2002. A unique signature in cuneiform shorthand (with co-author Irving L. Finkel)

Cuneiform Digital Library Bulletin (CDLB), 2024

This article features the Groton School cuneiform-text collection, including a discussion on its provenance as well as photographs, transliterations, translations, notes, and commentaries on the three texts in the collection. Two of the texts are from the Ur III period (ca. 2110-2003 B.C.E.), whereas one is from the Late Babylonian period (ca. 5th century B.C.E. through 1st century C.E.). The Ur III texts are an expense report from Puzriš-Dagān and a sealed receipt from an unknown provenience. Their commentaries focus on key terminology such as the term šu-gid 2 in the former and the phrase apin-la 2-ta ba-a in the latter. The Late Babylonian text is a loan document from Sippar concerning silver for a house sale. It is utilized for a detailed reconstruction of the provenance of the Maštuk archive, first postulated by Caroline Waerzeggers (2002). The commentaries for all three texts also highlight prosopographical observations, especially for the Late Babylonian text.

Cuneiform Digital Library Bulletin, 2021

We describe a case study which demonstrates how sign counts derived from an online tool presented in this paper may be useful for answering questions about the proto-cuneiform corpus. The content of the proto-cuneiform composition "Archaic Tribute" has been debated for several decades. We delineate the extent to which data from the known administrative corpus can be used to explore the design of this unusual lexical text.

Aula Orientalis 32 (2014) 179-183, 2014

A NCIENT MESOPOTAMIA DID NOT PLAY WITH ITS IDEOGRAPHIC SIGNS AND syllables. This does not mean that there was never wordplay. However, unlike the iconicized scripts of Islam, the historiared and embellished initials of the Western medieval world, or the animated hieroglyphs of pharaonic Egypt given agency by the addition of arms and legs, once Mesopotamian signs were stabilized into abstracted and legible forms, they retained their boundaries and their shapes within the scribal canon. With the possible exception of phonetic rebuses in the form of recognizable images early in the first millennium BeE,! distinctions between text signs and image figu res were carefully maintained. And yet, there are things to be said about the relationship between verbal and visual representation throughout the three millennia of the Mesopotamian sequence-particularly for a volume exploring cultural and historical permutations on the relationship between textual signs and imagery. It is my intention here to focus upon a particular subset of inscriptions in Sumerian and Akkadian, the languages of ancient Mesopotamia: those intended to be deployed and viewed in public. As a class, the works bearing inscriptions range in size from small cylinder seals, held in the hand and impressed upon clay tablets, bullae, and door and jar sealings, to large-scale, independent monuments and architecture. At both extremes, the inscribed works function "out there," in a domain where the carrier of the inscription has a material presence beyond the private exchange of information, as would have been the case in a letter from a father to a son scribed on a clay tablet, in which handwriting, that is, scri pr-wr iting, could be individual and distinctive. Because most of the examples I shall discuss are largely carved on stone rather than impressed into clay and were intended to be viewed by a public unfamiliar with the idiosyncrasies of personal-ized writing, the signs on monuments tend to be particularly well articulated and regular. As such, the signs both connote and contribute to legibility. They convey a formality that is seen to be part of the visual effect of the inscription. I shall refer to this group of texts on public works as executed in a "lapidary style" not unlike the regularized scripts employed on Roman triumphal arches and temples, or funerary markers from the classical world to the present. I would characterize such works, often

2023

Updated version (6 August 2023)

ZA 104, 2017