A COMPANION TO

THE ANCIENT
NEAR EAST
SECOND EDITION

Edited by
Daniel C. Snell
This Second edition first published 2020
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 CHAPTER TWENTY

The Languages of the Ancient

Near East
John Huehnergard

Introduction: Languages, Language Families,

and Scripts
The Ancient Near East has the distinction of being the region in which the first writing, and
thus the world’s earliest written languages and records, appeared, with the emergence of
Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs in the late fourth millennium BCE. Mesopotamian
cuneiform was eventually used to write other languages as well, such as Akkadian, a Semitic
language, and Hittite, an Indo‐European language. And around the beginning of the second
millennium BCE, speakers of another Semitic language, living in Egypt, distilled a few Egyptian
signs into a short, easy‐to‐learn consonantal alphabet, from which most scripts in use around
the world today are derived (apart from Chinese and its descendants).
Most languages belong to language families, whose members share similar vocabulary
and grammatical structures because they descend from a common ancestor. Examples
are the Semitic language family and the Indo‐European language family, both of which are
described below. Some languages, called isolates, are not part of a family, that is, they
are not demonstrably related to any other known language; Sumerian, the first language
considered here, is such an isolate.

Sumerian
The world’s first writing arose in the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk, in the fourth
third
millennium BCE. At first this comprised drawings of objects and signs for numerals, incised
or pressed into moist clay tablets, presumably records of commodities and their amounts.

A Companion to the Ancient Near East, Second Edition. Edited by Daniel C. Snell.
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
342 John Huehnergard

Eventually some of the signs were used not to indicate the object depicted, but rather for
the sound of the name of the object; this is called the rebus principle, and it is the foundation
of all true writing systems – a simple example would be the drawing of a bee and a leaf to
write “belief” – since it allows any and all words, including words for abstract concepts and
grammatical function words, to be expressed. Rebus writings such as “bee‐leaf” are lan-
guage‐specific, since they rely on homonyms or near‐homonyms to work. When instances
of the rebus principle appear in the early Mesopotamian pictograms, they show that the
language being represented is Sumerian (for example, the drawing of an arrow, pronounced
ti, to write the verb “live,” also pronounced ti). The drawings of objects evolved over time,
especially as they began to be impressed into the clay with the end of a reed stylus, which
created lines ending in a triangular head; cuneiform means “wedge‐shaped.”
Sumerian writing remained a mixture of signs that represented objects and the words
for those objects, called logograms
logograms (“word‐signs”), and signs that represented sounds,
called phonograms (“sound‐signs”). Many signs had both functions; for example, one
sign represented both the word en ‘lord’ and the sound‐sequence e+n. The phonograms
represented syllables, either a simple vowel (such as a or i), a vowel plus a consonant (such
as en or ub), a consonant plus a vowel (such as di or la), or a consonant plus a vowel plus
a consonant (such as nam or gur). Sumerian writing is therefore said to be a logo‐syllabic
system. A sample Sumerian sentence appears at the end of this chapter.
Sumerian, as noted above, is a language isolate, unrelated to any other known language
(although there have been many attempts to connect it with other languages). It is an
agglutinating language; that is, speech elements are attached as units, with some modifi-
cation, to form words and phrases, as in the writing é lugal‐a‐na‐ka for the sequence
/é lugal.an(i).ak.a/, literally “house king.his.of.in,” that is, “in the house of his king.”
The tens of thousands of Sumerian texts comprise many genres: administrative and legal
texts, law codes, letters, royal inscriptions, and literary texts such as hymns, prayers, lit-
urgies, and epics.
It is not certain when Sumerian ceased to be a spoken language; the question is debated
by scholars, with opinions ranging from the late third to the mid‐second millennium. But
Sumerian continued to be learned, and written, as a literary language by Akkadian scribes
until the death of cuneiform writing itself in the first century CE.

