Ashmolean Museum: 19 (2023-06-25)

Created by: Wagensonner, Klaus

Seven-sided prism containing a version of the Early Dynastic List of metals and metal objects; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Ashm 1931-128.

This lexical text was compiled in the late Uruk period (ca. 3200-3000 BC). It contains a list of metals and metal objects, following a sophisticated sequence based on semantic and graphical characteristics. This word list belongs to a group of archaic thematic word lists that, at the beginning of the third millennium, spread from Uruk to other cities in the ancient Near East. The best evidence for this particular list originates from the northern Babylonian sites of Fara and Tell Abu Salabikh, both dating to the ED IIIa period (ca. 2600-2500 BC). The list even reached the Syrian site of Ebla, attested there in an almost perfectly preserved manuscript. While some archaic word lists, at least so far as we know, cease to be transmitted after the end of the Early Dynastic period, other lists continued in use until the early 2nd millennium, alongside the emergence of many new (genres of) lexical texts in the late Early Dynastic period. Still, the evidence for these texts in the second half of the third millennium is quite scarce. The quite well-preserved seven-sided prism in the Ashmolean museum (originally published by O. R. Gurney in 1969 Iraq 31, pp. 3ff.) contains a version of the Metals list that dates to the Old Akkadian period. An important peculiarity about this version is the addition of a semantic classifier to each of the entries. This classifier ‛uruda’ precedes designations of objects made of copper. Otherwise, the text itself does not differ substantially from the Early Dynastic versions. Besides this modification, one should note the alternation of entries with and without the sign AN in a large section of the text. This feature is already present in the archaic versions. Patterns like this one are not uncommon in the early lexical corpus. The qualifier AN has been interpreted in several ways. Besides being a divine marker, it has also been argued that it might be an early form of the Sumerian designation for tin, an-na, or, since AN is also the Sumerian designation of the heavens, for “meteoric” iron. CDLI entry: P213492

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus