Canaanite in Cuneiform‪.‬

It has become a truism that Akkadian, the principal Semitic language of ancient Mesopotamia, was the lingua franca of the Near East during the second millennium B.C.E. This is stated, more or less in so many words, in any number of works on the ancient Near East, which usually offer the Amarna letters, the trove of correspondence between Egypt and other states that was found at the site of Akhetaten (Tell el-Amarna), as the parade example of Akkadian as lingua franca. (1) But is the truism true? The idea that Akkadian was in common use as a written language throughout the ancient Near East, Egypt included, tacitly assumes the exact identity of writing with language: it assumes, that is, that what people write represents at face value the language in which they mean to communicate. According to this theory, if a scribe in Hatti or Egypt, Canaan or Cyprus, writes in cuneiform using sign sequences that spell Akkadian words, he means to write in the Akkadian language, regardless of whether what he writes exhibits features of his own or another language as well as errors in Akkadian. But this idea conflates the modality of encoding linguistic expression with linguistic expression itself. It need not be the case that the signs with which a text is written directly represent the language in which it is written, and to assume that this is the case is inherently problematic when the writing system in question is one such as cuneiform, which tends to employ a variety of frozen graphic sequences (e.g., logograms) dissociated from language-specific referents. When such a writing system is borrowed from one language community into another, the assumption that the language of a text is directly represented by the writing of the text becomes so problematic that it should be treated as a proposition requiring demonstration rather than an axiom to be taken for granted.