Babylonian is alive!

MilesDB

Well-known member
Great news for language buffs: You can now hear Babylonian online! :eek:

Babylonian, dead for millennia, now online

LONDON – The language of the Epic of Gilgamesh and King Hammurabi has found a new life online after being dead for some 2,000 years.

Academics from across the world have recorded audio of Babylonian epics, poems, and even a magic spell to the Internet in an effort to help scholars and laymen understand what the language of the ancient Near East sounded like.

The answer? Cambridge University's Martin Worthington told The Associated Press that it's "a bit like a mixture of Arabic and Italian."

Babylonia was among the world's first civilizations and produced some of its earliest pieces of literature. Its people also play a central role in the Biblehttp://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101001/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_babylonian#. Babylon's soaring, pyramid-shaped Temple of Marduk is thought to have inspired the tale of the Tower of Babel, while their conquest of the Kingdom of Judah in the early sixth century B.C. led to the deportation and exile of the nation's Jewish population.

The Babylonian language, written on clay tablets in cuneiform script, dominated the Near East for centuries before it was gradually displaced by Aramaic. After a long decline, it disappeared from use altogether sometime in the first century A.D. — and was only deciphered nearly two millennia later by 19th-century European academics. Read more..
 
That's actually pretty cool, take that Klingon language fanbois! OH dear god in heaven I need further sleep .... since Mike hasn't slipped a certain sale in early I'm off to catch some zeds.
 
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