other variants occur between the parallel texts, but in C:X there are no variants at all be-
tween the sources. The discussion will return to these texts after surveying the other vari-
ant categories. It will suffice presently to indicate that the situation where more than one
pairing of texts agrees is minimal. That is, where sources such as A:X and X:AA show a
close orthographic affinity, there is no such affinity between A:AA.
Orthographic (linguistic) Variants
There are few linguistic variants between the sources, and those that do occur typically
involve case endings which, by the first millennium, had become largely defunct. For ex-
ample, M272 shows that across three sources three different case endings are used for the
same noun. This example demonstrates that the use of case endings was not uniform be-
tween the sources. Other linguistic variations, namely the omission or addition of ventive
affixes to nouns, may be more aptly described as grammatical variations.
Also included in this category are two possible variations in Sumerian grammatical
forms, M210 and M277. The extent to which these variants should be considered as
grammatical rather than orthographic is debatable, as it is unclear how familiar a typical
first millennium Akkadian scribe would have been with Sumerian grammatical forms.^333
Unlike the sources for Gilgamesh XI or the prologue to the Laws of Hammurabi, there
are few pronunciation or dialectal variants in the sources for MUL.APIN. Like EAE 63,
this may be due to the relatively formulaic nature of the documents. Alternatively, this
(^333) This was pointed out to me by W. Horowitz, personal communication.