Complete Babylonian Beginner to Intermediate Course: A Comprehensive Guide to Reading and Understanding Babylonian, with Original Texts (Teach Yourself)

It's slow studying but so many interesting things to learn. It's well worth the effort.

For anyone who might have concerns, Babylonian refers to a people. The language they primarily wrote/spoke was Akkadian, but also other Cuneiform-based languages like Sumerian. Later, they used Aramaic.These are Neo-Assyrian, Semitic languages. "Babylonian" is not a language...

This books title reads "Complete Babylonian, ect" ref pg. 5, 1.5 "This course introduces you to (CURSIVE NEO- ASSYRIAN SIGN FORM)Further down same paragraph; "Knowing these you should be able to "recognize" (Neo-Assyrian monumental sign forms easily)I wanted to learn "Babylonian" the older the better, not some (Neo-Semitic monumental, cursive form of Assyrian) this should be explained, not fronted as teaching you reading and writing Babylonian.

Fantastic quality.

It has finally arrived, so thank you. Very happy

What I noticed is that this book introduces Ancient Babylonian in a way you would find in a contemporary foreign language textbook. It's a straightforward approach and you can easily grasp how sentences are formed.

Well done!

Very good method. I'm learning akkadian in college too, and this is much clearer than my teacher's lessons.Difficulty is progressive, examples are drawn from babylonian litterature and religious texts.. I would buy it again 100%Just remember it won't teach you cuneiform signs.

For two decades and more I had wanted to learn Akkadian, the umbrella-term for Babylonian and Assyrian. I tried three books:- David Marcus 'A Manual of Akkadian' - this uses a kind of direct method, teaching grammatical points as they arise, so that the student ends up with a pointillistic impression of the grammar, with no clear overview. The explanation of the verbal system is desperately and perversely unhelpful. Furthermore you are forced to learn the cuneiform script, which involves memorising hundreds of signs, many of them polyvalent. I found the book unusable.- Richard Caplice 'Introduction to Akkadian' - thorough, but so compressed as to be horribly indigestible. Here too you are forced to learn the cuneiform script. This book too, whilst maybe useful as a reference grammar, is unusable as a textbook for learning the language.- John Huehnergard 'Grammar of Akkadian' - a very very thorough introduction to the language, introducing new grammatical points bit by bit, and introducing the cuneiform script gradually too. A beginner may find it overwhelming, and the grammatical explanations are written in a curiously convoluted way. The sentences for translation in the early chapters are mind-numbingly dull. It's an excellent book, but it's not fun. If you buy it, make sure you also buy the extra volume with the key to the exercises, otherwise you will struggle.And now here is the second edition, revised and expanded, of Martin Worthington's 'Teach Yourself Complete Babylonian'. It's a very intelligent, lucid, practical textbook.The language is taught entirely in transliteration, so that you can learn it thoroughly without having to do battle with the cuneiform script (though in this new edition it is also possible - NB optionally - to learn the script). It is in my view better to learn the language in transliteration at first, and optionally add knowledge of cuneiform later, because deciphering a cuneiform text is far easier when you already know well what lies 'behind' it.Grammatical points are introduced in a rational, sensible, easy-to-understand way, there are plenty of normalisation+reading exercises with often highly amusing practice sentences, all of them taken from real Babylonian sources, and including such gems as 'Buy donkeys!','I spent the night in my dung, like an ox', 'He must not pester the palace', 'I'm the one with the nanny-goat'.Dr Worthington has a light touch and sprinkles the book with delightful nuggets of information.If you work through this wonderful book you will quickly and easily acquire a really excellent working knowledge of Babylonian from every era of its development. A short chapter towards the end of the book includes the main features of Assyrian in so far as it diverges from Babylonian, so that you will be able to read both dialects of Akkadian.I recommend this book wholeheartedly, and if I could give it six stars, or seven stars, I would do so without hesitation. I have spent three extremely happy months working through it in detail, and have fulfilled an ambition I had harboured for many years: to acquire a good, working knowledge of Akkadian, and - a lovely bonus - I've had a lot of fun on the way, all thanks to Dr Worthington.

Eine wirklich gute und pädagogisch wertvolle Einführung ins Babylonische!