Cuneiform 103 · Chapter 19

Reference

Everything the course taught, on one shelf — the mold of 101’s and 102’s closing pages. Nothing here is new; everything here is yours.

The grammar, shelved

Everything below was met in a real line first; every cell links back to its teaching. The dashes are honest — forms this course never met.

The noun wears its case at the end (ch. 02, ch. 08):

A noun missing its mimationthe -m that closes Old Babylonian noun endings (šarrum, not šarru) — a hallmark of Hammurabi's stage of the language, dropped in later centuries is reaching for the noun after it — the construct (ch. 03: bēl šamê, šar mīšarim). The duala grammatical number for exactly two, beyond singular and plural — Akkadian keeps it for natural pairs: īnān, "the two eyes" survives in paired body parts (ch. 16: īnān, “the two eyes”). Suffixes ride the case: -šu “his” (ch. 01), -ya “my” (ch. 12) — and -šu melts against a root’s last consonant: iktašassu, bīssu (ch. 10).

The verb — three tenses on four stems, every filled cell a word you read (ch. 05, ch. 09, ch. 15):

Around the stem: the hither-marker -am (ch. 09: šūbilam, “send HERE”); the chaining -ma, “and then / and so” (ch. 05); the naked imperativethe naked command form of a verb, no prefix at all — qibīma, "speak!"; šūbilam, "send it!" (ch. 12: qibīma, “speak!”); the wishing li- of blessings and verdicts (ch. 12, ch. 18: lillikma, līmur); and the quiet -u a verb takes inside a ša-clause (ch. 17: wašbu).

The melody of a law — the tense chain every šumma-law walks (ch. 15), here from law 1:

The little words, each with its teaching seat:

Every sign taught in 103

The course’s own sign list, generated from its registry — each glyph links to its codex page; veterans carry the voice they gained at the border:

With these signs and their veterans, the course’s reading kit covers 79.4% of everything written in the Old Babylonian corpus this school measures against — four of every five signs on a random tablet of Hammurapi’s century are now yours on sight.

Conventions used in this course

The full law lives in the school’s rulebook beside 101’s and 102’s; the essentials:

• The dialect is Old Babylonian, the entry dialect of the standard grammars and of the Codex Hammurapi.
• Akkadian transliterationthe sign-by-sign rendering of ancient writing in modern letters, so every sign stays accountable is italic, hyphenated, and carries no homophoneone of several different words or signs sharing the same sound — like English "two", "too", and "to"; index numbers (e₂, u₄) tell same-sounding signs apart indexes (i-nu, not i₃-nu) — the script column carries the sign’s identity. Sumerian-course quotes keep their indexes, as their own convention requires.
• Bound transcriptionthe joined-up dictionary form of an Akkadian word (šarrum, awīlum), reconstructed from its syllable-by-syllable transliteration with vowel lengths marked — the upright register with vowel length marked (šarrum, awīlum) — is a separate layer: the word as spoken, never sign by sign.
• Green marks what is read whole. Wherever signs are spoken as one word rather than sounded in sequence, the reading prints the voice in green capitals over green-marked signs: sumerogramsa Sumerian word-sign kept inside Akkadian text as learned shorthand — written LUGAL, read aloud as Akkadian šarrum, "king" (EṢEMTI), the notary’s Sumerian formulary (ŠU BA-AN-TI), and rebusborrowing a picture for its sound instead of its meaning — drawing a sun to write "son"-written names (SUEN). Black is sounded out; green is read whole. A reading never cites: sign-name spellings (GIR₃.PAD.RA₂) belong to prose and sign lists.
• ▢ 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 silent in braces ({d}, {diš}); raw corpus ASCII appears only in exhibits marked as verbatim ATF.
• Every reading’s script is resolved through the Oracc Sign List via the Nabu library — glyphs are looked up, never guessed — and every ancient line carries its URN and license class in place.

Where the road goes

The stele holds 280 more laws, and Babylon kept writing for fifteen hundred years after it: omens and mathematics, school letters and lamentations, and the long literary line of Standard Babylonian — Gilgameš stands in it — whose dialect differs from yours the way Shakespeare’s English differs from a newspaper’s. Those are other courses’ promises. What does not change: the signs, the roots, the melody of the verb — and the fact that you now stand in the small company of people, in any century, who can face the stone and need no hired eyes.

Further study

• John Huehnergard, A Grammar of Akkadian — the standard teaching grammar this course’s didactic claims lean on, cited where each piece was taught; when you want the full paradigm tables, start there.
• The open corpus this course reads from: the CDLI’s Old Babylonian slice, reachable with per-passage licenses through the Nabu library.
• In this school: the Akkadian Addenda keeps every sign’s story and the drills keep them sharp; the Sumerian shelf does the same for your veterans.

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, every one of them license: attribution — the Codex Hammurapi composite text (urn:nabu:cdli:p464358) that carries the course from its first law to the king’s invitation; the school letter of chapter 12 (CUSAS 43, 28 — urn:nabu:cdli:p252638) and the beer-letter conditional (YOS 13, 172 — urn:nabu:cdli:p296097); and the Sippar loan of chapter 17 (PBS 8/2, 195 — urn:nabu:cdli:p257793). Each is one click away, whole, through its URN — the texts outlive everyone who copies them.