Gone but not forgotten: Babylonian bounces back

Almost 2,000 years after its last native speakers disappeared, the sound of Ancient Babylonian is being lined up for an unlikely comeback, in an online audio archive. Prompted by the enquiries of curious colleagues and friends, a University of Cambridge researcher, Dr. Martin Worthington (pictured), has begun what he hopes will be an ongoing project to record readings of Babylonian poems, myths and other texts in the original tongue. The results are being compiled in an audio library, publically available and completely free, where users can stream Babylonian - one of the chief languages of Ancient Mesopotamia - while reading English translations. Just 30 recordings have been released so far, but they include excerpts from some of the earliest known works of world literature, dating back to the first years of the second millennium BC. Dr. Worthington, an expert in Babylonian and Assyrian grammar based at St. John's College, Cambridge, put the collection together in his spare time. The readings are typically given by fellow Assyriologists, in an effort to present users with a variety of voices. His hope is that having heard the sound of the extinct language, some listeners will be sufficiently intrigued to investigate further, and perhaps end up studying the history, language or culture of the period.