Culture

Sumerian language

The pastime of an Assyrian King by F.A. Bridgman
Assyrian was a dialect of Akkadian language, a member of the eastern branch of the Semitic family and the oldest historically attested of the Semitic languages, which began to appear in written form in the 29th century BC. The first inscriptions in Assyria proper, called Old Assyrian (OA), were made in the Old Assyrian period.

During the 3rd millennium BC

During the 3rd millennium BC, a very intimate cultural symbiosis developed between the Sumerians and Akkadian-speakers, which included widespread bilingualism. The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian (and vice versa) is evident in all areas, from lexical borrowing on a massive scale, to syntactic, morphological, and phonological convergence. This has prompted scholars to refer to Sumerian and Akkadian in the 3rd millennium BC as a sprachbund.

Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as the spoken language

Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as the spoken language of Mesopotamia somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BC (the exact dating being a matter of debate), but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific language in Mesopotamia until the 1st century AD.

In the Neo-Assyrian period

In the Neo-Assyrian period, the Aramaic language became increasingly common, more so than Akkadian—this was thought to be largely due to the mass deportations undertaken by Assyrian kings, in which large Aramaic-speaking populations, conquered by the Assyrians, were relocated to Assyria and interbred with the Assyrians, and due to the fact that Tiglath-pileser II made it the lingua franca of Assyria and its empire in the 8th century BC.

The ancient Assyrians also used the Sumerian in their literature and liturgy

The ancient Assyrians also used the Sumerian in their literature and liturgy, although to a more limited extent in the Middle- and Neo-Assyrian periods, when Akkadian became the main literary language.

The destruction of the Assyrian capitals of Nineveh and Assur

The destruction of the Assyrian capitals of Nineveh and Assur by the Babylonians, Medes, and their allies, ensured that much of the bilingual elite (but not all) were wiped out. By the 7th century BC, much of the Assyrian population used distinct Akkadian influenced Eastern Aramaic varieties and not Akkadian itself. The last Akkadian inscriptions in Mesopotamia date from the 1st century AD. The Syriac language also emerged in Assyria during the 5th century BC, and during the Christian era, Syriac literature and Syriac script were to become hugely influential.

However, the descendant Eastern Aramaic dialects from the Neo-Assyrian Empire

However, the descendant Eastern Aramaic dialects from the Neo-Assyrian Empire, as well as Akkadian and Mesopotamian Aramaic personal, tribal, family and place names, still survive to this day among Assyrian people in the regions of northern Iraq, southeast Turkey, northwest Iran and northeast Syria that constituted old Assyria, and are spoken fluently by up to 1,000,000 Assyrians, with a further number having lesser and varying degrees of fluency. These dialects are very different from the now almost extinct Western Aramaic of the Arameans in the Levant and Trans-Jordan, which does not have an Akkadian grammatical structure or loan words.

After 90 years of effort, the University of Chicago in 2011 completed an Assyrian dictionary, the style of which is more like an encyclopedia than a dictionary.