CHICAGO — It was a monumental project with modest beginnings: a small group of scholars and some index cards. The plan was to explore a long-dead language that would reveal an ancient world of chariots and concubines, royal decrees and diaries — and omens that came from the heavens and sheep livers.
The year: 1921. The place: the University of Chicago. The project: assembling an Assyrian dictionary based on words recorded on clay or stone tablets unearthed from ruins in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, written in a language that hadn’t been uttered for more than 2,000 years.
The scholars knew the project would take a long time. No one quite expected how very long.
Decades passed. The team grew. Scholars arrived from Vienna, Paris, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, Berlin, Helsinki, Baghdad and London, joining others from the U.S. and Canada. One generation gave way to the next; one century faded into the next.
The work was slow, sometimes frustrating and decidedly low-tech: Typewriters. Mimeograph machines. And index cards. Eventually, nearly 2 million of them.
And now, 90 years later, the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is officially complete — 21 volumes of Akkadian, a Semitic language (with several dialects, including Assyrian) that endured for 2,500 years.
The project is more encyclopedia than glossary, offering a window into the ancient society of Mesopotamia, now Iraq, through every conceivable form of writing: love letters, recipes, tax records, medical prescriptions, astronomical observations, religious texts, contracts, epics, poems and more.
Why is there a need for a dictionary of a language last written around A.D. 100 that only a small number of scholars worldwide know of?
Gil Stein, director of the university’s Oriental Institute (the dictionary’s home), has a ready answer: “The Assyrian Dictionary gives us the key into the world’s first urban civilization,” he said. “Virtually everything that we take for granted . . . has its origins in Mesopotamia, whether it’s the origins of cities, of state societies, the invention of the wheel, the way we measure time, and, most important, the invention of writing.
“If we ever want to understand our roots,” Stein added, “we have to understand this first great civilization.”
The translated cuneiform texts — originally written with wedged-shaped characters — reveal a culture where people expressed joy, anxiety and disappointment about the same events they do today: a child’s birth, bad harvests, money troubles, boastful leaders.
“A lot of what you see is absolutely recognizable — people expressing fear and anger, expressing love, asking for love,” said Matthew Stolper, a University of Chicago professor who worked on the project on and off over three decades. “There are inscriptions from kings that tell you how great they are, and inscriptions from others who tell you those guys weren’t so great. . . . There’s also a lot of ancient versions of ‘your check is in the mail.’ “
There were omens too — ways of divining the future by reading smoke patterns, the stars, the moon and sheep livers.
Now that the dictionary is finished, Martha Roth, the dictionary’s editor-in-charge and dean of humanities, said there is a feeling of tremendous accomplishment and “a little bit of a sense of loss. . . . This has occupied my waking and sleeping moments for 32 years. You dream this stuff.”
Robert Biggs, a professor emeritus at the university who devoted nearly a half-century to the dictionary, said the scholars are satisfied with the final version, but there is that lingering temptation.
“It might be nice to start over,” he said, “but no one has the courage to do it anymore.”
Work not done in a flash
By 1935, scholars already had 1 million index cards. It would take more than 30 years before the first of the 21 volumes was published. Most cover a single letter. The entire collection spans about 10,000 pages and 28,000 words. The definitions are more fitting for an encyclopedia; they provide cultural and historical context, similar to those in the Oxford English Dictionary.
