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86-578: Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea usually appear together in Mesopotamian texts. Typically Lugal-irra was followed by Meslamta-ea, though instances of the order being reversed are known too. While attestations of Lugal-irra without Meslamta-ea are known, they are considered unusual. Lugal-irra's name was most commonly written in cuneiform as Lugal - GÌR -ra . It can be romanized as Lugalirra as well. It has Sumerian origin and can be translated as "the strong lord". The variant Lugal-girra, Lugal-gír-ra , reflects

172-430: A Hittite ritual presumably adapted from a Babylonian original, KBo 15, 2, which prescribes the preparation of a figure representing him for that purpose. Astronomical texts, such as the compendium MUL.APIN , identify Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea with a pair of stars known as the "Great Twins", MAŠ.TAB.BA.GAL. It corresponded to Alpha Geminorum and Beta Geminorum . The analogous name "Little Twins" (MAŠ.TAB.BA.TUR.TUR)

258-501: A bright pigment. The statuettes wore garments known as tillû and horned headdress. Neo-Assyrian sources indicate that they were buried under entrances to buildings. A hymn refers to Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea as a pair of ravens , respectively black and white, though the basis for this association is unknown. Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea were both closely associated with Nergal . They could be considered members of his court. Both of them could be directly identified with him as well. It

344-406: A completely unknown writing system in 19th-century Assyriology . It was successfully deciphered by 1857. The cuneiform script changed considerably over more than 2,000 years. The image below shows the development of the sign SAĜ "head" (Borger nr. 184, U+12295 𒊕 ). Stages: The cuneiform script was developed from pictographic proto-writing in the late 4th millennium BC, stemming from

430-430: A divine housekeeper. An Early Dynastic text refers to her as an artisan or carpenter ( nagar ). In various documents, she appears in enumerations of the courtiers of Enlil, with the sequence of Ninimma , Ennugi , Kusu , Ninšar, Ninkasi and Ninmada occurring in at least two sources, An = Anum and the so-called Canonical Temple List . Her husband was the god Erragal , who like her was associated with knives. He

516-485: A form of Lugal-irra. The oldest known references to Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea as a pair have been identified in hymns from the reign of Ibbi-Sin , the last king from the Third Dynasty of Ur , which indicate at the time their cult center was Kisiga (Kišaga). It is not certain if it was identical with Kissik known from sources from the first millennium BCE. Texts from the reign of Sîn-kāšid of Uruk refer to Dūrum as

602-550: A given sign could have various meanings depending on context. The sign inventory was reduced from some 1,500 signs to some 600 signs, and writing became increasingly phonological . Determinative signs were re-introduced to avoid ambiguity. Cuneiform writing proper thus arises from the more primitive system of pictographs at about that time, labeled the Early Bronze Age II epoch by historians. The earliest known Sumerian king, whose name appears on contemporary cuneiform tablets,

688-577: A language structure typical of the non-Indo-European agglutinative Sumerian language . The first tablets using syllabic elements date to the Early Dynastic I–II periods c.  2800 BC , and they are agreed to be clearly in Sumerian. This is the time when some pictographic element started to be used for their phonetic value, permitting the recording of abstract ideas or personal names. Many pictographs began to lose their original function, and

774-422: A late reinterpretation of the name as "lord of the dagger" and is no longer considered an indication that Lugal- GÌR -ra was ever read as Lugal-girra. Despite the phonetic similarity, the second half of Lugal-irra's name is most likely unrelated to the theonym Erra (variant: Irra), and its Akkadian translation was gašru according to lexical lists . The most common spelling of Meslamta-ea's name in cuneiform

860-805: A million tablets are held in museums across the world, but comparatively few of these are published . The largest collections belong to the British Museum ( approx.  130,000 tablets), the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin , the Louvre , the Istanbul Archaeology Museums , the National Museum of Iraq , the Yale Babylonian Collection ( approx.  40,000 tablets), and Penn Museum . Writing began after pottery

