Babylonia). Akkadian comprises two dialects, Babylonian and Assyrian. We have cuneiform documents in Akkadian from the second half of the third millennium B.C. down to the beginning of the Christian era(1). (1) There is an earlier stage, Old Akkadian, though it is not certain that Babylonian and Assyrian are direct linear descendants of it. The standard grammar is W. von Soden, Grundriss der akkadischen Grammatik (Rome, 1952) with Ergänzungsheft (Rome, 1969); for a dictionary one has idem, Akkadisches