lethargic_man gets sucked into spending hours researching how to

[lethargic_man]

I got an unusual email today:

I stumbled across one of your blog posts while looking for how to write a birthday in Cuneiform, and was wondering if you have gotten any further along in your studies?

The reason why I ask is because I am typesetting a book for an author who would like to have his birthday (January 31, 1968) written in Cuneiform on the "About the Author" page.

I thought: either this will be a five minute google, or it will be completely beyond me. What I found, to my surprise, is that it was somewhere in between the two, so I regarded it as a challenge. Starting from an overview of the Babylonian calendar on Wikipedia, I found a calendar converter online, but it only supoprts dates up to 76 CE. So, to work out the birthday, we need to move the date back into that range. Now, the Babylonian calendar runs in a nineteen year period; this is because the lunar and solar calendars come together every nineteen years. So, if we move multiples of nineteen years into the past, we'll arrive at the same Babylonian day.

That's the theory.

In practice—warning: calendar geekery follows—the nineteen year cycle in the lunar calendar consists of 235 months of 29.53059 days, totalling 6939.68865 days; but nineteen solar years, according to the Gregorian year of 365.2425 days, comes to 6939.6075 days, i.e. the lunar year is 0.08115 days (1 hour, 56 minutes and 51.36 seconds) longer than the solar year. So, winding the birthday back by one hundred nineteen-year periods, we end up on the 31 January 68 CE Gregorian, which is 2 February 68 in the Julian calendar; but by that stage the lunar calendar is 154.185 days out of sync with the solar calendar—almost half a year!

So the question is: do we adjust the date by that period, or assume the Babylonians would have corrected their calendar to keep it synced with the solar year (like Western culture did with the switch to the Gregorian calendar)—or like the Jews, who also use a lunisolar calendar, and picked up the Babylonian month names during the Babylonian Exile. I'm going to assume the latter: after all, they did put intercalary months in to result in that nineteen year cycle, unlike the Muslims, whose calendar gradually gets earlier and earlier compared to the Gregorian calendar (which is why the Islamic calendar now says it's 1432 years after the Hejira, despite that happening 1389 common-sense years ago!).

So, if we enter 2 February 68 into the above web form, this tells us that the date then was 9 Shevat Šabaṭu of the year 378 of the Seleucid Era according to the Babylonian reckoning (and 379 according to the Macedonian reckoning), or year 314 of the Arsacid Era. Seleucus was one of the generals of Alexander the Great, who established an empire of his own in Babylonia after the death of Alexander; Arashk (or in Greek, Arsaces) was the founder of the (later) Parthian Empire. I have no idea which is more relevant, but let's go with the Seleucid reckoning, on the grounds that it's referred to more on the Net of a Thousand Lies. In reality, if cuneiform had remained in use, they would almost certainly have switched to the Islamic calendar, but by the time Islam reached Mesopotamia, cuneiform had fallen out of use in favour of the much easier to write Aramaic.

So, now how do we represent the date 9 Šabaṭu 2178? A prolonged google (via an interesting digression to the tablet showing the calculation of √2) seems to show that dates were expressed in the form:

MU <year-num> KAM <king-name> ITI <month-num> UD <daynum>

where MU, KAM, ITI and UD are sign names referring to, I think, what they represented in Sumerian; in Babylonian MU is (I think) šattu, ITI (w)arḫu (related to Hebrew יֶרַח), UD ūmum (יוֹם). KAM I couldn't easily find a Babylonian equivalent of, but it doesn't matter, as we're just using the cuneiform sign anyway. The formula above is from a late-period text, so that suits my purposes.

Therefore what I need to write is:

MU 36,18 KAM Si-lu-uk-ku ITI Šabaṭu UD 9

(where 36,18 is 2178 expressed in sexagesimal, the base 60 system the Babylonians used), which appears to be (mouseover for more information):

Note: I'm not sure about the first sign of Seleucus's name; that appears before his name in various places, represented as a superscript m. I have no idea what it means. [ETA: Found it out: m, f and d represent signs indicating a man, a woman and a god(dess).]

So there you are, how to represent 31 January 1968 in Babylonian cuneiform. Do be warned, though, that if you use this, sooner or later you will get a knowledgeable reader coming up and pointing out that I've made horrendous mistakes, and mixed together cuneiform signs from a thousand years apart, or used the wrong sound value, or anything even worse.

But for your average reader, I could have written "I like linguistics geekery", and 99.9% of them would never know the difference. :o)

Comments

[hatam-soferet.livejournal.com]

Oh, hm. I was wondering the other day - how does direction work with cuneiform?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Left to right (at least in Assyrian; I can't speak authoritatively for any other time or language).

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Okay, so how can the second and third glyphs (from the left) be "36, 18"? They look a bit too similar. Are they 16 and 18 (or 36 and 38)?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Whoops, you're quite right: I've used the wrong numeral for 36.

Correct Glyphs

[claidheamdanns.livejournal.com]

Is what you have up there now the corrected one? If so, I will go ahead and convert this into vector format for the book.

