Complete Babylonian

by Martin Worthington

Do you want to engage with Babylonian culture and literature in the original language?

The course will introduce you to a fascinating world of gods and demons, heroes and kings. The readings are drawn from myths, letters, law-codes, medical incantations, and other authentic, ancient writings. The language is presented in the Roman alphabet, with an explanation of cuneiform script, and the main features of Assyrian - cognate with Babylonian - are also explained. Learn effortlessly with a new easy-to-read page design and interactive features in this book from Teach Yourself, the No. 1 brand in language learning.



Learn effortlessly with a new easy-to-read page design and interactive features:

Not got much time?
One, five and ten-minute introductions to key principles to get you started.

Author insights
Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author's many years of experience.

Test yourself
Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress.

Extend your knowledge
Extra online articles to give you a richer understanding of the subject.

Five things to remember
Quick refreshers to help you remember the key facts.

Try this
Innovative exercises illustrate what you've learnt and how to use it.

Genres: Language, Reference, Linguistics

352 pages, Paperback

First published August 27, 2010

Reviews

[Koen Crolla · Rating 3 out of 5]

A victim of its concern for its accessibility. In aiming to be understood perfectly even by people who have absolutely no experience with any language other than English, and even that not in a scholastic context, Worthington ends up over-explaining a lot of very basic concepts, ironically often making them considerably harder to grasp at a glance. Though the book's brevity shouldn't really be an issue (except when it comes to vocabulary, obviously; Babylonian/Akkadian, though alien to someone used to Indo-European languages, is a very straightforward language), his unwillingness to introduce much more than one new concept per chapter means he ends up repeating himself a lot as well, eating up space to the point that by the end he's clearly racing through it—numerals, quadriliteral roots, and numerals deserve more than one page each.
I suppose a book like this is best thought of as a taster to see if you want to get into a language rather than a useful introduction in its own right, and it does work as that. There's no bibliography, but Worthington will point you in the general direction of more traditional resources.

[Stephen Simpson · Rating 2 out of 5]

A decent attempt at transliteration-based learning of an interesting ancient language ... but I felt like the effort to simplify and make it more accessible actually undermined the education/teaching value. Yeah, you can get a decent sense of the language from this book, but I seriously question whether you could get very far with what you learn here. But I suppose you can use this as an easy entry-level test of whether you're really interested and want to commit to a more rigorous program of study.

[Beluosus · Rating 5 out of 5]

quttâku ! šattam u šaddaqdim gimir šiṭirti ātamar u ūmišam liginnī aqtabi. kīma ummânum šuruš lišānim išariš almad. dimmatam ištiat īšu : tikip santakki ul ulammad-ma ṭuppī šaṭāram ul ale''e.

[PS]

Great introduction to Babylonian. Will revisit this later this year when the new edition is released which includes the cunéiforme script – this edition uses transliteration.