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Tag Archives: cuneiform

What to Keep, What to Discard: The Mesopotamian Answer

28 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Modern

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ancient, archival studies, cuneiform, the End of Archives

Men and women in Neo-Classical dress talk and consult plans as a city is built in the background

Rome was not built in a day, but my emails were transferred in one! A Baroque tapestry of the AEDIFICATIO BABILONIAE in the city museum, Rimini.

It is the end of the semester in which I graduated, so I have been working to back up my emails onto my computer (Austrian university webmail is limited to 500 MB, and does IMAP not POP, so when the account closes the emails go away unless you move them to local folders). The Anglo chattering class loves to talk about what to do with old papers and knicknacks, with Marie Kondo or the Swedish Death Purge inspiring opinion pieces and social media threads. Did you know that the cuneiform world had a pretty firm opinion on the matter?
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Rochberg on Omens

22 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

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ancient, cuneiform, history of science, methodology

Your humble correspondent in the Central European blizzard of January 2019

One of the books which I would like to find time to read is Francesca Rochberg’s Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2016) {available from the publisher}. About a decade ago, she was puzzled why Mesopotamian omen lists include situations which can never occur, such as the appearance of the sun at midnight or a lunar eclipse which moves from west to east across the moon. The Mesopotamian literati were intimately familiar with the movements of the heavens, and had thousands of years of records, so they probably had a firm conviction that this was not the sort of thing which could happen in the ordinary course of events. Were these absurd? The result of block-heads mechanically multiplying omens to cover different combinations of left/right, the three watches of the night, the four directions, and so on regardless of whether that combination was possible? Violations of the order of the heavens on special command of the gods?

Perhaps this is where we step into the realm of the conceivable, or the conceptually possible, as differentiated from the possible, or at least the metaphysically possible … To say certain phenomena in the omen lists are “impossible” or “absurd” because they do not occur and cannot be observed is our judgement and occurs nowhere in the ancient sources. That is to say, our definition of impossible (not in accordance with real properties) is not expressed in the texts. It seems more consistent with the overall makeup of the omen lists that recording a phenomenon as an entry in a codified omen list is evidence that it was regarded as epistemically possible [something which a reasonable person may chose to believe]. That is, the list of statements (P) constitute data, or knowledge, on the basis of which the diviner makes judgements and draws conclusions about what will happen. The use of the terms possible and impossible are, among other things, relative to one’s accepted knowledge of how and what things are.

– Francesca Rochberg, “Conditionals, Inference, and Possibility in Ancient Mesopotamian Science,” Science in Context 22.1 (March 2009) pp. 5-25
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Horse Troops and Troops of the Bow

14 Saturday Apr 2018

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

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Achaemenid, ancient, cuneiform, Ebabbar, Late Babylonian

A dome of baked bricks with arches below

The architecture of holy places in the Middle East has changed a bit since the glory days of the Ebabbar, but how about this photo of a mosque in Isfahan?

A tablet from Sippar with the forgettable names BM 57222 and CT 57, 82 contains the following lines:

“(6) 1/2 mina 8 shekels silver to Šamaš-iddin (7) and the horse troops (8) who returned from the city of Egypt (9) 1 mina 50 shekels silver for mountain garments (10) and širannū for troop[s] (11) of the bow …”

Even though it is damaged, it tells us important things. The Ebabbar, the house of Šamaš at Sippar, was sending troops to Egypt in the fourth year of some king. Since the archive ends suddenly early in the second year of of Xexes, and since Cambyses had not yet conquered Egypt in his fourth year, this is probably the fourth year of Darius. It is usually thought that Darius visited Egypt a few years after his Putsch, although I don’t understand the arguments that his visit was in a specific Gregorian year. But in any case, it shows that conscripts could be sent all the way to Egypt, wearing the same clothing they were issued in other texts which do not specify what they were doing. Conscripts sometimes spent their time in service dredging out canals in Elam or improving roads near Nippur, but sometimes they went much farther.

Bow Estates Already Under Nebuchadnezzar

31 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

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Achaemenid, ancient, cuneiform, Late Babylonian, source

Sometimes the tablet-gods smile on us. Over the last hundred years, scholars have worked to establish when the properties known as bow, horse, and chariot estates first appeared in Mesopotamia. Earlier writers often saw them as examples of Iranian feudalism, imposed on Babylonia by the Medes or Persians, but there were a few examples under Nabonidus. Then in 1998 Michael Jursa reread a text from Uruk from the 35th year of Nebuchadnezzar with the following lines:

(15) 1 GUR 2 PI ŠE.NUMUN E2 GIŠ.BAN ša2 {m}Dan-/e-<>\-a
ša2 {m}{d}U.GUR-da-a-nu a-na er-ru-šu-tu2
i-ir-ši maš-ka-a-nu ša2 {m}Gi-mil-lu
a-di {m}G-mil-lu ŠE.NUMUN i-šal-lim

Vocabulary
rašû i/i “to get, acquire”
erušutu > erēşu “to seed
maškanu “security, pledge”

1 kur 2 pi of seed (ie. field which is sown with 7 bushels of barley), the bow estate of Dannēa, which Nergal-dān acquired to sow, is pledged to Gimillu, until Gimillu received the barley.

