#cuneiform

[tammuz]

Fragment of a vessel with frontal image of a Sumerian goddess and Cuneiform inscription from Entemena, the ruler of Lagash. The basalt vessel dates back to the Mesopotamian Early Dynastic Period around 2430 BCE, and it depicts one of the first Mesopotamian images of a female deity. The Pergamon Museum, Berlin, GERMANY.

Photo by Babylon Chronicle

[dedalvs]

Guess what I saw today!

[victusinveritas]

[mostlydeadlanguages]

Hello! I was wondering if you had any tips for using cuneiform as an art inspiration? One of my friends is super into cuneiform and birds, so I wanted to kind of write the cuneiform for "corvid" using stylised triangular crows.

Feel free to ignore this, it's a pretty involved ask!

I had a look at the Assyrian Languages website, and it spat out

but there's so many options! Why is the translation given as "erebu" without the cuneiform, then followed by the other words "uga" and "buru", which do have cuneiform?

And are there rules for rearranging the different units of the word? Is it like English, where you can't really split the letters of a word up, because it won't make sense?

I also double-checked the translation with the the Concise Dictionary of Akkadian, which you linked a couple posts ago, and they match, but there isn't any cuneiform in the dictionary.

Thank you for reading this far!

Okay, buckle up for a ride!

Akkadian is a Semitic language with a weird, cobbled-together writing system. It's a bit like a rebus: we can figure out that "👁️ ❤️ 🐑" means "I love you," because "eye" sounds like "I," hearts connote love, and a female sheep is a ewe, which sounds like "you." Likewise, a given cuneiform sign can be one of three things: a syllabogram (representing the sound of particular syllables, like 👁️), a logogram (representing a particular idea, like ❤️); or a determinative (representing a category of ideas, like "Dr."). In many cases, a given sign could be any one of those, depending on context. As a result, there are many possible ways to spell most words—although certain sign combinations tend to get standardized in a particular place and time.

In this case, "UGA" is the logogram for a corvid, and "MUŠEN" is the determinative for a bird. So one way to write "a crow" (literally "a crow-bird") would be to combine the signs for UGA and MUŠEN. (MUL is the determinative for an astral body, so if you were trying to say "the crow-planet," you could write it as "star-crow-bird," or "MUL.UGA.MUŠEN."). And yes, the order does matter in most cases; I wouldn't rearrange them.

But! Instead of writing something logographically, you could "spell it out" using syllabograms. So the word erēbu/arēbu, which is what "crow" would have sounded like, can be broken down into syllables and spelled that way, e.g. a-re/ri-bu. When the Epic of Gilgamesh describes sending out a raven as part of the Flood story, it spells it as "a-ri-bu." (Well, technically a-ri-ba/a-ri-bi, because those are the declined forms.)

The simplest two options that appear in the corpus, then, are UGA or BURU4 ("crow" without the "bird" determinative, which is optional) or a-ri-bu. Here's what those look like, using two different potential writing styles: Old Babylonian (an earlier and more complex writing system) and Neo-Assyrian (a more rectilinear, streamlined, later writing system):

As you can see, UGA is a very complicated sign, so I would recommend choosing either BURU4 or a-ri-bu. I find Neo-Assyrian much easier to reproduce, but the choice of writing system is up to you.

I hope this helps. Send me a picture of what you produce; it sounds so fun!

[linguisticdiscovery]

A lost Canaanite language called Amorite has been decoded thanks to the discovery of bilingual tablets, similar to the way the Rosetta Stone helped scholars decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The tablets were written in Amorite and Akkadian using the cuneiform script. Prior to the discovery of these tablets there was such little written evidence for Amorite that some scholars doubted whether it even existed. Amorite was a Canaanite language related to Hebrew, in the Semitic language family.

Pretty cool, Amorite? 😅

[lady-of-heaven]

Sumerian Miku

ḫāzune mīku kalāmak

𒄩𒍪𒉈 𒈪𒆪 𒌦𒀝

©️ 𒀭𒀹𒁯 2024

[thatshowthingstarted]

Cone of Urukagina, king of Lagash, circa 2350  BC,

Girsu, Mesopotamia,

Detailing his reforms againt abuse of "old days".

Height: 27 cm (10.6 in); diameter: 15 cm (5.9 in).

Collections of the Louvre (Department of Near Eastern Antiquities).

[dsm-wannabe-linguist]

brat sumer

[worldhistoryfacts]

The Sennacherib prism, commissioned by the Assyrian king in the 600s BCE. Its ten sides contain records of his conquests and achievements in cuneiform. The record culminates with Sennarcherib's 15-month siege and destruction of Babylon.

{WHF} {Ko-Fi} {Medium}

[scriptorsapiens]

Classicstober Day 14: Helen (𐀁𐀩𐀛/𒄭𒇷𒉌)

Helen of Troy… Helen Queen of Sparta… Helen Princess of Sparta… Helen the daughter of Leda and Zeus… the face that launched a thousand ships wore many masks over the course of her life but one thing that remains the same is how compelling she remains as a character. Many thanks to @symeona for helping me with her look!

