Cuneiform 102 · Chapter 10

In those days

Last chapter’s proverbs came from the same clay as a receipt: a household voice, a wish, a complaint any clerk could write between two tallies. This chapter changes rooms. Hymns and epics are not written by clerks keeping count; they are composed to be spoken, to a god or about a king, and Sumerian marks that shift with its own habits of opening, praising, and repeating. Batch eleven gives you the vocabulary the shift runs on.

Batch eleven

Five times each, aloud as you write: zi, a₂, ri. Small batch, large job: between them these three signs open more hymns and close more praise-lines than any other three in the literary inventory.

Grammar bite — a register that addresses, not counts

A receipt names a person, a quantity, a witness, and stops — it counts. A hymn opens by reaching backward in time and then speaks to someone: a god, a king, a temple. Sumerian marks the difference partly in what it says and partly in fixed phrases that a receipt never needs. The clearest of them is the formula that starts a composition rather than a sentence — Sumerian’s own way of saying “once upon a time”:

Ud, “day,” you have owned since 101; this chapter’s RI sign, read re here rather than ri, supplies the “that” — pointing not at today but at a day pushed off into the distance, the way a storyteller’s “once” pushes its story out of the present. The last sign is the quietest: the locativethe grammatical case meaning "in, on, at" — Sumerian marks it with -a -a from chapter 01’s tag list, carrying the “in” — day, distant, in. A hymn does not announce when it happens; it announces that it happened then, in days already far away, and lets that distance carry the weight.

The other mark of the register is a fixed praise-word riding on a noun: en zid, “true lord”; e₂ zid, “true house.” Ordinary prose does not stack “true” onto every lord and every house it mentions; literary Sumerian does, routinely, and the sense drifts from “genuine” toward something closer to “worthy of the name” — a seal of approval stamped by the word zid itself.¹

True son, true arm

The plainest use of zi(d) is not in a hymn at all — it is stitched into names, the way chapter 06 taught you names carry sentences:

Dumu, “son,” is 101’s TUR sign in its usual reading, a veteran here; zi is new. A god’s name and an ordinary person’s name are built from the identical two signs — the tablet does not tell you which came first, the name or the divinity.

This chapter’s other new sign joins zid inside one more attested name, both new signs sharing a single word:

A₂ zid-da, “the right side,” is literally “the true arm” — and the -da is chapter 03’s sign doing spelling-glue work, writing out zid’s own final /d/ with a vowel to carry it, exactly the job -la- did inside chapter 05’s formula. A single name, both of this chapter’s new signs, no gaps.

Lady of the true powers

Move from names to the hymns proper, and zid stops decorating a person and starts decorating a god:

The catalogue that filed a composition under ud re-a files another under this: a hymn to a lady — not merely the lady who holds the me, chapter 00’s word for the divine powers that keep the world running, but the lady of the true ones. Praise in this register rarely stops at naming what someone holds; it certifies the holding as genuine.

Poured out by the great mountain

Zid and ri meet in a single praise-line from the same temple hymn that gave last chapter’s “its heart is unknowable”:

Piece by piece, in the line’s own order:

• en zid — “true lord”: the register’s seal of approval, here on the temple’s own god.
• a — “water,” 101’s very first sign, in its oldest metaphor: the engendering seed. Everything after this word describes where that seed came from.
• kur gal-e — “the great mountain,” one of the god Enlil’s own praise-names, wearing the doer’s tag -e you first met on lugal-e back in chapter 01: the mountain is the one doing what comes next.
• ri-a — two small pieces doing the line’s biggest work. Ri here is not this chapter’s “distant”: it is the same sign’s other job, a verb — “to pour out, to set upon.” And the final -a is the describer ring you met on chapter 08’s lion line: it folds the sentence “the great mountain poured the seed” into a description hung back on the lord — “true lord, seed-poured-out-by-the-great-mountain.” Chapter 14 opens that ring properly.

One sign, two lives in one chapter: ri the pointer (“that distant day”) and ri the verb (“poured out”). Context — and the company each keeps — tells you which you are reading. Four of this chapter’s readings stack the same word, zid, over four different kinds of nobility — a son, an arm, a set of powers, a lord — and every time it means the same thing: this one is the real one.

A house says it twice

Praise is not the register’s only mode. When a temple falls, the same zid returns inside a different kind of line — one that says its point by saying it again:

A opens the line — the same water-sign you have owned since 101’s first chapter, wearing yet another job here: not “water” but a bare cry of grief, “alas.” E₂ zid, “true house,” is 101’s e₂ carrying this chapter’s praise-word; lu₂-bi, “its people,” is 101’s lu₂ with chapter 01’s -bi. Nothing in the line is new grammar — what is new is the habit of saying the same true thing twice before moving on, so that the loss lands twice as hard. A receipt never repeats a line for effect; a lament always does.

Drill before you go on

1. Write 𒍣ZI · [zi] · breath, life; true, righteous, 𒀉A₂ · [a] · arm; strength; side — a₂ zid-da, the right side, 𒊑RI · [ri] · [ri]; distant — ud ri-a, "in those days" from memory; say zi, a₂, ri.
2. Read ud re-a aloud and explain, in one sentence, what job the “distant” sense of ri/re is doing there — then name the other job ri works in this chapter’s last praise-line.
3. Name the four different nouns that zid attaches to across this chapter’s readings, and say in one sentence what the word adds each time.
4. Write a₂-zid-da and e₂ zid from memory, sign by sign, and say which chapters taught every sign in each.
5. Explain why a lament repeats e₂ zid and lu₂-bi instead of saying each once.

Next: a real dedication, read whole from actual stone.