LONDON, Oct 1: The language of the Epic of Gilgamesh and King Hammurabi has found a new life online after being dead for some 2,000 years.

Academics from across the world have recorded audio of Babylonian epics, poems, and even a magic spell to the Internet in an effort to help scholars and laymen understand what the language of the ancient Middle East sounded like.

The answer? Cambridge Universitys Martin Worthington told journalists that it's “a bit like a mixture of Arabic and Italian”.

Babylonia was among the world's first civilisations and produced some of its earliest pieces of literature. Its people also play a central role in the Bible. Babylons soaring, pyramid-shaped Temple of Marduk is thought to have inspired the tale of the Tower of Babel, while their conquest of the Kingdom of Judah in the early sixth century BC led to the deportation and exile of the nation's Jewish population.

The Babylonian language, written on clay tablets in cuneiform script, dominated the Middle East for centuries before it was gradually displaced by Aramaic. After a long decline, it disappeared from use altogether sometime in the first century AD _ and was only deciphered nearly two millennia later by 19th-century European academics.

Worthington, who specialises in the study of Babylonian language and literature, said he got the idea of posting audio recordings of the ancient tongue to the Web because “the questions which students of ancient languages most frequently hear from laymen are: 'How did they sound? And how do you know?'”—AP