Egyptian
Egyptian is a member of the Afro‐Asiatic language group, which also includes the Semitic
languages (see below), as well as Berber and Cushitic languages. Egyptian features with
analogs in Semitic languages include certain pronouns such as jnk “I” (similar to Hebrew
ʔānōkî) and the suffix ‐k “your” (like Hebrew ‐kā); feminine nouns marked with the
ending ‐t; a construction involving verbal adjectives, as in rdj‐kw “I was given” (compare
Akkadian nadnā‐ku “I was given”); and causative verbs marked with a prefixed s.
Egyptian writing appeared soon after the earliest writing in Mesopotamia. The best‐
known variety of Egyptian writing, of course, is hieroglyphs. The hieroglyphic signs may
represent the objects depicted, such as a crocodile for msḥ “crocodile,” although some of
the signs are more abstract, such as an open rectangle for pr “house.” Some signs came to
 The Languages of the Ancient Near East 343

be used to indicate the pronunciation of the object depicted, that is, as phonetic signs (the
rebus principle, again); whereas Sumerian phonetic signs represent syllables, Egyptian
phonetic signs represent consonants, either a single consonant, such m or f; or a sequence
of two consonants, such as ms or gm; or even sequences of three consonants, such as nfr
or stp. Vowels are thus not normally indicated. Some signs were used to represent both
words and phonetic values; the “house” sign, for example, was also used for the consonant
sequence pr in other words, such as prt “seed.” A number of signs were also used as deter-
minatives (classifiers), written at the end of a word to indicate the semantic class to which
the word belonged; for example, verbs of motion were often written with a sign depicting
“walking legs” at the end. See the sample Egyptian sentence at the end of this chapter.
Almost as soon as hieroglyphic writing appeared, a cursive variety, called hieratic, arose
alongside it. Hieratic was written with ink on papyrus, and was more common than hiero-
glyphic, which was mostly reserved for more permanent, monumental inscriptions on
stone and wood. An even more cursive variety of writing, called demotic, began to be used
in the seventh century BCE.
Egyptian had the longest recorded history of any language. Several chronological phases
of the language are distinguished: Old Egyptian, to about 2100 BCE; Middle Egyptian,
spoken to about the sixteenth century, but used as the standard written language until the
end of Egyptian history; Late Egyptian, until about 600 BCE; Demotic, from the seventhth
seventh
century BCE until the fifth century CE; and Coptic, written from the first century CE until
the eleventh (though spoken for several centuries after that). The last stage, Coptic, was
written not in a script derived from the hieroglyphs but in the Greek alphabet, with several
additional letters derived from the demotic script. The latest dated text in hieroglyphic
was written in 394 CE.
There are a vast number of Egyptian texts of many types, such as tomb inscriptions,
including autobiographies; royal inscriptions; letters and administrative documents;
mathematical and medical texts; religious and theological texts; hymns; instructions and
other wisdom texts; and some of the world’s oldest stories.

Semitic Languages
The Semitic language family, like Egyptian, is part of the Afro‐Asiatic language group.
The 45‐century recorded history of Semitic, from the earliest Akkadian texts in the mid‐
third millennium BCE up to the Semitic languages of the present day (such as Arabic,
Amharic, and Hebrew), is the longest of any language family. And for most of the history
of the Ancient Near East, the Semitic languages constituted the most widespread language
family.
The earliest Semitic language attested is Akkadian. Speakers of Akkadian borrowed the
cuneiform writing invented for Sumerian and adapted it to their own language; logograms
continued to be used, but much of Akkadian is written with the syllabic phonograms that
are also used, though to a lesser extent, in Sumerian writing. Modern‐day Assyriologists
transliterate logograms with their Sumerian pronunciations; an Akkadian sentence such as
šarrum ana bıt̄ im ı r̄ ub “the king entered into the house” (literally, “king to palace
entered”) could be written LUGAL a‐na É i‐ru‐ub, where LUGAL and É are the Sumerian
344 John Huehnergard

words for “king” and “house.” Akkadian texts were written from the mid‐third millen-
nium BCE until the first century CE. Over the course of those 25 centuries, the language
naturally underwent many changes. Assyriologists refer to third‐millennium texts as Old
Akkadian; thereafter, there are two major dialects, Assyrian in northern Mesopotamia and
Babylonian in the south, and the following broad chronological labels are applied:

