Cuneiform 103 · Akkadian

The border crossing. Prerequisites: 101 · Foundations and 102 · Sumerian — this course assumes all 77 signs you own and every habit the school has taught you. What changes is the language underneath: Akkadian, a Semitic tongue with nothing in common with Sumerian, written in the same wedges — because the scribes of Babylon borrowed the script whole and bent it to their own sounds. Most of your signs are about to grow second lives as pure syllables, and the destination is not an exercise: this course reads the opening of the Codex Hammurapi, its laws whole — from the murder charge to tooth-for-tooth and the priced injuries below it — real Old Babylonian mail, a Sippar loan with its witnesses and year-nameBabylon's dating system: years carry no numbers — each is NAMED for a royal deed ("the year Immerum built Inanna's temple"); the scribes' lists of these names are how we order their history, the epilogue where the king signs his name, and his invitation to every future reader — all in the original.

Chapters

0. A script crosses a border — what Akkadian is, and what your signs already buy you
1. Spelling sound by sound — the syllabary at work
2. The noun wears its case — -um, -am, -im, and a king's name
3. Lord of heaven and earth — two nouns bound together
4. When lofty An… — the prologue opens
5. The verb arrives — he charged, he did not convict, he shall pay
6. If a man… — šumma, and the first law
7. The strong shall not wrong the weak — the creed, and the stele's purpose made whole
8. More than one: the plural — -ū, -ī, -ātum, and the monument's own name
9. The stems named — G, D, Š, N: the deferrals paid in full
10. The River decides — law 2 whole: the ordeal and its mirror
11. An eye for an eye — laws 196–197, read from the original
12. Say to him: a letter — the mail of Babylon, formula and plea
13. I am he — the epilogue's self-naming, and the second negation
14. Where you stand — the course measured, honestly
15. It has happened — the perfectthe Akkadian verb shape for what HAS happened — a -ta- slipped in after the first root consonant: iptaras "he has decided", uḫtappid "he has blinded"; the laws use it for the newest deed in a chain named, and law 202 read whole
16. Eye, tooth, bone — the bone law paid in signs, and the scale of persons
17. Silver changes hands — a real Sippar loan: interest, witnesses, year-nameBabylon's dating system: years carry no numbers — each is NAMED for a royal deed ("the year Immerum built Inanna's temple"); the scribes' lists of these names are how we order their history
18. The king's invitation — the epilogue addresses its future reader, answered; the close
19. Reference — every sign taught, the grammar shelved, conventions, sources

Sixteen chapters are live; the course still ends mid-story on purpose. The laws run to nearly three hundred, contracts and omens wait behind them, and the literary language of Gilgameš stands further on — later chapters continue where chapter 14 leaves you: reading.

The conventions this course writes by — transliterationthe sign-by-sign rendering of ancient writing in modern letters, so every sign stays accountable, the normalization layer, how a familiar sign is marked when it gains an Akkadian value — are declared as they are introduced, and the Sumerian Addenda remains the home of everything Sumerian. Akkadian sign lore lives on its own shelf: the Akkadian Addenda.