The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

— Babylonian lists of words and signs —
Figure 30.1 K 214: a fragment of the first tablet of Erimhush from Nineveh, seventh century
BC. The division of the text into ruled sections can be seen clearly. (Courtesy of The Trustees of
the British Museum.)
both Assyria and Babylonia. No overall principle of structure is visible either within
or between its many tablets, but several principles are evident for ordering the entries
within the groups. For example, one finds synonyms and antonyms listed together,
as in this example:
Sumerian Akkadian meaning
dul mūlû ‘high ground’
tul 2 -la 2 musˇpalu ‘pit’
bu-ur bur3 sˇuplu ‘low place’
a-su 3 -ra asurrakku ‘deep waters’
One finds also words derived from the same (or similar) Akkadian root, or different
words that happen to share a common form, as in this example:
Sumerian Akkadian meaning
gisˇ suhur-la2 kaparru ‘tree top’
gisˇ kak-usˇ DITTO sˇa ziqti ‘same, as in barb’ (= barbed whip)
sipa-tur DITTO sˇa amēli ‘same, as in the man’ (= shepherd)
Another new addition to the lexical corpus came about by the regular addition of a
further column to Syllable Alphabet A mentioned above, yielding what is known as
439