akkadian

This tablet is written in Akkadian and is dated in the Akkadian era.

Note that our knowledge of Akkadian pronunciation is quite a bit better than our knowledge of other old Afroasiatic languages, because Akkadian is written with vowels.

The language is pretty well preserved I believe, some say there is more text in Akkadian than in classical Latin[^1].

Also, reading Akkadian cuneiform involves learning a bit of Sumerian vocabulary, because texts spell out words in Sumerian that were presumably pronounced instead as the appropriate Akkadian word (Sumerograms).

If you were at the Penn Museum, you were looking at tablets mostly written in Akkadian and Sumerian cuneiform.

Aside: The biblical story of the Ark and the flood in ripped off wholesale from Sumerian and Akkadian narratives.

The Arabic languages may be older; they're semitic languages like the Akkadian of Mesopotamia.

Is that a lot of convention and guess work or is it reasonably secure through knowing (approximately) Akkadian pronunciation via other Semitic languages?

In addition, Akkadian used cuneiform not only for phonemic writing, but also had many signs borrowed as-is from Sumerian as logograms (sumerograms), e.g.

Or maybe I'm thinking of different versions of stories, in Sumerian and later Akkadian or Babylonian.

However, if you are tempted to take on Sumerian after reading this, I suggest that you start with Akkadian first.

People still study the Akkadian language, despite its lack of speakers.

In English the city (and god) is usually called "Ashur"; in Akkadian it's Ashshur.

They're called "tells" because, thousands and thousands of years ago when Mesopotamia spoke Old Akkadian, they were called "tells".

A fun example is that we know the vowel in the name of the Egyptian god conventionally called "Ra" because he is mentioned in an Akkadian text.

The article states that "Prop­er­ly writ­ten out, these syl­la­bles join up into a flow­ing cal­lig­ra­phy that your aver­age, edu­cat­ed Baby­lon­ian would be able to read at a glance", so presumably they're thinking of Akkadian.

The third most common source was ancient Hebrew-adjacent languages, 2 for Aramaic, 1 for Ugaritic, 1 for Akkadian.

Cuneiform was used to write several different languages, most prominently Akkadian, which is a Semitic language closely related to Arabic and Hebrew.

Writers would use multiple languages (eg Sumerian, Akkadian), even on the same tablet.