Akkadian Addenda · Signs

𒁍

tear

NameBU
Reads[bu/pu]
Means[bu]; to tear away in the lists
Taught in10 · The River decides

Where it comes from

A long horizontal sign the lists connect with tearing away — graded unclear; the wedges are reticent. Akkadian reads it bu or pu, the b and p trading places as freely as they do on BI, and hands it the corpus’s most unprovable noun: kišpū, “sorcery.”

How to remember it

What cannot be proven must be torn out some other way: the pu of kišpū is why law 2 sends a man to the River at all. A long sign for a long walk to the water.

In the wild

Codex Hammurapi (composite text), law 2. urn:nabu:cdli:p464358:a:316 · license: attribution.

Akkadian reading taught in 103’s chapter 10.