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Academic revives ancient Babylonian 2,000 years after language died out
A Cambridge academic has taught himself to speak ancient Babylonian and is leading a campaign to revive it as a spoken language almost 2,000 years after it became extinct.
Dr Martin Worthington, a fellow of St John’s College, has created the world’s first film in the ancient language with his Babylonian-speaking students dramatising a folk tale from a clay tablet from 701BC.
Entitled The Poor Man of Nippur, it recounts the tale of a man with a goat who takes revenge on a City mayor for killing the animal by beating him up three times.
It is the culmination of his two decades of research into how the language, once the lingua franca of the Middle East used by Babylonian kings in Mesopotamia, Egyptian pharaohs and Near East potentates, was spoken and pronounced.
He has also created a unique archive of recordings from different readers of stories and scripts from Babylon and set up an annual conference for sixth-formers interested in studying ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Dr Worthington has pioneered teaching spoken Babylonian because he believes it is the best way to understand and “get under the skin” of a language. “It enables students to enjoy the magic of authenticity and connect through words to a world that is lost and far away,” he said.
“There are letters from spies, treaties between states, diplomatic correspondence, incantations and medical prescriptions. You can encounter a civilisation that is similar to us in some ways but also very different. It’s an important part of the world’s cultural heritage.”
Dr Worthington has been learning the language since 2000 and says he could make a speech in it but admitted he was by no means fluent, more a “work in progress.”
He tells students on his Assyriology course it is “not too difficult,” adding “the structures are extremely regular, and most learners find that at some point, often about seven months in, they suddenly “get” it: the structures click into place.”
He believes educated Babylonians would understand today’s speakers as the language is semitic like Hebrew and Arabic which replaced it as the dominant language in the Middle East.
Spoken Babylonian died out by the time Jesus was born. The last known written tablet dates from 75AD. It effectively remained extinct until 1857 when a learned Victorian society decided to test whether it was a distinct language by asking four academics to analyse the script.
They agreed it was, giving a huge filip to the study of Assyriology. It encompasses the Assyrians and Babylonians, two peoples who ruled modern-day Iraq, respectively controlling areas north and south of Baghdad for some two millennia.
Interest in Babylonian history was further fuelled in 1872 when The Daily Telegraph sponsored an expedition by the renowned Assyriologist George Smith to return to Iraq to see if he could find any further fragments of the so-called Gilgamesh Epic tablets.
The 11th tablet of the Epic - which is in the British Museum - describes Noah’s flood, when the Gods were said to have sent down the waters to destroy the world.
“Amazingly, George Smith did find the second half of the fragments,” said Dr Worthington, who also speaks Assyrian and Sumerian as well as French and Italian.
For his film, he has used a relief from the British Museum of two murderous dagger-wielding cat demons to depict the three beatings of the mayor by the poor man of Nippur. He said they did not want to have students acting out the fight in the film so used the relief with the sounds behind it.
In modern terms, Dr Worthington suggested it could be read as an allegory of how “middle management” might be out to get you, but that there was a superior being who was good and would look after you, as the King does in the tale by providing the poor man with a chariot.
The film, which is now available on YouTube, is opened by the world’s oldest Assyriologist James Kinnier Wilson, 97, who taught at Cambridge University for 34 years.
The main funders were the Philological Society and the Thriplow Charitable Trust, Cambridge University, and several Cambridge Colleges.
The next conference for sixth-formers interested in studying Babylonia, Mesopotamia and Egypt will be held in March next year. They are not A-level subjects but are available at universities including Cambridge, Cardiff, Liverpool, Oxford, Reading, SOAS, UCL, UEA, and UW-TSD.