The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Maggie has morphed.....

Maggie has morphed.....
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Saturday, August 27 2016, 19:33:13 (UTC)
from *** - *** Network - Windows NT - Mozilla
Website:
Website title:

...a new website has appeared where Maggie's old one used to be...this one has a lengthy summary of ancient Assyrian history, but ends on a curious note...it is written by a Euro or Gringo who is a part-time "professor" of history at some college somewhere....my impression is that whoever did this simply lifted from other, accredited, sources...except this last paragraph has to be his own doing....

"Aramaean was easier to write than Akkadian and so older documents collected by kings such as Ashurbanipal were translated from Akkadian into Aramaic, while newer ones were written in Aramaic and ignored the Akkadian. The result was that thousands of years of history and culture were preserved for future generations, and this is the greatest of Assyria’s legacies."

...I beg to differ. When the cunieform documents were unearthed beginning in the 1850s, no one, not Nestorians nor anyone else could read ancient Assyrian/Akkadian...and no "thousands of years of history and culture were preserved for future generations." Modern Assyrians, like everyone else, only knew about the ancient Assyrians from the Bible and a few reference from Greek writers...but no "thousands of documents" were translated by the ancients into Aramaic.

First of all he doesn't list any of these documents which were translated into Aramaic from the Assyrian language, known as Akkadian, and consisting of cuneiform letters. I've never seen such a translated document anywhere.

The greatest literary find of all is the "Epic of Gilgameah" and it was not found in Aramaic but in Akkadian/cuneiform....the whole world knows of the act of genius in deciphering Akkadian so the ancient documents could be read....if anything was ever translated into Aramaic by the ancients surely this masterpiece would have been...but it wasn't. And neither was anything else.

No one in the modern era, who knew how to read Aramaic was able to read a SINGLE cuneiform tablet pulled from the ruins....all had to wait for George Smith, an amateur hired by the British Museum who, on his own, was able to accomplish this wondrous task of learning to read cuneiform/Akkadian.

So, where does this part-time "professor" get this from? he doesn't say, he just says it, even though it is universally admitted long ago that ancient writings had to be deciphered in the modern era because no one was left who could read Akkadian...certainly no modern Assyrians made head nor tails of the cuneiform tablets, not until they were taught by Euros...just as they were "taught" they were Assyrians by these same Euros.

Such a blunder, or lie, is hard to explain away...unless it is yet another attempt to prove that modern Assyrians, now speaking Aramaic, "always knew" they were descended from the ancients.....and always remembered how to read Akkadian because it was "translated into Aramaic" while the Empire still stood...a claim which flies in the face of All Assyriology studies and our own experience.

It is indeed puzzling, and I've wondered often, why the ancients, when they finally defeated the Arameans before being defeated themselves, never bothered to translate the works in that wonderful library of Ashurbanipal...why did they allow their rich history to be buried with NO translations into their newly acquired Aramean...if they had done that then the people who survived the fall of their empire would have maintained the knowledge of those centuries of empire...instead it was forgotten for soon no one was left who could read cuneiform, the language used for all those documents....it is a mystery but you don't solve it part-time by simply making a statement which flies in the face of what all Assyriologists have known for centuries.

Nothing really changes with Maggie...still selling at the same stand, part-time.



---------------------


The full topic:



***



Powered by RedKernel V.S. Forum 1.2.b9