Old Assyrian 2000–1500 Old Babylonian

Middle Assyrian 1500–1000 Middle Babylonian
Neo‐Assyrian 1000–600 Neo‐Babylonian
600–100 CE Late Babylonian

Old Babylonian, the dialect of Hammurapi and of his famous laws, came to be regarded
as the classical form of Akkadian. A later literary dialect in which scribes attempted to
reproduce Old Babylonian, called Standard Babylonian, is the form of Akkadian in which
important texts such as Enūma elish and the standard version of Gilgamesh are written.
There are scores of thousands of Akkadian texts, in an impressive diversity of genres:
myths and epics, hymns, prayers, encyclopedic lists of words and grammatical texts,
mathematical, medical, and astronomical texts, historical records, lists of omens, and
much more.
Another ancient Semitic language written in cuneiform was Eblaite, which is attested in
some 4000 tablets found in the city of Ebla, about 60 km south of Aleppo in Syria, all
dating to the twenty‐fourth century BCE. Eblaite is closely related to Akkadian, and con-
sidered by some scholars to be a dialect of Akkadian rather than a separate language
(Catagnoti 2012).
Akkadian and Eblaite, which are characterized by a distinctive verbal system, constitute
East Semitic, one of the two main branches of the Semitic language family. The other
branch, West Semitic, comprises all other Semitic languages. The earliest examples of West
Semitic that have been identified are several lines that record anti‐snake spells in the
Egyptian Pyramid Texts of the mid‐third millennium BCE (Steiner 2011). Another early
form of West Semitic is found in several thousand personal names (plus a few dozen loan-
words) in cuneiform texts (and some Egyptian texts) from the end of the third millennium
until the mid‐second millennium; these names, which are clearly composed of Semitic
words (and god names), but just as clearly not Akkadian, are referred to as Amorite (Streck
2000). An example of such a name is that of Hammurapi himself, whose name, really
ʕammu‐rāpiʔ, means “the (divine) kinsman is one who heals” in West Semitic.
Apart from Amorite and those anti‐snake spells, West Semitic languages are written in
an alphabet. As noted above in the introduction, the alphabet was invented in Egypt, early
in the second millennium BCE. Speakers of a West Semitic language used 27 Egyptian signs
(some hieroglyphic, some hieratic) to represent each of the individual consonants of their
language (Hamilton 2006). The principle behind the invention – called the acrophonic
principle – was simple, but ingenious: each consonant was indicated with one Egyptian
sign, a sign depicting an object whose name in the West Semitic language began with that
consonant; for example, the Egyptian “house” sign was used to write the consonant b,
because the West Semitic word for “house,” *bayt‐, began with that consonant; similarly,
for the consonant r, the sign for “head” was used, because the West Semitic word for
 The Languages of the Ancient Near East 345

