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Soc. Bibl. Arch. vi. 279. Jensen, Kosmologie, p. 127, proposes to read Umun-pauddu. Hilprecht, Old Babylonian Inscriptions, i. 2, no. 93. The name also appears in syllabaries as Shul-pa-ud-du-a. For the element pa-udda, see p. 103. Jensen, Kosmologie, pp. 125, 126. See Journal Asiatique, September-October, 1895, p. 393. De Sarzec, pl. 8, col. v. ll. 8-12. IR. pl. 2, no. 4.
Finally, the Assyrian syllabaries have preserved the meaning of signs, that, so far as we can judge, would otherwise have been stumbling-blocks even to the wise men of Nineveh when they were confronted with such ancient inscriptions as those whose fragments are still found among the ruins of Lower Chaldæa.
The pictorial systems of the Egyptians and the Hittites required a hand skilled in drawing to express them; the cuneiform syllabaries of Babylonia, Assyria, and Elam needed an extraordinary memory to grasp the almost infinite variety in the arrangement of the wedges, and to distinguish each group from all the rest; even the Cypriote syllabary was of awkward and unnecessary extent, and was expressed by characters needlessly complicated.
Meissner that syllabaries prepared for the better understanding of the formulas and words employed in preparing the legal and commercial tablets, date, in part, from the period which we may roughly designate as that of Hammurabi, covering, say, the three centuries 2300 to 2000 B.C. With this evidence for the existence of pedagogues devoted to the training of novices in the art of reading and writing, in order to fit them for their future tasks as official scribes, we are safe in assuming that these same schoolmen were no less active in other fields of literature.
From syllabaries, we learn that he was a form of the sun-god, worshipped in the city of Kish in northern Babylonia, and it also appears that he was identified at one period with Ninib. The temple to Zamama perhaps only a shrine stood in the city of Kish, which was remodeled by Hammurabi.
Unfortunately, the superstition of the monarch led him to collect more especially books upon omens and dreams, and astrological treatises, but other works were not overlooked, and we owe to him a large number of the syllabaries and lists of words in which the cuneiform characters and the Assyrian vocabulary are explained.
There were dictionaries and grammars for explaining the Sumerian language to Semitic pupils, interlinear translations of Sumerian texts, phrase-books, lists of synonyms, and commentaries on difficult or obsolete words and passages, besides syllabaries, in which the cuneiform characters were catalogued and explained.
Among those Assyrian syllabaries which have been so helpful in the decipherment of the wedges, there is one tablet where the primitive form of each symbol is placed opposite the group of strokes which had the same value in after ages. This tablet is, however, quite exceptional, and, as a rule, the cuneiform characters cannot thus be traced to their primitive form.
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