Mesopotamian Languages
The ancient languages of Mesopotamia have come down to us in the cuneiform script, deciphered by Henry Rawlinson and other scholars in the 1850s. Assyrian and Babylonian are sister dialects of a single language known as Akkadian, which is related to other Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.
The script was invented before 3000 BC and was first used for the Sumerian language, which has no known relatives. Sumerian was spoken in South Iraq until it died out around 2000 BC, giving way to Akkadian; but it survived as a scholastic language, much like mediaeval Latin, until the very end of cuneiform in the late 1st millennium BC. During the 2nd millennium BC, Akkadian was adopted all over the Near East as the language of scholarship, administration, commerce and diplomacy. Later in the 1st millennium BC it was gradually replaced by Aramaic, which is still spoken in some parts of the Middle East today.
Cuneiform documents are mostly of clay and have been recovered in thousands at archaeological sites from the Mediterranean to Bahrain. As well as records of daily life and administration, they include religious, mathematical, musical and astronomical texts, the earliest known laws, and a rich literature that includes the Epic of Gilgamesh and the oldest versions of the Flood Story. As the world's first fully urban society, ancient Mesopotamia is of paramount interest to world archaeology, and its art, architecture and technology were the rival, and indeed often the precursors, of Egypt's. Mesopotamia was open on all sides to its neighbours, and its influence can be traced from India to Greece: the Pharaoh's scribes used cuneiform script to correspond with the Great Kings of the Hittites in Turkey, at Ugarit on the Syrian coast the forerunners of the Phoenicians kept their legal and commercial records on cuneiform tablets in Akkadian, and later the Biblical and Classical worlds grew up in the shadow of these ancient cultures to the east (and sometimes under their direct political domination).