“head” was *raʔs‐. The consonants of every word in that West Semitic language could
thus be written with just those 27 signs. The pictographic origin of the letters remained
evident in examples of alphabetic writing through much of the second millennium BCE
(from southern Egypt, from the Sinai peninsula, and from the Levant), but by 1000 BCE
or so, the letter shapes had become quite abstract. Those early alphabetic inscriptions are
all quite short, usually brief invocations of a god, or dedications, or, often, simple
graffiti.
The earliest West Semitic language in which texts of any length are written is Ugaritic,
the indigenous language of the ancient city of Ugarit near the coast of the northeast
corner of the Mediterranean. Ugaritic texts, which date to the thirteenth and twelfth cen-
turies BCE, are written in an alphabet, but the 30 letters of the Ugaritic alphabet – and
Ugaritic texts – are written on clay tablets in a unique type of cuneiform. There are over
1500 Ugaritic texts, over half of which are administrative documents that record tax lists,
deliveries, loans, and the like. The most famous Ugaritic texts are some 50 mythological
and epic stories about gods and legendary kings, the poetic style of which is very similar
to the poetry of the Hebrew Bible. Other texts are letters to and from prominent citizens
of Ugarit, and copies of rituals and other cultic activities.
The Canaanite languages comprise a closely related sub‐branch of West Semitic. The
best attested Canaanite language is Hebrew, known especially from the Hebrew Bible (the
Christian Old Testament). The earliest parts of the Bible, such as the poetry of Judges
chapter 5 and Exodus chapter 15, reflect a rather archaic form of Hebrew, and may date
to the twelfth century. Other parts of the Bible were composed over the following thou-
sand years, and so Biblical Hebrew reflects a chronological span during which the lan-
guage naturally underwent changes. Hebrew inscriptions dating to roughly the same
timespan exhibit grammar that is essentially the same as the contemporary Hebrew of the
Bible (Dobbs‐Allsopp 2005). (A sentence from a Hebrew inscription appears at the end
of this chapter.) Later Hebrew texts, such as the Mishnah and other Jewish writings from
around the turn of the era, reflect a slightly different form of Hebrew. In the early cen-
turies CE, Hebrew became extinct as a native language, although it always continued to be
written. It was revived in the nineteenth century, and modern Israeli Hebrew is now the
native language for several million people.
Hebrew scribes borrowed their 22‐letter alphabet from writers of another well‐attested
form of Canaanite, the Phoenician language of coastal city‐states such as Beirut, Byblos,
Sidon, and Tyre, which is recorded in inscriptions from about 1000 BCE. The form of
Phoenician known from colony cities, especially in North Africa, such as Carthage, is
referred to as Punic. The name Carthage itself derives from the Phoenician–Punic phrase
qart ḥadašt “new town.” Punic texts written after the destruction of Carthage by Rome
in 146 BCE are referred to as Neo‐Punic. Neo‐Punic texts, including some Latin–Punic
bilinguals, are found until the fifth century CE.
Other Canaanite dialects, likewise written in descendants of the Phoenician alphabet,
include Moabite, which is known from one long inscription of the Moabite king Mesha
(mid‐ninth century BCE) and a few small fragments. Ammonite and Edomite are known
from a small number of inscriptions dating from the ninth to the sixth centuries BCE. The
earliest vestiges of Canaanite are found in cuneiform letters sent by rulers of Syro‐
Palestinian city states to their overlord, the king of Egypt, in the early forteenth century
346 John Huehnergard