946-641: A phonetic complement. Yet even in those days, the Babylonian syllabary remained a mixture of logographic and phonemic writing. Elamite cuneiform was a simplified form of the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, used to write the Elamite language in the area that corresponds to modern Iran from the 3rd millennium BC to the 4th century BC. Elamite cuneiform at times competed with other local scripts, Proto-Elamite and Linear Elamite . The earliest known Elamite cuneiform text

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1032-405: A play on the name and the word SI 12 , referring to the color green. Antoine Cavigneaux and Manfred Krebernik note that the name's meaning shows no direct connection with her well attested functions. Ninšar should not be confused with Ninšár ("Lady of All"), who alongside the matching male deity Enšár appears in enumerations of ancestors of Enlil in sources such as the god list An = Anum and

1118-437: A pointed stylus, sometimes called "linear cuneiform". Many of the early dynastic inscriptions, particularly those made on stone, continued to use the linear style as late as circa 2000 BC. In the mid-3rd millennium BC, a new wedge-tipped stylus was introduced which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped cuneiform. This development made writing quicker and easier, especially when writing on soft clay. By adjusting

1204-477: A resemblance to Old Japanese , written in a Chinese-derived script, where some of these Sinograms were used as logograms and others as phonetic characters. This "mixed" method of writing continued through the end of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, although there were periods when "purism" was in fashion and there was a more marked tendency to spell out the words laboriously, in preference to using signs with

1290-549: A sharpened reed stylus or incised in stone. This early style lacked the characteristic wedge shape of the strokes. Most Proto-Cuneiform records from this period were of an accounting nature. The proto-cuneiform sign list has grown, as new texts are discovered, and shrunk, as variant signs are combined. The current sign list is 705 elements long with 42 being numeric and four considered pre-proto-Elamite. Certain signs to indicate names of gods, countries, cities, vessels, birds, trees, etc., are known as determinatives and were

1376-574: A slightly different way. From the 6th century, the Akkadian language was marginalized by Aramaic , written in the Aramaic alphabet , but Akkadian cuneiform remained in use in the literary tradition well into the times of the Parthian Empire (250 BC–226 AD). The last known cuneiform inscription, an astronomical text, was written in 75 AD. The ability to read cuneiform may have persisted until

1462-607: A stylus. Writing is first recorded in Uruk , at the end of the 4th millennium BC, and soon after in various parts of the Near-East . An ancient Mesopotamian poem gives the first known story of the invention of writing : Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat [the message], the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay. The cuneiform writing system

1548-669: A temple dedicated jointly to the pair named E-Meslam, which might be either an abbreviation of E-Meslam-melamilla or the name of a temple complex rather than a single house of worship. Relying on the fact that Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea were only associated with Old Babylonian Dūrum, and not with Neo-Babylonian Dūru, which was a cult center of Sin and his wife Ningal instead, Paul-Alain Beaulieu suggests that these two toponyms referred to different settlements. He proposes that Dūrum might have been renamed Udannu, or alternatively that cults native to it might have at some point been transferred to

1634-716: A temple in the state of Lagash built by Uruinimgina , most likely in Girsu . Evidence for the worship of Ninšar is also available from Umma from the Ur III period . In the same period Shulgi built a temple dedicated to her in Ur . In the Kassite and Middle Babylonian periods, a temple of Ninšar existed in Nippur, and it is possible that it can be identified with the E-šuluhhatumma, "house worthy of

1720-433: Is Enmebaragesi of Kish (fl.  c.  2600 BC ). Surviving records became less fragmentary for following reigns and by the arrival of Sargon, it had become standard practice for each major city-state to date documents by year-names, commemorating the exploits of its king. Geoffrey Sampson stated that Egyptian hieroglyphs "came into existence a little after Sumerian script , and, probably, [were] invented under

1806-506: Is a treaty between Akkadians and the Elamites that dates back to 2200 BC. Some believe it might have been in use since 2500 BC. The tablets are poorly preserved, so only limited parts can be read, but it is understood that the text is a treaty between the Akkad king Nāramsîn and Elamite ruler Hita , as indicated by frequent references like "Nāramsîn's friend is my friend, Nāramsîn's enemy

