This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Few languages stay in continuous documented use for two thousand years. Akkadian did. The language takes its name from the city of Akkad, whose king Sargon built the first Mesopotamian empire to unite Sumerian and Akkadian speaking cities under one rule beginning in the twenty fourth century BCE, and it is usually reckoned the earliest attested member of the Semitic language family, the same family that later produced Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic. Akkadian scribes wrote by adapting the older Sumerian cuneiform script to their own, quite different, spoken language, producing the huge cuneiform archives, royal inscriptions, law codes, letters, omens and epics, that give historians their clearest window into Bronze and Iron Age Mesopotamia. The language itself split over time into regional descendants, Babylonian in the south and Assyrian in the north, each evolving through its own Old, Middle and Late periods while remaining recognizably the same tongue. What finally displaced Akkadian was not conquest so much as convenience: Aramaic, written in a simpler alphabetic script rather than cuneiform's hundreds of syllabic signs, spread as the everyday language of trade and administration across the region during the first millennium BCE, and Akkadian gradually receded into scholarly and religious use, much as Latin would later outlive its own everyday speakers in Europe. The last known cuneiform tablets written in Akkadian, astronomical texts kept by temple scribes in Babylon, date to around the first century of the Common Era, closing out one of the longest continuous documented runs of any human language.