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Inside the court of Ashurbanipal, king of the world
- rtx 8y agoThat name sounds like something from ancient India. Ashur-Bani-Pal could be translated to Demon-Voice-Protector or Sky-Voice-Protector. I wonder if there were some links between the two cultures.
- gumby 8y agoAlmost certainly as there were extensive trade links between Harappan society and the Fertile Crescent going back at lease 4,500 years (attested by archeological artifacts). Also of course writing diffused from this region into India. However I am not sure there would have been any linguistic connection between the regions’ tongues, but who knows?
- vram22 8y agoConsidering that they were not too far from each other, geographically, there could be a linguistic connection.
- gumby 8y agoIt’s quite possible but nobody knows what the harappan people spoke. I am not an expert in this area but I am not sure there are Semitic fossils in the modern non-PIE-derived languages of the subcontinent. But I am not an expert so this is simply my surmise. There’s plenty of tantalizing evidence against my guess!
- thrower123 8y agoI'd say it's probably Proto-Indo-European roots, although I seem to think the Assyrians were always classed as Semetic in my textbooks.
- Koshkin 8y agoYes, Assyrian was a dialect of Akkadian, an East-Semitic language.
- garmaine 8y agoIs. Assyrian is still spoken.
- Koshkin 8y agoRight, but the modern Assyrian is "Neo-Aramaic," not a dialect of Akkadian like the old one.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoGiving one language the same name as another language from which it doesn't descend isn't really a good reason to claim that the earlier language is "still" spoken.
- jhanschoo 8y agoNot really; Akkadian is East Semitic and Assyrian is Central Semitic.
- Koshkin 8y agoIt was (at the time).
- Scriptor 8y agoGilgamesh was written ~2000 years after PIE's theorized origins. It actually lines up well with the Rigveda, one of the oldest surviving Vedic Sanskrit texts.
- mcguire 8y agoI believe it was originally written in Sumerian, a language isolate originally found in southern Mesopotamia. I should check out the Rigveda.
- hansbo 8y agoThe wikipedia article points Ashur to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashur_(god) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashur_(god), which could very well influence words in other languages.
- mcguire 8y agoAshurbanipal means something like "Assur Protects Him" in Akkadian, the Semitic language of Mesopotamia. There were significant contacts with India going back thousands of years, apparently.
- rtx 8y agoThanks this makes more sense. My father's name is Anil which is another name for God of wind in India. I was surprised to find out Enlil was also god of air in that region. Such an long journey for that word.
- pachydermfort 8y ago'Assur protects him' might actually be a better translation for an earlier Assyrian king, Aššurnaṣirpal, 'Ashur is the protector of the heir.' Ashurbanipal is the rendering of the king's name from the Hebrew Bible; in the Akkadian it would be more like Aššur‑bāni‑apli, which translates to 'Ashur is the creator of an heir.' Akkadian names were like full sentences, and make sense when thought of as the joyous exclamations of a parent upon grasping their newborn baby.
- mcguire 8y agoThanks! I was wondering if I had the wrong king there.
- rraghur 8y agoAlso I've heard in Zoroastrianism asuras are the good guys and devas the bad guys whereas in Hinduism it's the other way around... So ashurbanipal literally means God protects him Here's one interesting read on how the myths evolved https://videshisutra.com/2013/03/22/hariti-saraswatis-persian-cousin/ https://videshisutra.com/2013/03/22/hariti-saraswatis-persia...
- vram22 8y ago>in Zoroastrianism asuras Yes, except that they call them ahura, IIR(ead)C. Similarly, that sacred / intoxicating drink of the Vedas, called soma, was called haoma in Persia, I've read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(drink) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(drink)
- mcguire 8y ago"The god of scribes has bestowed on me the gift of the knowledge of his art. I have been initiated into the secrets of writing. I can even read the intricate tablets in Shumerian; I understand the enigmatic words in the stone carvings from the days before the Flood …” -- Ashurbanipal (Horrible translation, but the best I could do now.)
- ashurbanipal 8y agoVery cool, I endorse this post! Older episodes of Dan Carlin’s hardcore history podcast that cover this period have put the whole ancient near east into context. highly recommend.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- KSS42 8y agoObligatory Dan Carlin history podcast reference : https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-56-kings-of-kings/ https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-56-kings-of-kings... https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-57-kings-kings-ii/ https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-57-kings-kings-ii... https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-58-kings-kings-iii/ https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-58-kings-kings-ii... (should be available through your favourite podcast app). This King of Kings series is about the Achaemenid Persian Empire but it does go into details about the Assryian Empire and Ashurbanipal.
