Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Assyriology" in English language version.
Il faut pourtant d'emblée soulignerun fait qui semble ignoré : c'est Renan qui a donné aux spécialistes desécritures cunéiformes le nom d'assyriologues, qu'ils portent toujours. Dans le Journal des savants de 1859, il se réfère à «MM. les assyriologues» etajoute en note: "Je demande la permission d'employer ce mot, nécessaire pour éviterde longues périphrases et que l'analogie du mot égyptologue semble autoriser." Le terme fut ensuite employé communément, sans que personne apparemment se souvienne de son origine, tant cette désignation semblait logique. Cependant, Renan ne fut pas réellement une bonne fée au ber-ceau de l'assyriologie… C'est que les données exhumées de plus en plusabondamment du sol de la Mésopotamie à partir de 1843 ne s'accordaient guère avec le système qu'il avait mis au point dans sa jeunesse et auquelil est peu ou prou resté fidèle toute sa vie.
It is necessary here to remark, that the application of the term "Assyriology," as it is now generally used, to the study of the cuneiform inscriptions, is not quite correct; indeed it is actually misleading. It is true that the study of these inscriptions first began in connection with the Assyrian royal inscriptions, which for some ten years monopolized the public interest… But when the celebrated Clay Tablets of Assurbanipal's (or Sardanapalus') library were discovered and closely examined, it became more and more clear that the literary treasures it contained belonged to an epoch far earlier than that of the Assyrian monarchy, namely, to that which is now known as the early Babylonian period… Babylonia is the cradle of the earliest civilization, and could look back to a history covering several thousands of years at a time (about 1900 B.C.) when the history of Assyria was in its infancy; it is for this reason that the Assyrian civilization (its language, script, and religion) is, in the main, merely an offshoot of the Babylonian. It is absurd, therefore, to speak of an independent Assyrian literature; unless, of course, we are prepared to regard the inscriptions of the Assyrian kings as a separate school of literature by itself. The material which Sardanapalus placed in his library consisted, however, with unimportant exceptions, of mere copies of earlier Babylonian texts. As I have already pointed out, the study of the cuneiform inscriptions first began with the investigation of Assyrian monuments, and for this reason received the not altogether appropriate name of Assyriology. If, however, we go back to the first beginnings of the deciphering, we find ourselves again face to face with Babylonia, though, it is true, at a very late stage of its development; for it was a Babylonian translation of the early Persian Achaemenid texts—the inscriptions of Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes—which first led to the unravelling of the tangled web of Semitic cuneiform writing.
The term Assyriology is derived from these people, but it is very misleading. In fact the Assyrians make up only a part of the science of Assyriology... Ask ten Assyriologists to define Assyriology and, in all probability, you will get ten different answers… A philologist maintains it is the decipherment of the cuneiform tablets. To the historian the science deals with the history of Mesopotamia and Persia. The archeologist is quick to say that it is the archeology of these areas. Each is right, but only partially… The first cuneiform tablets discovered in any quantity were in Assyria. Later discoveries revealed that the people referred to their language as Akkadian. The northern dialect came to be known as Assyrian, and the southern one as Babylonian. In scholarly circles Akkadian has replaced the term Assyrian when speaking of the language, but the science remains Assyriology… Gradually Assyriology began to embrace the study of the majority of the peoples of the ancient Near East who wrote in cuneiform. This included the Hittites until recently. Today most authorities tend to regard Hittitology as a separate field, now that more is known about them. One wonders if Sumerology will break away (some schools have chairs of Sumerology), but this is doubtful, as the Sumerians furnished the foundation for the culture of the Assyrians, Akkadians, and Babylonians. Persian studies may make the break when the knowledge of the field is enriched enough to do so. For the purpose of this essay Assyriology is defined as the study of the history, literature, and antiquities of ancient Mesopotamia, Persia, and the littoral regions. This includes all facets of their civilization from philology to architecture. Major groups of peoples coming under study are the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Kassites, Elamites, and Persians.
The term 'ancient Near Eastern', in the context of Western European and American scholarship, refers to the geographical area of the Near East and its pre-Christian or pre-Islamic civilizations in the territory of present-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, the Arabian peninsula and Iran. As understood by Eastern European scholars, the term ancient Near Eastern includes all ancient advanced civilizations between the Mediterranean and the China Sea. Originally, and to some degree even today, the discipline has borne the traditional name Assyriology, since it was inscriptions from ancient Assyria that marked the beginning of research on the culture of ancient Mesopotamia. In comparison with that term the designation Ancient Near Eastern Studies proved to be increasingly appropriate the more ancient Near Eastern civilizations became known. The enormous increase in inscriptions and archaeological material over the years led to the development of two sub-disciplines: Ancient Near Eastern Philology and Near Eastern archaeology, which, however, remain linked by a shared goal – which is to reconstruct an ancient advanced civilization on the basis of written and material evidence.
