Clearly this isn't intended as a serious way of "ranking" languages, but I wish there was a way to measure the "efficiency" of languages from the same geographic setup (and, preferably, family) but in different time periods, e.g. Akkadian vs. Babylonian vs. early Hebrew vs. early Arabic.

One would expect the efficiency to improve over time, but maybe this is not true.

Is there anything in this topic that one can read?