Another year over, and a new one begun! 2023 was pretty cool overall. Now for 2024.
Aug 29 - DomCon
Link to old thread: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=7714
Fight Calendar 2024
Breaking news, Francis is boxing AJ. Confirmed by Eddie Hearn.
Edit: This post is now for archiving my research notes:
Read publications of the OB version of IoSh to see if they give any commentary on why so many lines are so nonsensical/corrupted. Write a paragraph on how you think that it is not just a rare line that has this, but rather a ton of lines have it and it seems to indicate a break in the tradition in the Old Akkadian period with the OS lit having to be reconstructed by Neo-Sumerian scribes.
So actually the main publications of the text pretty much all came from Alster, Civil, and Biggs. The two that you really need to look at are Civil and Biggs 1966, which is not the OIP 99 text though that was also 1966, and the first edition, done by Alster in 1974, which I believe is that thin red book from Frayne's library. Okay from the Biggs 1966 paper see page 77 where he says the corpus is so similar to Fara that undoubtedly there was some system where the cities of central Sumer were replenishing each other. Though earlier he mentions the Fara material is really boring as it only has 1 damaged literary text(called F 512). Okay, so the oldest citation Alster gives us is Biggs' 1966 article, but it itself when talking about IoSh already talks about it like its a known thing. He says its best known from unpublished OB copies and says see Kramer JCS 1 p.33 n. 208. However, Biggs seems to indicate the best summary of the the composition is in Lambert BWL p.92-95 and E.I. Gordon BiOr 17 p.148 and n. 249 and he says see also Kramer, The Sumerians, p.224. He mentions early in the text the abbreviations are those of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, Vol. A/1. In the Civil/Biggs article on archaic texts they give the same Lambert reference, which is an edition btw. They also give the same Gordon citation but add note 2452. Ah okay, so those two writing at that time said that Kramer allowed them to compare the Adab fragments to his provisional reconstruction. So it seems at this point the OB version is best known by Kramer but maybe also Lambert? The Adab version seems to be studied well enough they are comparing it now, and the AbS one just came out of the ground not long before. Btw at this time their understanding seems very basic. They are saying "Look how the son's name changed from UR.ASH to Ziusudra, this must be caused by copying and not natural sound change. They say they need to wait for a proper publication of "Instructions of Shurupak" before they can really make a comparison. So Im guessing the Lambert publication is for one fragment which comments of some info from other fragments and to this point there is still no edition published, meaning Alsters was probably the first. Ah, so it goes on to do a comparison of the AbS version, Kramer's notes edition, and LAmbert's copy. The tablet its referencing from Lambert according to CDLI is actually a medical text and indeed it doesnt seem to match lol Another sign this is really old, Civil is wonder if the "hamlu and maru" designations exist for all verbs or just the irregular ones that look completely different such as dug/e, de/tum, etc.
Alright Im reading Hallo's book now looking for clues. He is talking about genres which may transend time and specifically mentions a genre that may go back to the times of Lugalzagesi and mentions "“Frontier of Shara"” dated by Sollberger, so find whatever this is. Apparently some kind of survey, not literature. Royal inscriptions of course also transcend time. He says the divine hymn genre has monumental origins and this would be another that yeah you can probably push back to ED times. With this in mind, reread your notes on the kesh temple hymn specifically looking to see if we have any crystal clear OB or later versions, which would contradict your theory. Okay Hallo makes a good point that in the Sargonic era they were commissioning Sumerian literary works, such as those by Sargons daughter. So it wouldnt be that the tradition was crushed and suppressed, but rather fell out of favor or popularity, or perhaps reduced as it was competing with Akkadian.
Note that Hallo when categorizing literary traditions used both OS(2500-2200) and OB(1900-1600). Okay here we go, page 77, Shulgi of Ur claimed the founding of the great scribal schools at both Ur and Nippur. He was a patron of the arts and in this regard he was emulated by his Ur III successors and among the early kings of Isin. This Neo-Sumerian corpus provided the bulk of the curiculum of the OB period which freely adapted them. Heres another interesting fact, page 79, when the OB dynasty fell the scribal schools of Nippur and Babylon closed and Sumerian scholars fled to the Sealand. However the Kassite conquerors did try to encourage some preservation of Sumerian and it survived in a more limited curriculum. On page 177 he notes the signs of Sumerian national consciousness such as taking king names and cults from other city states, the Sumerian king list, etc. Page 240 - Nippur was at the forefront of scribal schools and Ake Sjoberg did a study of it. It was founded by Shulgi according to lines 272-332 of his Hymn B. So, this would mean that already in Ur III proper understanding of of IoSh would have been lost. Page 242, during the Sealand times when scholars fled to the Sealand, Nippur was unoccupied. It is not known if the school reopened in Kassite times, but we do know from a colophon that Kassite era texts were collecting and copying texts from Nippur among other sites. 244 - in Neo-Assyrian times Tukulti-Ninurta I and Ashurbanipal both demanded tablets from Babylonian collectors and copied and cateloged them, this included some of the Sumerian curriculum. In some cases we have the Assyrian copies which say they are copies from a certain site in their colophon, then the original turns up in a modern archaeological excavation.
