thumb|The [[Mesopotamian god Ninurta with his thunderbolts pursues the divine monster Anzû stealing the Tablet of Destinies from Enlil's sanctuary, Austen Henry Layard Monuments of Nineveh, 2nd Series, 1853]]

thumb|[[Reconstruction (architecture)|Reconstruction of the Babylonian Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.]]

Assyriology (from Greek , Assyriā; and , -logia), also known as Cuneiform studies or Ancient Near East studies, By 1897 Fritz Hommel described the term as misleading, and today the International Association for Assyriology itself calls the term "old-fashioned".

The term is defined in different ways by different scholars in the field. Today, alternate terms such as "cuneiform studies" or "study of the Ancient Near East" are also used.

Originally Assyriology referred primarily to the study of Assyrian texts discovered in the north of modern-day Iraq, ancient Assyria, following their initial discovery at Khorsabad in 1843. Although the decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform had taken place prior, much of the subsequent decipherment of cuneiform was carried out using the multilingual Achaemenid royal inscriptions, comparing the previously deciphered Persian with the Assyrian cuneiform where used in parallel scripts. Usage of the term began to expand after it was noticed that, in addition to Old Persian and Assyrian, the cuneiform script had been used for a sister language, Babylonian. Babylonian and Assyrian had diverged around 2000 BCE from their ancestor, an older Semitic language that their speakers referred to as "Akkadian".

From 1877, excavations at Girsu showed that before Akkadian, cuneiform had been used to write a completely different language, Sumerian. "Sumerology" therefore gradually became a branch of Assyriology. Subsequent research showed that during the 2nd millennium BC, cuneiform writing had also been used for other languages such as Ugaritic, Hurrian, Hittite or Elamite, which became subsumed under the increasingly ambiguous term Assyriology. Today the term designates the study of texts written in cuneiform script, irrespective of whether the script is from Egypt, Sumer, or Assyria. The identification of the city of Babylon was made in 1616 by Pietro Della Valle. Pietro gave "remarkable descriptions" of the site, and brought back to Europe inscribed bricks that he had found at Nineveh and Ur.

18th century and birth

Between 1761 and 1767, Carsten Niebuhr, a Danish mathematician, made copies of cuneiform inscriptions at Persepolis in Persia as well as sketches and drawing of Nineveh, and was shortly followed by André Michaux, a French botanist and explorer, who sold the French Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris an inscribed boundary stone found near Baghdad. The first known archeological excavation in Mesopotamia was led by Abbé Beauchamp, papal vicar general at Baghdad, excavating the sculpture now generally known as the "Lion of Babylon." Abbé Beauchamp's memoirs of his travels, published in 1790, sparked a sensation in the scholarly world, generating a number of archeological and academic expeditions to the Middle East.

In 1811, Claudius James Rich, an Englishman and a resident for the East India Company in Baghdad, began examining and mapping the ruins of Babylon and Nineveh, and collecting numerous inscribed bricks, tablets, boundary stones, and cylinders, including the famous Nebuchadnezzar Cylinder and Sennacherib Cylinder, a collection which formed the nucleus of the Mesopotamian antiquities collection at the British Museum.

Decipherment of cuneiform

One of the largest obstacles scholars had to overcome during the early days of Assyriology was the decipherment of curious triangular markings on many of the artifacts and ruins found at Mesopotamian sites. These markings, which were termed "cuneiform" by Thomas Hyde in 1700, were long considered to be merely decorations and ornaments. It was not until late in the 18th century that they came to be considered some sort of writing.

In 1778 Carsten Niebuhr, the Danish mathematician, published accurate copies of three trilingual inscriptions from the ruins at Persepolis. Niebuhr showed that the inscriptions were written from left to right, and that each of the three inscriptions contained three different types of cuneiform writing, which he labelled Class I, Class II, and Class III (now known to be Old Persian, Akkadian, and Elamite).

Class I was determined to be alphabetic and consisting of 44 characters, and was written in Old Persian. It was first deciphered by Georg Friedrich Grotefend (based on work of Friedrich Munter) and Henry Creswicke Rawlinson between 1802 and 1848.

Class II proved more difficult to translate. In 1850, Edward Hincks published a paper showing that the Class II was not alphabetical, but was in fact both syllabic and ideographic, which led to its translation between 1850 and 1859. The language was at first called Babylonian and/or Assyrian, but has now come to be known as Akkadian.

Further reading

  • Open Digital Ancient Near Eastern Studies (OpenDANES)