(called the Amarna letters, after the site in Egypt where they were found); although these
texts are ostensibly written in Akkadian, they exhibit a verbal system that is not Akkadian
at all, but is in fact very close to that of Ugaritic and early Hebrew (Rainey 1996).
Aramaic inscriptions, again written in the 22‐letter alphabet borrowed from the
Phoenicians, begin to appear in the mid‐ninth century BCE. Most of these Old Aramaic
texts, as they are called, are commemorative or dedicatory royal inscriptions, each exhibit-
ing distinctive local dialect features. With the advent of the Persian Empire in 539 BCE,
Aramaic became one of the official languages of the state administration, and a large
number of texts on papyrus in this Official (or Imperial) Aramaic have been preserved,
especially from Egypt; the Aramaic in which part of the biblical book of Ezra was written
is also an example of this type of Aramaic. After the fall of the Persian Empire to Alexander
in 330 BCE, Aramaic again presents distinct dialects, such as the inscriptional Palmyrene (in
the city of Palmyra) and Nabataean; but a standard literary variety, based on Official
Aramaic, is also used, for example, in the biblical book of Daniel, in Targum Onqelos and
Targum Jonathan (translations, respectively, of the Torah and the Prophets of the Hebrew
Bible), and in the Aramaic texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls. From about the third century
CE, a more marked distinction between western and eastern Aramaic dialects is evident.
Western Aramaic texts include the Jerusalem Talmud and a corpus of Christian Palestinian
texts. Eastern Aramaic includes the dialect of the Babylonian Talmud; Syriac, the language
of a vast Christian literature; and Mandaic, written by ancient and modern Mandaeans.
Aramaic continues to be spoken today by some 100 000 people, formerly in Syria, Turkey,
Iraq, and Iran, but now scattered throughout the world.
Texts in the ancient South Arabian languages begin to appear early in the first millen-
nium BCE. Most have been found in present‐day Yemen and southern and western Saudi
Arabia, although a few have been found as far away as Egypt and Greece. The four main
languages are Sabaic, Minaic, Qatabanic, and Hadramitic; of these, Sabaic, the language
of the biblical land of Sheba, is by far the best attested, with texts continuing up to the
sixth century CE. These languages are written in an alphabet of 29 letters, also descended
ultimately from the pictographic alphabet described above, but along a different line of
development from the 22‐letter Phoenician alphabet. The several thousand monumental
texts in stone (and sometimes in metal), in a beautiful script, include dedicatory and
building inscriptions, commemorative inscriptions (some of them very long, describing
military expeditions), oracles and atonement texts (Stein 2012–13). (A sample sentence
from a Sabaic text on stone is given at the end of this chapter.) A cursive form of the alpha-
bet, only recently deciphered, was used to write texts on palm‐leaf stalks; these are letters
and legal and administrative documents, several hundred of which have been published in
recent years.
Ancient North Arabian refers to inscriptions in a continuum of languages that are
related (but not ancestral) to classical Arabic. The texts are written in varieties or deriva-
tives of the ancient South Arabian alphabet. The most numerous of these, by far, are tens
of thousands of Safaitic rock inscriptions in the desert of southern Syria and northern
Jordan and neighboring parts of Saudi Arabia, conventionally dated from the first century
BCE to the fourth century CE, but possibly beginning several centuries earlier. Most of
these short texts are simple genealogies, but a good number also include brief narratives
of daily activities, rituals, and mourning (Al‐Jallad 2015). The earliest inscriptions that
 The Languages of the Ancient Near East 347

may be considered linguistic forerunners of classical Arabic are from the sixth century CE;
Arabic writing proper is derived from the cursive Nabataean Aramaic script.
Semitic languages reached the region of present‐day Ethiopia and Eritrea, probably
from the Arabian peninsula, some time during the first millennium BCE. Texts in Classical
Ethiopic, also called Ge‘ez, first appear in the fourth century CE, in fairly long inscriptions
of king Ezana of Axum. The Bible was translated into Ge‘ez not long after, and Ge‘ez also
became the language of a very large Christian literature. Modern Semitic languages in the
region include Tigrinya, the national language of Eritrea, and Amharic in Ethiopia.

