Reading the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, is tough. For one thing, it’s very, very old, and not refracting the text through our 21st-century prism is difficult. For another, it’s written in two odd ...

I grew up hearing the Code of Hammurabi read out loud, in Akkadian, at the dining-room table. I did not know that my graduate-student mother was one of Akkadian’s few regular readers. The language of ...

The ancient Assyrian language is classified as Akkadian; it was the language of the Assyrians and Babylonians, written in Cuneiform. To facilitate administrative tasks of the Assyrian Empire Aramaic ...