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Akkadian, an ancient Semitic language spoken in Assyria and Babylonia, is one of the earliest known languages, with a surviving written history from 2500BC to 500BC. Guy Deutscher investigates its development over these two millennia. He shows that changes in the language can be linked to the emergence of complex patterns of communication required by an increasingly sophisticated civilization. His book will interest specialists and general linguists. It offers the former a significant contribution towards a badly needed historical grammar of Akkadian. Its value for the latter lies not only in the central theoretical questions it addresses on how and why languages change, but in the window it opens to a language that, despite its enormous historical importance, has rarely been presented to non-specialists. The fact that the book links linguistic to social change will also make it of interest to archaeologists and historians of the ancient Near East.