The term "Assyriology" is itself problematic because it covers a broad range of topics. Assyriology literally means the study of Assyria, yet the field is by no means restricted to Assyria… What Assyriology actually means, though, is the archaeological, historical, and linguistic study of ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq) and related cultures that also used cuneiform, like northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and western Iran. In other words, Assyriology is not merely one discipline, but a group of disciplines related to cuneiform that make frequent references to one another. An Assyriologist might be a specialist in the language, or archaeology, or history of the cuneiform world, but by no means is everyone who has worked on cuneiform materials an Assyriologist. Sir Max Mallowan might be better known as an archaeologist of ancient Near Eastern civilizations than an Assyriologist, to give one example. A hallmark that distinguishes Assyriologists from other related specialists is training in ancient Mesopotamian languages, mainly Sumerian and Akkadian. Apart from Sumerology, Assyriology also embraces disciplines including Elamitology, Hittitology, Ugaritic, Urartian, and old Persian studies. However, experts in these fields are not always comfortable being known as Assyriologists. In the preface of A Manual of Ugaritic, André Caquot asserts that "Ugaritology deserves to be considered an independent historical discipline, one to be mastered by itself and for itself, as distinct a field as Assyriology or Egyptology, even if it appears easier because of the profound affinities shown by Ugaritic with other long known Semitic languages." This might well also be acknowledged by specialists in Elamite, Hittite, and Urartian studies, unsettled by the obsessive attention given to Assyriology. For the purposes of this paper, however, I subsume all the aforementioned disciplines and sub-disciplines within the category of Assyriology, or rather "cuneiform studies," with more focus on philological studies in Akkadian, Sumerian, and Elamite.
The term "Assyriology" is itself problematic because it covers a broad range of topics. Assyriology literally means the study of Assyria, yet the field is by no means restricted to Assyria… What Assyriology actually means, though, is the archaeological, historical, and linguistic study of ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq) and related cultures that also used cuneiform, like northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and western Iran. In other words, Assyriology is not merely one discipline, but a group of disciplines related to cuneiform that make frequent references to one another. An Assyriologist might be a specialist in the language, or archaeology, or history of the cuneiform world, but by no means is everyone who has worked on cuneiform materials an Assyriologist. Sir Max Mallowan might be better known as an archaeologist of ancient Near Eastern civilizations than an Assyriologist, to give one example. A hallmark that distinguishes Assyriologists from other related specialists is training in ancient Mesopotamian languages, mainly Sumerian and Akkadian. Apart from Sumerology, Assyriology also embraces disciplines including Elamitology, Hittitology, Ugaritic, Urartian, and old Persian studies. However, experts in these fields are not always comfortable being known as Assyriologists. In the preface of A Manual of Ugaritic, André Caquot asserts that "Ugaritology deserves to be considered an independent historical discipline, one to be mastered by itself and for itself, as distinct a field as Assyriology or Egyptology, even if it appears easier because of the profound affinities shown by Ugaritic with other long known Semitic languages." This might well also be acknowledged by specialists in Elamite, Hittite, and Urartian studies, unsettled by the obsessive attention given to Assyriology. For the purposes of this paper, however, I subsume all the aforementioned disciplines and sub-disciplines within the category of Assyriology, or rather "cuneiform studies," with more focus on philological studies in Akkadian, Sumerian, and Elamite.
The term 'ancient Near Eastern', in the context of Western European and American scholarship, refers to the geographical area of the Near East and its pre-Christian or pre-Islamic civilizations in the territory of present-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, the Arabian peninsula and Iran. As understood by Eastern European scholars, the term ancient Near Eastern includes all ancient advanced civilizations between the Mediterranean and the China Sea. Originally, and to some degree even today, the discipline has borne the traditional name Assyriology, since it was inscriptions from ancient Assyria that marked the beginning of research on the culture of ancient Mesopotamia. In comparison with that term the designation Ancient Near Eastern Studies proved to be increasingly appropriate the more ancient Near Eastern civilizations became known. The enormous increase in inscriptions and archaeological material over the years led to the development of two sub-disciplines: Ancient Near Eastern Philology and Near Eastern archaeology, which, however, remain linked by a shared goal – which is to reconstruct an ancient advanced civilization on the basis of written and material evidence.
