What is Assyriology?
Assyriology is the science, which concerns itself with the investigation of the languages, history, religion and culture of the cuneiform-using peoples of Ancient Near East.
Ancient Near Eastern
philology researches the languages, which were spoken in modern Iraq, Syria,
Turkey, and Iran. People of that region developed an original writing system:
the marks were pressed into clay with a special writing stick stylus and they looked like little
wedges. That is why in our time this writing system is called cuneiform from Latin cuneus wedge + forma form. Most likely the cuneiform was used first by the
Sumerians, later it spread to the other peoples, like Babylonians, Assyrians,
Elamites, Hurrians, Hittites, Urartaeans, and Persians. Though the original
cuneiform system was mostly pictographic and ideographic, it became more and
more phonetic in languages more different from Sumerian, until the Persian
syllabic-alphabetic cuneiform script, which included about five ideographic signs.
The last cuneiform texts origin from the beginning of 1st millennium
AD; after that, these cultures were forgotten for thousands of years. Modern
assyriology was born in 1802, when W.Grotefend deciphered the first cuneiform
marks. Scientific study of Akkadian language was started by F.Delitzsch
(1850-1922) and Sumerian by F.Thureau-Dangin (1872-1944).
Geographically, by
"Ancient Near East" that area is meant which encloses the region of
the "Fertile Half-Moon" and the Middle and Eastern Asia Minor. It reaches
from the Western Iran all over Mesopotamia and North Syria including the area
around Lake Van and Lake Urmia in the north and Kizil Irmak in Middle Turkey.
Temporally, the cuneiform tradition spreads over more than half of the written
history of mankind, from the 4th millennium BC to the beginning of 1st
millennium AD.
However, the investigation
of the Old Oriental languages depends heavily upon the archaeological research.
This discipline yields the inevitable material for philology from clay tablets
to bareliefs as well as it leads to the integrated understanding of material
and written culture two aspects of historical substance which are inseparable
in assyriology. Only by the cultural interpretation of
archaeological substance is it possible to understand the ways of life and
thought, everyday activities and high religion of cities long lost in the past.
Delving into the study of
Ancient Near Eastern cultures, it often strikes us in which extent that faraway
tradition is rooted in our own life. Large part of this cultural inheritance is
carried on by Judaism, Islam, and Christianity the younger brothers of
ancient religions, which have learnt and reinterpreted a lot of them. European
royal crowns and the imperial purple; deity dying and reborn; wide stairs of
public buildings; maps oriented to north; shapes, names and sumbolic meanings
of constellations and planets; Cabalistic mysticism and rational mathematics
this is but a short list from among all we have inherited from the eldest cultures.
In some sense, the Ancient Near East can be considered to be the original home
of the human ontology of our civilization. Rediscovering this is the subject of
assyriology.
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