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One Principle of Cuneiform: Punning

22 Saturday Jul 2017

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

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Tags

ancient, cuneiform, principles of cuneiform

Ways of drawing unicode character 74455 񴑕, a stylized hand with the fingers pointing left

Ways of writing the sign ŠU, number 354 in Labat’s Manuel d’Épigraphie Akkadienne

As cuneiform scribes developed a script which had been designed to write brief notes in Sumerian into one which could write long complex texts in several languages, they relied on several principles. These are not always obvious to the student today, but can make it easier to learn. One of these principles is punning.

A common Sumerian word is /šu/ “hand.” Usually this is drawn as a vertical wedge and four horizontal wedges, the bottom-most longer than the others, representing the base of the hand and the fingers (Yes, hands in cuneiform have four fingers, just like hands on the Simpsons!) Now, having a sign for /šu/ is a very useful in Akkadian: lots of words begin with it and it is a common suffix. The Akkadian word for hand is /qātu/ (or /qātān/ “two hands”) and while it would be possible to write it as [qa-a-tu] or [qa-a-ta-an] it was convenient to just write ŠU or ŠU.II (so “hand” plus “2”). So we have one sign which can be pronounced /šu/ in one language or /qātu/ in another. That opened up the possibility of using the same sign to write /qad/ or /qat/ as part of other words, such as /qadādu/ “to bow down” or /qatû/ “to finish.” The sign had all three readings (“hand,” šu, qātu) immanent within it, and required the reader to judge which made sense in context.

While the multiple readings required work to learn, they allowed the system to expand as needed without ever requiring a student to learn more than a few hundred signs. On the other hand, they opened up a world of puns which Spider Robinson would be ashamed to print (and etymologies which might have made Madame Blavatsky cry “hold on, my rubes are pretty stupid but I can’t get them to accept that one.”) For example, in the first millennium BCE Gilgameš is two thirds a god and one third human (earlier tablets give him other ancestry). These proportions do not work in the world of Mendelian genetics, where ancestry is a sum of fractions like 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, … and you can prove that no sum of such fractions equals 1/3. So why is he 2/3 divine? Now, the ferryman who takes Gilgameš across the Waters of Death once had the name Sursunabu which is neither Sumerian or Akkadian. At some point, scribes started writing his name as Ur-šanabi which is Sumerian for “the servant of two thirds.” Eventually, this became accepted as his real name, but it raised a problem: how was he a servant of two-thirds? Uršanabi was first the servant of Uta-napišti the survivor of the flood, but then served Gilgameš. And its just possible that at some point the scribes said “Uršanabi is the servant of two thirds, Uršanabi is the servant of Gilgameš, therefore Gilgameš is two thirds. What is he two-thirds? He is two-thirds divine.” We don’t know, but that kind of thinking was the way that scholarly cuneiform scribes showed off their learning.

Photo of an open book with the following text and gloss: It has been suggested that these [rings on the face of a buckler] were sword-breakers, ie. they were designed to entangle an opponent's blade so that it could be broken or twisted out of his hand: Sic di Grassi vel scriptor temporis eius

I am not a very good ṭupšarru but I have extended this principle further. Its traditional to gloss books in the margins and to draw a hand pointing from text to gloss or vice versa. We have already established that ŠU = HAND = any word for hand. Ergo, a ŠU is a perfectly acceptable substitute for a drawing of a hand.

Further Reading: Sebastian Fink, “How Gilgemeš Became a Two-Thirds God: It Was the Ferryman,” State Archives of Assyria Bulletin XX (2013/2014) https://www.academia.edu/12076152/How_Gilgamesh_became_a_two-thirds_God_It_was_the_Ferryman

Scott Noegel has written a book on puns in the writing system as a technique in interpreting dreams https://faculty.washington.edu/snoegel/index.html

Edit 2017-07-24: Corrected malformed HTML in second picture

Bonus Content: How Do We Know About the Libraries of Carthage?

