Ancient Language Discussion & Questions

[sumskilz]

Anyone here read any ancient languages well? Might be good to know for those of us doing historical research.

A specific question, anyone know the word for walnut in Achaemenid Persian?

Also, I will rep anyone who makes a descent attempt at translating my signature:

Balāṭam ša tasaḫḫura lā tutta.
Inūma ilū ibnû awīlūtam,
Mūtam iškunū ana awīlūtim,
Balāṭam ina qātīšnu iṣṣabtū.

This might help:

ṭ = ט = ط

š = שׁ = س

ḫ = ח = خ

q = ק = ق

ṣ = צ = ص

Feel free to post a similar challenge...

[conon394]

A specific question, anyone know the word for walnut in Achaemenid Persian?

Got me on that I only know the Roman and Greek names

Here is a paper out of UC Fullerton that talks about nuts but seems more interested in Oranges and Peaches - the context of Persian History.

http://iranian.com/History/2005/Sept...ientPersia.pdf

The university email is at the bottom the Author might reply to specific question.

[sumskilz]

Got me on that I only know the Roman and Greek names

Here is a paper out of UC Fullerton that talks about nuts but seems more interested in Oranges and Peaches - the context of Persian History.

http://iranian.com/History/2005/Sept...ientPersia.pdf

The university email is at the bottom the Author might reply to specific question.

Thanks, this actually seems to answer my question. I'll just have to trace the references.

At Ramat Rahel, near Jerusalem, there is a palace site that served as an administrative center of the Persian province of Yehud. There was a fairly extensive garden enclosure with several of the plant species mentioned in the biblical Song of Songs, some of them native to modern Iran originally rather than to the Levant. All were long since decomposed, but pollen was preserved within the plaster of water system. It's the only known garden of its kind during the period, and I suspect it may have been the inspiration for some of the imagery in the Song, but no one has firmly dated the Song's composition. There is a word in the Song, a hapax legomenon, that means walnut in several modern Semitic languages but it has no Semitic root, so its almost certainly a loan word. The word is ĕgōz, and this paper you posted mentions gōz ī hindūg (Indian nut) and čiyōn gōz (walnut).

[Hobbes]

Is that Akkadian?
Second line reads: When god [ibnu] humans
Third line reads: Death(?) [ishkunu] so that humans (but this time in genitive, "humans'" ?)

No idea what the other stuff says.

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

I don't know but I think it is Phoenician. Or at least some Semitic language from Mesopotamia.

[sumskilz]

Is that Akkadian?
Second line reads: When god [ibnu] humans
Third line reads: Death(?) [ishkunu] so that humans (but this time in genitive, "humans'" ?)

Yes Akkadian, specifically Old Babylonian, and you did pretty well with the parts you attempted.
Second and third lines:

When the gods created humanity,
Death they decreed for humanity,

Ilū is plural, ilum is singular in Old Babylonian. In later dialects the m is dropped and singular just ilu. The long vowel isn't always indicated in cuneiform, but the verb conjugation makes it clear. Ibnû is a conjugation of the verb banûm (to build, to create). The root is b-n-h. Biblical Hebrew has a cognate bānāh. Humans would be awīlû; awīlūtam is a form that sort of indicates the status of being human. It is similar to the word for woman because feminine forms tend to be used for abstract concepts. You spotted the genitive correctly. So +rep, and I'll see if anyone else has an interest in attempting the other lines.

Did you get that from knowing some Akkadian or from familiarity with another Semitic language?

I don't know but I think it is Phoenician. Or at least some Semitic language from Mesopotamia.

The second is correct. Phoenician is so close to Hebrew that you can't always differentiate between them.

So here's a Phoenician inscription (no vowels obviously):

ʾnk tbnt khn ʾštrt mlk ṣdnm bn ʾšmnʻzr

Now the same in the oldest Biblical Hebrew:

ʾnky tbnt khn ʾštrt mlk ṣydnym bn ʾšmnʻzr

The Phoenician written in modern characters would be:

אנך תבנת כהן עשתרת מלך צדנם בן אשמנעזר

"I, Tabnit, priest of Astarte, king of the Sidons, son of Eshmunazar"

The only difference is the Hebrew indicates some vowels using the y, which is not always the case with old Hebrew inscriptions, so for all we know, in the case of this line of the Phoenician inscription, the two might have sounded the same.

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

Wait... aren't walnuts a new world plant?

[Ciciro]

Wait... aren't walnuts a new world plant?

They are, but they are also European/Asian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juglans

And though it isn't that ancient a language, I'm trying to learn Old English.

