The Scansion System  of Akkadian Poetry

Ali Abdul Malik, Munther

	The Scansion System of Akkadian Poetry
Al-Adab Journal
Article 1, Volume 0, Issue 124, 2018, Pages 257-272
Author
Munther Ali Abdul Malik
Abstract
From the third to the first millennia BCE (c.2400-600 BCE), Akkadian literature developed many different literary genres: hymns, lamentations, prayers to various gods, incantations against a range of sources of evil, love-lyrics, wisdom literature (proverbs, fables, riddles), as well as long epics and myths — roughly 550 different compositions in all. Many of these compositions have not yet been studied in an analytical way. In particular, they have not been studied for scansion in the way that Arab poetry has been. Therefore, in this talk we try to study these texts for the systems of scansion in each verse of poetry. Before we do so, it is necessary to appreciate the difference between meter, rhythm and rhyme. The rhythm of language is infinitely varied. All aspects of language contribute to it: loudness, pitch, duration, pause, syntax, repeated elements, length of phrases, frequency of polysyllabic words. However, we cannot treat scansion of each line as encompassing all the phonetic facts, especially for a dead language such as Akkadian. Meter, by contrast, is an ordering of language by means of an extremely limited subset of its characteristics. If we take it to mean the regular ordering of language by syllabic stress, we can recognize passages which belong to Akkadian poetry, through vital the rhythm of its verses. As for rhyme, we see that each poetic verse ends in one or two phonemes, which may be different from one stanza to another. Alternatively, verses sometimes end in same word. We will use these definitions to present an analysis of scansion in Akkadian poetry.

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