Descent of Inanna

[claire]

Hi !
Can anyone out there help me to find the words
'Come man come' or 'let a man come' in cuneiform? I want to make some jewellery that literally has that written on it. I understand that in the description of Inanna's pectoral and her eye make up it wasn't that literal ( or maybe it was?;-))
Thank you scholars.
C

[sheshki]

hi,

i think "come man come" should be

lu2	ja2	nu	ja2	nu

taken from ETCSL line 23

[us4-he2-gal2]

Hello all - this was quite a struggle for me, at least for an hour or two, because I would have to explain ğa2-nu in order to respond to this post. Well, this is an expression, and therefore it breaks the rules of typical Sumerian spelling and that makes it hard for a modern student. It is a little bit like how in English instead of saying 'come on!' we might isntead say 'c'mon' - that is confusing for non-native speakers or for people trying to read it thousands of years later. See, the typical the verb of movement is in Sumerian ğen 'to go' but which also be 'to come.' What Sheski has found, and what occurs many times in the ETCSL (Sumerian literary) corpus, is ğa2-nu - apparently this is a "directive expression" which is still based on the verb ğen, and yes, it does mean in fact 'come!'.



This phenomena, whereby ğen is found in variant form ğa2-nu is discussed in Schretter, M.K., Emesal-Studien. Sprach- und literaturgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur sogenannten Frauensprache des Sumerischen, page 160. He gives various ancient lexical entries that make the equation ğa2 = a-la-ku (Akk. 'to go'). Hallo considered it a 'weak form of ğen' which others speculated that it was the form from a reduplicated ğen.


Another curious problem is that this ğa2-nu is in the ePSD listed under gana "come!" - ...why gana. Well, Scretter does mention that in some later texts, ğ can be represented by g. There are some 16 texts at ETCSL which spell this expression ga-na occurs already. There are at least as many which spell it ğa2-nu. The important thing is that ğa2-nu is a legitimate way of expressing 'come!' and this seems to be the case, especially when you take into account Pascal Attinger's partitur, his examination of the variants of Inana's Descent:



www.iaw.unibe.ch/unibe/portal/fak_historisch/dga/iaw/content/e39448/e99428/e122665/e122821/pane122850/e441297/1_4_1_ger.pdf


On page 10, line 23, we can see that in 6 of the textual variants the scribe used the expression ğa2-nu, but in one variant (source y) they have spelled out ğen-ğen-na which is probably the reduplicated imperative form "come!"



Long story short, I think it would be fine to go with the expression you have picked, come man come, which in Sumerian is as Sheshki indicated above.