CONCLUSION
Undoubtedly, Babylonian and Assyrian scholars regarded their writing system, first and foremost, as a tool that provided them with the opportunity to accurately reproduce language.
But this was not the only function cuneiform writing fulfilled for them. Drawing on the polysemy and polyphony inherent in the repertoire of cuneiform signs, and inspired by the belief that the many alternative readings of each of these signs conveyed to them a secret message on how things were actually connected, they found ways to imbue the texts they wrote, by using particular characters, with additional layers of meaning,116 * and to discover such layers, through the application of creative hermeneutics, in the foundational texts they read and commented on.117 Cryptographic writing was employed to make certain texts inaccessible to everybody except a small group of initiates.118 And finally, as demonstrated in our preceding overview of omens dealing with graphemes, there were also traditions that applied completely alien “codes” to cuneiform writing. In the case presented here, scholars employeda code in which, as far as we can determine, the shape of the signs was the primary factor that determined their meaning.119 This peculiar “grammar” of the visual appearances of cuneiform signs was part of the much larger system of analogies governing the Mesopotamian omen corpus.120 Another code unrelated to the established conventions of cuneiform writing seems to be used in a few cuneiform syllabaries from the first millennium B.C. that associate individual graphemes with numbers. The principles behind the equations presented in these texts are still obscure to us.121
Given the ever increasing complexity of Mesopotamian “grammatology,” it is not surprising that the etiological tale the Enmerkar epic gave with regard to the cuneiform writing system — that it was invented to ease long-distance communication — was eventually replaced by another story.
The most prominent version of it can be found in Berossos’s famous “Babyloniaka,” written at the beginning of the Seleucid era and in Greek language, but in the spirit of Babylonian scholarship. Berossos reports that in the early days of mankind, the semi-divine sage Oannes-Adapa, emerging from the sea, had taught the people how to found cities, establish temples, introduce laws, and measure land, had inaugurated sciences and crafts of all kinds — and had given men the knowledge of letters.122 For Berossos, and many other Babylonian and Assyrian scholars, the cuneiform writing system was not a human creation, compromised by all the imperfections of mortal striving, but a gift of the gods, originating in a period that preceded historical times, and capable of conveying, on various levels, completely incontestable eternal truths.ABBREVIATIONS
| AHw BM CAD | W. von Soden, Akkadisches Handworterbuch Tablets in the collections of the British Museum A. Leo Oppenheim et al., editors, The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago |
| CT K. KAR MSL | Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum Tablets in the Kouyunjik collection of the British Museum Keilschrifttexte aus Assur religiosen Inhalts Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon |
ECKART FRAHM
Figure 7.1. Cuneiform graphemes mentioned in the extispicy texts, Alamdimmu III, and KAR 395, in alphabetical order. The sign forms, for the most part taken from Goetze 1947, pls. 127-32, are those of the Old Babylonian younger cursive and the so-called “archaic cursive.”
ECKART FRAHM
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