Ninety years in the making, the 21-volume dictionary of the language of ancient Mesopotamia, unspoken for 2,000 years but preserved on clay tablets and in stone inscriptions deciphered over the last two centuries, has finally been completed by scholars at the University of Chicago.
This was the language that Sargon the Great, king of Akkad in the 24th century B.C., spoke. That Hammurabi used around 1700 B.C. to proclaim the first known code of laws. It was the vocabulary of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first masterpiece of world literature. The project was started in 1921 by James Henry Breasted, founder of the Oriental Institute.
The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary Project site.
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