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1892-568: Is an adaptation of the Old Assyrian cuneiform of c. 1800 BC to the Hittite language and was used from the 17th until approximately the 13th century BC. More or less the same system was used by the scribes of the Hittite Empire for two other Anatolian languages , namely Luwian (alongside the native Anatolian hieroglyphics ) and Palaic , as well as for the isolate Hattic language . When

1978-429: Is called gunû or "gunification"; if signs are cross-hatched with additional Winkelhaken , they are called šešig ; if signs are modified by the removal of a wedge or wedges, they are called nutillu . "Typical" signs have about five to ten wedges, while complex ligatures can consist of twenty or more (although it is not always clear if a ligature should be considered a single sign or two collated, but distinct signs);

2064-531: Is described as dedicated to both Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea. The same source lists the ceremonial names of their respective seats, Bara-šadišša (" dais of the perfect one") and E-ḫursag-siga ("house of the silent mountain"). The Canonical Temple List also mentions a further temple dedicated jointly to the pair, E-sulimgurruede ("house clad in awesome radiance"), though its location is unknown. In Babylon Lugal-Irra and Meslamta-ea were worshiped in Erabriri, "house of

2150-549: Is my enemy". The most famous Elamite scriptures and the ones that ultimately led to its decipherment are the ones found in the trilingual Behistun inscriptions , commissioned by the Achaemenid kings. The inscriptions, similar to that of the Rosetta Stone 's, were written in three different writing systems. The first was Old Persian , which was deciphered in 1802 by Georg Friedrich Grotefend . The second, Babylonian cuneiform,

2236-528: Is no evidence that any major sanctuaries of Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea as a pair existed outside of Dūrum and Kisiga. The Canonical Temple List assigns the E-melamsulimgurru ("house clad in fearsome radiance"), possibly located in Ur , to Meslamta-ea. A house of worship bearing the same name (or a chapel within the temple of another deity), presumably identical with it, occurs in a topographical text which most likely originated in said city, though there it

2322-526: Is only documented in a single Old Babylonian god list, and it is not certain if it necessarily implies they were regarded as couples. Their respective divine " viziers " ( sukkal ) were Zi-mingi (or Zi- MU) and Zi-ĝara, though a single god list postdating the Old Babylonian period instead equates this pair with them. In texts belonging to this genre Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea could also be identified with other pairs of twin deities, presumably originating in

2408-519: Is placed next to Nergal . Boivin argues his relative importance in the Sealand texts might indicate that the center of this kingdom was located close to Udannu. However, she notes that he is attested alone, without Meslamta-ea, which is unusual. He received offerings referred to as nindabû , possibly held to celebrate the full moon, similarly as the Sebitti and Nanshe . According to Wilfred G. Lambert there

2494-399: Is presumed that while Meslamta-ea could be treated as a distinct god, was initially an epithet of Nergal used to refer to him in cities located to the south of Kutha up to the Ur III period . However, Dina Katz argues that he was a distinct deity in origin, and only came to be syncretised with Nergal at some point. The identification between Nergal and Lugal-irra was a late phenomenon, and

2580-503: Is sparsely attested, and while he was likely distinct in origin from the better known Erra , not much else is possible to determine about him with certainty based on available documents. He might have been associated with the destruction caused by storms. In the Early Dynastic period , Ninšar was worshiped in multiple cities, for example Nippur and Shuruppak . The Zame Hymns refer to AB.NAGAR as her cult center. She also had

2666-459: The Akkadian Empire from the 23rd century BC ( short chronology ). The Akkadian language being East Semitic , its structure was completely different from Sumerian. The Akkadians found a practical solution in writing their language phonetically, using the corresponding Sumerian phonetic signs. Still, many of the Sumerian characters were retained for their logographic value as well: for example

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2752-453: The Iron Age (c. 10th to 6th centuries BC), Assyrian cuneiform was further simplified. The characters remained the same as those of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiforms, but the graphic design of each character relied more heavily on wedges and square angles, making them significantly more abstract: Babylonian cuneiform was simplified along similar lines during that period, albeit to a lesser extent and in

2838-600: The Seleucid period. The text KAR 132, an instruction for the akītu of Anu , mentions them among deities invoked during these celebrations. Cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo - syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East . The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era . Cuneiform scripts are marked by and named for

2924-413: The Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin , the Louvre , the Istanbul Archaeology Museums , the National Museum of Iraq , the Yale Babylonian Collection (approx. 40,000), and Penn Museum . Most of these have "lain in these collections for a century without being translated, studied or published", as there are only a few hundred qualified cuneiformists in the world. The decipherment of cuneiform began with

3010-520: The Winkelhaken impressed vertically by the tip of the stylus. The signs exemplary of these basic wedges are: Except for the Winkelhaken , which has no tail, the length of the wedges' tails could vary as required for sign composition. Signs tilted by about 45 degrees are called tenû in Akkadian, thus DIŠ is a vertical wedge and DIŠ tenû a diagonal one. If a sign is modified with additional wedges, this

3096-504: The 3rd millennium Sumerian script. Ugaritic was written using the Ugaritic alphabet , a standard Semitic style alphabet (an abjad ) written using the cuneiform method. Between half a million and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000 –100,000 have been read or published. The British Museum holds the largest collection (approx. 130,000 tablets), followed by

3182-399: The Akkadian period, at the time of the Uruk ruler Lugalzagesi (r. c. 2294–2270 BC). The vertical style remained for monumental purposes on stone stelas until the middle of the 2nd millennium. Written Sumerian was used as a scribal language until the first century AD. The spoken language died out between about 2100 and 1700 BC. The archaic cuneiform script was adopted by

3268-519: The Neo-Babylonian period. Lugal-irra was worshiped at this time in one of the ekurrātu , small independent sanctuaries located in the city or in its proximity. A street named after him is also attested. It is uncertain if Meslamta-ea was also actively worshiped in Uruk in the Neo-Babylonian period, as he is only attested in the name of a city gate. Both Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea were also venerated in Uruk in

3354-410: The Sumerian phrase dingir-min-a-bi , "the twin gods", a synonym of the theonym Maštabba. Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea were regarded as warrior deities. In early sources from the end of the Ur III period both of them were associated with judgment, especially with river ordeal . They were also regarded as guardians of doorways. The incantation series Maqlû describes them as “guard-gods who tear out

3440-471: The Sumerian signs of the terms in question, added as a guide for the reader. Proper names continued to be usually written in purely "logographic" fashion. The first inscribed tablets were purely pictographic, which makes it technically difficult to know in which language they were written. Different languages have been proposed, though usually Sumerian is assumed. Later tablets dating after c.  2900 BC start to use syllabic elements, which clearly show

3526-414: The beginning, similar-sounding words such as "life" [til] and "arrow" [ti] were written with the same symbol (𒋾). As a result, many signs gradually changed from being logograms to also functioning as syllabograms , so that for example, the sign for the word "arrow" would become the sign for the sound "ti". Syllabograms were used in Sumerian writing especially to express grammatical elements, and their use

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3612-474: The bulk of the cuneiform record. Akkadian cuneiform was itself adapted to write the Hittite language in the early second millennium BC . The other languages with significant cuneiform corpora are Eblaite , Elamite , Hurrian , Luwian , and Urartian . The Old Persian and Ugaritic alphabets feature cuneiform-style signs; however, they are unrelated to the cuneiform logo-syllabary proper. The latest known cuneiform tablet dates to 75 AD. Cuneiform

3698-407: The character for "sheep" was retained, but was now pronounced immerum , rather than the Sumerian udu . Such retained individual signs or, sometimes, entire sign combinations with logographic value are known as Sumerograms , a type of heterogram . The East Semitic languages employed equivalents for many signs that were distorted or abbreviated to represent new values because the syllabic nature of

3784-485: The characteristic wedge-shaped impressions ( Latin : cuneus ) which form their signs . Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system and was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq ). Over the course of its history, cuneiform was adapted to write a number of languages in addition to Sumerian. Akkadian texts are attested from the 24th century BC onward and make up

3870-534: The cleansing ritual," which is assigned to her in the so-called Canonical Temple List without a location specified. , The theophoric name Ur-Ninšar is common in sources from the Early Dynastic and Ur III periods. Other names invoking her are known too and continued to appear in the records from the Old Babylonian period . In the myth Enki and Ninmah , Ninšar appears as one of the seven assistants of

3956-431: The compound IGI.A (𒅆𒀀) – "eye" + "water" – has the reading imhur , meaning "foam"). Several symbols had too many meanings to permit clarity. Therefore, symbols were put together to indicate both the sound and the meaning of a symbol. For instance, the word 'raven' (UGA) had the same logogram (𒉀) as the word 'soap' (NAGA), the name of a city (EREŠ), and the patron goddess of Eresh (NISABA). To disambiguate and identify

4042-399: The cult center of Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea. His inscriptions mention the renovation of the temples E-Meslam-melamilla ("E-Meslam which bears radiance"), dedicated to Meslamta-ea, and E-niḫušgurusuzilla ("house clad in awesome terror, bearing radiance"), dedicated to Lugal-irra. A literary letter attributed to his daughter Ninšatapada , who served as a high priestess of Meslamta-ea, mentions

4128-587: The cuneiform script was adapted to writing Hittite, a layer of Akkadian logographic spellings, also known as Akkadograms, was added to the script, in addition to the Sumerian logograms, or Sumerograms, which were already inherent in the Akkadian writing system and which Hittite also kept. Thus the pronunciations of many Hittite words which were conventionally written by logograms are now unknown. The Hurrian language (attested 2300–1000 BC) and Urartian language (attested 9th–6th century BC) were also written in adapted versions of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform. Although

4214-456: The decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform in 1836. The first cuneiform inscriptions published in modern times were copied from the Achaemenid royal inscriptions in the ruins of Persepolis , with the first complete and accurate copy being published in 1778 by Carsten Niebuhr . Niebuhr's publication was used by Grotefend in 1802 to make the first breakthrough – the realization that Niebuhr had published three different languages side by side and

4300-555: The development of Egyptian hieroglyphs, with the suggestion the former influenced the latter. But given the lack of direct evidence for the transfer of writing, "no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt". Others have held that "the evidence for such direct influence remains flimsy" and that "a very credible argument can also be made for the independent development of writing in Egypt ;..." Early cuneiform inscriptions were made by using

4386-500: The early Achaemenid rulers from the 6th century BC down to the 4th century BC. Because of its simplicity and logical structure, the Old Persian cuneiform script was the first to be deciphered by modern scholars, starting with the accomplishments of Georg Friedrich Grotefend in 1802. Various ancient bilingual or trilingual inscriptions then permitted to decipher the other, much more complicated and more ancient scripts, as far back as to

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4472-402: The eponymous goddess, the other six being Ninimma, Shuzianna , Ninmug , Ninmada , Mumudu and Ninniginna. They do not appear together otherwise. However, in this myth they are collectively described as Šassūrātu , a term used to collectively refer to Ninmah's helpers. In Enki and Ninhursag, she is the daughter of the eponymous deities, and in turn becomes the mother of Ninkurra . In

4558-411: The fact that the former could be referred to with the same epithet as the latter, dingir irra ("strong god"), is not an indication of equivalence as it was applied to many deities. Instances of the pair being identified as Sin and Nergal are known too, with the connection of the latter two being their shared status as sons of Enlil . The equation between Lugal-irra and Sin might depend on references to

4644-425: The god list An = Anum , the name could also be represented by the logograms MUḪALDIM ("cook") or GÍRI ("knife"). A syllabic spelling, Nin-nì-si , might be present in a god list from Mari , but both the restoration of the final sign and the identification of this deity with Ninšar remain uncertain. The name NIN.SAR is usually translated as "Lady Greenery" or "Lady Greens." One hymn to Nuska might contain

4730-419: The heart and compress the kidneys”. Typically Lugal-irra was associated with the right side and Meslamta-ea with the left. It has been argued that this role reflected their status as gatekeepers of the underworld , which made it appropriate to also entrust other gates to them. In addition to regularly playing this role in Mesopotamian sources, in a single case Lugal-irra is also attested as a protector of doors in