539-540 - Hallo references himself about how Nippur's tradition was enshrined in the OB period by the first dynasty of Isin. Reference is "Towards a history of Sumerian literature" in a publication in honour of Jakobsen. Safe to assume I can just use this later book if I need to cite that. 615 - He is talking about the "That which enters" riddle and how it appears in epics. Cite his interpretation for that line. He reads it as "It enters and does not fill up, it leaves but does not diminish. -(what is it?)-Royal property." Apparently he knows examples that write out the solution then? 619 - He is now doing the same for the "unknown dog, unknown man" proverb. Cite his interpretation on your notes on that line. He reads it as "An unknown beast is bad, an unknown man is horrible, on an unknown road at the edge of a foreign country, (Oh Utu, an unknown man is worse)." He cites Wilcke on this line so presumably his translation. 719 when he cites alster when he talks about IoSh generally he cites Alster 1974, and 1975. So as of like 15 years ago Alsters work from the 70s is still the main authority. Alsler, B. 1974. The Instructions of ˇSuruppak. Mesopotamica 2. Copenhagen. 1975. Studies in Sumerian Proverbs. Mesopotamica 3. Copenhagen. Okay looking at Biggs original publication, he says right in it there is no edition published at this time, though I think later that year Alster publishes one. Also, your theory that they dont always write verbs twice when they appear twice as a form of abbreviation is mentioned here already by Biggs, who states in unequivocally and references line rev. iii 13-14 - the raise a man destroy a house lines. The problem is both have broken sections that could have the other verbs in them and a partial sign in one of them indeed looks like one. Anyways, Biggs gives no indication that the text might be incorrect in some way, and in fact he talks about how these old ED texts seem to have been faithfully copied based on the Kesh Temple Hymn. The problem there is its hard for us to understand, so why is that? Maybe by the OB they couldnt read it that well either.
Okay on to Civil's 1984 article now. So right away he references Alsters 1974 edition, so even then that was the edition. Pretty much the whole article is just discussing technical details, no mention of possible text corruption. Though it does say for general comments reference Alster and Wilcke. Okay, next source is Biggs 1986: In the 3rd millennium we can see there was a scholarly network where works of Sumerian learning were transmitted in a fairly standardized manner -p32. So he is mainly using the lexical lists to argue this, which is very convincing of course. But remember that texts like this can be transmitted without necessarily transmitting the correct understanding of them. The best example of this is Ad-Gi4, but also the lines in IoSh that Alster has already demonstrated as being corrupted such as "man from Shurupak" and the donkey renting line. Biggs notes that third millennium texts such as the lexical list "Proffessions List A" remained very popular until the OB period while other 3rd millennium compositions were forgotten, showing that of course there is an errosion of transmission over time. He states that in literary texts there was less conservatism and more potential for innovation. -p33.
On Alster's 1974 edition: Alster has a chapter specifically dedicated to philological problems with the classical version. He starts by questioning if it even makes sense to reconstruct it as one consistent text given the variations. He says obviously it has been fixed to a very high degree, but there are differences. He says while there are some ommissions and interpolations its essentially the same text. He notes some mistakes scribes made, including an OB scribe who no longer understood the idiom a2-zi denoting violence. -p71-72.
