saqqu
SAK-koo
Akkadian
“The humble cloth bag — carried to markets, filled with flour, thrown over soldiers' shoulders — has an Akkadian name pressed into clay four thousand years ago, making sack one of the oldest everyday English words still in circulation.”
The Akkadian word saqqu (sometimes transcribed as saqum) designated a coarse-woven cloth bag or sack, typically made from wool, goat hair, or plant fiber, used to carry and store goods. Akkadian trade documents from Ur and Nippur — clay tablets listing commercial inventories from the Old Babylonian period (c. 2000–1600 BCE) — record saqqu among standard containers for grain, dried goods, and other commodities. The Akkadian term is cognate with Hebrew śaq (שַׂק), which appears in Genesis when Joseph's brothers return to Egypt with grain: their 'sacks' are śaq, the same coarse woven bag the Akkadian merchant used. Hebrew śaq also designated the rough cloth worn by mourners in lamentation — sackcloth — a garment of deliberate discomfort that signaled grief and submission.
The word moved westward through the Semitic languages and into Greek as sákkos (σάκκος) — a coarse bag or cloth of rough weave, already carrying both the commercial meaning (a bag for goods) and the penitential meaning (rough cloth worn as a sign of mourning or contrition). Greek sákkos came from the same Semitic root that gave Hebrew śaq, whether directly from Phoenician trade contact or through Aramaic intermediaries. The Greek word was adopted into Latin as saccus — the everyday Latin word for a bag of any kind — and from there it spread through all the Romance languages (French sac, Italian sacco, Spanish saco) while simultaneously entering Old English as sacc.
The English word sack has accumulated multiple distinct meanings across its history, each one a separate branch from the original bag. The verb 'to sack' meaning 'to plunder a city' derives from the soldiers filling their sacks with loot — a linguistic record of the material experience of ancient and medieval warfare. 'To give someone the sack' or 'to get the sack' (meaning dismissal from employment) derives from the 18th-century practice of workmen carrying their tools in a sack, which was returned to them when employment ended. The geological term 'sac' (a pouch-like cavity in a living organism) and 'cul-de-sac' (literally 'bottom of the bag' in French) are extensions of the same spatial metaphor.
The Akkadian saqqu is thus one of the most generative loan-words in English, having produced not just the noun but a family of idioms, a verb for plunder, a verb for dismissal, a suffix in medical anatomy, and a geographical term. Few words from any ancient language are so embedded in English at so many registers — from the grain merchant's inventory to the football manager's phone call to the anatomist's drawing. The Mesopotamian cloth bag, pressed into cuneiform on a tablet at Ur, became one of the most productive words in the English language.
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Today
Sack is a word that has been continuously in use in English for over a thousand years, through Old English, Middle English, and Modern English, without a single century of interruption — and it was already ancient when it arrived. The Akkadian merchant's inventory and the English language are connected by an unbroken chain of speakers who needed a word for a cloth bag.
The English idiom 'to get the sack' (to be dismissed from work) is now so embedded that few people connect it to an actual bag. But the concrete origin was real: the workman whose services were no longer needed received back his sack of tools. The Akkadian container became a metaphor for economic dispensability — a long way from the grain merchants of Ur, but still the same bag.
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