By Sridhar Pappu
Roth started working on the dictionary in 1979 and became its latest editor in 1996. “I’m just a baby,” she says. “Twenty years is nothing. Only millennia, as we like to say, count around here.”
One of the people who read the book was the wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr., the son of the U. of C.’s founder. She and Breasted met and became friends, and by 1919 Breasted had persuaded her husband to hand over $100,000 to create the Oriental Institute, a place that would bring together people from all the social sciences to study the ancient world. They would be able to study architecture, languages, and art in a way that isolated professors could not. Breasted promised to draw upon the best researchers and professors around the country, giving them access to the institute’s materials in return for letting the school use their names.
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In time the Akkadians were conquered by the Persians, the Macedonian Greeks, the Romans. Now they were the ones being assimilated. By the end of the first century their language had died out, cuneiform had been replaced by Aramaic script, and clay tablets had been replaced by ink and papyrus.
In October 1921, two years after receiving Rockefeller’s donation for the Oriental Institute, James Henry Breasted put five people to work on an Akkadian dictionary in the basement of the Haskell Museum–they would move into the institute when it was completed, in 1930. Only small glossaries and dictionaries of the language existed, and he believed an updated, comprehensive work was critical for scholars.
Determining the meaning of a word wasn’t easy, because the language had evolved across time and across cultures. Israel Shenker writes in his book about dictionary making, Harmless Drudges, “A common Akkadian verb like epesu can delay the dictionary for weeks. Epesu has meanings such as to act, to treat, is, happens, to construct, to practice (as witchcraft), to sacrifice (as a bull).” Moreover, new words and meanings were constantly being found as new texts were unearthed in the Near East and rediscovered in museum basements–thousands of them every year. The researchers often hit dead ends; sometimes, says Martha Roth, you know a word describes a textile, but that’s as far as you can go.
