What’s the Sumerian word for city again? One of the texts at the heart of the ScriPTS project is the composition known as Syllabary B (Sb), one of a class of sign-lists which include the closely related Syllabary A (and derived texts), the great sign-list Ea = nâqu, and Diri = atru. A rough composite edition of Sb yields ca. 743 lines divided across two tablets (Sb A and B), transmitted in various forms and formats. Larger library texts might contain four or five columns, including the leading DIŠ-wedge, the syllabic reading, the sign, possibly the sign name, and an Akkadian translation. The majority of witnesses are, however, school copies, consisting only of the leading wedge and the sign. The list is hardly “lexical” in the narrow sense, since it is the signs themselves and not the translation which are at the forefront. Though dry and repetitive, the text deserves closer attention precisely because it was so widely used in schools and is attested in so many tablets across such a long period of time, at almost all major sites which have yielded cuneiform.
With so many duplicates, the main question becomes, how stable is that reading tradition? When, where, and how do we observe changes in the text and its readings? The last full edition of the text was provided by Hans-Siegfried Schuster and Benno Landsberger in the third volume of the series Materialien zum sumerischen Lexikon in 1955, based on around 76 individual witnesses.1 The edition was followed quickly by revisions and notes on additional texts in subsequent years, as more and more witnesses appeared.2 The hunt for variance, however, is made much more difficult by two common trends in editing the text. Earlier periods often saw the use of composite copies, where several texts were artificially combined.3 The more common option today is to omit full editions at all, and simply refer to the composite in MSL 3, noting diverging signs as recognized.4 To even begin to answer the question of variance, one of the main goals of the project is thus to make the sources for Sb available through the Sign Lists project of the Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts.
While there is much to be said about Sb‘s importance for the transmission of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamian schools, it is also helpful to recall what a central role the text played in the history of Assyriology.5 It was the syllabaries which gave the final impulse to the decipherment of cuneiform, even before the famous test-case of the Tiglath-pileser I prism in 1857. Among the trickle, then flood of inscriptions brought back to London from Layard’s excavations at Nineveh, Edward J. Hincks in 1852 first put into print his recognition of a class of texts as syllabaries containing signs and their readings.6 Recalling his 1852 visit to Nineveh, Jules Oppert reports having seen syllabaries among the “bricks, covered in characters as finely drawn as they are clear.”7 The first major witnesses to Sb made their full debut only a few years later as a composite copy in the second volume of Rawlinson’s cuneiform inscriptions.8 With the publication of Friedrich Delitzsch’s Assyrische Lesestücke in 1876, the same Syllabaries A and B which had helped to crack the cuneiform code also became early mainstays of introductions to Akkadian.9 Students learned to read cuneiform with the same tools that Oppert and others had used to decipher it.

The clearest way to see the historical role of Sb in Assyriology would be to look at the importance assigned to the information derived from the text. One of the best examples is the sign URU “city.” Since the time of Jules Oppert, the primary reading has vacillated between URU and IRI (or ERI), starting already with ʿur in Jules Oppert’s 1855 Écriture anarienne against the ír in Joachim Menant’s Le syllabaire assyrien.10 Menant explicitly connects the reading with the Semitic (Hebrew and Ugaritic) ʿīr “city.”11 The latter is echoed in the ʿ of the readings “alu, ʿiru (uru)” in Delitzsch’s Lesestücke.12 As Sb was caught up in the early debates about the relationship between Sumerian and Akkadian, readings began to follow the split. Fossey’s Contribution au dictionnaire sumérien-assyrien has iri alone, while Deimel’s Šumerisches Lexikon privileges u-ru = a-lum.13 René Labat’s Manuel d’épigraphie completes the divide, with rí/ré/eri₄, etc. for Akkadian and URU for the logogram.14
If the Sumerian reading iri(URU) now seems beyond doubt, it is partly due to the recognition that the older Ea tradition is unequivocal, as in MSL 14, 53, 538.15 So is the later Syllabary A Vocabulary, as in JCS 8, 144 iii 8′.16 The value úru is otherwise generally associated with the composite sign URU×KÁR or URU×UD, the more common word for “city” in Emesal-Sumerian. Occasional attestations for uru17– as a shortened form of uru17(URU×MIN) or for uru (úru– ?) in Emesal-contexts are no exception: both can be explained essentially as reduced or faulty forms in which an inscribed element is missing.17 The latter case might represent actual variation between standard Sumerian and Emesal.

Where then do we get uru? Rykle Borger’s Mesopotamisches Zeichenlexikon notes two possible sources.18 In the greatly problematic Tablet VI of first millennium Ea = nâqu, section C line 1′ is reconstructed to read ⸢ú-rum⸣ [URU a-lu], followed by MIN [URU×UD a-bu-bu] and other URU-compounds; MSL 14, 432. Even if the syllabic reading ⸢ú-rum⸣ is accepted, the sign itself is missing. That leaves only Sb. The composite entry in MSL 3 for tablet B 259–260 has the sequence:
259 ú-ru URU a-lum “city”
260 ” URU×UD a-bu-bu “deluge”
Does this mean we finally have an Sb reading? Of the sources for the line which include a gloss and translation, the Neo-Babylonian BM 34912 from Babylon has [x]-⸢x⸣ URU i-[…] in obv. 2: [DIŠ u₂]-⸢ru⸣ may be possible, though only traces of a final vertical wedge are suggested by the copy, and the following entry i-[…], in the sign-name column, suggests that the name itself was understood as iri. That leaves only the library tablet K 110 from Nineveh, the same already used as the basis for the composite copy in Rawlinson’s Cuneiform Inscriptions: DIŠ ú-ru URU a-lum. There is certainly no reason to see uru as representative for the Sb tradition as a whole. Is this a case of a writing úru–? Should we think of a scribal error which anticipates the unproblematic ú-ru = URU×UD of the next line? Or does this point to an actual contamination of readings influenced by the Emesal tradition? Whatever explanation we choose, the last 170 years of the city URU seem to come down to a single line.
