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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Encyclopaedias & reference works > Reference works > General
A Grammar of Old Assyrian describes the language contained in a
very large corpus of cuneiform tablets mainly found in Anatolia in
the middle of Turkey and dating to ca 1900-1700 BC. These tablets
come from the archives of a community of Assyrian merchants who
conducted a long-distance trade between Assyria and Anatolia and
eventually settled in Anatolia. Alongside Babylonian, Assyrian is
one of the main branches of Akkadian, the Semitic language spoken
in Mesopotamia (roughly present-day Iraq) in the third, second and
first millennium BC, and Old Assyrian is its oldest attested stage.
Old Assyrian is also one of the oldest and largest corpora of texts
in any Semitic language. "Kouwenberg has managed to describe and
discuss the corpus in a structural and comprehensive manner. His
grammar will therefore prove to be a useful source of information
for decades." - J.J. de Ridder, in: Bibliotheca Orientalis 76.1-2
(2019)
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