Françoise Briquel Chatonnet is Senior Researcher in the team “Orient et Méditerranée” at CNRS (Paris). She works on Ancient History of the Levant, Semitic epigraphy and the history of the Semitic alphabet, the history of the Hebrew Bible, and also on Syriac manuscripts and the history of Syriac Christianity.

Dennis R.M. Campbell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at San Francisco State University. He specializes in the history and languages of the Ancient Near East with particular focus on Hittite, Hurrian, and Urartian. He has further worked on the administrative material written in Elamite from the Achaemenid Period.

Amalia Catagnoti currently is an Associate Professor of Assyriology at the University of Florence (Italy). She specializes in the study of the 3rd millennium Ebla Texts, publishing administrative and chancery documents. She has written the first comprehensive grammar of the Ebla language.

C. Jay Crisostomo is Assistant Professor of Assyriology at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on Mesopotamian scribal practices and language, in particular Sumerian‐Akkadian multilingualism and translation practices.

Peter T. Daniels is an independent scholar living in New Jersey specializing on writing systems and their typology. He received his advanced degree from the University of Chicago and has taught at the University of Wisconsin‐Milwaukee and Chicago State University.

Margaretha Folmer is a Lecturer at the University of Leiden (Netherlands) and associate professor of Biblical Hebrew at the Vrije Universteit Amsterdam, working on Aramaic language and linguistics, with special focus on Imperial and Qumran Aramaic, Targumic and Biblical literature, language contact, bilingualism, and ancient Jewish Magic.

Viktor Golinets is Professor for Hebrew Linguistics at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien, Heidelberg (Germany). His main research interests are the philological investigation of Northwest Semitic languages, especially Amorite and Hebrew, with focus on their epigraphic attestations and onomasticon.

Rebecca Hasselbach‐Andee is Associate Professor of Comparative Semitics at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the reconstruction of the Semitic language family and individual Semitic languages, especially Akkadian, from a historical linguistic and typological perspective. In more recent work, she has also incorporated socio‐linguistic approaches to Semitic languages.

Robert Hawley holds the chair (directeur d’études) in “Religions and cultures of the ancient Levant” at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, France. His research and teaching touch on various aspects of Northwest Semitic epigraphy, philology, and the history of Levantine scribal traditions, with a special focus on Ugaritic studies.

Christian W. Hess is assistant at the department of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). He specializes in the linguistic and literary analysis of Akkadian, in particular the structure and use of the Akkadian literary dialect known as “Standard Babylonian”.

Aaron Koller is professor of Near Eastern and Jewish Studies at Yeshiva University, where he is chair of the Beren Department of Jewish Studies. His is the author of Esther in Ancient Jewish Thought (Cambridge University Press) and Unbinding Isaac: The Akedah in Jewish Thought (JPS/University of Nebraska Press), and numerous studies in Semitic philology. Aaron Koller has served as a visiting professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and held research fellowships at the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research and the Hartman Institute. He lives in Queens, NY with his wife, Shira Hecht‐Koller, and their children.

Antonio Loprieno is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Basel (Switzerland), where he also acted as president from 2006‐2015. His main research foci are on Egyptian and Semitic linguistics, Egyptian literature and higher education leadership.

Craig Melchert is the A. Richard Diebold Emeritus Professor of Indo‐European Studies and Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work focuses on Anatolian Linguistics, including studies on Hittite, Luwian, Lycian, and other Anatolian languages.

Piotr Michalowski is the George G. Cameron Emeritus Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations at the University of Michigan, where he taught for thirty‐five years. He is the author of numerous articles and books on all aspects of early Mesopotamian cultures, on literature, history, historiography, magic, and languages.

Ludwig Morenz is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Bonn. His research focuses on early Egyptian writing, Ancient Egyptian literature (especially literature of the Middle Kingdom), and ancient Egyptian society.

Matthias Müller is a research associate for Egyptology and Ancient History at the University of Basel (Switzerland). His focus is on Coptic and Ancient Egyptian, although he has also worked on Akkadian and its grammar in texts from Egypt.

Christopher Rollston is Professor of Northwest Semitic Languages and Literatures at George Washington University. His expertise includes Northwest Semitic epigraphy, literacy in the ancient world, ancient scribal practices and scribal education, and the origins and early usages of the alphabet.

Seth Sanders is Professor of Religious Studies at UC Davis and focuses on the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew, and comparative religion. One of his recent projects is a comparison between ancient Babylonian, Hebrew, and Aramaic scholarship.

Thomas Schneider is Professor of Egyptology and Near Eastern Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He has published widely on Egyptian interconnections with the Levant and the Near East, Egyptian history and chronology, Egyptian historical phonology, and the history of Egyptology in Nazi Germany.

Christian Stadel is Senior Lecturer in the department of Hebrew language at the Ben‐Gurion University of the Negev (Beer Sheva, Israel). His research focuses on the Aramaic language of various periods, in particular Old and Imperial Aramaic as well as Middle and Late Aramaic dialects such as Qumran Aramaic and Samaritan Aramaic.