Indo‐European Languages
The Indo‐European family, which includes English, is so named because its member lan-
guages stretch from India to Europe. The oldest recorded branch of Indo‐European is
Anatolian, speakers of which probably entered Anatolia (present‐day Turkey) in the third
millennium BCE. The most prominent member is Hittite, attested from the mid‐seven-
teenth to the early twelfth centuries BCE on some 10 000 clay tablets (in 30 000 fragments)
written in Mesopotamian cuneiform, most of which have been found in excavations at the
Hittite capital Hattusa (modern Boghazkale, formerly Boghazköy), although tablets have
also been discovered at other Anatolian sites. Among the many types of texts are histori-
ography, laws, treaties with vassals and with other major powers, myths, rituals, prayers,
hymns, and letters.
Two other Anatolian languages are attested in the second millennium. Palaic, probably
spoken in northwestern Anatolia, is known only from about a dozen ritual texts in
Mesopotamian cuneiform, all fragmentary, from the same span of time as Hittite. Luwian
(or Luvian) is also attested in a few cuneiform texts from the same period, likewise mostly
rituals, but there are many more Luwian texts, mostly on stone, in an indigenous hiero-
glyphic writing system (which is also logo‐syllabic in nature, like Mesopotamian cunei-
form). Hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions first appear in the fifteenth century; but the
majority, narrative texts commissioned by local rulers in Syria as well as Anatolia, date to
the first millennium (until the eighth century BCE).
In addition to hieroglyphic Luwian, several other Anatolian Indo‐European languages
are known from the first millennium BCE. These include Lycian, Lydian, and Carian, which
are written not in syllabic cuneiform or hieroglyphic scripts, but rather in alphabets derived
from the Greek alphabet (sometimes with significant additions and other changes), in
inscriptions dating to the eighth through third centuries BCE. Lycian, spoken in southwestern
coastal Anatolia, is known from over 150 inscriptions on stone, mostly short epitaphs,
although there are also two longer texts, one of which is a trilingual Lycian–Greek–Aramaic
inscription. There are about 100 inscriptions in Lydian, the majority from the region of
Sardis in western Anatolia; these inscriptions are also mostly epitaphs, although a few
decrees are also attested. Carian was spoken in an area between Lycia and Lydia; a few
inscriptions, including an important Carian–Greek bilingual, have been found in that area,
but a larger number of Carian texts are brief tomb inscriptions left by Carians in Egypt.
Phrygian, the language of the first‐millennium BCE kingdom of Phyrgia in central and
western Anatolia, seems to be a separate branch of the Indo‐European family. Several
348 John Huehnergard

hundred Old Phrygian texts, in an indigenous alphabet derived from early Greek, date
from the eighth to the fifth centuries, mostly from the capital city, Gordion, one of whose
kings was the famous Midas; the contents are difficult to determine because the language
is not well understood. There is a chronological gap until the appearance of New Phrygian
texts, over 100 in number, in the first and second centuries CE; these are mostly funerary,
written in the Greek alphabet (and about half are Greek–Phrygian bilinguals).
Indo‐Iranian is a large branch of the Indo‐European family that includes languages such
as ancient Sanskrit and modern Hindi and Persian. A few Indo‐Iranian words and god
names appear in Hittite and Hurrian texts from the mid‐second millennium BCE. Gods
such as Indra and Varuna appear as witnesses in treaty texts (and also form parts of some
personal names), while other words are found in a text concerning horse training. The
earliest actual Indo‐Iranian texts attested, however, are in Old Persian, one of the official
languages of the Persian Empire, from the sixth to fourth centuries BCE. A new script was
created to write Old Persian, based on Mesopotamian cuneiform but greatly modified (it
is partly syllabic and partly alphabetic). Most of the texts are royal inscriptions of the
Achaemenid rulers (especially Darius I and Xerxes I, 522–465). Old Persian is quite closely
related to Avestan, the language of the Zoroastrian texts of the Avesta. The language of
the Medes, Median, is also an ancient form of Iranian; it is preserved for the most part
only in loanwords in Old Persian.
The earliest Greek attested is Mycenean, the language of the thousands of clay tablets
written in Linear B, a logo‐syllabic script derived from the earlier Linear A script (which is
discussed in the section below on undeciphered languages and scripts). The inscriptions,
which date from the fifteenth to the twelfth centuries BCE, are inventories (of personnel,
rations, animals, and so on); most have been found at royal sites such as Knossos on Crete
and Mycenae, Pylos, and Thebes in mainland Greece. Greek inscriptions written in the
Greek alphabet, which was borrowed from the Phoenicians, begin to appear from the
eighth century.

