Kassite language

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Kassitisch
Period 18.-12. Century BC Chr.

Formerly spoken in

Northern Mesopotamia , Babylonia , today in Syria , Iraq and Turkey lying area
Linguistic
classification

The Kassite language - formerly also known as the Kosean language - was used by the Kassites in northern Mesopotamia from the 18th to the 4th century BC. Spoken. From the 16th to the 12th centuries, Kassite kings ruled Babylon before being subdued by the Elamites .

The Kassites, whose region of origin was probably the Zagros Mountains , came to dominate southern Mesopotamia after the end of the first Babylonian dynasty (1594 BC). The Kassite period lasted until 1155 BC. Several kings of this dynasty called themselves Kurigalzu (see Kurigalzu I. and Kurigalzu II. ). In many places they renewed the ancient Mesopotamian temple towers ( ziggurats or ziggurats), the ziggurat of the Kassite capital Dur-Kurigalzu (today Aqar Quf west of Baghdad) is particularly well preserved . The name Kassite comes from the Akkadian name kaššū , which may be found again as Koσσαῖoι (Kossaioi) in Strabo .

The assimilation of the Kassites to the culture of the Babylonians and thus also the adaptation of the Babylonian cultural language must have taken place very quickly and thoroughly. Most of the Kassite building inscriptions are written in Sumerian - as with the Babylonians - while Akkadian (Babylonian) was used for correspondence, economic and legal documents . The traditional Kassite language material is extremely poor despite the four hundred years of domination: a Kassite list of gods and personal names with the Babylonian equivalents, a Kassite-Akkadian vocabulary and so-called horse texts with Kassitian proper names and color names.

A Kassitian grammar cannot currently be reconstructed due to the scarcity of the material, but Kassitic seems to have been an agglutinating language .

The kinship of the Kassitic is unclear; in any case, the Kassitic is neither Indo-European nor Semitic , and relationships to Elamite and Sumerian can also be excluded. On the basis of a few words, it was suggested that they belong to the Hurro-Urartean languages , which were also extinct . Furthermore, some words in the so-called horse texts seem to point to area contacts with the Indo-Iranian languages. For the time being, Cassitic should, with caution, be viewed as an isolated language .

See also

literature

  • A. Ancilotti: La lingua dei Cassiti. Milan 1980, OCLC 860591332 .
  • Kemal Balkan: Kassite Studies. I. The language of the Kassites (= American Oriental Series . 37). New Haven 1954.
  • Friedrich Delitzsch : Language of the Kossaeer. Leipzig 1884.
  • K. Jaritz: Remnants of the Kassite language. In: Anthropos. 52, 1957, pp. 850-898.
  • Leonhard Sassmannshausen: Kassite rulers and their names. In: Leonhard Sassmannshausen, Georg Neumann (Hrsg.): He Has Opened Nisaba's House of Learning. Studies in Honor of Åke Waldemar Sjöberg on the Occasion of His 89th Birthday on August 1st 2013 (= Cuneiform Monographs. 46). Brill, Leiden / Boston 2014, ISBN 978-90-04-26074-0 , pp. 165-199.
  • Thomas Schneider: Kassitisch and Hurro-Urartäisch. A contribution to the discussion on possible lexical isoglosses. In: Ancient Near Eastern Research. 30, 2003, pp. 372-381.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Schneider 2003, basically also Sassmannshausen 2014.