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Newly compiled lists

The corpus of word lists, which goes back as far as the archaic period at the end of the 4th millennium received a considerable extension until the middle of the 3rd millennium. A majority of the entries known from the archaic texts and transmitted in the later Early Dynastic period either widely unchanged or slightly modified became obsolete. They had no immediate significance for contemporary mundane texts. This lack might have triggered the emergence of new compilations covering either new semantic fields or elaborating on already established lists.

Already at the end of the 4th millennium next to a corpus of standardized lists the textual record attests to a high amount of further lexical compilations. Such lists appear not to be copied on multiple exemplars and are conventionally referred to as vocabularies or unidentified lexical texts. These texts cover a wide range of topics, although a majority of these texts do not allow any satisfying interpretation. Among these texts are the earliest examples of sign lists, i.e., lists collecting graphically similar sign forms (in particular W 9123,d und W 14264).


Klaus Wagensonner (Freie Universität, Berlin)
For suggestions and corrections please email Klaus Wagensonner

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newly_compiled_lists.txt · Last modified: 2016/04/22 19:18 by wagensonner
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