Sheshki:
Thank you for posting this discussion from Prof. Frayne's RIME Pre-Sargonic Period Vol. 1. I fondly remember my discussions with the
late Prof. Frayne (who passed away in 2017), he would delight to have a receptive audience with whom to discuss his various pet theories, a good example of which is this discussion of what the NUN component of the geographic name UD.NUN.KI (=Adab) is doing. As we will see below, Frayne has built his discussion in this case on positions expressed in prior literature.
The Phonological Realizations of the City name/Bird name Adab
In order to participate in this quandary, we must submit it to a fresh examination, one which may complicate what Frayne has said (even more than it already is). So let's start with the information he provided which came in two paragraphs. The first paragraph, quoted in the previous post, reads:
"(c) Writing of the City Name
The most common writing of the city name Adab (particularly in post ED
texts) is UD.NUN.KI. It occasionally occurs in early texts with the MUÍEN
“bird” determinative, indicating that the city name was apparently derived
from the city’s totem, the adab bird. The lexical and literary sources give
several writings for the city and bird name: /udubu/, /usab/, /adab/, and /arab/
(see Zhi Yang, JAC 2 [1987] pp. 121–25). The middle consonant would
appear to be the /dr/ phoneme posited by Bauer, WO 8 (1975) pp. 1–9;
Thomsen, Sumerian Language p. 44 § 23; Boison, Bulletin de la Société de
Linguistique de Paris pp. 212–14; Cavigneaux, Zeichenlisten pp. 56 ff.;
Steinkeller, JNES 46 (1987) pp. 56–57 and n. 5. Its existence was questioned
by Yoshikawa, BiOr 45 (1988) col. 501 and Black RA 84 (1990) pp. 111,
115–16."
Jacobsen 1967 (=JCS 21, "Some Sumerian City-Names") quotes one the of the lexical sources which Frayne refers to, the lexical list known as DIRI I, as follows (p.100-101):
140. a – da – a b : UD-NUN-KI : “ ( = ú – t u) n u – u n k i – k i : Ú-[sa-ab] URUki
The lexical list gives three equivalencies: there is the geographic name Adab; this is formed with the signs UD.NUN.KI (the values of which are utu-nun
ki); the third equivalency is Usab
ki.
Jacobsen explains the reason for these equivalency of Adab and Usab as follows: firstly, there is a known sound change from d > s in some Sumerian words, for example, there is the divine name Nidaba which in some texts appears as Nisaba. Secondly, the form Usab (or Udub) is likely an earlier form of the name before the Sumerian vowel harmony rule came into affect which causes the spelling to change as follows: Usab > Asab / Adab. These changes help to clarify the variation in the spelling of the name Adab, although, as will be indicated below, the sound change d > s may in this case be a result of the loss of the /dr/ phoneme.
As it turns out, there is a Sumerian bird name which is identical to the city name Adab. The lexical list DIRI I gives a similar list of equivalences for the bird name Adab as it had for the city name Adab in the preceding entry:
141. a – d a – a b : UD-NUN-MUŠEN : “ ( = ú – t u) “( = n u – u n) m u – š e – e n – n u – u : ú-sa-[bu]
The lexical list gives three equivalencies for the bird name Adab include forms with mušen (the determinative for birds): there is the reading Adab; this is formed with the signs UD.NUN.MUŠEN (the values of which are utu-nun mušen); the third equivalency is Usabu.
First of all, in terms of the analysis of the middle consonant, Frayne seems to have a point when he says "The middle consonant would appear to be the /dr/ phoneme." Frayne has based himself on de Maaijer and Jagersma 1998 here. Early Sumerian phonology included the so called /dr/ phoneme which was lost in the third millennium and became /d/ in Northern Sumerian dialects and /r/ in Southern Sumerian dialects. The bird name is sometimes written phonetically with the DU sign which, in those cases, DU stands for rá, and the reading then is: u4-rá-bu. The rá here is the /dr/ phoneme so in early contexts it would be pronounced udrabu, and later urabu/udabu. An additional development is that the Akkadian scholars perceived /dr/ as /s/ and, as Jagersma's grammar (p.43) states, they would have read the world as usabu. So the pronunciation of the name has gone from udrabu to udabu to usabu. One assumes the same development holds true for the city name Adab, the variations which Frayne gives for the spelling of city name are: /udubu/, /usab/, /adab/, and /arab/. See also Sheshki's post from 2015 on this thread above.
