mesopotamian ritual terms with similar meaning to tākultu include naptanu (Sumerian bur ; "ceremonial banquet") and qerītu ("banquet festival"). Beate Pongratz-Leisten argues certain conventions present in Neo-Assyrian tākultu texts, for example the inclusion of deified natural features, constitute a survival of tradition originating in the Syro-Anatolian cultural sphere, where they commonly occur in treaties. She notes deified mountains, rivers and regions are otherwise absent from Assyrian rituals, but occur in Old Babylonian texts from Tell Leilan , as well as in Hurrian and Hittite sources. Volkert Haas considered it "indisputable" that features of Neo-Assyrian tākultu reflected Hittite influence. Gary Beckman notes that similar Akkadian terminology pertaining to food offerings appears both in tākultu and in

4690-532: Was largely confined to scholars and priests working in temples in Assyria and Babylonia. The last known Akkadian cuneiform document dates from the 1st century AD. Mandaic spoken by Mandean Gnostics and the dialects spoken by the extant Assyrians ( Suret ) are three extant Neo-Aramaic languages that retain Akkadian vocabulary and grammatical features, as well as personal and family names. These are spoken by Assyrians and Mandeans mainly in northern Iraq , southeast Turkey , northeast Syria , northwest Iran ,

4760-426: Was presumably performed in Assur in the temple of Ashur, Beate Pongratz-Leisten notes that the geographic distribution of the texts might indicate the ritual was performed simultaneously in multiple cities, or alternatively more than once during the reign of a single ruler. Surviving colophons indicate the texts were prepared by high ranking courtiers, such as the astrologer Issar-šumu-ēreš  [ de ] and

4830-441: Was used as a determinative for divine names. Another peculiarity of Akkadian cuneiform is that many signs do not have a well defined phonetic value. Certain signs, such as AḪ , do not distinguish between the different vowel qualities. Nor is there any coordination in the other direction; the syllable -ša- , for example, is rendered by the sign ŠA , but also by the sign NĪĜ . Both of these are often used for

4900-505: Was used mostly in letters and administrative documents. During the first millennium BC, Akkadian progressively lost its status as a lingua franca . In the beginning, from around 1000 BC, Akkadian and Aramaic were of equal status, as can be seen in the number of copied texts: clay tablets were written in Akkadian, while scribes writing on papyrus and leather used Aramaic. From this period on, one speaks of Neo-Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian . Neo-Assyrian received an upswing in popularity in

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