Helen is a character intrinsically associated with her appearance, but early sources do not describe her at all outside of demonstrations of her status. For this piece, I have borrowed from two sources. The first is symeona, who's excellent translations on Ancient Greek color theory informed my take on Achilles. The second was that wretched and accursed fnckboy Ovid, who described Helen's mother Leda as having 'snowy white' skin and black hair. Since Zeus appeared to Leda in the form of a swan, and considering how pale Leda was, I decided to make her somewhat swan-like in appearance, with big black eyes and naturally ruddy lips to seal the deal.

First, let's talk about Helen the Spartan (rendered here in Linear B as 'Eleni of Laconia'). Despite mainly being known for her role in the Trojan War, Helen lived the majority of her life in Sparta and her husband Menelaus claimed the throne of Sparta through her. Laconia and Sparta are some of the oldest sites of Mycenaean culture, so Helen got to be depicted as Mycenaean as all getout. The high-piled hair, the diadem, the open tunic, and the bracelet are all very common in depictions of Mycenaean and Minoan women. She also has very elaborate florets to mark her status. The red fabric and large gemstones mark her wealth too i completely forgot to draw in the necklace she wore in the sketch version.

I mentioned before in my picture of Cassandra and Hector that I am basing the Trojan looks heavily on ancient Hittite clothing, and this is no exception. I know the movie Troy sucks for lots of reasons, but I did like that they made the Trojan theme color this very rich blue so I decided to add that here; dark, rich colors in general are very expensive to produce, so even if it's not red the saturation makes the cloth very expensive and a mark of royalty. I based her clothing and jewelry off a Hittite statue, but I decided to omit the tall hats that Hittite women appear to wear under their veils; I kind of wanted that to represent status, so only Andromache and Hecuba would wear the tall hats if I depict them.

I was not trying to make a commentary with it, but it does strike me how conservative the veiled, tunic wearing Hittite woman looks compared to the open-bodiced Mycenaean woman. That could easily be read into, but I'm just going to leave it as depiction and not try to ascribe any symbolism to it.

The decorative circle around Helen represents several things. Horses feature prominently in her life. The Trojan Horse is the most well known, but the wedding oath that Tyndareus made Helen's suitors swear to was sealed with the sacrifice of a horse too. Anemones are a sacred flower to Aphrodite (long story) and the white lilies seem like a fun way to evoke the 'pure woman' image.

Also in the circle are depictions of Eris' golden Apple of Discord. For the life of me, I could not find any translation related to fairness or beauty in any Mycenaean dictionaries so I had to cheat: "𐀴 𐀏𐀪𐀯𐀳𐀂/ti ka-ri-se-te-i" is just a phonetic transliteration of ΤΗΙ ΚΑΛΛΙΣΤΗΙ (tē(i) kallistē(i)), translated as 'for the fairest.'

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 88: No such thing as the oldest language

It's easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately, there's an easy (though unsatisfying) answer: none of them! Like how humans are all descended from other humans, even though some of us may have longer or shorter family trees found in written records, all human languages are shaped by contact with other languages. We don't even know whether the oldest language(s) was/were spoken or signed, or even whether there was a singular common ancestor language or several.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what people mean when we talk about a language as being old. We talk about how classifying languages as old or classical is often a political or cultural decision, how the materials that are used to write a language influence whether it gets preserved (from clay to bark), and how people talk about creoles and signed languages in terms of oldness and newness. And finally, how a language doesn't need to be justified in terms of its age for whether it's interesting or worthy of respect.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Lingthusiasm episode 'Tracing languages back before recorded history'

'My Big Fat Greek Wedding- Give me any word and I show you the Greek root' on YouTube

Glottolog entry for 'classical'

Wikipedia entry for 'Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir'

Wikipedia entry for 'Bath curse tablets'

Wikipedia entry for 'Cuneiform'

Wikipedia entry for 'Mesopotamian writing systems'

Wikipedia entry for 'Home Sign'

Lingthusiasm episode 'Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou'

Wikipedia entry for 'Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language'

Wikipedia entry for 'Kata Kolok' (also known as Benkala Sign Language)

True Biz by Sara Nović on Goodreads

Gretchen's thread about reading True Biz

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[tammuz]

Sumerian foundation figure, dating back to the Early Dynastic period around 2900–2350 BCE. The Pergamon Museum, Berlin, GERMANY.

Photo by Babylon Chronicle

[lionofchaeronea]

Line drawing of an impression from the cylinder seal of Shar-Kali-Sharri, ruler of the Akkadian Empire ca. 2217-2193 BCE. On the right of the impression, the hero Gilgamesh wrestles with a lion. From The Seal Cylinders of Western Asia by William Hayes Ward, published in 1910.

[victusinveritas]

[mostlydeadlanguages]

On Foxes

eṭlu ša sibbat nēši iṣbatuni ina nāri iṭṭubu ša sibbat šēlebi iṣbatuni ussēzib "The man who seized the lion’s tail sank in the river; he who seized the fox’s tail was saved." — ABL 555 r.3-6 (Neo-Assyrian cuneiform letter, date and name missing)

πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ' ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog one big thing.” (Archilochus, 7th c. BCE)

“We communicate like the burrows of foxes, in silence and darkness, under ground.” — Henry David Thoreau, letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, February 12, 1843

“Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.” — Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” 1970

[sumerianlanguage]

What does this actually mean?

Its a new tumblr badge

Hello! This is the sign 𒂂 dugud, which has several meanings including "weight, heavy, massive", "cloud" and "important, to be important". I assume it's being used in the latter meaning, designating the person as important here on tumblr dot com!