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July 20, 2007

In Preparation for Something Unimportant

I've been working on something for much longer than it deserves. I'm still not quite ready to post on it or even disclose exactly what "it" is. So I thought I'd post a few random comments of various Akkadian words for "mule" and my translation of a famous passage from one of the Mari tablets (ARM VI 76: 22-25a) that to some extent informs what I'm working on.

The tablet is a letter to Zimri-Lim from Bahdi-Lim. The passage in question reads in my translation,

[My lord], do not ride on horses {ANŠE.KUR.RA.HI.A}. [In a] carriage (drawn by) mules {ANŠE .HI.A ku-da-ni-ma} m[y lor]d shall ride. (Thereby) he shall bring honor to his reign.

Here Bahni-Lim gives Zimri-Lim advice on how to inter the city of Mari. In this Mari passage, we should likely read ANŠE.HI.A as a determinative for equines (plural). Kūdanu is the most common word for "mule" in Akkadian. While it appears in personal names as early as Old Akkadian, its earliest attestations as a common noun may be found at Mari and in Gilgamesh (VI, VIII and X). It is often written ideographically: ANŠE.GÌR.NUN.NA (but sometimes without the ANŠE). There can be little doubt that it means "mule." For example, it is used as a metaphor denoting infertility, ki ša zēra ša ANŠE.GÌR.NUN.NA laššûni, "as the seed of the mule is not." See CAD, K 49 for this and other examples.

But there are other Akkadian words that mean "mule" or some kind of a mule: parû (ANŠE.ŠÚ.MUL) (CAD P, 206f) and damdammu (ANŠE.NUN.NA) (CAD D, 64). Parû is the second most common word for mule in Akkadian. Parû may also refer to hinny and like the other words for mule it is known from Mari. It is not clear how a parû differs from a kūdanu. But see below for a wild unsupported guess. At least at Mari kūdanū usually denotes riding stock while damdammū are draft animals. But the text I translated above seems to use kūdanu to denote a draft mule. Are damdammū as subset of kūdanū?

One might ask if there is a relationship between the final sign in the ideographic representation of parû, MUL, and our word "mule." Such a connection is so unlikely as to be negligible. When used as a determinative in Akkadian (and it is not a determinative here), MUL signifies a "star." And MUL means "star" in Sumerian from which the sign comes. I have no idea why it is used here unless it somehow means "starry," "bright," "sparkled" or the like. Not all mules are brown; there are appaloosa like mules and other speckled (paint) verities. I'm not sure that parû relates in anyway to such variations. It's a wild guess On the other hand, no guesswork is required to know that our English word "mule" ultimately comes from Latin mulus, which means, well, "mule."

And then there is pirdu. And with that, I will end this post.

References:

Posted by Duane Smith at July 20, 2007 2:59 PM | Read more on Akkadian |

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