Middle Assyrian Grammar

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael P. Streck
• Subject Area: Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Term: from 2012 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 222009615

This project aims to describe Middle Assyrian as a dialect of the Akkadian (Babylonian-Assyrian) language. The last monograph on this topic by Mayer (1971) is only based on 750 texts mainly from the heartland of the Middle Assyrian kingdom. Since then the corpus has risen to over 3.000 texts, and many of the new texts stem from archives from the periphery of the Middle Assyrian kingdom: Dur-Katlimmu, Tall Sabiy Abyad, Tall Huera, Tall Billa, Tall Alli, Tall Fahariya, Tall Rimah, Tall Fray and Giricano. Therefore, a new grammar of Middle Assyrian can offer a much more detailed description of the language. Special attention will be paid on the internal development of Middle Assyrian that took place in the 400 years of the textual material, as well as on the geographical-dialectal differences within the corpus. Two further goals are to describe the position of Middle Assyrian within the development of the Assyrian language from Old Assyrian to Neo-Assyrian and the possible influences of other languages on Middle Assyrian, e. g. Middle Babylonian and Hurrian, both in contact with Middle Assyrian, particularly in the periphal archives.The project will take place in the framework of an cooperative initiative of the Institut für Altorientalistik der Freien Universität Berlin und des Altorientalischen Instituts der Universität Leipzig provisionally titled „Mittelassyrische Forschungen in Berlin und Leipzig“. The goal of this initiative headed by Prof. E. Cancik-Kirschbaum and Prof. M. P. Streck is to provide essential reference tools for Middle Assyrian studies. The initiative is based on an already existing and continually expanding database of Middle Assyrian published and unpublished texts. The project Middle Assyrian Grammar has full access to and contributes to this database that will be an essential tool for the project. The Middle Assyrian text corpus as defined here can be divided into three main genres:a) Laws and decreesb) Lettersc) Legal and administrative documentsThe grammar will be described in five chapters:a) Orthographyb) Phonologyc) Morphology and morphosyntaxd) Sentence syntaxe) The position of Middle Assyrian in the history of the Akkadian language (including the description of influences of contact languages)The grammatical method and terminology follow good philological use in traditional and recent Ancient Near Eastern and Semitic studies.The three years project has a modular structure, each modul focusing on one text genre and one chapter. This enables the project to present coherent results already after shorter periods of time. At the end, the different moduls will be published together as a monograph.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Person: Professorin Dr. Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum