Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

(36) Codex Hammurapi §196
ßumma aw®lum ®n ma¢r aw®lim u˙tappid ®nßu u˙appadu¢
If a man (will have blinded =) has blinded the eye of another man, they shall blind
his eye.
The third type mentioned by Streck only occurs in the letters of Hammurapi and need not
concern us here (see Streck 1999, 113-115, where a number of examples are presented).
The second type of Akkadian perfect, however, what Streck describes as “zeitlicher
Progreß der Vorzeitigkeit” or “temporal progress,” 19 bears a strong resemblance to my
proposal that the reduplication of a Sumerian achievement verb in *bi-√ yields an
adverbial clause of cause or result. In characterizing a corpus of “temporal progress”
examples drawn from the letters of Hammurapi, Streck writes as follows:
Temporal progress of anteriority (= zeitlicher Progreß der Vorzeitigkeit) is
characterized by the sequence iprus + discourse particle + iptaras, whereby the
number of iprus-elements as well as the number of iptaras-elements varies. The
situations represented by iprus and iptaras are separated from one another
temporally: in temporal terms, iptaras follows iprus and is thereby posterior to it.
The progress is linked to neither a specific tense, nor a clause-level syntactic
construction type: present and future tense examples are attested. In terms of clause-
level syntactic construction type, only occurrences in main clauses are to be found in
the following corpus, but attestations from outside the corpus show that the iptaras
19 This may be equivalent to the traditional notion of consecutio temporum but I have not attempted to ascertain
whether Streck equates the terms in his writings.
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