Languages of Iraq, ancient and modern - J. N. Postgate

For all five thousand years of its history Iraq has been home
to a mixture of languages, spoken and written, and the same is
true today. In November 2003, to celebrate the country's rich
diversity and long history as a centre of civilisation the
British School presented a series of talks by experts on each of
the major languages of Iraq and their history, and this
illustrated volume brings these now to a wider public. Iraq's
languages come from different linguistic families - Semitic,
Indo-European, and agglutinative languages like Sumerian, Hurrian
and Turkish. Some, although long dead, have a prime place in the
history of the Old World: Sumerian, probably the first language
to be written and the vehicle of cuneiform scholarship for more
than two millennia, and Akkadian, the language of Hammurapi and
the Epic of Gilgamesh, and used across the Near East for
administration and diplomacy. The history of Aramaic is even
longer, stretching back to overlap with Akkadian before 1000 BC.
It survives, precariously, in both written and spoken forms,
being one of four languages spoken in Iraq today. Of these Arabic
as a major world language has often been described, but here we
have an account of the vernacular Iraqi Arabic dialects, and the
descriptions of Iraqi Kurdish and Turkman are unique, detailed
and authoritative.