Sounds of Destruction: Scholars Revive Babylonian Language

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As Jerusalem was falling to the forces of Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C.E., its narrow streets and corridors would have echoed with the alien voices of invading troops speaking a language that few in the besieged city would have understood: Babylonian.

But what did this foreign Mesopotamian tongue sound like to the Judahites, many of whom were then rounded up and marched into exile by the Babylonian troops?

Scholars of Babylonian, also known as Assyriologists, have long grappled with this question. By the late 19th century, they had learned to read and translate the thousands of cuneiform tablets left behind by Babylonian scribes, but reconstructing the actual sounds of a language that hadn’t been spoken in more than 2,000 years remained even more elusive.

Now, a group of scholars headed by Dr. Martin J. Worthington of Cambridge University is using clues gathered from the ancient and modern languages of the Middle East and the ancient cuneiform texts themselves to approximate how Babylonian would have sounded.

Babylonian belongs to the Semitic language family, so one of the ways Assyriologists reconstruct its pronunciation is to look at sounds in related languages, such as Biblical Hebrew and Arabic. The Hebrew word for palace (heykal, pronounced hay-kal), for example, may provide a clue that the closely related Babylonian word for palace (ekallum) was pronounced with a long rather than short vowel sound at the beginning (thus ay-kallum).

Additional clues about the pronunciation of Babylonian, according to Worthington, can be gleaned from different syllabic and vocalic pronunciation patterns found within the spelling of Babylonian words themselves, as well as those rare times when Babylonian words were written down in a known ancient vocalic alphabet, such as Greek.

With these clues in hand, Worthington began recording Assyriologists as they read some of the most famous works of Mesopotamian literature in the original Babylonian, including the Code of Hammurabi and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Worthington has now compiled 30 different Babylonian recordings, all of which illustrate the various and often competing theories scholars have about how the language actually sounded.

So what do Assyriologists think Babylonian sounded like? Worthington invites you to find out for yourself. All of the recordings, along with word-by-word transcriptions and translations of the readings, are freely available on the Web at www.soas.ac.uk/baplar.

As Jerusalem was falling to the forces of Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C.E., its narrow streets and corridors would have echoed with the alien voices of invading troops speaking a language that few in the besieged city would have understood: Babylonian.