[Hobbes]

Yes Akkadian, specifically Old Babylonian, and you did pretty well with the parts you attempted.
Second and third lines:

When the gods created humanity,
Death they decreed for humanity,

Ilū is plural, ilum is singular in Old Babylonian. In later dialects the m is dropped and singular just ilu. The long vowel isn't always indicated in cuneiform, but the verb conjugation makes it clear. Ibnû is a conjugation of the verb banûm (to build, to create). The root is b-n-h. Biblical Hebrew has a cognate bānāh. Humans would be awīlû; awīlūtam is a form that sort of indicates the status of being human. It is similar to the word for woman because feminine forms tend to be used for abstract concepts. You spotted the genitive correctly. So +rep, and I'll see if anyone else has an interest in attempting the other lines.

Did you get that from knowing some Akkadian or from familiarity with another Semitic language?

I study linguistics as a hobby so I've seen a few grammar tables and such. Akkadian noun declension looks like Arabic which I had to study in Uni for two semesters. I immediately recognized Ilū as something to do with gods because I had to write about Monotheism in Arabia as part of an Islamic Law course, which meant I had to know about al-Ilah and whatnot.

I will go ahead and assume that Balatam is "life" in the accusative. That la thing is a negative particle and the "tasahhura" can't be anything but a verb since I cannot find anything starting with tasa- in some dictionary I found (is this cheating? I think it is) and wiki says that ta- indicates a verb is in the second person, no clue about the number though; table isn't helping. The "sha" could be "although" or a relative pronoun.

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

This is all supremely interesting. Love those obscure topics like ancient linguistics.
I've always wondered about the ancient Hittite language even though it is unrelated to Semitic languages except from cultural influence.

Akkadian and Egyptian must also be very interesting as far as the Bronze age is concerned. I'm wondering how much influence Aramean had on the old Achaemenid and Sassanid Persian. Greek might have had some influence on the Sassanind Persian as well.

[sumskilz]

And though it isn't that ancient a language, I'm trying to learn Old English.

A worthy endeavor. You'll probably find that there are relatively predictable patterns of difference between Old English and Modern English that make figuring things out easier. Linguistic changes tend to occur semi-uniformly across a language. Like this difference between Latin-based adverbs in French and English:

rarement = rarely

exactement = exactly

précisément = precisely

I study linguistics as a hobby so I've seen a few grammar tables and such. Akkadian noun declension looks like Arabic which I had to study in Uni for two semesters. I immediately recognized Ilū as something to do with gods because I had to write about Monotheism in Arabia as part of an Islamic Law course, which meant I had to know about al-Ilah and whatnot.

I will go ahead and assume that Balatam is "life" in the accusative. That la thing is a negative particle and the "tasahhura" can't be anything but a verb since I cannot find anything starting with tasa- in some dictionary I found (is this cheating? I think it is) and wiki says that ta- indicates a verb is in the second person, no clue about the number though; table isn't helping. The "sha" could be "although" or a relative pronoun.

I think the Proto-Semitic word for god must have been based of this root ʾ-l-h (with the aleph/alif in the first position if that symbol doesn't show up for everyone), because in Akkadian it's ʾilu, but Akkadian drops final hs. In the West Semitic languages, it's ʾl in Phoenician and Old Aramaic, ʾil in Ugaritic and ʾēl in Hebrew, but then in all cases the h magically reappears when the plural ending is added. But I think that goes back to that predictable shift maybe, because at some point h rather than t became the feminine singular ending for a lot of words in West Semitic languages, so having it there would have made the word seem like goddess.

Balāṭam is indeed "life" in the accusative. The Hebrew cognate palêṭ is interesting because it means "escape" or "deliverance". The next verb is a second person singular form of saḫārum, equivalent to the Hebrew sāḥar, meaning "to search", or "to circle", or "to walk around". The last verb is really not easy because the first consonant of the root assimilates and the final one is dropped even in the infinitive. It's watûm, which is "to find" or "to discover". There is an Arabic cognate wātā which means "to come to/upon". Like I said, all I know of the root is w-t-?, so if someone knows the last letter of the root in Arabic, please tell me.

Anyway, I'll give the translation of the first three lines, and you'll see that everything you were pretty sure on was correct:

The life you seek you will not find.
When the gods created humanity,
Death they decreed for humanity,

I kind of did a trick with the relative pronoun to streamline the translation. Akkadian doesn't have a definite article but the relative pronoun implies it. I could have gone with "The life which you search for...", but I don't think it's necessary, and actually that's what I did the first time I translated it, but then I saw someone else do it this way and liked it, so it's not really my trick.

