Scholars complete dictionary of lost language after epic 90 year academic quest
A dictionary of a dead language not used for two millenia has finally been completed after academics spent 90 years painstakingly deciphering ancient words scrawled on clay and stone tablets.
As decades came and went generations of scholars travelled from across the world to the University of Chicago to work on the monumental Chicago Assyrian Dictionary project.
It is now officially complete and contains 21 volumes devoted to Akkadian, a Semitic language with several dialects including Assyrian, that endured between 2500 BC and AD 100 and was recorded on tablets in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey.
The dictionary was begun in 1921 by James Henry Breasted, an American archaeologist who wanted to “recover the lost story of the rise of man.” He died 14 years later, by which point one million index cards had already been compiled.
Robert Biggs, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, later devoted half a century to the dictionary, uncovering tablets in the desert and poring over texts in museums in London and Baghdad as he tried to translate the wedge-shaped letters....