Okay, onto "Studies in Sumerian Proverbs" now. He says its a work in the same format as an oral tradition and therefore is a folklorist work. Interestingly he notes that it being part of the tradition shows it conforms to the norms of the tradition and would fall out of use if it no longer was. He says this is why the text gets reorganized over time. He gives a summary here of his chapters including the one on transmission and the point he is making there is that because the text keeps getting transmitted yet gets reorganized it shows its part of "stable structural models". -p16. So on that chapter he dives right into it - he asks how does the Abu Salabikh version relate to the classical one. He notes that the classical version is much longer, and that while the OS version is divided in two "chapters" the OB one is divided into three with the third being very long. He notes some parts that were added, ommitted and says the order of lines stayed largely the same. He said the important parts for studying the text's development are the additional sections which he said seem to show additions could be made ad infinitum as long as they fit the patterns of the composition and such additions would strengthen the text -p71. Alster shows how the line order of AbuSalabikh and Adab are very closely related, yet in some instances Adab agrees with the classical version rather than AbuS. While it seems at first Adab is a link between then, this is not exactly correct. For example where there is the "refrain"(I assume he means "Shurupak gave instructions, etc") in AbuS it has been removed in the Adab version but in order to keep the strophic character of the poem has taken two lines from elsewhere to fill the void, and these two lines are now in reverse order of how they appear in both AbuS and OB. Significantly the two lines are side by side in the AbuS version yet separated by a sequence of lines in the OB version. Where these changes occured the strophic character of the composition is not properly maintained -p77-78. This indeed seems to indicate the AbuS version is the original and the other two versions modified it in their own ways for their own purposes. He then shows how the OB version tried to maintain the four line system by adding two new lines to two old lines in its expansion efforts. He said they did the same thing when adding the introduction and making the conclusion longer. -p79. He speculates about why the lines were ommitted and gives some solid suggestions, but then emphasises we have no way of knowing if its not just because they come from independant traditions. He then focuses on this question, noting the versions span across roughly 700 years and are from found in different locations. He says that due to the remarkable consistency/similarities across versions clearly they were linked by a continuous written tradition -p80. I agree but I would qualify continuous as only necessarily true in the sense of tablets being passed down, and not necisarily their complete explanation of each line. He ends the section by saying clearly the proverb collections like this were made for the school curiculum by literary people who however used an oral technique of composing(since the patterns repeat, etc.) -p81. The big observation we get from this book is that while Adab is not a direct link/intermediary between AbuS and OB, it is a move in the general direction but to an intermediate degree. So now the question is, was the OB version composed a few generations after the Adab one, c.2300, and transmitted with minimal change from then? More likely I think Ur III scribes composed it using copies roughly contemporary with AbuS though perhaps with small regional divergences, and perhaps also based on Adab-like intermediaries. Actually Alster is probably right that the additional lines were at least added before Ur III since they maintain the strophic character, so the Ur III scribes would have also had access to these later versions. Alster mentions in the proverbs book that one of the ways the OB one was reorganized was to stress the idea of the society supporting the collective welfare of their people as opposed to barbarians, an idea which was only a small part of the OS version. Note how this would fit well in the ideology of the Ur III state(yet, the new lines were likely added before Ur III so maybe this concept became more prominent as Sumerians had to more and more encounter the Akkadian yoke and Gutian invasions).
Wilcke notes: On page 197 he comments on how the new text has changed compared to the old one and says since we dont have any Ur III examples we cant know for certain when these changes took place. Wilcke is probably right that the "glean like a slave girl, eat like a queen" was likely a saying for daughters that got added to the list of proverbs, though that parts not in the AbS version. From 203-211 he is just translating lines from the OB version with no commentary.
Not really sure its worth quibbling about whether the theif is a specifically mythical snake, i.e. a dragon. Since its not the most common word for snake and doesnt seem to be neciserily mythical, I'd say its prolly just a specific kind of snake, and the Akkadians translations suggest a viper. Also note the term also means foremost and noble, so this specific kind of snake was not chosen accidentally as its also contrasts the slave girl at a social level. But yeah, not really sure this is worth mentioning.
Other note I had to remove from my doc but is good info:
Wilcke misinterprets u4-sar-ra-kam as he was writing before Civil clarified the term in 1984. Romer agrees despite elsewhere citing Civil 1984, which seems bizarre. Don't actually include this part, as Alster keeps it classy and doesn't directly mention they were both wrong. He just explains that orthographic confusions have resulted in people conflating u sar with u sakar. Possibly because they did so based on Alster himself publishing the same mistake. See p.102 in his 1974 edition.
