Akkadian Cuneiform - the Hardest Language I Have Ever Tried to Learn!

For my Rosetta Stone project, I was in the Mesopotamian group (Phoenicia is in that area) and we had some difficulties with our language and writing form.  I mostly worked with Catherine to create the first artifact, and so during the second part I took a back seat, and mostly worked as the liaison to the group that received our artifact.  But the first artifact itself was hard enough.

To start with, one of our other group members had talked to  a professor on campus that was fluent in Akkadian cuneiform, so he went and talked to him, and gave us a sheet of paper with the English phonetic syllables and the English translation of the Akkadian, but not the cuneiform.  For that, he told us to go down to the Museum of Peoples and Cultures and look at the actual clay nail that it was written on.  (Note: Akkadian is the language of the Babylonians around 2500 B.C., cuneiform is the script they used to write it down, and Babylonia was the civilization that Catherine studied.)




Here comes my adventure.  Catherine and I met at 3 o'clock on Wednesday afternoon and walked down to the Museum together.  Luckily, there was someone there able to help us, pull out the correct nail, and take some really good photographs of the nail and email them to us.  But we were presented with two problems: the cuneiform was illegible to us, and there was way to much of it to copy the whole thing.  We didn't even know for certain that we had the beginning of the circular writing, let alone knowing where one phrase stops so that we could only write a translatable portion.  And though the pictures were great, even if we had been versed in that language it still would have been hard to read because of decay and slight differences in script.  I thought trying to read that cuneiform would be comparable to a native English speaker trying to do family history indexing, with those difficult-to-read, old documents, and that would be if I was a native Akkadian speaker, cuneiform writer.  So although the Masters in Archeology student was very helpful and friendly and understanding with our difficulty, we were still in a bind because the cuneiform wasn't legible enough for me or Catherine to copy. 

One Angle of the Authentic Clay Nail

While sitting in her office waiting for the pictures to download and be emailed to us, we discussed our predicament and possible solutions.  We looked back of the resources we had: photos of an illegible ancient artifact, and a paper with the phonetic syllables of the Akkadian and the English translation.  Then, Catherine remembered that on the ancient scripts site they had a table where the syllables were written in the cuneiform script.  When we got back to her apartment, she started looking up the syllables of the phrase we had chosen so I could begin writing them in the clay.  (We had a little difficulty understanding the table at first, but that got straightened out quick with two minds working on it.)  Then I prepared the clay with my fingers and a nearby bowl of water, smoothing out the rough places and making the edges straighter.  During the writing, we had to add on more clay to our tablet, but it was doable.  Then, using a stylus that another group member had created, with a triangle shape on one side and a point on the other, I got to work transcribing the symbols that Catherine had found.  Not all of the syllables were on this initial Ancient Scripts site, so we had to use a few others as well, but I mostly skipped over those symbols.  By the time I had to leave, I had written about two-thirds of the tablet as Catherine and I had worked on finding the symbols and keeping the clay the right size.  We spent 5.5 hours on that masterpiece total.  Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of its amazing-ness, and I am told it is now cracked.  :-( 

It was a really cool experience to work with the clay and writing the script I felt like a real craftsman, working diligently to make the clay look good, and the symbols and figuring out the tricks of the trade, if you will.  Like that you should make the triangles with the longest lines first because they will center the rest of your character, and then you proceed with the other triangles.  Getting the angles down right was really hard, and the correct length for each line coming out of the triangle, but the wedge/inverted v shape was the hardest, because they were a specific angle which was hard to make with our stylus.  The clay was a good medium because it was easy to erase and add more too as needed.

For the second part of the project, I wasn't able to contribute as much because of other time commitments and responsibilities that I had a greed to weeks before, but I was able to coach the group that received our tablet through the process backwards, and help with anything that might have gotten lost in translation.  I think part of what made ours difficult (besides the language and script itself), was the fact that we had chosen an actual Akkadian phrase, something that they really wrote back then, so it wasn't even a simple phrase in English.  I think they appreciated my assistance, and they did very well in the eventual translation.

This was a really interesting project, but difficult to do because we are not masters of languages after just studying the culture for a couple of weeks.  Usually translators and interpreters have years of experience and fluently speak both (or all three in our case) of the languages.  Also, it showed me the difficulty of finding good modern resources that can make an expert out of a novice in a matter of minutes, without resorting to an actual human expert.  It was good to work with different people in the class too, and to see what they also learned about our same region of the world.  In the end, all it was was an adventure!