Neo-Babylonian Onomastics
Authors:   , Thissen Cornelis Bernard 
Published: August 2024

Only one generation ago, it was thought there were no generally applicable rules to transcribe the spelling of a Neo-Babylonian person’s name that includes logograms correctly. We now know that this transcription is quite straightforward. What seemed like the scribes’ random use of verbal tenses, or even verbs, for a certain verbal logogram turns out to be a simple and efficient system of rules.

The aim of this thesis was to answer two specific questions. First, did scribes use consistent rules for writing the logograms in Neo-Babylonian names – and, if so, what is the correct transcription for the various (verbal) logograms in Neo-Babylonian names? Second, was there a system for the use of verbal forms in Neo-Babylonian names that use only verbal logograms?

The orthographic system

Both questions regarding the orthographic system can be unequivocally answered in the affirmative. As we have seen, Neo-Babylonian scribes did, and probably – for legal reasons – had to do everything possible to record the correct reading of the personal names they wrote in their tablets. They did this by consistently spelling out names completely, by using verbal logograms with a phonetic complement, or by solely using verbal logograms.
In the first case, the transcription of the name is usually unambiguous. In the second case, it turned out that scribes used complements that indicated the right verb unmistakably, without the chance of choosing another verb that was also associated with that logogram. All the known logograms with phonetic prefixes or suffixes were gathered here in two simple tables that show at a glance all the phonetic complements that Neo-Babylonian scribes used.

I found that imaginative male names that deviate from the standard types are hardly found after Nebuchadnezzar II. The plethora of name formats and names from the OB and MB period was largely replaced with a simple system of deity, object and verb. Together with the increasing demand for administrative business documents, this paved the way for the increase of the use of logograms for verbs in Neo-Babylonian names, which made work simpler and more efficient for scribes. When a name was spelled with only a logogram, i.e., without a phonetic complement, the question arises which person and “tense” (present, preterite, perfective, participle, imperative or precative) was meant and, more importantly, whether the results per logogram can be structured into a, preferably simple, scheme with clear rules. We saw that the spelling Nabû-MU always yielded a preterite but Nabû-PAP yielded a participle. Therefore, it became clear that a simple table with a ‘verb = name format’ rule cannot be applied. Through my research, I was able to demonstrate that an elegant system of rules existed, where for every number of elements in the name, a short IF-THEN-ELSE decision-tree can be used to yield the correct result, only depending on the place of the deity (DN) and the verbal logogram in the name, and the question whether the verb expresses ‘creating’ offspring. There is a decision-tree for one-element names, three decision-trees for two-element names – DN-Verb, Verb-DN and non-theophoric names – and one for three-element names DN-Object-Verb.

Only in exceptional cases did scribes deviate from this system, and even in those situations the name could nearly always be found out easily, because of a limited number of well-known family names, non-staple elements such as a preposition or an interrogative pronoun, or special verbs that lead to one, well-known name.
Thus, it is now possible to identify hitherto mis-transcribed persons from modern Name Indexes correctly, which may lead to finding – with another spelling – a well-known individual from other sources.