21 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

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ancient, Ancient History magazine, ancient libraries, Carthage, cuneiform, shameless plug

Issue 7 of Ancient History magazine is now heading to subscribers. It contains something which was not quick to write, but which I think is very important: a summary of some studies in German which ask how many words of text in different ancient languages survive. Do you think that there are about twice as many words of Greek because the green Loebs take up twice as much shelf space as the red ones? Or prefer ten to one like Liddell and Scott guessed? How do Egyptian, Akkadian, and Sumerian fit in? This article explores how those German researchers tried to find an answer, and what that answer is. To my knowledge, their work has never been discussed in plain language in English, so check it out! The article had to be trimmed for space, so in this post I would like to give the sources for a statement.
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The Information Density of Cuneiform Tablets

29 Saturday Oct 2016

Posted by Sean Manning in Modern, Not an expert

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

21st century, cuneiform, GURPS, modern, whimsy

A photograph of a cuneiform tablet against the backdrop of 1 mm graph-paper

Tablet HS 643 in Jena.

When I was visiting the tablet collection in Jena (as one does) my mind naturally turned to fact-checking GURPS books. Back in 2007, some of the thoughtful writers at Steve Jackson Games put together an article “How Heavy is Dense Reading?” on the density of information from medieval manuscripts to modern printed books in words per square metre, words per kg, and words per cartload. They included some guesses about Greek papyri and cuneiform tablets, but did not seem to have as much data for those. Their house style discourages mentioning sources, but I am pretty sure that their medieval data comes from a survey of all surviving medieval European manuscripts which a professor mentioned in my undergraduate days. Today, I would like to put together some evidence on the size and capacity of small cuneiform tablets to help them fill in the gaps.
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On Sketching Tablets

17 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Achaemenid, ancient, cuneiform, Iron Age, methodology

A photograph of a cuneiform tablet against the backdrop of graph-paper and bubble-wrap

Tablet HS 643 in Jena. On the graph paper in the background each small square is 1 mm wide.

At the beginning of October I had the pleasure of visiting the Frau Professor Hillprecht Collection in Jena to handle and sketch tablets. Doing so made clear to me some of the issues with reading and publishing cuneiform tablets. In this post, I will try to explain what those issues are.

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Gadal-iama, Part 3: Grammars Pile High, Head Bows Low

07 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient, Uncategorized

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Achaemenid army, ancient, cuneiform, Gadal-iama, Iron Age, Late Babylonian

Table in a library with a variety of books on ancient clothing spread across it cover-up

Entrance to the Fachbibliothek Atrium, North Wing, Universität Innsbruck. Photo by Sean Manning, February 2015.

Despite some health difficulties, I have been slowly making sense of the Gadal-iama contract and updating my transcription and further reading in an earlier post. Perhaps “making sense” is not the right expression. Because while historians happily quote translations of this text into fluid English or French, the original Babylonian is full of rare words, technical phrases whose meaning is not fully understood, and intricately nested sub-clauses. After the book by Guillaume Cardascia in 1951 and the article by E. Ebeling in 1952, both of which discuss the difficult points of this tablet and argue how to resolve some of them, translators have chosen to hide the uncertainties. Debate continues, but in philological venues where squeamish historians don’t always look. I am having trouble reconciling many of the details in the translations which I have read with the Babylonian original. So this is not the sort of text which you can read in translation with a light heart.

I find it comforting that when I look up difficult words in the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (the sort in 25 volumes which fills an entire bookshelf) I almost always find a short entry which cites this contract and perhaps one or two others. The specialists in cuneiform have trouble with this text too. And the three people who have transcribed the tablet almost completely agree about which signs are written on it. But I wonder how many other optimistic translations of ancient texts I am innocently relying on.

Two Perspectives on the Astronomical Diary for Gaugamela, Part 1: Background

27 Saturday Jun 2015

Posted by Sean Manning in Ancient

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Tags

Achaemenid, Alexander the Great, ancient, Astronomical Diaries, cuneiform, Darius III, Iron Age, Late Babylonian, methodology

It is notorious that few stories about Alexander the Great written during his lifetime survive. The embroidered narratives by Greek and Latin writers which form the basis of most modern accounts were written 300 to 500 years later. A few of Alexander’s coins and inscriptions have been preserved, but they naturally give his point of view. A few chance references in Greek literature give a sense of the shock which many contemporaries felt that the king of a land on the edge of civilization suddenly overthrew the greatest power which had ever existed and conquered places which were little more than legends. One of the few long stories about Alexander which does survive in a version written during his lifetime is a cuneiform text, the Astronomical Diary for Gaugamela. This week I thought that I would write an introduction to the Diary and what is involved in reading such a text. Next week I will talk about two different ways of reading them as represented in articles by R.J. van der Spek (English: Darius III, Alexander the Great, and Babylonian Scholarship) and by Robert Rollinger and Kai Ruffing (German: ‘Panik’ im Heer: Dareios III, die Schlacht von Gaugamela, und die Mondfinsternis vom 20. September 331 vor Christ). I hope that the second will be helpful for readers who are interested in ancient history but not comfortable reading German.
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