I've always wondered about the ancient Hittite language even though it is unrelated to Semitic languages except from cultural influence.

Akkadian and Egyptian must also be very interesting as far as the Bronze age is concerned.

Akkadian was the lingua franca for trade and diplomatic correspondence during the Bronze Age in the Near East. So that, and the fact that I already knew a Semitic language, is why I studied it, but I'd study the others as well if I had more time. As you seem to know, Aramaic later replaced Akkadian as the international language.

[Hobbes]

Cool stuff, Sumskilz. Working with all those consonantal roots is fascinating, it's really quite different from everything else. Do you have any experience with Afroasiatic in general?

[Tureuki]

What do you guys think about Sumerian ? many people tend to connect it to their language.

[athanaric]

Meh, I only got as far as "definitely Semitic, possibly Babylonian".

Humans would be awīlû;

Is that related to (Arabic) ahl?

This is all supremely interesting. Love those obscure topics like ancient linguistics.
I've always wondered about the ancient Hittite language even though it is unrelated to Semitic languages except from cultural influence.

Akkadian and Egyptian must also be very interesting as far as the Bronze age is concerned. I'm wondering how much influence Aramean had on the old Achaemenid and Sassanid Persian. Greek might have had some influence on the Sassanind Persian as well.

Persian inscriptions are riddled with Semitic words. In the transcription this looks wacky because the Semitic words (such as "MLK" meaning "king") are all in uppercase, to differentiate them from the Iranian ones.

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

Well certainly the Achaemenids had influence from Mesopotamia. Whether it is Assyrian or Babylonian it probably doesn't make much difference by then. But I'm really wondering if Aramean had direct influence on their language. As you seem to say it did then.

I'm wondering when this trend started to use foreign languages by the Achaemenid state. Certainly in the time of Cyrus, Persian and Babylonian or even Elamite were used. It does appear that Darius reformed the Persian language and made it more widespread for state purposes across his empire rather than just on a regional level. The Egyptian language being mostly confined to its use in Egypt. Darius also began using the Aramaic language but did Cyrus as well? I would have to check what the three language inscriptions were on the Cyrus gate at Pasargadae.


In the hallway at that gate there stood 4 of these carved stones with inscriptions above them.
This is the only stone that survived and the inscriptions are gone now. But a 19th century archaeologist copied the one inscription over this stone which said "I am Kurosh, an Achaemenian", the inscriptions being in three languages. At the end of the hallway there was a room with more of these carvings of winged figures and what appear to be birds or dragons with inscriptions, these are largely destroyed now too.

Clearly this carving in particular shows an Assyrian motif with the winged figures. The crown appears to be of mixed Mesopotamian and Semitic origin. The Semitic origin might even go further back to the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, what seems to be imported regalia and motifs by the Phoenicians from the Egyptians.

[sumskilz]

Cool stuff, Sumskilz. Working with all those consonantal roots is fascinating, it's really quite different from everything else. Do you have any experience with Afroasiatic in general?

I have just looked into the other Afroasiatic languages casually, but I don't know much. They use triconsonantal roots as well, but I don't know if any connect to the Semitic ones in an obvious way. The basic vocabulary has obvious similarities. Like just one example, Chadic has mi and ma for "what", the latter being basically the same as most Semitic languages.

This image is just taken from a Wikipedia page, but it demonstrates really well how the Semitic root system works, for anyone who is interested.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

What do you guys think about Sumerian ? many people tend to connect it to their language.

Everybody wants to be connected to the first civilization, but I don't have the expertise with Sumerian to really assess how far-fetched their claims are. One thing I can say with some certainty, is that there is a Sumerian or Sumerian-like linguistic substrate to Akkadian, which means that there was probably a large population of people in prehistoric Northern Mesopotamia who probably spoke a language related to Sumerian, but who were conquered by Semitic speaking people who established themselves as a ruling class and their Semitic language spread top down. For a variety of reasons, I think that a similar process happened in the Western Fertile Crescent, so that the Semitic languages originated in Arabia explaining why Arabic is the most conservative phonologically, but that the earliest inhabitants of the fertile crescent were more connected to the Caucasus and Eastern Anatolia originally. There is some genetic and archaeological evidence to back that up as well. Most of the material cultural movements are north to south, with the only major exception being Egypt's influence into the Levant.

Is that related to (Arabic) ahl?

