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Begun in 1921, The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary was finally just finished.
There was much to research, much to record. By 1935, scholars already had 1 million index cards. It would take more than 30 years before the first of the 21 volumes was published. Most cover a single letter. The entire collection spans about 10,000 pages and 28,000 words. The definitions are more fitting for an encyclopedia; they provide cultural and historical context, similar to those in the Oxford English Dictionary.
That's interesting. Wonder what the sentence structure and verb conjugations were like and how they figured it out. Didn't realize there was was so much (surviving) Assyrian writing to go by. 21 volumes…betchya that's going to cost a few bucks.
I think from Mesopotamian civilizations they have thousands of tablet fragments containing cuneiform (or other similar wedge-shaped writings) that date to around the time of Sumer Add to this writings done in the language into the days of the Roman empire, and you have a lot of material to work with.
