Language and Writing in Ancient Mesopotamia: The History and Legacy of the Languages and Scripts Used across the Region in Antiquity

Along with Egypt, the cultural and geographic region known as Mesopotamia was home to some of the world’s earliest civilizations and also the first known form of writing, cuneiform. Many different ethnic groups vied for power in ancient Mesopotamia over the course of antiquity, spanning about 3,000 years, and many of them spoke different languages. Despite these differences, the people in Mesopotamia shared many cultural attributes, including similar religious practices, a common art and architecture style, and a shared use of the cuneiform script.

As this suggests, language and writing were different but also interconnected. The languages spoken by the peoples of Mesopotamia were as diverse as the many ethnic groups, but as those groups asserted their military, economic, and cultural power over the other groups, two languages became dominant in the region: Sumerian and Akkadian. These were the two languages that were primarily used by the people of Mesopotamia to record their myths, religious rituals, government records, and historiographical accounts.

Indeed, the languages and written scripts of Mesopotamia were not just enduring over time in the region, but they also had wide geographic influence, much more than any language groups or scripts at the time. The Sumerian language continued to be learned by scribes throughout Mesopotamia centuries after it had become a “dead language,” and the Akkadian language eventually became the lingua franca of the Near East by the Late Bronze Age. Akkadian became the language of diplomacy and trade, while cuneiform was used to record agreements in Akkadian between the 'Great Powers” of the era. Cuneiform was also adopted by people outside of Mesopotamia, such as the Hittites and Elamites, who modified the script to fit the lexicons and rules of grammar for their own languages.