The Assyrian Democratic Organization
Project begun in 1921 to translate ancient cuneiform finally concluded
Alison Flood
Tuesday 7 June 2011
A 21-volume dictionary detailing an ancient Mesopotamian language has finally been completed after 90 years’ work.
The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary identifies and explains the words carved in stone and written in cuneiform on clay tablets by Babylonians and Assyrians in Mesopotamia between 2500 BC and AD100.
The project was first embarked upon in 1921 by James Henry Breasted, founder of Chicago University’s Oriental Institute, and has seen millions of index cards referencing 28,000 words in the Semitic Akkadian language compiled over the last 90 years.
The various meanings for each word are laid out in the 21-volume dictionary, as well as their context and means of use. The entry for the word "umu", for example, meaning day, runs to 17 pages and covers its use in the Epic of Gilgamesh: "Those who took crowns who had rule of the land in the days of yore."
Robert Biggs, a professor emeritus at the Oriental Institute, worked as an archaeologist on digs recovering tablets as well as on the dictionary, spending almost 50 years on the project. "You’d brush away the dirt, and then there would emerge a letter from someone who might be talking about a new child in the family, or another tablet that might be about a loan until harvest time. You’d realise that this was a culture not just of kings and queens, but also of real people, much like ourselves, with similar concerns for safety, food and shelter for themselves and their families," he said. "They wrote these tablets thousands of years ago, never meaning for them to be read so much later, but they speak to us in a way that makes their experiences come alive."
Matthew Stolper, a University of Chicago professor who devoted – on and off – 30 years to the dictionary, told the Associated Press that "a lot of what you see is absolutely recognisable – people expressing fear and anger, expressing love, asking for love".
"There are inscriptions from kings that tell you how great they are, and inscriptions from others who tell you those guys weren’t so great," he said. "There’s also lot of ancient versions of ‘your check is in the mail’. And there’s a common phrase in old Babylonian letters that literally means ‘don’t worry about a thing’."
The dictionary’s completion was announced by the University of Chicago yesterday. Director of the university’s Oriental Institute Gil Stein said it provided "the key into the world’s first urban civilisation".
"Virtually everything that we take for granted … has its origins in Mesopotamia, whether it’s the origins of cities, of state societies, the invention of the wheel, the way we measure time, and most important the invention of writing," he told the AP. "If we ever want to understand our roots, we have to understand this first great civilisation."
