Monthly Archives: November 2011

Updated Vocab and Signs, 1-18

With this post comes a major new recension of our growing digital glossary and sign list for GAkk-2. Improvements include:

  1. Extensive new logogram cross-references between the vocab list and sign list.
  2. Additional vocab and signs from contracts and Hammurapi included.
  3. As always, typos and other errors corrected whenever found (if you see any errors while using these files, please let me know).

I am in hopes that this will become the ultimate digital reference to GAkk-2. Let me know what you think.

P.S. If anyone is interested, here are the top ways that I use these files when I study:

  1. Use the search function in Excel to look up vocab and signs.
  2. Use the “Sort” function in Excel to scroll alphabetically through the vocab or the sign values, or to see the vocab and signs grouped by lesson or Labat number (for Labat, sort by column A in the sign list; the JPG files are named according to their Labat number).
  3. Merge the files into Perpetua to create flashcards, then study the flashcards.
  4. Copy needed images from the Excel sign list and insert them into a Word document, for instance when an assignment says to write something in cuneiform. (I’ve been typing all my assignments, so I figure that inserting an image of a cuneiform sign is tantamount to typing a Roman character!)
  5. There are no doubt other uses for these spreadsheets and images that I haven’t thought of. If you can think of any, please share them!

 

Ištēt Unqum

1 Šalāš unqātum1 ana šarrī Lilî2 šaplān šamê, Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
2 Sebûm ana bēlī Kurî3 ina appadānīšunu4 ša abnim, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
3 Tišûm ana Tenēšētim5 enšētim6 kišid eperim,7 Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
4 Ištētum ana Bēlim Eklim wašbim eli kussîšu eklim One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
5 Ina māti Mūrdūr8 ali ṣillū iṣallalū.9 In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie.
6 Ištēt Unqum ana bêlīšina kalîšina, Ištēt Unqum ana amārīšina, One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
7 Ištēt Unqum ana puḫḫurīšina10 kalîšina u ina eklētim kaṣārīšina One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
8 Ina māti Mūrdūr ali ṣillū iṣallalū. In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie.

Akkadian translation and footnotes by Joshua Tyra.

[1] unqum – f. “ring; (stamp-)seal” (Jeremy Black, Andrew George, and Nicholas Postgate, eds., A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian [Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1999], 423).

[2] šarrī Lilî – “the Elven-kings”, lit. “the kings of the (storm) demons” (see Ibid., 182). Here I have followed the lead of Faragallah Sayyid Muhammad who, in his magisterial Arabic translation of The Lord of the Rings, chose the term jinn (“demon[s]”) to translate Tolkien’s elves. A jinn can be harmful or benevolent and so can a lilûm, as far as I understand the matter (see J. R. R. Tolkien, Sayyidu l-Khawaatim: Rifqatu l-Khaatim [The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring], trans. Faragallah Sayyid Muhammad [Cairo: Nahdet Misr, 2009]).

[3] kurûm, f. kurītum – “short”; as subst. “short (person), dwarf” (Black, George, and Postgate, A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian, 169).

[4] appadān – “pillared hall”, a Neo-Assyrian loanword from Old Persian. Probably too late to be used in this translation, which otherwise mostly adheres to Old Babylonian norms, but the meaning is such a good fit (the dwarves’ halls are indeed pillared) that I couldn’t resist.

[5] Tenēšētim – “human kind”, pl. of tenēštum (Black, George, and Postgate, A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian, 404).

[6] enšētim – for “mortal” I have used enšum “weak”; this term is not only related to the previous word tenēšētum (see note 5) but also to Hebrew ʾenôš, “man[kind]”, translated “mortal man” in such passages as Job 4:17. As Averbeck has suggested, perhaps the Semitic root originally implied the weakness, limitedness, and hence mortality of humankind. I’m open to better suggestions for “mortal”.

[7] kišid eperim – “acquisition of the soil”, “conquered by the soil” = doomed to be buried (Ibid., 74–75).

[8] Mūrdūr – Following standard Akkadian practice and Faragallah’s Arabic example, the name of Mordor is indeclinable.

[9] By a happy (and poetic) coincidence, one verb for “to lie” (ṣalālum) is from the same root as “shadows” (ṣillū) (Black, George, and Postgate, A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian, 332).

[10] puḫḫurīšina – puḫḫurum = “to bring together, assemble (trans.)”, the D-stem inf. of paḫārum (Ibid., 261).