Neik Veldhuis (2004), in his volume "Nanshe and the Birds (=CM 20)," remarks on the fact that an Old Babylonian lexical list (the list Ur5-ra) renders the bird name adab as arabu. According to the discussion above, we might take that as as an indicator that the word as it appears in this list is under influence of a Northern Sumerian dialect in which the /dr/ phoneme became /r/. Veldhuis states (p. 93-94): "More interesting is the case of the a
12-ra
2-bu
mušen, a kind of waterfowl. In the early period this bird name was written UD.NUN
mušen, to be read adab. In Old Babylonian Ur5-ra the entry UD.NUN
mušen had been replaced by a
12-ra
2 bu
mušen, representing a slightly different interpretation of the phonological realization of the word. In later recensions of the list, however, we find both versions of the name. The ancient spelling UD.NUN
mušen (or some variant thereof) and the modernized entry a
12-ra
2-bu
mušen were both retained."
The Orthography (the Sign Forms) of the City name/Bird name Adab According to Frayne/Jacobsen
Returning to the second paragraph of Frayne's comment on the name Adab, the name also has to be considered for the curious sign combination that underlies the reading of the name. Could it, as Frayne suggests, evolve from the physical form of the Adab bird?
The “NUN” component in the later compound toponym UD.NUN.KI
appears in the archaic seal impressions from Ur, the ED tablets from Abu Salabikh
(see Biggs, JCS 20 [1966] p. 83 n. 75), and the ED tablets from Adab
(see Zhi Yang, JAC 2 [1987] p. 122) in a form with two separate strokes
arranged in a > shape at the end; it is identical with the end of the kalam and
un signs (see Edzard, RLA 5 p. 553 fig. 25). Thus it differs from the real NUN
sign which has one upright final wedge; consequently the sign in the city name
Adab should be distinguished from the NUN sign. The logogram UD.NUN as a
whole could have developed from a depiction of an adab bird on a standard;
such bird standards are found on the so-called Stele of the Vultures; see
E1.9.3.1. The upraised wings of the bird could have developed into an UD
sign.
The suggestion that the sign UD-NUN in its early form looks like the adab bird goes back to earlier scholarship. Jacobsen 1967 (=JCS 21, "Some Sumerian City-Names", 101) said about the early form of the writing UD.NUN for adab: "the sign, as will be seen, is not a ligature but an original pictograph representing a disc placed on top of a pole or stake... It thus becomes likely that the writing of the city-name Adab was originally a picture of a symbol, a disc affixed to a stake for carrying, and since that picture served also to designate the usabu bird one may assume that the symbol represented an usabu bird and had a picture of that bird on its disc."
Is there a connection between Adab the city and adab the bird? Jacobsen (1967 (=JCS 21), 101) suggests that there is: "since such symbols were often in bird-form there is nothing strange in assuming that the pictogram of a symbol to which UD-NUN seems to go back should have represented a bird, the usab bird, or that the clan which gathered around that clan symbol, and the town of the clan, should have called itself the Usab (clan) and the Usab (town)." Jacobsen therefore provides us with an explanation which we would love to accept since it clicks in the mind and suddenly something makes more sense. Unfortunately, as will be explained below, it is likely that this suggestion cannot be accepted (because the Adab standard arguably never contained a depiction of a bird).
The Orthography (the Sign Forms) of the City name/Bird name Adab In Light of Archaic City Standards
While Jacobsen's supposition that the city-name Adab was originally a disc affixed to a stake (which would have had the image of a bird on it) is one way to theorize the history of the signs, another is to examine the development of archaic city standards into into archaic script as do art historians and paleontologists such as Krystyna Szarzynska and Renate van Dijk.
Some 15 years ago, on the
Exploring Archaic Standards and Emblems thread, we gave quite a good deal of attention of the archaic standards known mainly from Uruk — and particularly to one which is which is taken to stand for the city Adab. As was noted at that time, we know the form of these standards not because any of them ever survived intact but because scribes from the Uruk period rendered their likeness in pictographic form on cuneiform tablets (and, from Ur, they also survive from the archaic period as iconography on seals).
15 years ago, there were several things that were puzzling about the form of the standard which signifies the city Adab, and this of course complicated the question of how later cuneiform script came to adopt the writing UD.NUN
ki for the city. Using the same study as was the focus of our discussion long ago, Szarzynska 1996 (=
JCS 48 "Archaic Sumerian Standards"), I will further isolate the variations of form which seem to exist in the Adab standard. There are, in fact, three distinctly different forms all of which are taken to be the Adab standard (although some are debatable):
Each of these figures -Fig. 1a, 1b and Fig. 2-, contain standards which are supposed to stand for the city Adab. How and why are they all supposed to stand for Adab? As we will see below, Fig 1b, the crescent standard, may not, as it turns out, stand for Adab at all (although some have said that it does). The following discusses each form in turn:
The standards of fig. 1A: We see that the emblem on top of this standard is clearly an UD / Utu sign, and this makes the standard a candidate for the sign which in later texts is written UD.NUN = Adab. However, on close inspection, it is clear that the bottom part of this standard is not really a NUN, rather it is the shaft with fringe / tassel that makes up the classic form of a standard (see the
standards thread). This was not a conclusive obstacle for early interpreters as Szarzynska (1996 p.12) relates: Legrain (UET III) and Burrows (UET II) understood the sign of [Fig. 1A] as UD+NUN = ADAB. In ZATU (sign 19) [Fig. 1A is similarly interpreted, with the remark that the archaic form of the shaft "develops" later into NUN." Szarzynska accepts this line of reasoning and adds her own comment: "In the course of time, the shaft of [fig 1A] may have been replaced with the sign NUN, following which, [fig 1A appeared as a ligature of two signs, [UD] and NUN. Compare the change of the sign NA to similar sign KI in the later writing of the name of the god Nanna: SES
NA -> SES.KI."