In our association, the old-fashioned term "Assyriology" covers all scholarly fields related to the study of the ancient Near East in the time of the cuneiform cultures, from the fourth millennium BCE to the first century CE in the historical regions of Mesopotamia, Syria, and the Levant, Iran, and Anatolia, including periods and regions of influence and contact.
Through the accident of the better preservation of the Persian ruins, visited by Europeans as early as the seventeenth century, the first Akkadian texts studied in the West came from this source. With little understanding of the Persians as supplanters, no knowledge yet of the Sumerians as predecessors, and mostly half-believed stories from the Old Testament and Herodotus to indicate that Babylon had existed, Westerners coined the term "Assyriology," still to be found in university catalogues. Before Assyriology could go beyond its first misstep in the nineteenth century, however, some tangible remains of Akkadia were needed.
Au contraire de l'égyptologue, l'assyriologue n'était donc pas, ipso facto, un archéologue. L'assyriologue s'occupait de déchiffrer les textes en langue assyrienne découverts en quantité dans le nord de l'Irak actuel, l'ancienne Assyrie, à partir de 1843. On s'aperçut peu après que, outre l'assyrien, l'écriture cunéiforme avait servi pour une langue-sœur, le babylonien : babylonien et assyrien avaient divergé vers 2000 avant notre ère à partir de leur ancêtre, une langue sémitique que leurs locuteurs eux-mêmes désignaient comme « akkadien ». Par ailleurs, à partir de 1877, les fouilles de Tello montrèrent que, avant l'akkadien, le cunéiforme avait servi à écrire une langue complètement différente, le sumérien. La sumérologie devint donc peu à peu une branche particulière de l'assyriologie au sens large. Et la suite des recherches montra qu'au cours du Il millénaire avant notre ere, l'écriture cunéiforme avait aussi été employée pour noter d'autres langues, comme le hourrite, le hittite ou l'élamite. Dès lors, le terme assyriologue est devenu ambigu : dans son acception large, il désigne toute personne qui étudie des textes notés dans l'écriture cunéiforme. Mais ces textes, écrits dans des langues très différentes, relèvent de civilisations distinctes, même si elles ont été en contact suffisamment étroit pour partager une même écriture.
Au contraire de l'égyptologue, l'assyriologue n'était donc pas, ipso facto, un archéologue. L'assyriologue s'occupait de déchiffrer les textes en langue assyrienne découverts en quantité dans le nord de l'Irak actuel, l'ancienne Assyrie, à partir de 1843. On s'aperçut peu après que, outre l'assyrien, l'écriture cunéiforme avait servi pour une langue-sœur, le babylonien : babylonien et assyrien avaient divergé vers 2000 avant notre ère à partir de leur ancêtre, une langue sémitique que leurs locuteurs eux-mêmes désignaient comme « akkadien ». Par ailleurs, à partir de 1877, les fouilles de Tello montrèrent que, avant l'akkadien, le cunéiforme avait servi à écrire une langue complètement différente, le sumérien. La sumérologie devint donc peu à peu une branche particulière de l'assyriologie au sens large. Et la suite des recherches montra qu'au cours du Il millénaire avant notre ere, l'écriture cunéiforme avait aussi été employée pour noter d'autres langues, comme le hourrite, le hittite ou l'élamite. Dès lors, le terme assyriologue est devenu ambigu : dans son acception large, il désigne toute personne qui étudie des textes notés dans l'écriture cunéiforme. Mais ces textes, écrits dans des langues très différentes, relèvent de civilisations distinctes, même si elles ont été en contact suffisamment étroit pour partager une même écriture.
The term "Assyriology" is itself problematic because it covers a broad range of topics. Assyriology literally means the study of Assyria, yet the field is by no means restricted to Assyria… What Assyriology actually means, though, is the archaeological, historical, and linguistic study of ancient Mesopotamia (Iraq) and related cultures that also used cuneiform, like northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and western Iran. In other words, Assyriology is not merely one discipline, but a group of disciplines related to cuneiform that make frequent references to one another. An Assyriologist might be a specialist in the language, or archaeology, or history of the cuneiform world, but by no means is everyone who has worked on cuneiform materials an Assyriologist. Sir Max Mallowan might be better known as an archaeologist of ancient Near Eastern civilizations than an Assyriologist, to give one example. A hallmark that distinguishes Assyriologists from other related specialists is training in ancient Mesopotamian languages, mainly Sumerian and Akkadian. Apart from Sumerology, Assyriology also embraces disciplines including Elamitology, Hittitology, Ugaritic, Urartian, and old Persian studies. However, experts in these fields are not always comfortable being known as Assyriologists. In the preface of A Manual of Ugaritic, André Caquot asserts that "Ugaritology deserves to be considered an independent historical discipline, one to be mastered by itself and for itself, as distinct a field as Assyriology or Egyptology, even if it appears easier because of the profound affinities shown by Ugaritic with other long known Semitic languages." This might well also be acknowledged by specialists in Elamite, Hittite, and Urartian studies, unsettled by the obsessive attention given to Assyriology. For the purposes of this paper, however, I subsume all the aforementioned disciplines and sub-disciplines within the category of Assyriology, or rather "cuneiform studies," with more focus on philological studies in Akkadian, Sumerian, and Elamite.
