The Style of the Discourse in Neo-Assyrian Letters (911-612) B.C

Abstract

The ancient Iraqis created the cuneiform writing five thousand years ago. The excavations provided us with hundreds of thousands of cuneiform texts. In fact, the use of cuneiform lasted for three thousand years. These texts gave us good knowledge in the fields of history, culture and other fields. As for the ancient Iraqi literature. It has been tackled by many translations and studies .Their essential sources are the literary genres such as the epics, legends, incantations and others. It must be mentioned that the literary studies are less than other studies in spite of the large quantity of various cuneiform texts including the letters which are the main topic of our study. The present research concentrates on the study of some of discourse style in letter writing in the Neo-Assyrian period. As it is known that these letters were written in Akkadian with its two dialects namely Neo-Assyrian and NeoBabylonian. These are official letters which represent the official discourse characterized by its declarative features which were highly different from the ordinary discourse. The literary discourse cannot be ignored and it must be studied and well analyzed. This reflected the reality of the history of Ancient Iraq which lasted nearly three centuries (911-612 B.C.).This is the New –Assyrian period. In this research, the letters are classified according to their subject matter such as complaining, sarcasm, praise, satire, threatening, proverb and wisdom. This research is concerned with the rhetorical study through which the verbs can be pointed out linguistically taking into consideration the phonetic aspects. It can also go through psycholinguistics. This can be achieved by examining all the mental activities expressed by these verbs. This is called psycholinguistics which is a branch of psychology that enable us to make a comparison between the cultural heritage of the ancient Iraqis and the present time.