A reasonable assumption, but that's actually from the root ʾ-h-l which is related to domestic or household concepts:

Aramaic: ʾāhil "to stay under the same roof"; ʾāhlāʾ "tent"; ʾāhlīt "encampment".

Hebrew: ʾāhal "to cover, to make a tent"; ʾōhel "tent, shelter"

Arabic: ʾahl "family"; ʾahlī "domestic"

But awīlum "people" is from the root ʾ-w-l. It's people generically but also a specific social class, the common people who were just below royalty and priests.

Hebrew: ʾĕwilîm "nobles"

Arabic: ʾawwal "first"

[athanaric]

Everybody wants to be connected to the first civilization, but I don't have the expertise with Sumerian to really assess how far-fetched their claims are.

I think the main thing he's getting at is the connection between Sumerian and Turkish that is made by certain interested parties, which is of course baseless, but some nationalists choose to believe it (and there's also linguists who try to establish connections with other, more obscure language groups or even isolates). From what I've heard (which isn't much) and from the information on Sumerian-Semitic interaction I'd extrapolate that the language family it belonged to may once have been widespread but was probably replaced by not only Semitic, but also Anatolian and other language groups.
These isolates are a fascinating phenomenon for sure. I'd also love to know the "taxonomy" of Basque, Elamic, Burushaski, or indeed Japanese and Korean (or whether the latter two are linked to Altaic languages), but I guess in some of these cases, we'll never know

A reasonable assumption, but that's actually from the root ʾ-h-l which is related to domestic or household concepts:

Aramaic: ʾāhil "to stay under the same roof"; ʾāhlāʾ "tent"; ʾāhlīt "encampment".

Hebrew: ʾāhal "to cover, to make a tent"; ʾōhel "tent, shelter"

Arabic: ʾahl "family"; ʾahlī "domestic"

But awīlum "people" is from the root ʾ-w-l. It's people generically but also a specific social class, the common people who were just below royalty and priests.

Hebrew: ʾĕwilîm "nobles"

Arabic: ʾawwal "first"

I see, that's good to know. I'm familiar with the word 'awwal as well but wouldn't've made that connection on my own. While I can grasp the Semitic system to some extent, I do prefer IE languages

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

Looking around again I could not find if there were three languages written above the Cyrus figure at Gate R in Pasargadae. So I'm not sure if it actually was written in three languages.
I could only find this which was written in Persian:


K_ruš xš_yathiya vazraka Kab_jiya
hy_ xš_yathiyahy_ pu_a Hax_manišiya
th_tiy yath_ ...
... ... akut_ ...


According to Jonah Lendering from Livius.org it means this:

Cyrus the great king,
son of Cambyses the king, an Achaemenid,
says: When [...] made [...]

and then the hall of Gate R leads to audience hall S

Where it says:
adam \ kuruš \ xš�ya-
thiya \ hax�manišiya

(I am, Cyrus the king, an Achaemenid.)

Yet again though I cannot find a reference to the three languages I mentioned in a previous post. I might have mistaken it for Darius perhaps.

Edit
and just when I was starting to doubt myself I looked up Ker Porter's Middle Eastern excavations in the 1820s and he states that there were indeed 3 languages inscribed above the stele: Persian, Babylonian and Elamite. Although I can only find the Persian inscription.

[athanaric]

and then the hall of Gate R leads to audience hall S

Where it says:
adam \ kuruš \ xš�ya-
thiya \ hax�manišiya

(I am, Cyrus the king, an Achaemenid.)

I'm pretty sure that one is a retcon devised by Dareios or another Achaemenid. Reason being they retroactively declared Cyrus an Achaemenid IIRC.

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

Well according to Ctesias the person known as Cyrus was a peasant who rebelled against his lord Cambyses and seized the throne. This is discredited by just about all other writers of the ancient period. Ctesias having been told so in the court of Artaxerxes II who was himself not descended from Cyrus and so maybe trying to discredit the legitimacy of the other Achaemenid line that Darius claims also existed.

I think the reason that some believe that Cyrus was not Achaemenian was that it supposedly claims in the Behistun inscription that Darius was the first king to use Persian for state or ceremonial purposes. This sounds highly unlikely though. More modern scholars have interpreted the words in the Behistun inscription to mean that Darius used other languages on a national level rather than just regionally.
Although it makes sense that Cyrus would use Elamite and Persian it is the Babylonian that seems to contradict this. But after some thought one must see that Cyrus did not seemingly use Aramaic while Darius did. It is much more likely that Cyrus only used Persian, Elamite and Babylonian while Darius used even more languages.