4816-399: The incantation series Šurpu . Ninšar was associated with meat, and was often described as the "butcher of Ekur ," as already attested in texts from the reign of Shulgi . An even earlier text from Lagash from the reign of Urukagina calls her the "butcher of Ningirsu ." She could also be referred to with the epithet "she who makes the food good." She is also attested in the role of

4902-413: The influence of the latter", and that it is "probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia". There are many instances of Egypt-Mesopotamia relations at the time of the invention of writing, and standard reconstructions of the development of writing generally place the development of the Sumerian proto-cuneiform script before

4988-432: The latter acting as a judge in the underworld. It is presumed that the connection between the pair and Nergal is the reason why the logograms MAŠ.TAB.BA and its variant MAŠ.MAŠ were sometimes used to render his name. According to Wilfred G. Lambert , the wife of Lugal-irra was Ku'annesi, while Meslamta-ea was associated with either Ninshubur or Mamitu . However, the connection between the pair and Ku'annesi and Ninshubur

5074-560: The latter city. He points out that in Neo-Babylonian period two deities represented by the logogram IGI.DU were worshiped there, and proposed a connection between them and Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea. Odette Boivin suggests that Lugal-irra's presence in the archive of the First Sealand dynasty was tied to his position in Dūrum and Udannu. He is attested without Meslamta-ea in a number of offering lists, though his position in them varies. Sometimes he

5160-407: The ligature KAxGUR 7 consists of 31 strokes. Most later adaptations of Sumerian cuneiform preserved at least some aspects of the Sumerian script. Written Akkadian included phonetic symbols from the Sumerian syllabary , together with logograms that were read as whole words. Many signs in the script were polyvalent, having both a syllabic and logographic meaning. The complexity of the system bears

5246-443: The meaning and the other the pronunciation (e.g. 𒅗 ka 'mouth' was combined with the sign 𒉣 nun 'prince' to express the word 𒅻 nundum , meaning 'lip', formally KA×NUN; cf. Chinese phono-semantic compounds ). Another way of expressing words that had no sign of their own was by so-called 'Diri compounds' – sign sequences that have, in combination, a reading different from the sum of the individual constituent signs (for example,

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5332-463: The near eastern token system used for accounting. The meaning and usage of these tokens is still a matter of debate. These tokens were in use from the 9th millennium BC and remained in occasional use even late in the 2nd millennium BC. Early tokens with pictographic shapes of animals, associated with numbers, were discovered in Tell Brak , and date to the mid-4th millennium BC. It has been suggested that

5418-642: The peripheries of Mesopotamia, including Almu and Alamu, Birdu and Šarrabu, and two other duos whose names are only partially preserved. An = Anum additionally refers to the deity Ḫar as the messenger of the pair, though this tradition is not documented elsewhere. According to Paul-Alain Beaulieu Gašru , a god worshiped in Mesopotamia in Opis and Mari , as well as further west in Emar and Ugarit , could be considered

5504-490: The preparation of apotropaic figures states that the representation of Lugal-irra should hold a bow and arrows, while Meslamtaea an axe (in his left hand) and a mace (in his right hand). The terms used, ḫutpalû and zaḫaṭû , more specifically indicate the weapons were a mace with a stone head and a single bladed axe. Furthermore, the statuettes of Meslamta-ea were decorated with "black paste" (IM.GI 6 , an unidentified substance), and these representing Lugal-irra possibly with

5590-458: The recognition of the word "king". Ninnisig Ninšar ( Sumerian : 𒀭𒊩𒌆𒊬 , NIN.SAR; also read Nin-nisig ) was a Mesopotamian goddess commonly associated with the preparation of meat. The reading of her name remains uncertain, and its possible etymology appears to be unrelated to her role in the Mesopotamian pantheon. She was chiefly worshiped in Nippur , though her original cult center