- sogwiz 8y agoThanks for sharing! The Assyrian language itself is threatened by various factors, so I created an online English to Assyrian dictionary using (React & MongoDB for the app. Scrapy + Java to power the data matching) to help preserve the language. I owe alot of the development choices behind the web app to the useful posts on hackernews! The frontend code is also available on GitHub. I get feedback from Assyrian parents trying to keep the language alive and from non Assyrians trying to learn, typically to impress their significant other and share a commonality. http://sargonsays.com http://sargonsays.com What I'll try to do next is create an Alexa skill. Languages are important
- chris_st 8y agoExcellent sounding project -- great thing to do for the web! How are you going to deal with pronunciation in the Alexa skill?
- sogwiz 8y agoAppreciate that! Regarding Alexa, the sargonsays app does store the phonetic pronunciations so that you could sound it out by saying the word / phrase aloud. To your point though, Alexa won't know how to sound it out correctly. For that reason, the most popular terms have audio recordings already so I'll try to have Alexa just play the recording. I've had some success in the past getting local Assyrian organizations and churches to help with the manual effort of audio recordings. Thoughts?
- chris_st 8y agoYeah, recordings are a great idea! It's been a long time since I did my Alexa skill (...a long time in internet-scale, anyway!) and they may have a way to do some kind of International Phonetic Alphabet kind of text now. But I know they support playing recordings, so that's a great place to start.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> they may have a way to do some kind of International Phonetic Alphabet kind of text now A recording is a better idea. Even meticulous IPA isn't going to be a good guide to the pronunciation of any language. Consonants are straightforward, but vowels are points in a continuous multidimensional space and all IPA characters for them are, by necessity, only rough approximations. To get good pronunciation of IPA from a computer, you'd need the computer to already know (1) what language it's supposed to be pronouncing in, and (2) how it should interpret IPA vowels for that language.
- rajekas 8y agoEven the name percolates down the sands of time. The fifth Mughal emperor and builder of the Taj Mahal took the name "Shahjahan," i.e., King of the World. Like Ceasar becoming Kaiser, etymology recapitulates history.
- pachydermfort 8y agoThough Assurbanipal doesn't really translate to 'king of the world' (see my comment below), the title in Akkadian is actually 'shar mātāti,' which is all the more striking. I haven't been able to find whether Akkadian shar shares a common root with Persian shah, although the ancient Achaemenid Persian empire did consciously model itself on a friendlier, ecumenical Assyrian model.
- crwalker 8y agoI keep suggesting that folks name their next child Ashurbanipal, Shalmaneser, or Tiglath-Pileser. So far nobody has taken up the offer ... but think of the excellent nicknames: "time to wrap up The Prince and study some more endgame strategies, Tiggy!"
- dahidahi1 8y agoAshurbanipal sounds so much like Sanskrit. Did the Assyrians have Indian heritage or links with ancient (medieval) India. Also how is “The Epic of Gilgamesh”, the world’s oldest epic? We have far older epics like Ramayana, Mahabharata etc.
- schoen 8y agoAccording to the estimates cited on Wikipedia, the Epic of Gilgamesh is about 9-10 centuries older than the Mahabharata, which in turn is older than the Ramayana.
- dahidahi1 8y agoRamayana predates Mahabharata. I think that's what you meant. But even Wikipedia estimates that Gilgamesh himself lived between 2500 BC and 2000 BC. The authentic date of an existing record of the Gilgamesh epic is only from 700 BC. The Mahabharata on the other hand, is from at least 5000 BC. The Ramayana is even older, from 7000 BC.
- foobarchu 8y agoThis is outside my wheelhouse of history, but the citations on Wikipedia claim the Ramayana is at most from 7th century BC. That's a big pretty difference from your claim (which I find extremely suspect to begin with).
- dahidahi1 8y agoI can understand why you may find it suspicious. The problem is the abundance of the rather fake history about the dating of the great Indian events & epics. For a very long time, the narrative was monopolized by people who believed that the history of mankind (or life?) is not more than 5000 years ago, (mainly because of the bible or something else)? Therefore, when the British & other Marxist historians found something older than the purported 5000 years, they had to adjust every event in Indian / Hindu history to match it. Too many things have been "adjusted" in this way, unfortunately. When modern human species evolved approximately 200,000 years ago, it should not be so far fetched to imagine that advanced civilizations existed 10,000 years ago? A google search provides many good resources & links that I will just fill up my comment to provide. These resources have documented many many proofs, events more than 3000 years ago cannot be treated the same as events 500 or even 1000 years ago, because the archeological remains would not survive that long unfortunately. Please try this: https://www.google.com/search?q=dating+the+ramayana https://www.google.com/search?q=dating+the+ramayana I think the research done by PN Oak & Dr. Koenraad Elst would be most pertinent. I am assuming that you are not limited or prejudiced by the timelines provided in the bible or something else.