Cuneiform 102 · Chapter 06

Names that are sentences

The last chapter closed with a dedication formula assembled from your own inventory. This one opens with something stranger and more personal: the discovery that the people on these tablets — the farmers, overseers, and scribes of the receipts — carry names that are complete little sentences, built from signs you already own. First, the batch that makes it possible.

Batch seven

Write each five times, saying šu, ma, igi aloud. Two of the three are pictures that survived the wedge; MA is the other kind of sign — pure sound, no story — and knowing which kind you are holding is by now an old habit.

Grammar bite — a name is a sentence

Sumerian parents did not pick names from a list of name-words. They composed them — a wish, a thanks, a boast, folded into a phrase and handed to a child. The name lists of the earliest school tablets are, sign for sign, made of the same grammar this course has been teaching: possession, cases, the verb at the end. Which means every name below is a one-line reading exercise.

Start with one you could have read five chapters ago:

Three signs, three words: lugal the king, gal “great,” zu the knowing — and the gloss’s two readings differ only in how they wire them: is the king the one who knows greatness, or the great one who knows you? Names compress harder than sentences, and editors keep both wirings open. Either way, a subject, a verb — a sentence someone answered to. Now the new batch goes to work on two more, from the same genre of tablets:

Ur- plus a god’s name — “servant (literally: dog, loyal as one) of DN” — is one of the most common name shapes in the language: you met the god Dumuzi’s servants and king Ur-Nammu’s namesakes without knowing it. MA doubles itself into the goddess’s name. And en-šu compresses further than editors can confidently unfold — the translation stays honest about that.

The eye that makes it legal

Why teach 𒅆IGI · [igi] · eye; face; before — igi PN, "witnessed by" in a chapter about names? Because on the receipts, a name’s most frequent job is not to boast or to pray — it is to witness. Sumerian contracts close with a list of people introduced, each one, by the eye:

“Before the eye of So-and-so”: the witness’s presence is the legal act, and the scribes wrote it with the body part that did the work. When a case tag joins on, you can read that too — from the same Šuruppak archives:

One more thing MA can do

A last reading, two signs, and a word you already use in English — because it never stopped being used:

Silver by the minathe Mesopotamian pound: a weight of about 500 grams, divided into sixty shekels — silver by the mina was serious wealth, barley by the gurthe big Mesopotamian grain measure — three hundred sila of roughly a liter each, so about 300 liters of barley; the granary's counterpart to the silver-scale's mina: with 101’s 𒄥GUR · [gur] · gur — the great capacity measure of grain accounts and this chapter’s 𒈠MA · [ma] · [ma] — a spelling workhorse𒈾NA · [na] · [na]; stone in some words you now hold both pans of the Sumerian economy’s scale.

Drill before you go on

1. Write 𒋗ŠU · [šu] · hand, 𒈠MA · [ma] · [ma] — a spelling workhorse, 𒅆IGI · [igi] · eye; face; before — igi PN, "witnessed by" from memory; say šu, ma, igi.
2. Read all five readings above cold, covering translit and gloss.
3. Compose, in transliterationthe sign-by-sign rendering of ancient writing in modern letters, so every sign stays accountable only, a witness line introducing ur-ma-ma: igi + the name. Then write it in signs — every sign is yours.
4. Explain in one sentence why a Sumerian name can be read at all — what is it made of?

Next: the little word that lets a king say “I am” — and the palace-sized vocabulary that follows it.