Cuneiform 101 · Chapter 12

Reference

The scribes of the é-dub-ba-a opened their training with sign lists and never stopped consulting them; chapter 09 called the lexical lists the first dictionaries. This page is this course’s own small entry in that four-thousand-year-old genre — and unlike a clay list, it is generated directly from the course’s sign registry, so it can never drift out of date with the chapters.

Every sign taught in 101

Frequency, the founding criterion, is on display for every sign: the rank of the sign’s cited value in the ETCSL literary and CDLI documentary corpora, computed by this site’s own instrument over the Nabu library (graphic simplicity, the other half of the rule, weighed in at selection and needs no column). Origins are graded classic / stated / unclear per the standard sign lists (Labat; Borger’s MZL). Where the origin is graded unclear, the course taught you the shape, not a story.

26 signs — counted live from the registry, so this number can never lie — make a genuine working inventory: enough to read the structural skeleton of every Ur III royal titularya ruler's full formal string of names and titles, repeated in fixed order on monuments, compose any number below sixty, parse determinativesa silent sign at the end (in cuneiform, often the front) of a word that classifies it — person, god, place, motion — never pronounced on sight, spell with workhorse syllables, and see the workshop moves inside compound signs. The Sumerian track takes the inventory onward, in frequency-and-simplicity order, toward full reading literacy.

Conventions used in this course

All transliterationthe sign-by-sign rendering of ancient writing in modern letters, so every sign stays accountable in Edubba follows the field-standard ATF style of the CDLI and Oracc corpora:

• Values in lowercase, with index numbers distinguishing homophonous signs: e₂ is the second sign read e (the sign É). Edubba always prints the index as a subscript; the corpora’s plain ASCII writes it full-size (e2), a form this site shows only when quoting raw ATF.
• š is written sz in CDLI’s ASCII spelling (szul-gi = šulgi); the ETCSL corpus uses c for the same sound in its own files. This site prints š where typography allows and notes the ASCII forms beside real corpus data.
• Determinativesa silent sign at the end (in cuneiform, often the front) of a word that classifies it — person, god, place, motion — never pronounced in braces, unpronounced: {d} (𒀭AN · [an], diŋir · heaven; god) before divine names, {ki} (𒆠KI · [ki] · earth; place) after place names.
• Hyphens join the signs spelling one word.
• […] encloses text broken away and restored by editors; # marks a damaged but legible sign; a prime (′) on a line number means the surface’s top is lost and counting starts at the first surviving line.
• ▢ in a reading’s script column stands for transliterated value(s) whose sign has not yet been taught — a placeholder the course fills as your inventory grows, never a gap in the original.
• Citations: every ancient text on this site carries its Nabu URN (e.g. urn:nabu:cdli:p101077:seal.1), its source collection, and its license class. Follow the URN and you reach the tablet.

Further study

• Irving Finkel & Jonathan Taylor, Cuneiform (British Museum Press, 2015) — the best short introduction to the script as a whole; this course cites it throughout.
• C. B. F. Walker, Cuneiform (Reading the Past series, British Museum) — a compact classic on the script and its decipherment.
• The open corpora this course reads from: the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), Oracc, and the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) — all reachable, with per-passage licenses, through the Nabu library.
• Next in this school: 102 · Sumerian — the literacy track this course was built to feed.

Sources and licenses

Original prose on this page and throughout the course is CC BY-SA 4.0. The ancient texts quoted in chapters 04 and 06 come from CDLI (license class: attribution) and are cited in place with URNs. Sign frequencies were counted over Nabu’s ETCSL and CDLI holdings — 36,501 lines of Sumerian literature and about 1.5 million lines of administrative documents.