Akkadian was the main language of the Assyrian Empire’s royal inscriptions. It was a Semitic language written mainly in cuneiform and used in Assyrian and Babylonian forms across much of ancient Mesopotamia.
Assyrian kings used Akkadian for monumental texts describing campaigns, building projects, royal titles, and relationships with the gods. The language was written with a script originally developed for Sumerian, so Akkadian scribes used signs that could represent sounds, words, or grammatical information.
Sumerian remained important as a learned and religious language long after it ceased to be the everyday language of most southern Mesopotamian communities. Aramaic also became increasingly important for administration and communication, particularly in the first millennium BCE. These overlapping languages explain why Mesopotamian scribal culture cannot be reduced to a single language or script.