Hurrian and Urartian
The Hurrian and Urartian languages are related to each other, but not to any other known
languages. (A suggested connection to Northeast Caucasian languages has not found
wide acceptance.) Because linguistic comparison with other languages is therefore not
possible, both languages are incompletely understood, although progress on both con-
tinues to be made with additional texts finds and ongoing scholarship. Like Sumerian,
Hurrian and Urartian are ergative languages; that is, in both nouns and verbs, the subject
of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb are marked in the same way, while
the subject of a transitive verb, called the agent, receives a different marker (as if, in
English, we said “by‐her found I” instead of “she found me”). Most Hurrian texts are
written in Mesopotamian syllabic cuneiform; a few Hurrian texts are known from the late
third millennium, and a few more from the first half of the second millennium, but the
vast majority are from the later second millennium, especially from the Hittite capital,
Hattusa, but also from several other Late Bronze Age sites. Hurrian was spoken across
 The Languages of the Ancient Near East 349

much of northern Mesopotamia and Syria, and in addition to texts written in the language,
a large number of individuals bearing Hurrian names also appear in Akkadian texts from
the same general area throughout the second millennium. Many Hurrian texts are rituals,
but there are also literary works, songs, and a nearly‐500‐line Hurrian letter, one of the
Amarna letters, sent by the Mittanian king Tushratta to the Egyptian king Amenophis III
in about 1355 BCE. There are also a few Hurrian texts found at the city of Ugarit that are
written in the local Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet (see above, under Semitic Languages).
Urartian, also written in Mesopotamian cuneiform, is attested from the ninth to the late
seventh centuries BCE, mostly in stone inscriptions from the Iron Age kingdom of Urartu
near Lake Van (although there are also a few clay tablets in Urartian). Most of the texts
are commemorative royal inscriptions, referring to construction works and military cam-
paigns. And although some 500 inscriptions are known, they are quite formulaic and
repetitive, and so Urartian is less well understood than Hurrian. There are also a few brief
inscriptions in a hieroglyphic script (or scripts), but these have not been deciphered.

Other Languages
Hattic, also called Hattian, was a language of inhabitants of Anatolia before the arrival of
speakers of Indo‐European languages such as Hittite and Luwian. Hattic speakers wrote
no texts; rather, the language is known only from some 550 fragmentary cuneiform texts,
religious or cultic in nature, that have been found among the much larger corpus of
Hittite texts in ancient Hattusa. Since Hattic is not clearly related to any other language,
and since there are so few texts, it is not well understood, although some progress has
been made with the help of 20 bilingual Hattic–Hittite texts (Goedegebuure 2010, 2013).
Elamite was the indigenous language of ancient Elam, in southwestern Iran. It too has
no known linguistic relatives. Elamite texts were written in Mesopotamian cuneiform. A
few inscriptions in Old Elamite date from the late third to the early second millennia; they
include royal inscriptions and a treaty with a king of the Old Akkadian dynasty. After a gap
of several centuries, Middle Elamite texts, dating to the last centuries of the second mil-
lennium, when Elam was a major power, are well attested; many of these are royal inscrip-
tions, including historical texts and an Elamite–Akkadian bilingual, but there are also
administrative texts. After another gap in attestation, Neo‐Elamite inscriptions appear;
fewer in number, these also include royal inscriptions, administrative texts, and a few legal
texts. Achaemenid Elamite was one of the official languages of the Persian Empire. In offi-
cial monumental inscriptions, it is always accompanied by a similar text in Old Persian.
The famous inscription of Darius I at Behistun (Bisitun) was recorded in Elamite, Old
Persian, and Akkadian. There are also several thousand administrative inscriptions from
this period, most from archives in Persepolis, as well as a few letters. Elamite texts are not
attested after the end of the Old Persian Empire in the late fourth century. (For the early
inscriptions called “Proto‐Elamite,” see the following section, Undeciphered Languages
and Scripts.)
Kassite was the language of the Kassite people of the central Zagros mountains, some of
whom created a dynasty that ruled Babylonia from the sixteenth to the twelfth centuries
350 John Huehnergard

BCE. No texts written in Kassite are attested; the language is known only from a cuneiform
vocabulary text that lists 32 Kassite nouns with their Akkadian translations, a few Akkadian
texts about horse breeding that contain some Kassite words, and a small number of Kassite
loanwords in Akkadian.