Taking out line 15, as the unusual parts can be explained as it being imperative and the real question is what is the other verb besides DU. The OB data is unclear and seems corrupted so basically we just have no way of knowing and Alster already noted that the verb in AbS cant be DU. Here are my notes: In line 15 I agree with Alster that LAK134 is likely a forerunner of i and that NI.LAK134 is most likely the Sumerian word "in" meaning "insult" which appears as in-nu-ush in the OB version. Thus it can be read as i-ne2 which can be explained as the locative-terminative marker showing directionality, or simply as a dialectal pronunciation variant of in(-nu). The second verb would seem to be a form of the DU sign which Alster reads as gub. However, the partially broken sign in the copy does not look like DU and in Alster's collation he comments the sign looks exactly as it does in the copy (Alster 1991, 32). The only thing Wilcke says is that maybe NI.I is in-nu-ush but doesnt commit to it (Wilcke, 214). Neither Alster nor Wilcke credit each other or anyone else for this idea, so I'm curious if its in Alster's original addition. If its not then it seems Wilcke was the first to notice. Alster does have it in 1974, where he renders it as i(LAK)-ni. The lack of a number after LAK is how he actually put it(p.11). Romer doesn't translate the part with insult and in the notes he just says its unclear to him.
Another line basically unneeded:
In line 23 it is worth noting that me-zu seems no less viable than assuming its an early dynastic way of writing inim-zu. The line would thus be understood as "Yourself will be established(if you dont boast)". Alster never says it is for sure inim-zu so perhaps this is not worth mentioning, though he does translate it as if its inim-zu(but he does it with an asterisk and a question mark). Yeah this is just Alster not writing the obvious because he is alergic to literal translations. Probably dont include this. Wilcke just says refer to Alster for this line. Romer just says its unclear. Alster 1974 has "me," "zu," and "word" each with a "(?)" beside them (p.11-16). He non-commitally says me-zu is "apparently" ni2-zu (p.118).
Edit: This post is now for archiving my research notes:
Read publications of the OB version of IoSh to see if they give any commentary on why so many lines are so nonsensical/corrupted. Write a paragraph on how you think that it is not just a rare line that has this, but rather a ton of lines have it and it seems to indicate a break in the tradition in the Old Akkadian period with the OS lit having to be reconstructed by Neo-Sumerian scribes.
So actually the main publications of the text pretty much all came from Alster, Civil, and Biggs. The two that you really need to look at are Civil and Biggs 1966, which is not the OIP 99 text though that was also 1966, and the first edition, done by Alster in 1974, which I believe is that thin red book from Frayne's library. Okay from the Biggs 1966 paper see page 77 where he says the corpus is so similar to Fara that undoubtedly there was some system where the cities of central Sumer were replenishing each other. Though earlier he mentions the Fara material is really boring as it only has 1 damaged literary text(called F 512). Okay, so the oldest citation Alster gives us is Biggs' 1966 article, but it itself when talking about IoSh already talks about it like its a known thing. He says its best known from unpublished OB copies and says see Kramer JCS 1 p.33 n. 208. However, Biggs seems to indicate the best summary of the the composition is in Lambert BWL p.92-95 and E.I. Gordon BiOr 17 p.148 and n. 249 and he says see also Kramer, The Sumerians, p.224. He mentions early in the text the abbreviations are those of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, Vol. A/1. In the Civil/Biggs article on archaic texts they give the same Lambert reference, which is an edition btw. They also give the same Gordon citation but add note 2452. Ah okay, so those two writing at that time said that Kramer allowed them to compare the Adab fragments to his provisional reconstruction. So it seems at this point the OB version is best known by Kramer but maybe also Lambert? The Adab version seems to be studied well enough they are comparing it now, and the AbS one just came out of the ground not long before. Btw at this time their understanding seems very basic. They are saying "Look how the son's name changed from UR.ASH to Ziusudra, this must be caused by copying and not natural sound change. They say they need to wait for a proper publication of "Instructions of Shurupak" before they can really make a comparison. So Im guessing the Lambert publication is for one fragment which comments of some info from other fragments and to this point there is still no edition published, meaning Alsters was probably the first. Ah, so it goes on to do a comparison of the AbS version, Kramer's notes edition, and LAmbert's copy. The tablet its referencing from Lambert according to CDLI is actually a medical text and indeed it doesnt seem to match lol Another sign this is really old, Civil is wonder if the "hamlu and maru" designations exist for all verbs or just the irregular ones that look completely different such as dug/e, de/tum, etc.
