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A List of Assyrian and West Semitic Women's Names
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2014
Extract
Among the Neo-Assyrian “deeds and documents” still retrievable from the recesses of Bezold's catalogue of the Kouyunjik collection and its supplements, text K. 8434 stands slightly by itself, as regards both dimensions and contents. It is a relatively large (18·5 × 12· 5 cm), reddish-coloured fragment of an eight-column tablet, but only five of the prearranged partitions are inscribed in full, in an upward-slanting Assyrian hand. They hold the remnants of a long list of personal names—specifically, of the types of names usually borne by women—thus providing a certain amount of new material to the least-known sector in onomastic research for the Neo-Assyrian age.
The fact that the names in the tablet were prevalently applicable to women is a conclusion to be reached from an analysis of the onomastic data themselves, which bear ample evidence of (1) feminine morphemic affixes, relevant to East or West Semitic linguistic affiliation, and of (2) goddesses and female theophorous figures as subject-elements in complete or abbreviated sentence names. That they may have been exclusively borne by women is a deduction stemming—oddly enough—from the very fact that no absolute certainty is possible as to whether they were women's names or not, since no trace of the determinative SAL preceding the attestations survives.
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- Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1979
References
1 I am grateful to Dr. E. Sollberger of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities of the British Museum for his kind permission to publish this text, and for his collations of a few problematical attestations. I also thank Messrs. J. N. Postgate and J. D. Hawkins for their kind suggestions and useful corrections during the last phase of preparation of this article. In the catalogue (vol. III, 926), K. 8434 is described as a “list of words, including proper names. A large number of lines begins with 
”.
2 Cf. nos. 6–9 in appendix to ADD, vol. II (pp. 377–381); also ADD, 891, 894. Another goodsized list of women's names is ADD, 741 + ( = Fales, CCENA, no. 23), although it deals in fact with people of both sexes connected with landed estates; whereas a group of parallel lists of women workers from Assur is as yet unpublished.
3 Or with the Aramaic loanword sagittu, “a type of priestess” (AHw., 1003a).
4 The most recent additions to this corpus of parallels are undoubtedly Mi-ká-iá and Mi-ká-il from III millennium Ebla: cf. G. Pettinato, BA 39 (1976), 50b.
5 Zadok, loc. cit., understands the NA name Bur-ra-pi-' (from Gezer: T. G. Pinches, PEFQS, 1904, 231–232 : R. 11) as a construct-state attestation (“son of Rape”), and compares it to SALDUMU.SAL-ra-pi-e, ADD, 894:4 (“daughter of Răpē”). The parallel is surely well-founded, but—in my opinion— as that of two sentence names, with a predicative element formed by a nominal or verbal derivate from Aram. *rpy, “to heal” (pa“el, or noun: “ healer ”, or “ balm ”); for Bur, see above, while for DUMU.SAL I should agree with APN, 135b, and consider a correspondence with Aram. *mrt('), “(the) Lady”, through the well-attested scribal procedure of “improper encoding” (cf. ad i, 22, above: in this case, “spoken” *[mārtā] > “heard” as ± = *[mārtu], Akk. for “daughter”, > “elaborated”—esp. phonematized–as/mārtu/ > “ encoded ” as 〈DUMU.SAL〉).