CHAPTER THIRTY
BABYLONIAN LISTS OF
WORDS AND SIGNS^1
Jon Taylor
T
he Babylonians are famous for their habit of making lists of things. Scribes wrote
lists of names, lists of places, lists of sheep and other animals, lists of stars, lists
of gods, lists of objects made from wood and metals, lists of professions and many
other lists besides. Lists were also used to store other kinds of information. For
example, the Babylonians were renowned for their skills as astronomers, doctors and
fortune-tellers; knowledge derived from each of these fields was also committed to
writing in lists. We also find collections of proverbs written in a similar style. So
why did the Babylonians expend so much effort compiling lists, and what can the
lists tell us about the Babylonians themselves?
A tremendous quantity of information was stored in the lists. One of the constant
concerns was how to order that information in a useful and meaningful way.^2 The
early word lists contained words belonging to a particular theme. During the third
millennium the system of grouping together words whose spelling shares a particular
character of the script developed; to an extent this is a natural extension of the
thematic system, since many items within a theme will share a common sign in their
writing. Signs and words could also be grouped by some kind of ‘natural’ order, such
as moving from head to foot in the body. In the case of sign lists, the signs could
be arranged according to similarity of form. Within a list, individual entries may be
grouped according to various other considerations, such as similarity of sound or word
shape, or in terms of synonyms/antonyms or paradigms such as positive/negative or
colour terms. Indeed, within any one list, one may find many of the techniques used.
THE ORIGINS OF LISTSTo understand the Babylonian lists, we must first explore their origin and history.
The earliest known writing in the Near East comes from the city of Uruk (in what
is now southern Iraq) around the end of the fourth millennium BC. Most of these
documents are economic records, tracking the movements of commodities through
the temple household of the goddess Inanna. A few of the documents are lists of
words, however. So the humble list is present right from the beginning. The kind
of list that was written was a simple catalogue of types of pots, metals, domesticated