A team of scholars have completed a dictionary of a long dead language, which had not been spoken for more than 2,000 years, after working on it for 90-years.
The work to create the Assyrian dictionary began at the University of Chicago in 1921, and it was based on words recorded on clay or stone tablets unearthed from ruins in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey.
The project involved several generations of scholars from Vienna, Paris, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, Berlin, Helsinki, Baghdad and London, who travelled to Chicago to work on it.
The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is now officially complete. It contains 21 volumes of Akkadian, a Semitic language, with several dialects, including Assyrian that was in use for 2,500-years.
"The Assyrian Dictionary gives us the key into the world's first urban civilisation," the Telegraph quoted Gil Stein, director of the university's Oriental Institute, as saying.
"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.
"If we ever want to understand our roots we have to understand this first great civilisation," Stein added.
Robert Biggs, professor emeritus at the university, devoted nearly a half-century to the dictionary, uncovering tablets on digs in the Iraq desert.
Comments