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Once upon a time, before the formation of civilizations and before the norms of society were established, people communicated using hand gestures and primitive verbal sounds. The concept of languages emerged about 10 years ago and changed the course of mankind. It was the use of languages that led to the development of the human race and brought us to where we are today. Although the origin of the first language is controversial throughout the world, some ancient writings and cave paintings allow some assumptions. So, the 000 most ancient languages in the world.
10 Greek (1400 BC)
Greek is one of the oldest written languages on earth, one of the first Indo-European languages, and the language with the longest history of alphabetic graphology on the planet. The first written Greek letters were found on baked clay tablets in the remains of the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete. This language is known as Linear A, and until today it has not been fully deciphered. The most famous example is written on the famous Phaistos disc. In the 12th century BC, a new language began to develop called Linear B, where each character is a combination of consonants and vowels. Linear B dates from the Mycenaean civilization.
9. Hattian (1400 BC)
Hattian is a non-Indo-European language of ancient Anatolia. The Hattic language is found in Hittite cuneiform texts. It was the language of the linguistic substratum (the language of the indigenous people) in the bend of the Galis River (now called the Kyzyl River) and more northerly regions. It is impossible to establish how long the Hattians were present in Anatolia before the Indo-Europeans entered the country, but it seems that by the beginning of the new Hittite empire (c.1400–c.1190 BC), Hattian was a dead language.
8. Luwian (1400 BC)
The language was initially misidentified as a Hittite hieroglyphic because it was discovered in the archives of the Hittite capital of Hattusa (modern Boghazkal), but its decipherment eventually led to the conclusion that the language was not Hittite, but Luvian. Hittite and Luvian belonged to the Anatolian subgroup of the Indo-European language family. According to Hittite sources, the Luvians were their neighbors, and they formed a kingdom called Arzawa in western and southern Anatolia, where the Luvian hieroglyphs probably originated.
7. Hittite (1650 BC)
The Hittites were one of many nations that spoke the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The Hittite language was related to Luwian, and possibly to later languages such as Lydian, Lycian and Carian. Unlike Luvian, which had a local writing system, the Hittites adopted Akkadian cuneiform. Approximately 375 cuneiform characters have been adopted from Akkadian cuneiform. As in Akkadian, signs can be roughly divided into phonograms, logograms, and determinants.
6. Hurrian (2200 BC)
Hurrian language, which disappeared from the 3rd millennium BC. e., is not an Indo-European language and not a Semitic language. It was the language of the kingdom of Mitanni in northern Mesopotamia and was probably at least originally spoken in the Hurrian settlements of present-day Syria. It is believed that the speakers of this language originally came from the Armenian highlands and spread across southeastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia at the beginning of the XNUMXnd millennium BC.
5. Elamite (2300 BC)
The development of writing in Elam took place in parallel with the development in Sumer. Already in the 8th millennium BC. clay tokens were used to represent goods: grain, livestock, alcohol, etc. And, like the rest of Mesopotamia, by the end of the 4th millennium BC. the clay tokens were stored inside stamped envelopes that most likely indicated the owners or contents. Shortly thereafter, marks were applied to the surface of the envelopes to count the number of tokens inside, thus a numerical system was born. Soon, clay tokens were completely eliminated, and thus the transition to a purely abstract representation of quantities was completed.
4. Eblaite (2400 BC)
Eblaite is an extinct Semitic language that was spoken in the 23rd century BC in the ancient city of Ebla, in western modern Syria. Eblight was very close to pre-Sargonic Akkadian. For example, Professor Manfred Krebernik says that Eblaith is “so closely related to the Akkadian language that it can be attributed to the early Akkadian dialect.” According to Cyrus H. Gordon, although the scribes may have spoken Eblait, most of the inhabitants did not use it. The language is known from approximately 15 cuneiform tablets that were found in the 000s, mostly in the ruins of the city of Ebla.
3. Akkadian (2400 BC)
Akkadian, also called Assyro-Babylonian, is a dead Semitic language spoken in Mesopotamia from the 3rd to the 1st millennium BC. e. It was spread throughout the area stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf during the reign of the Sargon dynasty, who ruled from about 2334 to about 2279 BC. e. By 2000, Sumerian had supplanted Sumerian, although Sumerian was still used as the written language for sacred literature.
Around the same time, the Akkadian language was split into the Assyrian dialect spoken in northern Mesopotamia and the Babylonian dialect spoken in southern Mesopotamia. At first, the Assyrian dialect was more common, but Babylonian gradually supplanted it and became the lingua franca in the Middle East by the 9th century BC.
2. Egyptian (2700 BC)
On the basis of ancient texts, scholars usually divide the history of the Egyptian language into five periods: Ancient Egyptian (from before 3000 to 2200), Middle Egyptian (2200-1600), Late Egyptian (1550 – c. 700), Demotic (c. 700 BC). – about 400 g) and Coptic (from 2 to 17 c). Thus, the five literary dialects are differentiated. These language periods refer only to the written language, which is often very different from the spoken dialects. Coptic is still used by the church (along with Arabic) among Arabic-speaking Christians in Egypt.
1. Sumerian language (2900 BC)
The Sumerian language in southern Mesopotamia in the 2nd millennium BC was the first language to be used in cuneiform writing. It is an isolated language, which means that we do not know of other languages that have influenced it, even if there were. Although there are some theories that Sumerian is part of the Uralic languages such as Hungarian and Finnish, or other language families, this is a minority opinion with insufficient evidence.
The language was spoken in a region where Semitic languages such as Akkadian were also spoken, and eventually fell out of use in favor of those languages at the end of the second millennium BC. However, the literary form of the language continued for another 2000 years, and it also had a notable impact on the other languages of the region in regards to their vocabulary, grammar, and writing.