Akkadian

Akkadian (/əˈkeɪdiən/ akkadû, ak-ka-du-u₂; logogram: URI^KI ) is an extinct East Semitic language (part of the greater Afroasiatic language family) that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system, which was originally used to write the unrelated Ancient Sumerian, a language isolate. The language was named after the city of Akkad, a major centre of Mesopotamian civilization during the Akkadian Empire (ca. 2334–2154 BC), but the language itself precedes the founding of Akkad by many centuries.

The mutual influence between Sumerian and Akkadian had led scholars to describe the languages as a sprachbund. Akkadian proper names were first attested in Sumerian texts from around the mid 3rd-millennium BC. From the second half of the third millennium BC (ca. 2500 BC), texts fully written in Akkadian begin to appear. Hundreds of thousands of texts and text fragments have been excavated to date, covering a vast textual tradition of mythological narrative, legal texts, scientific works, correspondence, political and military events, and many other examples. By the second millennium BC, two variant forms of the language were in use in Assyria and Babylonia, known as Assyrian and Babylonian respectively.