Undeciphered Languages and Scripts

The name “Proto‐Elamite” is given to some 1600 inscriptions on clay tablets, most from
the city of Susa, that date to the late fourth and early third millennia, that is, just after the
invention of writing in southern Mesopotamia. The inscriptions, in a script similar to but
not the same as early Mesopotamian writing, are accounting texts, and while much of the
content has been worked out, the language encoded by the writing has not been deter-
mined (Englund 2004; Dahl 2013).
It was noted above that Linear B, the script used to write Mycenean Greek, is in all
likelihood derived from an earlier Cretan script called Linear A, with which it shares a large
percentage of signs, both phonetic and logographic. Thus, Linear A can to some extent be
“read,” and although there are nearly 1500 texts (from the mid‐ninteenth to the mid‐
fifteenth centuries), most are quite short, and so the language recorded in the texts, which
was presumably a language of the Minoans, is so far unidentified; most of the inscriptions
appear to be accounting texts, plus a few votive texts (Palaima and Bibee 2013). There are
also some 360 very brief inscriptions, on stone seals, in a Cretan hieroglyphic script, con-
temporary with or slightly earlier than Linear A, and from which Linear A writing prob-
ably derives. Also from Crete is the famous Phaistos Disk, a round clay tablet some 16 cm
in diameter found in an archaeological context of the eighteenth century BCE; on both
sides are pictographic signs that were impressed by means of 45 individual stamps (making
the disk the world’s earliest example of movable type). Although many “decipherments”
have been announced, the uniqueness of the document and the fact that its signs are not
obviously related to any other writing mean that no proposed decipherment can be tested
or proved.
Cypro‐Minoan refers to several related syllabic scripts found on inscriptions from
Cyprus (and elsewhere, including Ugarit) and dating to the second half of the second mil-
lennium BCE. These scripts seem to be related to the Cretan linear scripts described in the
preceding paragraph, and to a later syllabic script used on Crete in the first millennium BCE
to write a dialect of Greek. Thus, some of the signs can be read, but the language of the
Cypro‐Minoan texts remains undeciphered (Duhoux 2013).
At the site of Byblos in Lebanon were found a small number of inscriptions in a hiero-
glyphic script, dating to some time in the Bronze Age, though more precise dating has
proved difficult. The number of hieroglyphic signs, between 65 and 100 (depending on
whether some forms are variants of others), suggests a syllabic writing system. Some of the
inscriptions are on bronze, others on stone; some are quite short, only three lines, while
others are longer, up to 41 lines. The few proposed decipherments, which assume that the
language represented is Semitic, cannot be confirmed without additional material
available.
 The Languages of the Ancient Near East 351

SAMPLES OF SCRIPTS AND TEXTS

352 John Huehnergard

FURTHER READING

Reliable overviews of most the languages treated here can be found in Woodard (2004),
Kogan et al. (2010), Gzella (2012), and Hasselbach (2020). Recent introductions to the
Sumerian and Egyptian languages are Foxvog (2016) and Allen (2014), respectively.
Surveys of the Semitic language family include Huehnergard (1995, 2004, 2011), Rubin
(2010), Weninger et al. (2011), and Huehnergard and Pat‐El (2019). Among the many
surveys of the Indo‐European language family, the following recent treatments can be
especially recommended: Ramat and Ramat (1998), Fortson (2009), and Beekes (2011).
A complete and up‐to‐date treatment of Hurrian is not available in English, but see
Campbell (2015), and, for an introduction in German, Wegner (2007). For undeciphered
scripts, see Daniels and Bright (1996) and Robinson (2009).

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