What is Assyriology?

Assyriology is a discipline which embraces the entirety of a human civilization, over more than three thousand years. It is based on the analysis of documents in the Babylonian, Assyrian and Sumerian languages. Assyriology is the science of languages and cultures of the Ancient Near East.

Assyriology as a scholarly discipline began in Europe only in the second half of the 19th century.

Assyriology derives its name from the region of the first large discoveries of texts, Assyria. The geographic focus, however, comprises Near East or Middle East, Western Asia includes present-day Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and other neighboring states, a broad geographic area that was connected in antiquity with the wider world— the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Central Asia, and the Asian subcontinent.

Assyriologists are working particularly on texts in cuneiform script. The decipherment of the cuneiform script happened more or less simultaneously with the first excavations of the mounds of northern Mesopotamia.

Its earliest cuneiform attestations date from the late 4th or early 3rd millennium BC. The Sumerians, who lived in Mesopotamia in southern Iraq, invented the cuneiform system of writing, which was an essential element of Sumerians culture.

The cuneiform script per se was already known in Europe in the first half of the 17th century AD. But scientific approaches actually began in 1802 when the German philologist Georg Friedrich Grotefend identified the meaning of individual cuneiform signs for the first time. He presented his discovery to the professional public in 1837. The translation of cuneiform is a highly complicated process. It is only in comparatively recent years that the grammar has been scientifically established, while the lexical problems are still numerous and far from resolved.
What is Assyriology?

Sumerians and cuneiform script

Writing was invented in order to record business activities in the early Near East. The Sumerians developed a form of pictograph writing that used word pictures like bird, fish, ox of grain etc, around 4000-3500 BC.

The end of the wooden or reed stylus, which struck the clay first, made a wider mark than the shaft, and so came into being the typical wedge-shape impression after which this writing system became known – cuneiform (from the Latin word cuneus meaning wedge).

After the 3rd millennium BC it took a conventional form of linear cuneiform drawings and was written from left to right.

The writing system invented by the Sumerians was soon taken over by other peoples and languages: Aramaic, Persian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, and Hurrian as well as many localized dialects such as the Canaanite Akkadian of the Amarna letters.

Cuneiform, as the script for the Sumerian and Akkadian languages, became the lingua franca of most of the ancient Near Eastern world from before 3000 BC until it was superseded by the alphabetic Aramaic in the seventh to sixth centuries BC.
Sumerians and cuneiform script