Languages of Iraq, Ancient and Modern

by Nicholas Postgate

For all five thousand years of its history Iraq has been home to a mixture of languages, spoken and written, and the same is true today. In November 2003, to celebrate the country's rich diversity and long history as a centre of civilisation the British School presented a series of talks by experts on each of the major languages of Iraq and their history, and this illustrated volume brings these now to a wider public. Iraq's languages come from different linguistic families - Semitic, Indo-European, and agglutinative languages like Sumerian, Hurrian and Turkish. Some, although long dead, have a prime place in the history of the Old Sumerian, probably the first language to be written and the vehicle of cuneiform scholarship for more than two millennia, and Akkadian, the language of Hammurapi and the Epic of Gilgamesh, and used across the Near East for administration and diplomacy. The history of Aramaic is even longer, stretching back to overlap with Akkadian before 1000 BC. It survives, precariously, in both written and spoken forms, being one of four languages spoken in Iraq today. Of these Arabic as a major world language has often been described, but here we have an account of the vernacular Iraqi Arabic dialects, and the descriptions of Iraqi Kurdish and Turkman are unique, detailed and authoritative.

187 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2007

About the author

John Nicholas Postgate

Nicholas Postgate is a British Assyriologist. He is Professor of Assyriology at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
From 1982 to 1985, he was a university lecturer in the history and archaeology of the Ancient Near East. He was promoted to Reader in Mesopotamian studies in 1985. He was promoted to Professor of Assyriology in 1994.
He undertook excavations at Abu Salabikh, a Sumerian city in Iraq, from 1975 to 1989. From 1994 to 1998, he was the director of excavations at Kilise Tepe, a Bronze and Iron Age site in Turkey.

Reviews

[JW · Rating 3 out of 5]

Given the overall scope of this book and how the rest of the book is organized, I am quite sceptical about the need to dive head-first into Sumerian's ergativity etc without some "warning" first.

But in general it was a pleasant read considering the variety of authors -- it maintained its narrative and was informative.