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Motion verbs and the ventive in the correspondence of Samsi-Addu, the king of Upper Mesopotamia (early eighteenth century bc)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 August 2025

Ilya Arkhipov  and
Sergey Loesov Open the ORCID record for Sergey Loesov [Opens in a new window]
Ilya Arkhipov*
Affiliation:
Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation
Sergey Loesov
Affiliation:
Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation
*
Corresponding author: Ilya Arkhipov; Email: arkhipoff@mail.ru
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Abstract

The Akkadian ventive is now well understood as a marker that points to the location of the speech act participants. Nonetheless, there remain other domains of its usage which still need clarification. We endeavour to describe these domains of the ventive’s usage, relying upon a single-writer corpus of 178 Old Babylonian letters – those of Samsi-Addu, the king of Upper Mesopotamia (early eighteenth century bc), which contains c. 500 tokens of the ventive.

Keywords

Akkadianassociated motioncislocativemotion verbsOld Babylonianventive

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Bulletin of SOAS , First View , pp. 1 - 23
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of SOAS University of London.

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