"Lexical Texts, Ancient Near East" In: the Encyclopedia of Ancient History

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1 Lexical texts, ancient translations were not provided with further explanations or examples, but simply paired Near East a Sumerian word with an Akkadian one. NIEK VELDHUIS Sign lists were introduced in the Old Babylonian period (around 1800 BCE)when Cuneiform lexical lists may be divided into they were used in elementary education. Sign word lists and sign lists. Word lists were often lists tend to include common signs as well as thematically organized, listing all words for extremely rare or abstruse ones, preserving signs trees, birds, pots, and so on and may be either andsignvaluesthatwerenolongerinactiveuse. unilingual (Sumerian only) or bilingual In the first millennium BCE lexical lists (Sumerian–Akkadian). Sign lists provided an became prestigious repositories of traditional inventory of CUNEIFORM signs and usually pair knowledge. They were used both in scribal each sign with glosses that explain its proper education and in scholarly commentaries to use. Since most cuneiform signs may be used the ancient literary tradition. for more than one word or syllable, each sign is In modern research, lexical lists are essential repeated several times with different glosses. for the decipherment of Sumerian. In addition, Word lists are as old as writing itself, intro- they provide rich data for Mesopotamian intel- duced at the end of the fourth millennium BCE. lectual history and for researching the cultural This archaic cuneiform writing system was an self-understanding of Babylonian and Assyrian administrative device, created to keep track of scribes and scholars. increasingly complex transactions. The pur- pose of the archaic lexical lists was to standard- SEE ALSO: Akkadian language; Scribes, ancient ize and teach the symbols that were needed for Near East; Sumerian language. this administrative system. Accordingly, the lists contain words for officials, containers, REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS and commodities, as well as numeric symbols. Civil, M. (1995) “Ancient Mesopotamian Until the end of the third millennium BCE, lexicography.” In J. M. Sasson, ed., Civilizations word lists do not contain any explanation, of the ancient Near East: 2305–14. New York. but simply enumerate one word after another. Veldhuis, N. et al. (2003) [online] “Digital corpus In later periods word lists were often laid out in of cuneiform lexical texts.” Available from http:// two columns with Sumerian entries on the left oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt. (Accessed and Akkadian translations on the right. Such May 14, 2011.) The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, First Edition. Edited by Roger S. Bagnall, Kai Brodersen, Craige B. Champion, Andrew Erskine, and Sabine R. Huebner, print pages 4049–4050. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah01123.

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Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 2018; 5(1-2): 41–56
Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 2018; 5(1-2): 41–56 C. Jay Crisostomo* Language, Translation, and Commentary in Cuneiform Scribal Practice https://doi.org/10.1515/janeh-2018-0005 Abstract: Cuneiform scholarly practices systematized an exploration of mean- ing potential. In cuneiform scholarship, knowledge making emerged from multiplescribalpractices,mostnotablylist-making,analogicalreasoning, and translation. The present paper demonstrates how multilingualism stands atthecoreofcuneiformscholarlyinquiry, enabling hermeneutical exploration of possibility and potential. Cuneiform scholarly practices of translation and analogical hermeneutics coupled with an understanding of the cuneiform writing system constituted a system analogous to the medieval artes grammaticae. Keywords: translation, commentary, analogy, lists In a series of lectures given at the University of Cambridge, Ian Hacking asked the question “Why does language matter to philosophy?” He concludes “Language matters to philosophy because of what knowledge has become. … [Discourse is] that which constitutes human knowledge” (Hacking 1975: 187). Why does language matter to cuneiform “philosophy”? Or, perhaps, rather than Why, we can ask How. In order to answer this question, I examine the social and textual contexts in which a discussion of cuneiform “philosophy” can properly take place, namely in cuneiform scholarship. At the core of cuneiform scholarly practices and knowledge making is list-making. In his recent book Philosophy Before the Greeks, Marc Van De Mieroop argued that the list—the listing structure—provides the basis for a Babylonian epistemology which is grounded in the cuneiform writing system.1 As he states in his more recent work, “Lists were the dominant format in which Mesopotamian intellectuals speculated” (Van De Mieroop this 1 Van De Mieroop (2015).
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University of Groningen Elementary Education at Nippur. the Lists Of
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