Peter Stein is Associate Professor for Semitic Studies working in the Faculties of Theology at the Universities of Jena and Erfurt (Germany). His research focuses on the Arabian Peninsula in Antiquity, in particular on the epigraphic documentation in the Ancient South Arabian languages and in Aramaic.

Jan Tavernier is Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). His research focus includes Elamite and Old Iranian linguistics, Ancient Near Eastern (esp. Old Iranian, Akkadian and Elamite) onomastics, and the linguistic history of the Achaemenid Empire.

Juan Pablo Vita is a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid. He works on Northwest Semitic languages (especially Ugaritic) and Akkadian, in particular peripheral Akkadian dialects such as those from Ugarit and Emar, the Akkadian of the Amarna period (Canaano‐Akkadian), and language contact.

Mark Weeden is Senior Lecturer in Ancient Near Eastern Studies at SOAS, University of London, where he works on and teaches Ancient Near Eastern languages, literature, history, and scribal practices with special focus on Anatolia and Hittite.

Michael Wingert is a Lecturer in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focus is on the Hebrew and Aramaic biblical traditions, as well as on Iron Age Mesopotamia from a philological, historical, and socio‐linguistic perspective.

Christopher Woods is the John A. Wilson Professor of Sumerian at the University of Chicago and currently the director of the Oriental Institute (Chicago). His research focuses on Sumerian writing and language, as well as early Mesopotamian religion, literature, and mathematics.

Ilya Yakubovich holds research appointments at the Russian Academy of Sciences and the University of Marburg (Germany). His main academic interest is the linguistic and philological study of ancient Indo‐European languages, in particular, those belonging to the Anatolian and Iranian groups. In addition, he made contribution to the study of language contact in ancient societies.

The current volume serves as an introduction to a representative sample of Ancient Near Eastern languages and language families attested during the time period of roughly 3200 BCE to the second century CE. This time‐frame reflects the time from the beginning of writing (around 3200 BCE) to the end of cuneiform writing in the second century CE. The geographical scope selected reaches from Egypt through the Levant, Anatolia, northern Syria, Mesopotamia, all the way to southern Arabia and thus reflects all major cultures attested in the Ancient Near East during this time period. Although it was impossible to include a description of all languages attested in this wide geographical area throughout more than three millennia due to limitations in space, at least the majority of language families are represented, such as Egyptian, Sumerian, Semitic, Indo‐European, Elamite, and Hurrian.

As the reader will notice, this volume differs in various aspects from other existing overviews of Ancient Near Eastern languages. Although it contains chapters that include grammatical descriptions of individual Ancient Near Eastern languages, the focus of this volume is not so much on the detailed representation of the grammatical features of these languages, but rather on their context within Ancient Near Eastern societies and cultures, that is, on their socio‐linguistic contexts. The language chapters thus also contain sections on language contact and related phenomena whenever it was possible to include such information – in some cases, as for example concerning Amorite, no sufficient data exist for describing such socio‐linguistic features so far. The descriptions of the languages themselves are meant to provide the reader with a general idea of how they looked like and what kind of evidence there is for each of them and should not be taken as a comprehensive overview of the languages’ grammar.

In addition to the chapters on individual languages, the volume includes various sections on socio‐linguistic phenomena such as the use of various languages as administrative languages in the second and first millennia BCE (Akkadian and Aramaic), a section on language contact between various Ancient Near Eastern languages, such as Sumerian and Akkadian, Egyptian and Northwest Semitic, Hebrew and Aramaic, and a general chapter on multilingualism and diglossia in the Ancient Near East. Another section addresses the creation and use of literary languages and the influence of scribal cultures on each other that are attested in the broader Ancient Near East, such as the creation of a literary variant of Egyptian and Akkadian, the literary and scribal influence of Sumerian on Anatolia and the Ancient Near Eastern literary influence on the Hebrew Bible. These chapters are meant to give an introduction to the complex interactions that Ancient Near Eastern societies and cultures, and thus their languages, had with each other. Ancient Near Eastern languages did not exist in a vacuum, as overviews of these languages that solely deal with grammatical descriptions often seem to suggest, but they were in constant contact with each other and thus influenced each other. Although research into Ancient Near Eastern language contact, bilingualism, etc. has become popular in recent years, the field is still in its infancy and much is still unknown which languages or language varieties people in these societies actually spoke and how exactly the languages interacted. This volume attempts to bring together the work of scholars in different sub‐branches of Ancient Near Eastern studies in order to provide a starting point for further research and research questions.

Lastly, four chapters are devoted to the emergence and development of the major writing systems used in the Ancient Near East and the story of their decipherment, including cuneiform writing, Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, and alphabetic writing.

The chapters of the volume are meant to interconnect, but also to serve as ‘stand‐alone’ chapters, meaning they can be read without reference to other chapters in the volume. This approach has resulted in a few minor repetitions between the language and other chapters, which were necessary for the overall concept of the book and which I hope will not detract from the value of each contribution.

I am very thankful to all the contributors who have so graciously lent their time and expertise to making this volume possible, which, I hope, might be of interest to a broad variety of scholars and readers in general. Thanks should also go to the team at Wiley Blackwell for bringing the book to Production.