A survey of cuneiform signlists
1. Charles Fossey 1926, Manuel d'Assyriologie II: Evolution
des Cunéiformes, Paris.
Fossey’s objective was to give one example of each allograph
of every sign he encountered in the material available to
him, which was in the form of published hand copies by other
scholars. He simply listed the signs, giving the place of
publication, and arranged the material in a rough chronological
and geographical order. His collection is rich and still useful,
but it still presents numerous impedimenta to the user. For
example, it is impossible for the user to distinguish between
sign forms that constitute a norm for a place or time and
those that may be examples of hapax legomenon. Fossey states
that his intention was not to give the same allograph form
twice for one period and area, but he nevertheless gives very
near allographs. In a total of over a thousand pages thirty-six
thousand individual sign forms are registered. A whole section
is devoted to cases where allographic variation could result
in confusion between two signs.
2. René Labat 1948, Manuel d'Epigraphie Akkadienne,
Paris.
Labat depended greatly upon Fossey as well as – although
to a much lesser degree - specialized sign lists that had
appeared in the meantime (such as Burrow’s archaic sign
list) Ur Excavations: Texts II (1935) pp. 61 ff. ; he also
depends on his own intuition. Labat's list is much more clearly
organized than that of Fossey, with columns and boxes for
archaic, ED and Old, Middle and Late Assyrian and Old Middle
and Late Babylonian. Although the subject of Assyriology had
expanded greatly during the twenty-three years separating
Fossey and Labat, the total number of forms given by Labat
is well under a quarter of those given by Fossey.
Whereas Fossey’s collection struck deeply into the range
of then published cuneiform, Labat’s does not. Labat’s
book is by name a Manuel d’Epigraphie Akkadienne. However,
apart from the trivial point that most of it is palaeography
and not strictly speaking epigraphy, Akkadienne is used also
with a certain freedom: the ample ED column means that Sumerian
is included, while the Ur III period and Vth dynasty of Lagash
are left out. Mari - already then, as now, a pride and joy
of French Assyriology - is not singled out for careful treatment,
although the first volume of Archive Royale de Mari in the
Textes Cuneiformes du Louvre had already appeared, albeit
only two years earlier.
3. Rykle Borger 1978, Assyrisch-babylonisch Zeichenliste,
Neukirchen-Vluyn.
This is a fuller (413 page) version of an earlier Zeichenliste
from the same hand of 1971 (124 pages). The palaeographic
part of this is limited to thirty-two pages at the beginning
of the book. This contains eight columns of which only the
first six contain signs. These are an undifferentiated mix
of Neo- and Middle Assyrian, followed by Neo-Babylonian, Kassite
boundary stones, Old Assyrian, Old Babylonian general and
Old Babylonian Code of Hammurabi. The final two columns refer
the reader to Johannes Friedrich’s Hethitische Lesestuecke
(Heidelberg, 1960) and to Fossey. The bulk of the Zeichenliste
is taken up with supplying Sumerian and Akkadian readings
for groups of signs, and a rough guide to the Sumerian verbal
chain. The former was a godsend to students, who until its
appearance still had to use Deimels’ outdated Sumerisches
Lexikon of 1932 (Rome), which, like Fossey, collected data
but did not interpret it.
4. Friedrich Ellermeier 1979, Sumerisches Glossar, Nörten-Hardenberg
bei Göttingen.
This comes from the same stable as the Zeichenliste and is
in a sense almost as much - or as little - a list of signs.
Only Neo-Assyrian sign forms are given, and the purpose is
to establish what values signs, including compound signs,
can have.
Finally, two specialized sign lists must be mentioned:
5. Chr. Ruester and Erich Neu 1989, Hethitisches Zeichenlexikon.
Inventar und Interpretation der Keilschriftzeichen aus den
Boghazkoi-Texten, Wiesbaden.
This sign list gives a multiplicity of allographs of individual
signs, but, unlike Fossey, does not indicate sources for individual
quoted forms. As indicated above, an important desideratum
should be that a user would be able to trace the spread of
scribal traditions over space and time. For instance, consider
the following instance. Received opinion is that the Hittite
cuneiform derives from a late Old Babylonian cursive script
such as was used at sites such as Alalakh, Tell Atchana, and
that the script, plus, quite likely, the scribes themselves
and their equipment, were carried back to Hattusas as booty
by the Great King Hattusilis I during his campaigns in North
Syria around 1550 BC. Further, Heinrich Otten, the Altmeister
of Hittitology has expressed the opinion that the development
of cuneiform among the Hittites was not an internal Hittite
phenomenon but was linked to developments in the Syro-Mesopotamian
region. A scholar who wished to test this hypothesis would
not be greatly assisted by Ruester and Neu’s signlist.
6. M.-J. Steve 1992, Syllabaire Elamite. Histoire et Paleographie,
Paris.
This sign list has to deal with a much smaller corpus of
tablets than the others mentioned so far. Allographs are given,
though without quoting sources. On the other hand the chronological
development and usage is well represented in table form.
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