Cuneiform 102 · Chapter 18

Reference

The lexical lists were chapter 09 of 101; the colophona scribe's closing note on a tablet or manuscript — title, owner, date, the ancient equivalent of a title page at the end was chapter 16 of this course. This page is both at once: the course’s own sign list, generated live from its registry, with the scribe’s closing line implied. The track that began with three signs and a promise is complete.

Every sign taught in 102

51 signs taught in this course — counted live from the registry — on top of 101’s twenty-six: seventy-seven in all. Set against the corpora, your inventory now covers a little over half of all sign-value occurrences in both Sumerian literature and the administrative record (a floor, as chapter 00’s chart explains — polyvalent signs cover more than we count). Values in the Reads column are each sign’s primary teaching value; veterans picked up further readings along the way (lil₂, i₃, ke₄, išib, tum₂, de₃, be₂) exactly where readings demanded them.

The grammar, shelved

• The sentence: participants first, verb last (ch. 01).
• The cases, all seven with taught examples: the table in chapter 13.
• The genitivethe grammatical case of possession or belonging — "the king's house", "lord of Lagash"’s hidden /k/ and when it surfaces (chs. 02, 07, 11).
• The verbal chain: negation and wishes outermost (nu-, ga-, ha-, na-), finite openers next (i₃-, in-, ba-, mu- and its fused ma-), the dativethe grammatical case meaning "to, for (someone)" — Sumerian marks it with -ra -na- inside, stem, and trailing suffixes mostly glimpsed (chs. 04, 08, 09, 12, 14).
• The nominalizing -a, folding a clause into a description — “who ate,” “built by an honest man” (chs. 08, 14); its noun-riding twin, the locativethe grammatical case meaning "in, on, at" — Sumerian marks it with -a -a, sits in the case table.
• The copulaa word or word-part meaning "to be," linking a subject to what it is — Sumerian attaches it to the word itself: lugal-me-en, "I am king" -me-en for “I am” and “you are,” with za-e settling person (chs. 07, 13); third-person -am₃ previewed only.
• Doubling for plurals, intensity, and refrains (chs. 03, 09, 10, 17).
• nam- and niŋ₂- building abstractions and things (chs. 03, 09); nam tar, fate as a thing cut (ch. 17).

What this course left explicitly unopened: the chain’s dimensional suffix machinery, the -eda purpose-wrapper’s internal parts, the emesal register, and everything Akkadian. Those are another course’s promises, not broken ones.

Conventions used in this course

The full law lives in the school’s rulebook alongside 101’s Reference conventions; the essentials:

• Transliterationthe sign-by-sign rendering of ancient writing in modern letters, so every sign stays accountable in ATF style with Unicode subscript indexes (e₂, gu₇); the velar nasal printed ŋ; corpus ASCII (sza3, ce3) only in verbatim quotes, marked as such.
• Every reading’s script is resolved through the Oracc Sign List via the Nabu library — glyphs are looked up, never guessed.
• ▢ marks a sign not yet taught; determinativesa silent sign at the end (in cuneiform, often the front) of a word that classifies it — person, god, place, motion — never pronounced sit in braces ({d}, {ki}), silent; hyphens join the signs of one word.
• Every ancient line carries its URN and license class in place: CDLI quotes are license attribution with artifact links; ETCSL quotes are short and labeled non-commercial.

Further study

• Daniel Foxvog, Introduction to Sumerian Grammar (open access) — the reference this course’s grammar bites lean on, cited in chapters 00 and 01; when you want the full chain, start there.
• The open corpora this course reads from: the CDLI and the ETCSL, reachable with per-passage licenses through the Nabu library.
• Next in this school: 103 · Akkadian — the script’s second life in a Semitic tongue, open and reading the Codex Hammurapi.

Sources and licenses

Original prose on this page and throughout the course is CC BY-SA 4.0. Ancient texts are quoted in place with URNs throughout: CDLI material under license class attribution, ETCSL material as short quotes under its non-commercial terms (the site’s LICENSE carries the source-texts carve-out). The votivegiven to a god in fulfillment of a vow — votive objects carry dedication inscriptions inscriptions of chapters 11–12 and every name list and receipt behind chapters 06–17 remain one click away, whole, through their URNs — which was the promise of the tablet house all along: the texts outlive everyone who copies them.