Babylonian language revived at Cambridge

Updated on: Friday, October 01, 2010

Babylonian, the main language of Ancient Mesopotamia, is being revived in an online radio archive at the University of Cambridge, nearly 2,000 years after its last native speakers disappeared.

A Cambridge researcher, Martin Worthington, has begun what he hopes will be an ongoing project to record readings of Babylonian poems, myths and other texts in the original tongue.

The results are being compiled in an audio library, publically available and free, where users can stream Babylonian - one of the chief languages of Ancient Mesopotamia - while reading English translations.

Only 30 recordings have been released so far, but they include excerpts from some of the earliest known works of world literature, dating back to the first years of the second millennium BC.

Worthington hopes that having heard the sound of the extinct language, some listeners will be sufficiently intrigued to investigate further, and perhaps end up studying the history, language or culture of the period.

"Whenever I tell people what I do, the first question they ask is what did Babylonian sound like, and how do you know?" Worthington said.

"In the end I decided that the best thing to do would be to create a resource where they can listen to it for themselves."

"I also wanted to dispel some long-standing myths. Many people think that the further you go back in history, the less you know about it. In fact, we have masses of information about the Babylonians.

The site aims to give users a taste of the richness and complexity of Ancient Mesopotamian culture, which is not something you normally learn much about at school."

The existing collection focuses on poetry.

Most of this is known from cuneiform inscriptions found on clay tablets in the area that was once Mesopotamia, and now comprises Iraq, as well as parts of Syria, Turkey and Iran.

"In many cases they are the equivalent of Old English tales like Beowulf," Worthington added.

"Through them, we meet gods, giants, monsters and all sorts of other weird and wonderful creatures. As stories they are amazing fun."

Many also bear strong parallels with Biblical tales.

In Tablet 11 of The Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, users find the chief protagonist - the hero-king Gilgamesh - being instructed by the gods to prepare a boat ahead of a great flood.

In The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer, a pious citizen, Shubshi-meshre-Shakkan, is afflicted by a range of unjust ills and ends up questioning the nature of his faith in a way that resembles the better-known Job.

Beyond literature, the site has also begun to accommodate other key documents from the period. Part of the Codex Hammurabi, for example, the ancient law code from 1790 BC, can be both read and heard.

Working out how Babylonian, or any dead language, sounded relies on a variety of strategies and techniques.

In some cases, researchers are aided by later transcriptions into other languages, but often the sound is forensically deduced through the careful study of letter combinations and spelling patterns, using the original Cuneiform texts.

"It's essentially detective work," Worthington said.

"We will never know for sure that a Babylonian would have approved of our attempts at pronunciation, but by looking at the original sources closely, we can make a pretty good guess."

More recordings for the online library are currently being prepared. The present collection is available for use now at: www.speechisfire.com.

Babylonian language revived at Cambridge

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