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March 22, 2008
When Is a Pun Not Punny?
I'm still working my way through Scott Noegel's Nocturnal Ciphers: The Allusive Language of Dreams in the Ancient Near East and he has convinced me that puns played a major role in how the ancient Mesopotamians interpreted dreams. He calls punning a "divine hermeneutic." I thought I'd try out this hermeneutic on two my favorite urine dream omina from the Assyrian Dream Book (Series dZiq'iqu, tablet VII, [K. 6267 Rev. column I]) . So here goes:
[If you see squares, rectangles or something else that doesn't look right, please install the Charis SIL font.]
6') DIŠ KÀŠ-šú ina IGI UŠ(-šú) i-[tal-ka-ma ]
GIŠ.ZI SILA [ ]
DUMU.MEŠ TUK-[ ši ]
9') DIŠ KÀŠ-šú ina IGI UŠ-šú i-tal-[ka-ma ]
su-qá-a-tu S[I. ]
NÍG.GA-šú i-ḫub-ba-[tu ]
ana URU SUM-n[u ]
9') If his urine flows in front of (his) penis (onto) the streets, his property will be robb[ed] and given to the city.
I wasted a lot of time looking at KÀŠ (šinatā, "urine") and UŠ (išaru, "penis") before I came to SILA (sûqu, "street"). And then the fun began. To the uninitiated, all of this may be hard to follow because it is rooted in the peculiarities of the cuneiform writing system. Sometimes words are spelled out and sometimes, as in the case of SILA, they are represented by ideograms, generally from Sumerian, that must be rendered into Akkadian, sûqu, before being translated into English (or whatever), "street". And to make things even more interesting, a single ideogram may stand for more than one Akkadian word. That's the source of one type of punning.
So what besides "street" can SILA mean in Akkadian. Well, one thing it can mean is šalāṭu (II), which according to AHw, 1147, means "einschneiden" or "cut into" and another thing it can mean according to CAD, Š, I, 238, is šalāṭu (I), "to dominate, rule or control." CAD says the meaning of šalāṭu (II) is unknown but I'll ignore this for the purposes of this post. {Again for the uninitiated who may gave gotten this far, AHw and CAD are abbreviations for the two major Akkadian dictionaries.)
Now, let's look at the apodosis of the omen beginning at line 6' from tablet VII of the Assyrian Dream Book, "he will have sons." Okay, reading the alternate meaning of SILA as šalāṭu (I), "to dominate," etc, I can see how this might imply a son in the case of a king or some other high official.
But just a minute: The omen that begins in line 9' uses the SILA sign for "street" and tells us that "his property will be robbed and given to the city." That doesn't seem like dominating anything much to me. But if I take AHw's meaning of šalāṭu (II), "cut into" then SILA may provide a hermeneutical pathway to being "robbed" and then having one's stuff distributed in the city.
Now, if all this seems more than a little contrived to you, it does to me also. But how would an ancient learned scribe, well schooled in all the intricacies of the writing system and in oneiromancy, have seen it? Perhaps not in the ways I have outlined, but it is possible that that scribe might have explained these omina in other ways that would boggle our minds today.
What bothers me here is to what extent we have license to look aggressively for puns in this material. That Noegel and others have identified nearly indisputable examples is not in question. But, do their indisputable examples give us permission to mine for other such puns no matter how obscure or even contradictory? Or do these indisputable examples require that we engage in an exercise like the one I attempted above and be disappointed if we don't find anything very convincing?
I do worry that one can apply the "divine hermeneutic" to considerable excess even in materials that more or less beg one to try. In less mantic material, I think one should be extremely cautious with this "divine hermeneutic." Even with manic material, all cases should be evaluated with a considerable dose of skepticism. If the pun has some secret meaning, you'd better be prepared to explain not only what that meaning is but why it means that, why it meant that to first readers and why I should agree that it is important. By the way, I think Noegel does a fairly good job at this most of the time. I'll take a look at a couple of his examples in another post.
Arrrr, these are dangerous waters! And this from a seer of an echo of divination in Biblical Hebrew.
Posted by Duane Smith at March 22, 2008 6:10 PM | Read more on Akkadian |
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Comments
These "mystical puns" exist all over the world. This is the basis of Chinese numerology too. The word 'four' is si in Mandarin and pronounced with falling tone. It's considered a very bad number that brings death. And why is this? Because the word for 'four' sounds a lot like the word for 'to die' which is pronounced si with low rising tone. These same puns explain why '8' is likewise considered a number of prosperity, '9' is a symbol of longevity and '3' is understood as a number of wealth.
Posted by: Glen Gordon at March 24, 2008 2:50 AM
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