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Cuneiform Number-Syllabaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

Laurie E. Pearce
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Extract

A study of the cryptographic cuneiform texts brought to light a small group of texts which pair numerals with syllabic signs. A brief description of the corpus and preliminary observations about the texts follows.

Each of the texts pairs numerals written in standard sexagesimal notation with the signs of Syllabary A (Sa). I call these texts number-syllabaries. All of the number-syllabaries are in a late hand; some are datable to the Seleucid period by the cursive form of the numeral nine. All of the exemplars are known or suspected to have come from Babylon.

The corpus consists of these texts: MMA 86.11.364 Rm. 806, BM 47732 + 48191, BM 77233, BM 46603(+)46609. Each of these, except BM 77233, duplicates part of at least one of the other fragments.

MMA 86.11.364 is the largest and most complete exemplar of the number-syllabaries. The pattern of its entries, numeral—DIŠ—syllabic sign, is standard for the other texts. This pattern clearly differs from the one in lexical texts, where the DIŠ sign indicates the initial component of each entry. MMA 86.11.364 preserves each Sa sign only once, and not the number of times it appears in Sa.

BM 47732 + 48191 is the largest of the BM number-syllabary pieces. It duplicates the Metropolitan text in two places. Unlike the latter, however, BM 47732 + 48191 repeats the syllabic signs and their corresponding numbers as many times as the sign forms appear in Sa.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , Spring 1983 , pp. 136 - 137
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1983

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References

1 Pearce, Laurie E., Cuneiform Cryptography: Numerical Substitutions for Syllabic and Logographic Signs. (Ph.D. Thesis, Yale University, 1982)Google Scholar.

2 BM 77233 is a Sippar number. But E. Leichty and C. B. F. Walker have informed me that the text belongs to a small group of Babylon texts which are numbered in with the Sippar material.

3 For permission to study this text, I thank the late Dr. Vaughn Crawford and Dr. Ira Spar of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Dr. Spar will publish this text in the complete publication of texts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

4 Professor A. Sachs identified this fragment as well as MMA 86.11.364 and BM 47732 (before the join) as belonging to this category of text.