Cuneiform 101 · Chapter 07

Of gods and men

Start with the signs, as always — three of them, and the first two have been hiding inside a sign you already write.

Write each five times before reading on. Then look at what you have.

The king, disassembled

Chapter 06 taught you 𒈗LUGAL · [lugal] · king lugal, “king”, as one sign. Here is the open secret of its construction, plain in the earliest forms of the sign and still described this way in the standard sign lists:

Sumerian built titles the same way it built compounds like an-ki: transparently. The king is the big man; a queen’s palace, the e₂-gal — “big house” — a word you can now write yourself: 𒂍É · [e] · house, temple𒃲GAL · [gal] · big, great. (It traveled far: e₂-gal was borrowed into Akkadian as ēkallu, and echoes of it survive in several later languages of the region for “palace” and “temple”.)

Son of: the formula that names everybody

Mesopotamia had no surnames. A person was identified by name and father: X dumu Y — “X, son of Y” — often with a trade or title appended. This filiation formula fills rosters, contracts, and seals; after the royal titularya ruler's full formal string of names and titles, repeated in fixed order on monuments of chapter 06 it is the most useful single pattern a beginner can own. Here it is in the wild, in two consecutive lines of an Ur III personnel roster from Girsu:

Read the skeleton with your own inventory: dumu — your new sign 𒌉TUR · [dumu], tur · child, son; small — then a name, then a trade. Elsewhere on the same tablet a man is listed as lu₂-{d}nin-gir₂-su, “Man-of-Ningirsu”: your 𒇽LU₂ · [lu] · man, person, opening a personal name.

Gods inside names

That last example shows the other half of this chapter’s title. Mesopotamian personal names are tiny sentences, and gods live inside them: Man-of-Ningirsu, Ur-Nanše, Amar-Suen (“calf of Suen” — the king from chapter 06). In writing, every one of those divine names is flagged by the silent determinativea silent sign at the end (in cuneiform, often the front) of a word that classifies it — person, god, place, motion — never pronounced you have known since chapter 03: 𒀭AN · [an], diŋir · heaven; god, the star, whispering a god is named here to the reader and nothing at all to the ear. Scan any list of Sumerian names and the stars glitter down the column — which is exactly how a beginning reader picks names out of a dense tablet: find the 𒀭AN · [an], diŋir · heaven; god, find the people.

Drill before you go on

1. Write 𒇽LU₂ · [lu] · man, person, 𒃲GAL · [gal] · big, great, 𒌉TUR · [dumu], tur · child, son; small from memory; say lu₂, gal, dumu.
2. Write e₂-gal and explain to an imaginary student why the king is a “big man” — with glyphs.
3. From chapter 06’s Reading 1, find the divine determinativesa silent sign at the end (in cuneiform, often the front) of a word that classifies it — person, god, place, motion — never pronounced again — how many gods hide in the Amar-Suen seal?
4. Compose your own filiation line for yourself in the pattern X dumu Y (transliterationthe sign-by-sign rendering of ancient writing in modern letters, so every sign stays accountable is fine — your name has no cuneiform spelling yet; chapter 11 explains how the decipherers dealt with exactly that problem for foreign names).

Next: the workshop — how scribes hatched, nested, and compounded old signs into new ones, starting with a head you have met before.