Akkadian: The Semitic Language of Mesopotamian Empire

Akkadian is an East Semitic language belonging to the Afroasiatic family, attested from around the twenty-fourth century BCE and serving successively as the administrative and literary language of the Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian empires across ancient Mesopotamia, making it one of the earliest attested written languages in human history alongside Sumerian, with which it coexisted for many centuries in ancient Mesopotamia before eventually displacing Sumerian as an everyday spoken language while Sumerian persisted as a learned scholarly and liturgical register.

Akkadian was written in cuneiform, a script of wedge-shaped marks pressed into clay tablets that Akkadian speakers adapted from the earlier Sumerian writing system, and Akkadian literature includes the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest surviving substantial works of narrative literature anywhere, and the Enuma Elish, Babylon's creation epic, both of which preserve extensive Mesopotamian religious mythology concerning creation, the flood and the relationship between gods and humanity that scholars have long compared to parallel material in the Hebrew Bible. Akkadian itself later split into distinct Babylonian and Assyrian dialects as the two regions' political fortunes diverged, and Standard Babylonian, a somewhat archaizing literary register used for major texts including Gilgamesh, functioned across the wider Mesopotamian world in a manner comparable to Classical Chinese or Latin's role as a shared learned register beyond any single kingdom's borders.