The term 'ancient Near Eastern', in the context of Western European and American scholarship, refers to the geographical area of the Near East and its pre-Christian or pre-Islamic civilizations in the territory of present-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, the Arabian peninsula and Iran. As understood by Eastern European scholars, the term ancient Near Eastern includes all ancient advanced civilizations between the Mediterranean and the China Sea. Originally, and to some degree even today, the discipline has borne the traditional name Assyriology, since it was inscriptions from ancient Assyria that marked the beginning of research on the culture of ancient Mesopotamia. In comparison with that term the designation Ancient Near Eastern Studies proved to be increasingly appropriate the more ancient Near Eastern civilizations became known. The enormous increase in inscriptions and archaeological material over the years led to the development of two sub-disciplines: Ancient Near Eastern Philology and Near Eastern archaeology, which, however, remain linked by a shared goal – which is to reconstruct an ancient advanced civilization on the basis of written and material evidence.
Through the accident of the better preservation of the Persian ruins, visited by Europeans as early as the seventeenth century, the first Akkadian texts studied in the West came from this source. With little understanding of the Persians as supplanters, no knowledge yet of the Sumerians as predecessors, and mostly half-believed stories from the Old Testament and Herodotus to indicate that Babylon had existed, Westerners coined the term "Assyriology," still to be found in university catalogues. Before Assyriology could go beyond its first misstep in the nineteenth century, however, some tangible remains of Akkadia were needed.
A few words are necessary to justify the use of the term "Assyrian" in the title of the project and of the published Dictionary. In the early years of Assyriology the term "Assyrian" was commonly used for the main Semitic language of Mesopotamia, for the well-known reason that most of the cuneiform documents then available had been recovered from sites situated in what was once ancient Assyria. With the recovery of Babylonian sites in the following years, many more tablets came to light, showing not only that the two dialects used in Assyria and Babylonia, respectively, were closely related, but also that their users called their language neither "Assyrian" nor "Babylonian," but "Akkadian," after the Akkadians who had established the first great Semitic empire in the middle of the third millennium B.C. under their renowned leader, Sargon of Akkad. As some of these facts became known, the term "Akkadian" ("Accadian") began to crowd out the term "Assyrian" in good Assyriological usage. However, the term "Assyrian" for the Assyro-Babylonian language continues to be used —though on a much more limited and mainly popular basis—in parallel to such firmly established terms as "Assyriology" and "Assyriologist." The aversion toward the term "Akkadian" ("Accadian") in the popular American circles may be partially conditioned by the existence of the name "Acadian" ("Cajun") for the French Canadians of Nova Scotia (and later, Louisiana).
A few words are necessary to justify the use of the term "Assyrian" in the title of the project and of the published Dictionary. In the early years of Assyriology the term "Assyrian" was commonly used for the main Semitic language of Mesopotamia, for the well-known reason that most of the cuneiform documents then available had been recovered from sites situated in what was once ancient Assyria. With the recovery of Babylonian sites in the following years, many more tablets came to light, showing not only that the two dialects used in Assyria and Babylonia, respectively, were closely related, but also that their users called their language neither "Assyrian" nor "Babylonian," but "Akkadian," after the Akkadians who had established the first great Semitic empire in the middle of the third millennium B.C. under their renowned leader, Sargon of Akkad. As some of these facts became known, the term "Akkadian" ("Accadian") began to crowd out the term "Assyrian" in good Assyriological usage. However, the term "Assyrian" for the Assyro-Babylonian language continues to be used —though on a much more limited and mainly popular basis—in parallel to such firmly established terms as "Assyriology" and "Assyriologist." The aversion toward the term "Akkadian" ("Accadian") in the popular American circles may be partially conditioned by the existence of the name "Acadian" ("Cajun") for the French Canadians of Nova Scotia (and later, Louisiana).