Alright Im reading Hallo's book now looking for clues. He is talking about genres which may transend time and specifically mentions a genre that may go back to the times of Lugalzagesi and mentions "“Frontier of Shara"” dated by Sollberger, so find whatever this is. Apparently some kind of survey, not literature. Royal inscriptions of course also transcend time. He says the divine hymn genre has monumental origins and this would be another that yeah you can probably push back to ED times. With this in mind, reread your notes on the kesh temple hymn specifically looking to see if we have any crystal clear OB or later versions, which would contradict your theory. Okay Hallo makes a good point that in the Sargonic era they were commissioning Sumerian literary works, such as those by Sargons daughter. So it wouldnt be that the tradition was crushed and suppressed, but rather fell out of favor or popularity, or perhaps reduced as it was competing with Akkadian.
Note that Hallo when categorizing literary traditions used both OS(2500-2200) and OB(1900-1600). Okay here we go, page 77, Shulgi of Ur claimed the founding of the great scribal schools at both Ur and Nippur. He was a patron of the arts and in this regard he was emulated by his Ur III successors and among the early kings of Isin. This Neo-Sumerian corpus provided the bulk of the curiculum of the OB period which freely adapted them. Heres another interesting fact, page 79, when the OB dynasty fell the scribal schools of Nippur and Babylon closed and Sumerian scholars fled to the Sealand. However the Kassite conquerors did try to encourage some preservation of Sumerian and it survived in a more limited curriculum. On page 177 he notes the signs of Sumerian national consciousness such as taking king names and cults from other city states, the Sumerian king list, etc. Page 240 - Nippur was at the forefront of scribal schools and Ake Sjoberg did a study of it. It was founded by Shulgi according to lines 272-332 of his Hymn B. So, this would mean that already in Ur III proper understanding of of IoSh would have been lost. Page 242, during the Sealand times when scholars fled to the Sealand, Nippur was unoccupied. It is not known if the school reopened in Kassite times, but we do know from a colophon that Kassite era texts were collecting and copying texts from Nippur among other sites. 244 - in Neo-Assyrian times Tukulti-Ninurta I and Ashurbanipal both demanded tablets from Babylonian collectors and copied and cateloged them, this included some of the Sumerian curriculum. In some cases we have the Assyrian copies which say they are copies from a certain site in their colophon, then the original turns up in a modern archaeological excavation.
539-540 - Hallo references himself about how Nippur's tradition was enshrined in the OB period by the first dynasty of Isin. Reference is "Towards a history of Sumerian literature" in a publication in honour of Jakobsen. Safe to assume I can just use this later book if I need to cite that. 615 - He is talking about the "That which enters" riddle and how it appears in epics. Cite his interpretation for that line. He reads it as "It enters and does not fill up, it leaves but does not diminish. -(what is it?)-Royal property." Apparently he knows examples that write out the solution then? 619 - He is now doing the same for the "unknown dog, unknown man" proverb. Cite his interpretation on your notes on that line. He reads it as "An unknown beast is bad, an unknown man is horrible, on an unknown road at the edge of a foreign country, (Oh Utu, an unknown man is worse)." He cites Wilcke on this line so presumably his translation. 719 when he cites alster when he talks about IoSh generally he cites Alster 1974, and 1975. So as of like 15 years ago Alsters work from the 70s is still the main authority. Alsler, B. 1974. The Instructions of ˇSuruppak. Mesopotamica 2. Copenhagen. 1975. Studies in Sumerian Proverbs. Mesopotamica 3. Copenhagen. Okay looking at Biggs original publication, he says right in it there is no edition published at this time, though I think later that year Alster publishes one. Also, your theory that they dont always write verbs twice when they appear twice as a form of abbreviation is mentioned here already by Biggs, who states in unequivocally and references line rev. iii 13-14 - the raise a man destroy a house lines. The problem is both have broken sections that could have the other verbs in them and a partial sign in one of them indeed looks like one. Anyways, Biggs gives no indication that the text might be incorrect in some way, and in fact he talks about how these old ED texts seem to have been faithfully copied based on the Kesh Temple Hymn. The problem there is its hard for us to understand, so why is that? Maybe by the OB they couldnt read it that well either.
