Cuneiform 103 · Chapter 12
Warm-up · 6 quick retrievals from earlier chapters
𒈗 [šarrum] — what does it mean?
king · LUGAL · veteran — LUGAL gains [šarrum]: the king-sign as a sumerogram ↩
Say to him: a letter
The stele is Akkadian in its Sunday clothes. The other half of Old Babylonian literacy is the letter — clay the size of a bar of soap, carried in a clay envelope, opening with a formula every schoolchild drilled. Today you read real mail.
Batch thirteen
| Sign | Name | Key | Reads | Means | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 𒅀 | IA | my | [ia] | i and a fused in one sign | a ligature — 𒄿 welded to 𒀀 — writing the -ya of "my" |
| 𒊹 | ŠAR2 | myriad | [šar] | 3600 — the number of everything | the round number the scribes used for "beyond counting"; a blessing measures life in it |
| 𒄰 | KAM | ordinal | [kam] | the counting tag after numbers | after a numeral, English's "-th" — MU ŠAR2.KAM, "a 3600th year" |
| 𒆠 | KI | place | [qi] | — | veteran — 101's place-sign, pressed to qi |
| 𒉈 | NE | brazier | [bi] | — | veteran — 102's brazier-sign flames up as bi |
| 𒊑 | RI | distant | [re] | — | veteran — 102's distant-sign, e-colored: re |
The frame every letter wears
A Babylonian letter does not begin “Dear X.” It begins with an order — to the tablet, or to the messenger who will read it aloud: to X, speak! — thus (says) Y. The reader is the sender’s voice; writing is recorded speech. Here is the frame on a real school tablet, with the school’s own gods in both names:
urn:nabu:cdli:p252638:obverse:1–:obverse:4
· license: attribution.
Item by item — the frame is new grammar, so take it slowly:
- ana … qibīma — “to …, speak!”: the speaking-verb as an imperative — the naked command form, no prefix at all — with the -ma of chapter 05 sealing it. The addressee is grammatically the hearer of the tablet.
- Sîn-ašarēd — “Sîn-is-foremost”: the moon-god’s name is written 𒂗𒍪 — two signs you have known for a year, EN and ZU, fused by convention into one divine name — behind the god-star of 101.
- umma … -ma — “thus (says) …”: the quotation-opener. Everything after this word, to the end of the tablet, is direct speech. Old Babylonian has quotation marks; they are just made of clay.
- aššumīya — “for my sake”: aššum, “because of,” wearing this chapter’s new sign — -ya, “my,” the first-person cousin of chapter 01’s -šu.
- šanat šār — “a 3600th year,” and the green shows you why the mouth and the tablet part ways: the writing is MU ŠAR2.KAM — MU the year-sumerogram (the same sign is Sumerian “name” and “year”; Babylon reads it šattum, “year of” šanat), ŠAR2 the myriad, KAM the counting tag. A blessing does not say “long life”; it says year number 3600 — may you outlive arithmetic.
And what did he want?
Butter, honestly — the body of this school letter is a dowry list. Real letters keep the same shape and sharper wants. One sender, mid-negotiation about two kegs of beer, closes with the finest conditional sentence in the corpus — read it again, at home in its mailbag at last (chapter 09 met it as a stem specimen):
urn:nabu:cdli:p296097:obverse:8 · license:
attribution.
Four thousand years of correspondence have not improved on that sentence either. Note what it does with your kit: šumma from the laws, the durative for an ongoing state, the imperative from this chapter’s frame — the whole letter-writer’s toolbox in eight signs.
Drill before you go on
- Write 𒅀, 𒊹, 𒄰 from memory; say ia, šar, kam.
- Open a letter to your own teacher: ana … qibīma, umma …-ma — fill in the names, out loud.
- Whose voice does the tablet speak in, and to whom is qibīma actually addressed?
- What is MU doing in MU ŠAR2.KAM — which language is written, and which is spoken?
Next: the king steps out from behind his own monument and says the word the whole course has been walking toward.