Frayne went to some pains to point out that some versions of the shaft of Fig. 1A have > shape at the bottom, and could not have been a NUN. Similarly, as Szarzynska says: "The shaft with the pointed lower end and fringes on one side differs from the typical NUN sign, which always has a flat base and horizontal dashes crossing the upper part of the pole... However, the shaft with fringes and the sign NUN with dashes shows a slightly similar form." Indeed, some of the shafts of Fig. 1A end flatly like a NUN, some in a > point. It is correct that neither shaft is a NUN at this time, but that is missing the point because the claim wasn't that either form is a NUN already in the archaic period - instead, and in theory, both forms evolve later to become a NUN.
In any case, Jacobsen's description of a "disc placed on top of a pole" is based exactly on the data we are seeing in Fig. 1A (ATU entry 307): it is therefore certainly the case that said disc would never have had a bird on it, as Frayne / Jacobsen supposed. It is the UD sign, which is now understood to be a representation of the sun rising between two mountains. Taking all data into consideration, Szarzynska feels that it is "possible" that the standard of Fig. 1A stands for Adab in archaic Uruk, and the writing UD.NUN does not occur in archaic Uruk; however, she points out that it is puzzling that both Fig. 1A as well as the writing UD.NUN (for Adab) occurs in archaic Ur texts. This is difficult to explain.
The standards and UD.NUN writings of Fig. 2 As was just stated, in Fig. 2 Szarzynska is showing 3 instances of archaic Ur standards from seal impressions which are judged to be equivalent to the Adab standard known from archaic Uruk, and below these three are two writings which she judges to read UD.NUN (as Adab would be written in later texts). Why the standard and UD.NUN co-exist in the same context is difficult to explain.
The standards of Fig. 1b Finally, we come to the standard exemplified in the specimens presented in Fig. 1B which, somewhat startling, have a crescent emblem and yet are still considered to be Adab standards! How is this possible?
The phenomenon is described by Renate van Dijk in her
2016 dissertation on archaic Sumerian standards: she states on p. 28 "A variation of the sign ADAB appears to be a crescent standard, which is unknown in the iconography of the Uruk Period, but is represented in later periods"; further on page 61, she points out that while the crescent standard standing for Adab does not appear in Uruk iconography, it does appear in archaic script from Uruk (which is what is pictured in Fig. 1B, ATU sign 305). According to Szarzynska (p. 14), the analysis that the crescent standards in Fig. 1B should be equated with the Adab standards and thus signify Adab comes from Green and Nissen, editors of the ZATU manual on archaic Uruk script, who analyzed these crescent standards as simply being Adab standards with the sun disk missing and this gave them the value "Adab." We can see from an example at
CDLI[/url] which Sheshki posted 15 years ago that this interpretation has been influential, since CDLI labels this crescent standard in this case "Adab." To state it clearly, this line of interpretation does not involve a switch from sundisk to crescent, it simply suggests the sundisk is missing from the UD emblem.
However, I think I lightly prefer Szarzynska's interpertration of Fig. 1B: that is, it isn't an UD emblem missing the sundisk, it is simply a crescent standard that has nothing to do with the Adab standard or Adab. She then comes on p. 14 to what is actually the most simple and natural position: "Standard V designates an administrative or cultic institution, or its representative, which was most likely connected with the cult of the god Nanna." And yet, nothing is entirely conclusive here and I conclude below why some loose speculation on why the crescent standard could still be a reference to Adab in some contexts.
Parting Question: Why the UD Emblem anyway? Yang Zhi's 1989 study of Akkadian texts from Adab establishes on pages 103 and 270 that the main temple in Adab went from being the E-sar temple of Ninhursag in the first parts of the Early Dynastic period to the E-mah temple of Ninhursag in the later part of the Early Dynastic period (see also Sheshki's post from 2011 on this thread above). At all times, Adab seems to have been the cult center of Ninhursag. So the question becomes, why should the UD sign, representing the rising sun over the mountains, signify the cult center of Ninhursag? One might suppose that when the UD sign is used to depict the a cult center of the sun god, the sundisk is the important part of the emblem, and when the UD sign is used to signify the cult center of Ninhursag, the mountains are the important part of the emblem (and here, the crescent of Fig. 1B is identical to the mountainous part of the UD sign). However, this is a speculative explanation.