5676-463: The regular term for twins. As a theonym is first attested in an offering list from Mari from the Šakkanakku period, where it occurs between Nisaba and Ba- AḪ (the deified Balikh River ), and in a contemporary texts from Sippar known from a Neo-Babylonian copy where this pair is placed between ÍD (deified river or river ordeal ) and Ištaran . It could function as an epithet of Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea. The pair could also be referred to with

5762-449: The relative position of the stylus to the tablet, the writer could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions. For numbers, a round-tipped stylus was initially used, until the wedge-tipped stylus was generalized. The direction of writing was from top-to-bottom and right-to-left. Cuneiform clay tablets could be fired in kilns to bake them hard, and so provide a permanent record, or they could be left moist and recycled if permanence

5848-535: The script as refined by the Sumerians was not intuitive to Semitic speakers. From the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (20th century BC), the script evolved to accommodate the various dialects of Akkadian: Old Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian. At this stage, the former pictograms were reduced to a high level of abstraction, and were composed of only five basic wedge shapes: horizontal, vertical, two diagonals and

5934-445: The shackle which holds in check", the temple of Mandanu . Their seat in it was known under the ceremonial name E-melamḫuš, "house of awesome radiance". At least in the seventh century BCE, a temple dedicated to Lugal-irra existed in the city too. Additionally, 180 "stations" dedicated jointly to him and Meslamtaea are known from Tintir = Babylon , a commonly copied late topographical text. These were presumably small structures, much like

6020-452: The shrines of Ishtar , Sebitti, the deified rainbow ( Manzat ) and other figures mentioned in the same section. The same source states that one of the gates of Babylon was named after Lugal-irra. He also had a temple whose ceremonial name is unknown in Luḫatu in the proximity of Babylon. In Nippur in the Old Babylonian period Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea were regarded as the divine doorkeepers of

6106-415: The syllable [ɡu] had fourteen different symbols. The inventory of signs was expanded by the combination of existing signs into compound signs. They could either derive their meaning from a combination of the meanings of both original signs (e.g. 𒅗 ka 'mouth' and 𒀀 a 'water' were combined to form the sign for 𒅘 nag̃ 'drink', formally KA×A; cf. Chinese compound ideographs ), or one sign could suggest

6192-527: The temple of Nuska , where they received offerings. The Nippur Compendium , known from copies from the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods and later, lists them among the deities venerated in the local temple of Nergal, alongside Erra , Erragal and Damu . A single text from the reign of Rîm-Anum of Uruk might indicate that Lugal-irra and Meslamta-ea were worshiped there in the Old Babylonian period. They are also attested in sources from this city from

6278-472: The third century AD. The complexity of cuneiforms prompted the development of a number of simplified versions of the script. Old Persian cuneiform was developed with an independent and unrelated set of simple cuneiform characters, by Darius the Great in the 5th century BC. Most scholars consider this writing system to be an independent invention because it has no obvious connections with other writing systems at

6364-432: The time, such as Elamite , Akkadian, Hurrian , and Hittite cuneiforms. It formed a semi-alphabetic syllabary, using far fewer wedge strokes than Assyrian used, together with a handful of logograms for frequently occurring words like "god" ( 𐏎 ), "king" ( 𐏋 ) or "country" ( 𐏌 ). This almost purely alphabetical form of the cuneiform script (36 phonetic characters and 8 logograms), was specially designed and used by

6450-662: The token shapes were the original basis for some of the Sumerian pictographs. Mesopotamia's "proto-literate" period spans roughly the 35th to 32nd centuries BC. The first unequivocal written documents start with the Uruk IV period, from circa 3,300 BC, followed by tablets found in Uruk III, Jemdet Nasr , Early Dynastic I Ur and Susa (in Proto-Elamite ) dating to the period until circa 2,900 BC. Originally, pictographs were either drawn on clay tablets in vertical columns with

6536-585: The two languages are related, their writing systems seem to have been developed separately. For Hurrian, there were even different systems in different polities (in Mitanni , in Mari , in the Hittite Empire). The Hurrian orthographies were generally characterised by more extensive use of syllabograms and more limited use of logograms than Akkadian. Urartian, in comparison, retained a more significant role for logograms. In

