By the pre-declared rule the names show no preference, and almost all their signs are ordinary administrative signs
Under the pre-declared decision rule the archaic names show no preference for or against Englund's Sumerian name elements against either baseline, and 204 of the 211 distinct signs used in names also occur in non-name administrative entries.
What it means
- No sign subset is reserved for names in Uruk III, so there is no hint yet of the phonetic name-writing that appears at Ur about 2900 BC.For: When and how did phonetic spelling begin in Mesopotamian writing?
- The sign make-up of the names cannot by itself pick a language; any decision has to come from a calibrated benchmark or from phonetic spellings.For: Do the roughly 440 personal names in the archaic texts follow Sumerian, Semitic or some other naming pattern?
Next steps 12
Details
Go through the 27 matched archaic-to-ED names. Drop any that depend on a spelling first attested after ED I-II, such as the EN.E2 spelling of Enlil, and rerun the null comparison. If the excess over the null holds, continuity stands.
Details
Compare the full sign profiles of Schøyen/Brussels names and excavated Jemdet Nasr/Uruk names (shared vocabulary, Jensen-Shannon distance against a permutation null) to see whether they form two distinct naming populations.
Details
For each matched name, estimate the probability of a chance match from the frequency of its signs in ordinary entries and in Early Dynastic names, and rank the matches by strength.
Details
Repeat the bridge only for archaic names that contain a sign occurring in under 1% of names, weighting each match by how unlikely it is under the shuffle null. A surplus there would point to real survivals; none would leave the names with no route to a reading.
How it was found 1 run
The archaic names carry Englund's Sumerian elements at about the corpus rate, not below it
Share of 540 editor-marked names containing at least one element, against 10,000 random pseudo-names of the same lengths; CDLI Uruk III–IV transliterations
Notes from the run
The element list was fixed from Englund 2009 before any enrichment figure was computed; raw sign counts in the names had been looked at while checking the parser. The decision rule is in the docstring of names_test.py.
Sources 3
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). By the pre-declared rule the names show no preference, and almost all their signs are ordinary administrative signs [Evidence EVD0DFQST0K2V01]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DFQST0K2V01
@misc{mysteriesdept_evd0dfqst0k2v01,
title = {By the pre-declared rule the names show no preference, and almost all their signs are ordinary administrative signs},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Evidence, catalog key EVD0DFQST0K2V01},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DFQST0K2V01}
}