Diglossia and the Neo-Assyrian Empire’s Akkadian and Aramaic Text Production

Type:

Book Chapter

Author:

Karen Radner

Published:

2021

The Neo-Assyrian period is the time from ca. 900-600 BCE when the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean were politically and culturally dominated by the Neo-Assyrian Empire, 1 whose heartland in the triangle between the cities Assur (Qal'at Sherqat), Nineveh (Mosul), and Arbail (Erbil) corresponds to northern Iraq and whose core population spoke Neo-Assyrian, a dialect of Akkadian of the Semitic language family. 2 Since the restructuring of the state under Ashurnasirpal II (884-859 BCE), which brought the king to the fore, the imperial palace was unequivocally the heart of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, with the widely publicised move of the court away from Assur to the new capital city of Kalhu constituting the deliberate beginning of a new era. 3 By the second half of the 8th century BCE, the Empire formed a highly multilingual environment, 4 as the provinces of this sizable and complex state encompassed regions in modern Iran, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan where various Semitic languages (including Aramaic, Phoenician, Hebrew, and Arabic) and non-Semitic languages (e.g., the Indo-European languages Luwian and Median; the Hurrian languages ubrian and Urartian; and the isolates Mannean and Elamite) were spoken. Routine resettlement of large population groups across the holdings of the Empire 5 caused further dissemination of these language but also massively strengthened the use of the more widely spoken and moreover mutually understandable Semitic languages.

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