A survey of available cuneiform sign lists

 

1. Fossey's Manuel of 1925.

Fossey's objective was to give one example of each allograph of every sign he encountered in the material available to him, which was in the form of published hand copies by other scholars. He simply listed the signs, giving the place of publication, and arranged the material in a rough chronological and geographical order. His collection is rich and still useful, but it still presents numerous impedimenta to the user. For example, it is impossible for the user to distinguish between sign forms that constitute a norm for a place or time and those that may be hapax legomena. Fossey states that his intention was not to give the same allograph form twice for one period and area, but he nevertheless gives very near allographs. In a total of over a thousand pages thirty-six thousand individual sign forms are registered. A whole section is devoted to cases where allographic variation could result in confusion between two signs.

2. Labat's Manuel of 1948

Labat depended greatly upon Fossey as well as - although to a much lesser degree - specialized sign lists that had appeared in the mean time (such as Burrow's archaic sign list); he also depends on his own intuition. His list was much more clearly organized than that of Fossey, with columns and boxes for archaic, ED and Old, Middle and Late Assyrian and Old Middle and Late Babylonian. Although the subject of Assyriology had expanded greatly during the twenty-three years separating Fossey and Labat, the total number of forms given by Labat is well under a quarter of those given by Fossey. Whereas Fossey's collection struck deeply into the range of then published cuneiform, Labat's does not. Labat's book is by name a Manuel d'Epigraphie Akkadienne. However, apart from the trivial point that most of it is palaeography and not strictly speaking epigraphy, Akkadienne is used also with a certain freedom: the ample ED column means that Sumerian is included, while the Ur III period and Vth dynasty of Lagash are left out. Mari - already then, as now, the pride and joy of French Assyriology - is not singled out for careful treatment, although the first volume of Archive Royale de Mari in the Textes Cuneiformes du Louvre had appeared seven years earlier in 1941.

3. Borger's Zeichenliste of 1978

This is a fuller (413S.) version of an earlier Zeichenliste of 1971 (124). The paleographic part of this is limited to thirty-two pages at the beginning of the book. This contains eight columns of which only the first six contain signs. These are an undifferentiated mix of Neo- and Middle Assyrian, followed by Neo-Babylonian, Kassite boundary stones, Old Assyrian, Old Babylonian general and Old Babylonian Code of Hammurabi. The final two columns refer the reader to Friedrich's Hethitische Lesestuecke and to Fossey. The bulk of the Zeichenliste is taken up with supplying Sumerian and Akkadian readings for groups of signs, and a fool's guide to Sumerian. The former was a godsend to students, who until its appearance still had to use Deimels' outdated Sumerisches Lexikon of 1932, which, like Fossey, collected data but did not interpret it.

4. Ellermeier's Glossar of 1979

This comes from the same stable as the Zeichenliste and is in a sense almost as much - or as little - a list of signs. Only Neo-Assyrian sign forms are given, and the purpose is to establish what values signs, including compound signs, can have.

Finally, two specialized sign lists must be mentioned:

5. Chr. Ruester and Erich Neu, Hethitisches Zeichenlexikon. Inventar und Interpretation der Keilschriftzeichen aus den Boghazkoi-Texten of 1989

This sign list gives a multiplicity of allographs of individual signs, but, unlike Fossey, does not indicate sources for individual quoted forms. As indicated above, an important desideratum should be that a user would be able to trace the spread of scribal traditions over space and time. For instance, consider the following instance. Received opinion is that the Hittite cuneiform derives from a late Old Babylonian cursive script such as was used at sites such as Alalakh, Tell Atchana, and that the script, plus, quite likely, the scribes themselves and their equipment, were carried back to Hattusas as booty by the Great King Hattusilis I during his campaigns in North Syria around 1550 BC. Further, Heinrich Otten, the Altmeister of Hittitology has expressed the opinion that the development of cuneiform among the Hittites was not an internal Hittite phenomenon but was linked to developments in the Syro-Mesopotamian region. A scholar who wished to test this hypothesis would not be greatly assisted by Ruester and Neu's signlist.

6. M.-J. Steve, Syllabaire Elamite. Histoire et Paleographie of 1992

This sign list has to deal with a much smaller corpus of tablets than the others mentioned so far. Allographs are given, though without quoting sources. On the other hand the chronological development and usage is well represented in table form.

Alasdair Livingstone, 2000, for the Birmingham Cuneiform Digital Forensic Project.

This review is intended as an introduction to the CDF sign list, in preparation.

 

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