A List of Assyrian and West Semitic Women's Names

Abstract

Among the Neo-Assyrian “deeds and documents” still retrievable from the recesses of Bezold's catalogue of the Kouyunjik collection and its supplements, text K. 8434 stands slightly by itself, as regards both dimensions and contents. It is a relatively large (18·5 × 12· 5 cm), reddish-coloured fragment of an eight-column tablet, but only five of the prearranged partitions are inscribed in full, in an upward-slanting Assyrian hand. They hold the remnants of a long list of personal names—specifically, of the types of names usually borne by women—thus providing a certain amount of new material to the least-known sector in onomastic research for the Neo-Assyrian age. The fact that the names in the tablet were prevalently applicable to women is a conclusion to be reached from an analysis of the onomastic data themselves, which bear ample evidence of (1) feminine morphemic affixes, relevant to East or West Semitic linguistic affiliation, and of (2) goddesses and female theophorous figures as subject-elements in complete or abbreviated sentence names. That they may have been exclusively borne by women is a deduction stemming—oddly enough—from the very fact that no absolute certainty is possible as to whether they were women's names or not, since no trace of the determinative SAL preceding the attestations survives.