Readings of LÚ in Old Babylonian Letters

Abstract

In OB letters, the LU sign has three readings: 1) LU renders the noun aw?lum ‘man human being;’ 2) LU is the determinative preceding terms for male human beings; 3) LU corresponds to the headless sa in references to human beings. This paper proposes the ways to ascertain the correct reading of LU in a given context. First, we have established that in letters from Upper Mesopotamia (Mari etc.) the freely standing LU = aw?lum greatly outnumbers syllabic spellings of aw?lum, while in letters from Southern and Central Mesopotamia syllabic spellings are by far more frequent. This fact may be relevant for the description and history of the written Old Babylonian. Second, LU preceding terms for persons or groups of persons either reperesents aw?lum as an antecedent in appositive constructions or is the determinative. This study shows that LU should be understood as the determinative in the context of occupational and social category terms, as well as in that of collective nouns. LU as the determinative is more widely used in Upper Mesopotamia than in Southern and Central Mesopotamia. LU = aw?lum is plausible when LU precedes personal names and kinship terms. This usage is a hallmark of Upper Mesopotamian letters. Yet these results do not allow us to predict the interpretation of the LU sign in every case. Third, the LU sign appears in the context of occupational terms which etymologically are noun phrases headed by the erstwhile demonstrative pronoun sa (e.g., LU.BAN = sa q?stim ‘archer’). Moreover, we show that LU preceding place names can also be interpreted as sa, e.g. LU ter-qa KI = sa Terqa ‘(that) of Terqa’, i.e. ‘a man related to Terqa’ in one way or another.