Lingua Franca

We are now moving onto written languages, but still with Akkadia (for me at least).
Akkadian is one of the oldest written languages of all time [The Hebrew University of Jerusalem]. It was first a language that was only spoken, but the neighboring civilization of Sumeria invented a writing form. When Akkadia took over Sumeria, they adopted and changed the written language to form a cuneiform text.

Here is an example of the Akkadian language. Below shows just how time consuming writing could be!

All Together Now

Following the assignment to create a group post/video we came up with the following video. (Turn your speakers all the way up, we are amateur movie makers!)

Now we would just like to put in a few words more on the topic of Story and Song. In the video we talked about each other's civilizations and how they all relate through the theme of water in their origin myths, and stories in general. Maddie shared a little bit more on this theme here. What we didn't get to is how this important oral knowledge is shared, or the structures for sharing it.

All that we've learned: Oral Knowledge

From US Embassy New Delhi on Flickr

For those of you counting on this post to go up Friday morning, sorry despite the rumors I'm not perfect. This post took a little more research than I originally intended. As our discussion of oral knowledge winds down I wanted to take the opportunity to look back at all of that we've learned and discussed on this blog. Although our instructors have given us many interesting topics to learn about in this unit, I've enjoyed the themes that we pulled out here on our blog.

Myth Dreaming

The Epic of Gilgamesh (Linked to the translation)
This story of a king who was two-thirds God, is a long tale of how Gilgamesh came to defeat everything in his path.The story (probably told orally at first) was written in Akkadian on eleven stone tablets. The words still show traces of the oral format and also contain stories that other cultures have.

Akkadian Stories

Creation of Man:

"Mix the heart of the clay that is over the abyss,
 The good and princely fashioners will thicken the clay,
 You, [Nammu] do you bring the limbs into existence;
 Ninmah [earth-mother or birth goddess] will work above you,
 The goddesses [of birth] .  . . will stand by you at your fashioning;
 O my mother, decree its [the newborn's] fate,
 Ninmah will bind upon it the image (?) of the gods,
 It is man . . . ."    (Kramer, History Begins 109)