- H. S. Schuster and B. Landsberger, Materialien zum sumerischen Lexikon 3 (Roma: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1955), 89–153. [↩]
- B. Landsberger, R. Hallock, Th. Jacobsen, and A. Falkenstein, Materialien zum sumerischen Lexikon 4 (Roma: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1956), 203–207; B. Landsberger, ḪAR-ra = ḫubullu Tablet XV, Materialien zum sumerischen Lexikon 9 (Roma: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1967), 149–153; the literature is summarized in Niek Veldhuis’ monumental History of the Cuneiform Lexical Tradition, Guides to the Mesopotamian Record 6 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2014). [↩]
- R. Campbell Thompson, Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum 11 (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1900). [↩]
- See, for example, P. Gesche’s Schulunterricht in Babylonien im ersten Jahrtausend v. Chr., Alter Orient und Altes Testament 275 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2001), 243 on BM 36376. [↩]
- See the discussion in B. Lion and C. Michel, “Jules Oppert et le syllabaire akkadien,” in Histoires de déchiffrements: les écritures du Proche-Orient à l’Égée, ed. B. Lion and C. Michel (Nanterre: Maison René Ginouvès, 2009), 81–94; Dominique Charpin, En quête de Ninive: Des savants français à la découverte de la Méspotamie (1842–1975) (Paris: Collège de France Les Belles Lettres, 2023), 45–75. [↩]
- Paper read on 17th May, 1852, and published in E. J. Hincks, “On the Assyrio-Babylonian Phonetic Characters,” Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy 22 (1952): 342 footnote: “some inscriptions from pieces of terra cotta…which I recognised as an Assyrian syllabarium.” [↩]
- J. Oppert, Expédition scientifique en Mésopotamie} 1 (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1863), 70: “ces briques, couvertes de caractères aussi fins que nettement dessinés, contiennent, entre autres, des syllabaires, des textes astronomiques, des listes mythologiques, des décrets royaux et beaucoup d’autres documents d’un intérêt inappréciable.” [↩]
- H. C. Rawlinson, The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia II: A Selection from the Miscellaneous Inscriptions of Assyria (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1866), 5. [↩]
- F. Delitzsch, Assyrische Lesestücke, nach den Originalen theils revidirt, theils zum ersten Male herausgegeben und durch Schrifttafeln eingeleitet (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1876), 17–32 including II R 1–4 and duplicates, included in every edition thereafter with updates. [↩]
- J. Oppert, Écriture anarienne, syllabaire style modern de Babylone, tableau lithographié avec l’indication du nom du savant qui a le premier fixé la véritable valeur du signe (Paris: Imprimerie Kaeppelin, 1855) (value assigned by Oppert himself) under the column for vowels after ʿ and h; Joachim Menant, Le syllabaire assyrien, exposé des éléments du système phonétique de l’écriture anarienne (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1869), 385; see Charpin, En quête de Ninive, 52. [↩]
- See the critical remarks on the etymology in W. Sommerfeld, “Die ältesten akkadischen Sprachzeugnisse,” in The Akkadian Language and Its Semitic Context: Studies in the Akkadian of the Third and Second Millennium BC, ed. Guy Deutscher and N. J. C. Kouwenberg (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 2006), 52 n. 66. [↩]
- Delitzsch, Assyrische Lesestücke, 3; updated in F. Delitzsch, Assyrische Lesestücke, 5th Edition (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1912), 6 to “er; (rì, ur)”. [↩]
- Ch. Fossey, Contribution au dictionnaire sumérien-assyrien (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1907), 466; P. Anton Deimel, Šumerisches Lexikon II/1 (Roma: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1928). [↩]
- René Labat, Manuel d’épigraphie akkadienne (signes, syllabaire, idéogrammes), 4th edition (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1963), 57. [↩]
- P. Attinger, Glossaire sumérien-français, principalement des textes littéraires paléobabyloniens (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2021), 577, with older literature; we can ignore the problem of iri/eri here. [↩]
- The Early Dynastic reading iriis indirectly suggested by the writing I.NUN for Eridu in the archaic “Cities” list, discussed in S. F. Monaco, “The Sign NUN in the Archaic Texts,” in The Third Millennium: Studies in Early Mesopotamia and Syria in Honor of Walter Sommerfeld and Manfred Krebernik , ed. Ilya Arkhipov, Leonid Kogan, and Natalia Koslova, Cuneiform Monographs 50 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 511; I owe this reference to Camille Lecompte (Nanterre). [↩]
- C. Mittermayer, Altbabylonische Zeichenliste der sumerisch-literarischen Texte (Fribourg: Academic Press, 2006), 71f. Nr. 181 and the note on p. 197. [↩]
- R. Borger, Mesopotamisches Zeichenlexikon, Alter Orient und Altes Testament 305 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2004), 59. [↩]
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Christian W. Hess (16 juin 2023). Sb and the City Vincible. ScriPTS. Consulté le 13 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/vtcw
