Bet-Nahrain Forum

Re: Let them take me to court, it is five minute away from home

Posted By: Malik Don (68-116-91-185.dhcp.trlk.ca.charter.com)
Date: Saturday, 6 January 2007, at 12:51 p.m.

In Response To: Re: Let them take me to court, it is five minute away from home (Esarhaddon)

---Allah makhdeelukh.

"Eserhaddon Khaddun"

---Actually, you're repeating yourself here. You spelled your name as "Eserhaddon." I was giving you a tip that it is "Ashur Haddon" or "Ashur Khaddon."

You see, what most people don't know is that there are at least two forms of Assyriologists. One form learned how to pronounce the letters in the cuneiform alphabets by discovering similar sounding alphabets of neighboring dialects or by looking at a tablet that was discovered not long ago that was somewhat of an interlinear dictionary. What you had on it were words written in the first Assyrian, then in the ancient Assyrian [incorrectly called Akkadian], then in a dialect of the Elamites. Anyway, over time they deciphered one allowing them to decipher the others. The problem with this is that they assumed the pronunciation of the letters of the other languages to be the same as the first one deciphered (which even that they had no right to be sure of b/c it was one person's witness to it...not representative of the population speaking that language thousands of years ago). I will give an example of this later to help you make sense of this.

The second type of Assyriologist is one who learned the pronunciations of the letters from an authority on the subject. It is a fact that up until our last generation we had a few members of the clergy knowledgeable of the Ancient Assyrian [incorrectly called Akkadian]. It was not a secret to us that under a mound in Nineveh were located thousands of tablets. We simply did not have the tools to unearth some of this stuff. In fact, not even the West had the proper tools at the time...and that's why they ended up breaking so many of our works in the process of transferring them to their heathen lands. This type of Assyriologist is rare and this leads to the next problem which I will explain.

When someone comes across a word written in our language, they may know that we have a certain number of letters in our language or how they look but they do not know how to pronounce them. Thus, if the Western scholars relied on Elamite...which was translated for them via the aid of an Iranian who speaks the Persian language, then their view of the letters will be influenced by the language that the Iranian man speaks. In Farsi, which is influenced both by Arabic and Middle Assyrian [Aramaic], you see that they sometimes use the "s" sound rather than the "sh" sound in some instances. As a result, "Ashur" becomes "Assur." Fortunately, many of them have been smart enough to use the word "Ashuri." However, I still see some using it with the "s."

The scholars also would not have picked up on regional differences in pronunciations. Therefore, they would not have known that some Assyrians pronounce the letter khet as a "kh." In reality, it is a "h" but not the same as the letter "he" that follows "wow." The sound is actually between "he" and "kh" and the reason for this is by knowing how sounds were formed. This sounds comes more from the throat.

The other problem occurs when these "translators" don't know anything about vowels. Just b/c they didn't see any vowel markings did not mean they didn't exist. As a result, they took "Ashur" and turned it into "Esar." Both Khaddun and Haddun are correct. The reason we know it is "Ashur" is twofold: We have Assyrians that have read it in the cuneiform to confirm it and besides that, looking at the name in context makes sense. Ashur Haddun was a king both followed and preceeded by others who always used the prefix "Ashur." For example, Ashur Banipal...Ashur Nasirpal...Ashur Reshishi. Furthermore, looking at the lists of kings in cuneiform script, you won't see a difference of spelling between Ashur Banipal and Ashur Haddun. So why the difference in spelling in english??? Because the translators were stupid and because the translators weren't the same.

We need to stop relying on these foreigners to do our work. We need to take back our tablets and commission the building of an official Assyrian Museum and we must have REAL Assyrians translate this stuff. Instead, we worry about other things and supporting a gov't in its illegal presence in Iraq...a gov't not interesting in helping the Iraqi people or Assyrians in general.

KHAYA ASHUR / ZEND'E BAAD ASHUR / YAHYA ASHUR