AHC: Akkadian and/or Sumerian languages survive until the present

[Mongo]

There's still the matter of the storage media, though; as far as I know, cuneiform never "made the jump" from stone and clay to lighter, more portable materials like parchment or ceramic ostraca. If it were able to do that, then Aramaic would have very few concrete advantages over it indeed.

If Akkadian writing had made the jump to parchment, would we even know? Parchment is not exactly imperishable after all. I have heard it speculated by well-known Greekists, that almost all documents in Linear B would have been written on parchment (or perhaps papyrus), but that only writings on clay survived to the present. Ironically, the surviving texts were actually the least valuable ones, not considered to be worth the expense of writing them on parchment, but only on cheap and easily recyclable clay. The ones we have were all baked in the fires that caused the destruction of the buildings they were located in, they were not intended to be kept for more than a fairly short time.

 

[Leo Caesius]

Since there's a fairly large corpus of Aramaic texts inscribed upon ceramic with ink from the same region, I expect we'd find at least one example of inked Akkadian also written upon ceramic.

Given also that texts on papyrus in a variety of regional languages have survived in neighboring Egypt, I'd also want to look there for evidence that Akkadian had made the jump.

The truth be told, clay was abundant in Mesopotamia but papyrus would have to be imported from Egypt, and there's no evidence that they numbered parchment-making among their crafts (even though we have an incredible amount of information about crafts and trades in Mesopotamia from the enormous literature in clay). For those reasons, I don't believe that Akkadian made the jump.

 

[Roger II]

What about writing boards? Or were those only used for Aramaic? Also, when would be the best time for a spelling reform? It seems like we'd want to have it fairly early on(maybe even Old Babylonian or earlier), before Sumerian is too heavily entrenched as a literary language and while schooling practices are in a greater degree of flux.