The rediscovered ammorreum

Two clay tablets from present-day Iraq, written in cuneiform, have allowed researchers to uncover new information about Ammorrheian, a little-known Semitic language similar to ancient Hebrew. Researchers Manfred Krebernik of the University of Jena and Andrew R. George of the University of London examined, translated and commented on the tablets, publishing the results in a study entitled Two Remarkable Vocabularies: Amorite-Akkadian Bilinguals! scientific journal Revue d'assyriologie et d'archeologie orientale. The Ammorean language, already known to researchers, was so poorly understood that some doubted it was a distinct language from the better known Akkadian.

The new study has confirmed its existence and deepened our understanding of the language, since the tablets, discovered in Iraq perhaps between the 1980s and 1990s, are a sort of Rosetta stone. In the right column is written a text in Akkadian, an ancient Babylonian language, while in the left column is the same text in a Northwest Semitic language. At the end of an in-depth grammatical and lexical analysis, the researchers concluded that it was Ammorrhea.

The discovery is unique because for the first time it is possible to analyze whole sentences and not just single words. Furthermore, Ammorrhenian turned out to be very similar to ancient Hebrew, but earlier by a few millennia: the tablets date back to about 4 thousand years ago, while the oldest attestations of Hebrew only date back to a thousand years ago. It is therefore possible to study the evolution of languages of the same lineage over time.

But what was the purpose of these tablets? According to the researchers, it is the exercise of a Babylonian scribe, dictated by intellectual curiosity. According to others, however, such as Yoram Cohen, professor of Assyriology in Tel Aviv, it is a tour guide for people who spoke Akkadian and wanted to learn Amorite. In fact, the text explains the uses and customs, religion and daily life of the populations who lived in the area of Canaan, between present-day Syria, Israel and Jordan.

Agnese Picco

NP Marzo 2023