Iamanâya

As we're catching up on the diaspora of the Aramaean Euphrates, Gregory Crane reviews La Babylonie hellénistique proper. This was whence the classical Hellenists out west got their Mesopotamian lore, which they ascribed to "Berossos" - the equivalent to Manetho.

Crane includes the early years of the Parthian takeover in its Hellenistic era, which I wholly endorse, because the Arsacids of Parthia didn't start out as panIranian nationalists. They were more like Armenia and Pontus, appropriating Hellenistic culture. 'Tis possible that Parthians generally, not being Persians, considered the Achaemenids as failures. There'd be time to hype the glorious Iranian past, later (i.e. under the Sassanids).

These documents under review were not by Aramaeans or any Iranians, either. They concerned Greeks. That may be why they're in a dead language, the parasemitic Akkadian. This language is handy for our historians because it's on clay, not perishables. If only we could read it, or were allowed to read it (more on this, anon).

The Akkadian for Greeks was "Iamanâya". That looks uncomfortably like Late-Antique Syriac for Yemenites. I suppose context helps. I do see that R̥štivaigah, Attic Astyages, became "Ištumegu"; Akkadian orthographs preferred v-to-m transformation. This would happen in the middle of a word given they did not always do this for Huvaxshthra = Cyaxares (or Xyaxarus); they have "Waksatar" sometimes but also sometimes Úmakuištar. Behistun should have Akkadian for Fravartiš "Phraortes" also; wiki as reliant on the online Iranica doesn't help here. Although, to be warned, Persian names in Behistun were transliterated first to Elamite then to Akkadian, with the Old Persian text supplied last, in a script invented for the exact purpose of getting Persian written right.

As Akkadian / Greek direct philology is concerned, indeed some Greek did get translated into Akkadian. In reverse there's even Akkadian transliterated into the Attic alphabet! That fundament of the Axial oecumene, Behistun, might even count, being translated into Aramaic (I think, from the Akkadian) and summarised for Herodotus assuredly in Greek, although as far as I know it did not enter this book.

These Akkadian sources pinpoint the Battle of Gaugamela, lately famed for that Alexander bio (which is just Claudius Aelian). Also here are astronomical journals and chronicles, of which some blogs might consider the last years of Antiochus IV Epiphanes.

Crane hits this book for not including the actual Akkadian, just translating everything into French. That compares unfavourably with the Greeks and Akkadians themselves, as the book has presented. Maybe this choice is because the book is for students of Hellenistic cultures. They'd be expected to know Greek (like Aramaic scholars should know that language); not Akkadian. Maybe that's the problem: that we haven't been learning Akkadian because we simply don't have enough Akkadian in modern publication (Semitic students and Aramaeists in particular should be able to muddle through this dialect, nu?). Crane calls for ORACC to get that stuff out there.