Coolest Quote Ever

[Tudhaliya]

At least I think it is. I created its own thread so more people could see it. The Quote Thread is somewhat...moribund.

Anyway, here it is:
Transcription:
mAn-ti-’-ku-us LUGAL GAL-ú
LUGAL dan-nu LUGAL ŠÁR LUGAL E.KI LUGAL KUR.KUR
za-ni-in É.SAG.IL ù É.ZI.DA
IBILA SAG.KAL ša mSi-lu-uk-ku LUGAL
lúMa-ak-ka-du-na-a-a LUGAL E.KI
a-na-ku

Tranliteration:
Anti'kus šarru rabû
šarru dannu šar kibrāti šar Babili šar mātati
zanin esagil u ezida
aplu ašaredu ša Selukku šarru
Makkadunayya šar Babili
anāku

Translation:
Antiochus, great king,
powerful king, king of the world, king of Babylon, king of the lands,
nourisher of the (temples) Esagil and Ezida
first-born heir of Seleucus, the king,
a Macedonian, king of Babylon,
am I.

This comes from the first 6 lines of the "Antiochus Cylinder" of Antiochus Soter, son of Seleukus Nikator. For background and parallels, see here: http://www.livius.org/cg-cm/chronicl...cylinder1.html

This is a barrel-shaped clay prism that was used to dedicate the foundations of a rebuilt temple. I read it last quarter in my Akkadian class. The genre and the dedicatory language are part of a tradition that goes back for 1500 years (though the specific language of this cylinder is rather muted compared to some of the "classical" dedicatory inscriptions. The temples that Antiochus mentions rebuilding in the text are the Esagil and Ezida - the biggest and most bad-ass temples in Babylon and all of Mesopotamia. It was customary for the king to actually lay the first dedicatory brick for the temple himself, and indeed the cylinder mention Antiochus doing just that "with pure hands." This means that Antiochus himself probably held and deposited this very cuneiform cylinder! In Europa Barbarorum, the Seleukid administrator has to stay in Seluecia for the Babylon new year. Doing stuff like this was probably why.

[Mulceber]

Gotta say, that quote is pretty bad@$$. Really drives home the fact that the ancients didn't believe in modesty. -M

[Ibrahim]

it also, once again, proves that the Akkadian language never seems to have evolved all that much-at least in comparison to other languages

seriously, I learned old Babylonian/Assyrian, and mos of the words I recognize in exactly the same form as from then.

[Tudhaliya]

Dude, tell me about that. I asked in class about it, and apparently they really loved to write conservatively. Of course, what they wrote probably sound nothing like what they spoke (which at that time was definitely Aramaic), but even when there were Neo-Assyrian speakers alive, they rarely wrote in their "barbaric" dialect.

[Ibrahim]

Dude, tell me about that. I asked in class about it, and apparently they really loved to write conservatively. Of course, what they wrote probably sound nothing like what they spoke (which at that time was definitely Aramaic), but even when there were Neo-Assyrian speakers alive, they rarely wrote in their "barbaric" dialect.

indeed. Aramaic ended up replacing Akkadian as the lingua franca of the area in the 7th and 6th centuries BC. however, even when it was spoken regularly in the region, there is in fact surprisingly little change or divergeance between the dialaects of the language over its 2000 year existance. the main features that have changed are as follows:

1-loss of the final -m in declined and conjugated words
2-loss of the dual (already evident in old akkadian, but completed by its decendants)
3-the loss of weak consonants, and the contraction of most glottal stops. its where the circumflex sign on rabu originated; it used to be raba'u, but the glottal stop was contrated, and the succeeding vowel (the u here) became a long vowel.
4-a few vocab changes, between the dialects and thei ancestors; that's only natural

otherwise, Babylonian and assyrian, the two major dialects, remained both mutually intelligeable to each other, and partly with their past counterparts.

[ziegenpeter]

Wow! Cool quote. But since I don't know much about ancient oriental languages, I wonder why a greek king hat this written in Akkadian...? And Akkadian is related to Assyrian?