6622-564: The word more precisely, two phonetic complements were added – Ú (𒌑) for the syllable [u] in front of the symbol and GA (𒂵) for the syllable [ga] behind. Finally, the symbol for 'bird', MUŠEN (𒄷) was added to ensure proper interpretation. As a result, the whole word could be spelt 𒌑𒉀𒂵𒄷, i.e. Ú.NAGA.GA (among the many variant spellings that the word could have). For unknown reasons, cuneiform pictographs, until then written vertically, were rotated 90° counterclockwise, in effect putting them on their side. This change first occurred slightly before

6708-530: Was Mes-lam-ta-è(-a) . It can be romanized as Meslamtaea as well. It can be translated as "he who came out of Meslam" or "he who comes out of Meslam". Meslam is well attested as the name, or element of the name, of multiple temples of Nergal and related deities, with the most famous of them, the E-Meslam, being located in Kutha . The term Maštabba, Maš-tab-ba , is a Sumerian phrase meaning "the divine twins", derived from

6794-517: Was deciphered shortly after the Old Persian text. Because Elamite is unlike its neighboring Semitic languages , the script's decipherment was delayed until the 1840s. Elamite cuneiform appears to have used far fewer signs than its Akkadian prototype and initially relied primarily on syllabograms, but logograms became more common in later texts. Many signs soon acquired highly distinctive local shape variants that are often difficult to recognise as related to their Akkadian prototypes. Hittite cuneiform

6880-406: Was further developed and modified in the writing of the Akkadian language to express its sounds. Often, words that had a similar meaning but very different sounds were written with the same symbol. For instance the Sumerian words 'tooth' [zu], 'mouth' [ka] and 'voice' [gu] were all written with the original pictogram for mouth (𒅗). Words that sounded alike would have different signs; for instance,

6966-453: Was in use for more than three millennia, through several stages of development, from the 31st century BC down to the second century AD. The latest firmly dateable tablet, from Uruk, dates to 79/80 AD. Ultimately, it was completely replaced by alphabetic writing , in the general sense, in the course of the Roman era , and there are no cuneiform systems in current use. It had to be deciphered as

7052-478: Was invented, during the Neolithic , when clay tokens were used to record specific amounts of livestock or commodities. In recent years a contrarian view has arisen on the tokens being the precursor of writing. These tokens were initially impressed on the surface of round clay envelopes ( clay bullae ) and then stored in them. The tokens were then progressively replaced by flat tablets, on which signs were recorded with

7138-451: Was not needed. Most surviving cuneiform tablets were of the latter kind, accidentally preserved when fires destroyed the tablets' storage place and effectively baked them, unintentionally ensuring their longevity. The script was widely used on commemorative stelae and carved reliefs to record the achievements of the ruler in whose honor the monument had been erected. The spoken language included many homophones and near-homophones, and in

7224-428: Was rediscovered in modern times in the early 17th century with the publication of the trilingual Achaemenid royal inscriptions at Persepolis ; these were first deciphered in the early 19th century. The modern study of cuneiform belongs to the ambiguously named field of Assyriology , as the earliest excavations of cuneiform libraries – in the mid-19th century – were in the area of ancient Assyria . An estimated half

7310-409: Was the settlement AB.NAGAR. The reading of the theonym written in cuneiform as NIN .SAR remains uncertain. Wilfred G. Lambert considered Ninšar to be the correct reading. This option is also accepted by Andrew R. George . Antoine Cavigneaux and Manfred Krebernik instead argue that the correct reading might be Nin-nisig. Ninmu and Ninezenna have also been proposed as alternatives. According to

7396-681: Was used to refer to Alammuš and Ningublaga . This pair in turn can be identified as Delta Geminorum and Zeta Geminorum . The text KAR 142, a list of various heptads, lists them alongside five further pairs of such twin deities in addition to the Great Twins and the Little Twins, including the "twins of Papsukkal " (here a constellation corresponding to Orion ), Shullat and Hanish , Šarur and Šargaz , KU -an-na and KU -ki- SIKIL (possibly related to Lisin and Ninsikila 's children KU-anna and KU-kita), and Ninnisig and Erragal . An instruction for

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