Okay on to Civil's 1984 article now. So right away he references Alsters 1974 edition, so even then that was the edition. Pretty much the whole article is just discussing technical details, no mention of possible text corruption. Though it does say for general comments reference Alster and Wilcke. Okay, next source is Biggs 1986: In the 3rd millennium we can see there was a scholarly network where works of Sumerian learning were transmitted in a fairly standardized manner -p32. So he is mainly using the lexical lists to argue this, which is very convincing of course. But remember that texts like this can be transmitted without necessarily transmitting the correct understanding of them. The best example of this is Ad-Gi4, but also the lines in IoSh that Alster has already demonstrated as being corrupted such as "man from Shurupak" and the donkey renting line. Biggs notes that third millennium texts such as the lexical list "Proffessions List A" remained very popular until the OB period while other 3rd millennium compositions were forgotten, showing that of course there is an errosion of transmission over time. He states that in literary texts there was less conservatism and more potential for innovation. -p33.
On Alster's 1974 edition: Alster has a chapter specifically dedicated to philological problems with the classical version. He starts by questioning if it even makes sense to reconstruct it as one consistent text given the variations. He says obviously it has been fixed to a very high degree, but there are differences. He says while there are some ommissions and interpolations its essentially the same text. He notes some mistakes scribes made, including an OB scribe who no longer understood the idiom a2-zi denoting violence. -p71-72.
Okay, onto "Studies in Sumerian Proverbs" now. He says its a work in the same format as an oral tradition and therefore is a folklorist work. Interestingly he notes that it being part of the tradition shows it conforms to the norms of the tradition and would fall out of use if it no longer was. He says this is why the text gets reorganized over time. He gives a summary here of his chapters including the one on transmission and the point he is making there is that because the text keeps getting transmitted yet gets reorganized it shows its part of "stable structural models". -p16. So on that chapter he dives right into it - he asks how does the Abu Salabikh version relate to the classical one. He notes that the classical version is much longer, and that while the OS version is divided in two "chapters" the OB one is divided into three with the third being very long. He notes some parts that were added, ommitted and says the order of lines stayed largely the same. He said the important parts for studying the text's development are the additional sections which he said seem to show additions could be made ad infinitum as long as they fit the patterns of the composition and such additions would strengthen the text -p71. Alster shows how the line order of AbuSalabikh and Adab are very closely related, yet in some instances Adab agrees with the classical version rather than AbuS. While it seems at first Adab is a link between then, this is not exactly correct. For example where there is the "refrain"(I assume he means "Shurupak gave instructions, etc") in AbuS it has been removed in the Adab version but in order to keep the strophic character of the poem has taken two lines from elsewhere to fill the void, and these two lines are now in reverse order of how they appear in both AbuS and OB. Significantly the two lines are side by side in the AbuS version yet separated by a sequence of lines in the OB version. Where these changes occured the strophic character of the composition is not properly maintained -p77-78. This indeed seems to indicate the AbuS version is the original and the other two versions modified it in their own ways for their own purposes. He then shows how the OB version tried to maintain the four line system by adding two new lines to two old lines in its expansion efforts. He said they did the same thing when adding the introduction and making the conclusion longer. -p79. He speculates about why the lines were ommitted and gives some solid suggestions, but then emphasises we have no way of knowing if its not just because they come from independant traditions. He then focuses on this question, noting the versions span across roughly 700 years and are from found in different locations. He says that due to the remarkable consistency/similarities across versions clearly they were linked by a continuous written tradition -p80. I agree but I would qualify continuous as only necessarily true in the sense of tablets being passed down, and not necisarily their complete explanation of each line. He ends the section by saying clearly the proverb collections like this were made for the school curiculum by literary people who however used an oral technique of composing(since the patterns repeat, etc.) -p81. The big observation we get from this book is that while Adab is not a direct link/intermediary between AbuS and OB, it is a move in the general direction but to an intermediate degree. So now the question is, was the OB version composed a few generations after the Adab one, c.2300, and transmitted with minimal change from then? More likely I think Ur III scribes composed it using copies roughly contemporary with AbuS though perhaps with small regional divergences, and perhaps also based on Adab-like intermediaries. Actually Alster is probably right that the additional lines were at least added before Ur III since they maintain the strophic character, so the Ur III scribes would have also had access to these later versions. Alster mentions in the proverbs book that one of the ways the OB one was reorganized was to stress the idea of the society supporting the collective welfare of their people as opposed to barbarians, an idea which was only a small part of the OS version. Note how this would fit well in the ideology of the Ur III state(yet, the new lines were likely added before Ur III so maybe this concept became more prominent as Sumerians had to more and more encounter the Akkadian yoke and Gutian invasions).