Thanks again, I would not have gotten this far without you.

P.S. I read in some place in my studies for this that Cuneiform reads right to left, and yet all the tables I have found for numbers seem to contradict this.

Re: Correct Glyphs

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

No, it's not corrected. I'll not be able to do this until Sunday at the earliest.

P.S. I read in some place in my studies for this that Cuneiform reads right to left, and yet all the tables I have found for numbers seem to contradict this.

It's written from left to right according to Assyrian Primer by John Dyneley Prince, and the text I took the spelling of Seleucus's name from is left-to-right too.

Re: Correct Glyphs

[claidheamdanns.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'll hold off on the capturing this then.

Left to Right: okay, good to have an authoritative source on that, because there seems to be a lot of misinformation on the Net.

[hatam-soferet.livejournal.com]

Thanks :)

Linguistics geek - any idea why?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

At the risk of pushing the question back one level further: Presumably because Sumerian was written that way.

[hatam-soferet.livejournal.com]

Pedant :)

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

The writing system was devised for Sumerian; the Semitic languages which came along later had to inherit a writing system that was very poorly suited for writing them, but which was sufficiently well entrenched that it managed to hold off the much better suited, as well as easier to write, Aramaic alphabet for centuries.

[hatam-soferet.livejournal.com]

Can you do us a picture of Sumerian and tell us why it was suited to the writing system and the direction it went in? pleeease?

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Well, spotting a typo in an ancient script I can't read has got to be the geekiest thing I've done in the last twenty-four hours at least...

Re: Correct Glyphs

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I've now corrected that. However, I had a thought and went to the text I got Seleucus's name from (http://www.livius.org/cg-cm/chronicles/antiochus_cylinder/antiochus_cylinder1.html), and my fears were justified: several of the signs were different there. To explain: when I found I needed the MU sign I went off and googled it. Some of the signs on this document look like they might be versions of the same signs from a different time period; others look completely different. To recapitulate, I originally suggested:

I've now corrected that. However, I had a thought and went to the text I got Seleucus's name from (http://www.livius.org/cg-cm/chronicles/antiochus_cylinder/antiochus_cylinder1.html), and my fears were justified: several of the signs were different there. To explain: when I found I needed the MU sign I went off and googled it. Some of the signs on this document look like they might be versions of the same signs from a different time period; others look completely different. To recapitulate, I originally suggested:

Using the signs from the above document, however, we now come up with:

       

All of the signs are now from the one document except those for "Šabaṭu" and the numbers. However, I still do not guarantee that anything is correct; this is what you get for using an amateur who's using google to find his way blindly in the dark rather than a professional Babylonian scribe scholar.

Re: Correct Glyphs

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Is what you have up there now the corrected one? If so, I will go ahead and convert this into vector format for the book.

It would be better if you could find the signs in the fonts you said you had; what I have is taken from multiple sources, and is distinctly not visually uniform.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

No; I have to learn my Shavuos davening. <holds out for about five seconds> *sigh* You know my weakness.

Well, I'm not an expert, but a quick google reveals Sumerian started out written top to bottom:

Says Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_cuneiform):

In the mid-3rd millennium BC, writing direction was changed to left to right in horizontal rows (rotating all of the pictograms 90° counter-clockwise in the process), and a new wedge-tipped stylus was used which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped ("cuneiform") signs; these two developments made writing quicker and easier.

So why that particular direction? Maybe there was nothing to it; it had to be some direction, of a choice of (or boustrephedonic variants of):

left to the right, like the Europeans, [or] from the right to the left, like the Arabians, [or] from up to down, like the Chinese, [or] aslant, from one corner of the paper to the other, like ladies in England.

(Two points for identifying the quotation without googling.)

Re: Correct Glyphs

[claidheamdanns.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much. I regard your work as much more knowledgeable than my own. And though someone may come along later and correct our work, your statement still stands for the purposes of this book: "...for your average reader ... 99.9% of them would never know the difference..."

Thanks again.

Re: Correct Glyphs

[claidheamdanns.livejournal.com]

Not to worry. I will take this into Adobe Illustrator, and convert it to vector, and then fix it to make it look more uniform. The font I have is broken into two sets of the most commonly used glyphs, and may not have all of these characters. Still it wouldn't hurt to look, but would take roughly somewhere close to forever to look through all of them.

Re: Correct Glyphs

[claidheamdanns.livejournal.com]

By the way, the fonts I have are (I believe French made) divided into two sets, containing a good deal of the most commonly used glyphs. It is called Summerien-URIII-1 and Summerien-URIII-2.

I also have two others, not as complete. They are called Ugaritic3 and NeoAssyrianRAI.

[hatam-soferet.livejournal.com]

Didn't know the quotation :(

Thank you for being interesting.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I presume the "didn't" rather than "don't" means you've looked it up, and I don't need to explain it, then.

[hatam-soferet.livejournal.com]

Yes :)