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Sb and the City Vincible

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.

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