Wilcke notes: On page 197 he comments on how the new text has changed compared to the old one and says since we dont have any Ur III examples we cant know for certain when these changes took place. Wilcke is probably right that the "glean like a slave girl, eat like a queen" was likely a saying for daughters that got added to the list of proverbs, though that parts not in the AbS version. From 203-211 he is just translating lines from the OB version with no commentary.
Not really sure its worth quibbling about whether the theif is a specifically mythical snake, i.e. a dragon. Since its not the most common word for snake and doesnt seem to be neciserily mythical, I'd say its prolly just a specific kind of snake, and the Akkadians translations suggest a viper. Also note the term also means foremost and noble, so this specific kind of snake was not chosen accidentally as its also contrasts the slave girl at a social level. But yeah, not really sure this is worth mentioning.
Other note I had to remove from my doc but is good info:
Wilcke misinterprets u4-sar-ra-kam as he was writing before Civil clarified the term in 1984. Romer agrees despite elsewhere citing Civil 1984, which seems bizarre. Don't actually include this part, as Alster keeps it classy and doesn't directly mention they were both wrong. He just explains that orthographic confusions have resulted in people conflating u sar with u sakar. Possibly because they did so based on Alster himself publishing the same mistake. See p.102 in his 1974 edition.
Taking out line 15, as the unusual parts can be explained as it being imperative and the real question is what is the other verb besides DU. The OB data is unclear and seems corrupted so basically we just have no way of knowing and Alster already noted that the verb in AbS cant be DU. Here are my notes: In line 15 I agree with Alster that LAK134 is likely a forerunner of i and that NI.LAK134 is most likely the Sumerian word "in" meaning "insult" which appears as in-nu-ush in the OB version. Thus it can be read as i-ne2 which can be explained as the locative-terminative marker showing directionality, or simply as a dialectal pronunciation variant of in(-nu). The second verb would seem to be a form of the DU sign which Alster reads as gub. However, the partially broken sign in the copy does not look like DU and in Alster's collation he comments the sign looks exactly as it does in the copy (Alster 1991, 32). The only thing Wilcke says is that maybe NI.I is in-nu-ush but doesnt commit to it (Wilcke, 214). Neither Alster nor Wilcke credit each other or anyone else for this idea, so I'm curious if its in Alster's original addition. If its not then it seems Wilcke was the first to notice. Alster does have it in 1974, where he renders it as i(LAK)-ni. The lack of a number after LAK is how he actually put it(p.11). Romer doesn't translate the part with insult and in the notes he just says its unclear to him.
Another line basically unneeded:
In line 23 it is worth noting that me-zu seems no less viable than assuming its an early dynastic way of writing inim-zu. The line would thus be understood as "Yourself will be established(if you dont boast)". Alster never says it is for sure inim-zu so perhaps this is not worth mentioning, though he does translate it as if its inim-zu(but he does it with an asterisk and a question mark). Yeah this is just Alster not writing the obvious because he is alergic to literal translations. Probably dont include this. Wilcke just says refer to Alster for this line. Romer just says its unclear. Alster 1974 has "me," "zu," and "word" each with a "(?)" beside them (p.11-16). He non-commitally says me-zu is "apparently" ni2-zu (p.118).
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Edge Guerrero
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Don't be selfish, preserve this world for the next generations.
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Regret won't waste my life again
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Edge Guerrero
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Don't be selfish, preserve this world for the next generations.
I'll never long for what might have been
Regret won't waste my life again
I won't look back I'll fight to remain
Don't be selfish, preserve this world for the next generations.
I'll never long for what might have been
Regret won't waste my life again
I won't look back I'll fight to remain
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Edge Guerrero
- Posts: 8989
- Joined: Tue Oct 22, 2013 7:14 am
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Don't be selfish, preserve this world for the next generations.
I'll never long for what might have been
Regret won't waste my life again
I won't look back I'll fight to remain
Don't be selfish, preserve this world for the next generations.
I'll never long for what might have been
Regret won't waste my life again
I won't look back I'll fight to remain
Luigi wrote:Breaking news, Francis is boxing AJ. Confirmed by Eddie Hearn.
Wow that's pretty interesting. Did not know, thank you!
I'll hunt for some hype about it, some long work shifts coming
Masato wrote:Luigi wrote:Breaking news, Francis is boxing AJ. Confirmed by Eddie Hearn.
Wow that's pretty interesting. Did not know, thank you!
I'll hunt for some hype about it, some long work shifts coming
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