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Updated: May 23, 2025
It is generally admitted that all the literature of Babylonia, including the oldest and even that written in the "ideographic" style, whether we term it "Sumero-Akkadian" or "hieratic," is the work of the Semitic settlers of Mesopotamia.
Since each sign, in Sumero-Akkadian as well as in Babylonian, represented some general idea, it could stand for an entire series of words, grouped about this idea and associated with it, 'day, for example, being used for 'light, 'brilliancy, 'pure, and so forth. The variety of syllabic and ideographic values which the cuneiform characters show could thus be accounted for.
But in the course of time, additions to the ritual were made, written in the phonetic style; and then it would happen, as a concession to religious conservatism, that the text would be translated back into the ideographic form. We would then have a "bilingual" text, consisting of Babylonian and an artificial "Sumero-Akkadian."
This is the fundamental error of the advocates of the Sumero-Akkadian theory, who appear to overlook the fact that the testimony of archaeological and anthropological research must be confirmatory of a philological hypothesis before it can be accepted as an indisputable fact.
That incantations were also composed in pure Babylonian without reference to any "Sumero-Akkadian" original is conclusively shown by the metrical traits frequently introduced. Many of the sections by no means all can be divided into regular stanzas of four, six, or eight lines, and frequently to the stanza is added a line which forms what Professor D. H. Müller calls the "response."
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