Notes on the Nomenclature of Old Babylonian Sippar

Abstract

In my study of the Old Babylonian Sippar material, which necessitated the organizatioll of an elaborate filing system, I became increasingly aware of the fact that one untapped source of information on the everyday life of the Sipparians was the thousands of personal names (perhaps as many as 18,000) that had been collected and alphabetically arranged. I will here present gleanings from these names and some random observations. First a preliminary question must be raised. Given the accidental nature of our material, as well as the fact that we have in the collection an unknown fraction of the original material, to what extent is the body of personal names we do have representative of the nomenclature of Sipparians? This question was answered by a group of some 400 :EBritish Museum tablets that Professor Leo Oppenheim transliterated for the Sipper Project of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago some years ago. An examination of the theophoric names in this new group (and theophoric names constitute the overwhelming type of name) yielded the following results. Only a8 new names were added to the 1025 already on file. Breaking this down further, only 8 new elements were added to the 163 theophorous elements used with the god Sin, 9 new elements to the 211 Samas names, and one to the 45 Enlil names. Several deities appeared in the names of the new group who had not occurred previously, e.g., Tessup, Hulsu, Malik, and Elali. From these data one could conclude that our earlier collection contained a fairly good cross-section of Sipparian personal names. I first investigated to what extent the official religion of Sippar influenced the nomenclature, and found the following. Generally speaking 70 % of all the theophoric names contain the names of gods belonging to the official pantheon of Sippar, i e., of gods who had either a complex temple