Genuine Sumerian names carry these elements three to four times as often as the archaic names
Scored by the same procedure, lemmatized Early Dynastic Sumerian names contain one of Englund's elements in 40% (ED I–II, 326 names), 47% (ED IIIa, 11,799) and 53% (ED IIIb, 31,083) of cases, 2.9 to 4.5 times their nulls, with odds ratios of 4.5 to 5.8; the archaic names reach 12.4%, 1.27 times their null, with an odds ratio of 1.35.
What it means
- The archaic names do not have a Sumerian onomastic profile; the answer that they favour Sumerian elements is ruled out on its own criterion.For: Do the roughly 440 personal names in the archaic texts follow Sumerian, Semitic or some other naming pattern?
- Englund's names argument, restated as a comparison with real Sumerian names rather than as a deficit, holds: the Uruk III names are measurably not Sumerian-pattern names.For the key question: What language, if any, do the proto-cuneiform texts record?
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
Real Sumerian names carry the stock name elements four to six times more than chance; the Uruk III names barely do
Token odds ratio of Englund's Sumerian name elements in names against each corpus's other words, with 95% bootstrap intervals; Oracc ePSD2 and CDLI
Notes from the run
Readings are mapped to sign names through the OGSL index, so the Early Dynastic and archaic tests use the same signs. Early Dynastic names are spelled with more signs (2.2–3.1 against 1.9), which the length-matched null absorbs.
Sources 3
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). Genuine Sumerian names carry these elements three to four times as often as the archaic names [Evidence EVD0DFVQADHXGK8]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DFVQADHXGK8
@misc{mysteriesdept_evd0dfvqadhxgk8,
title = {Genuine Sumerian names carry these elements three to four times as often as the archaic names},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Evidence, catalog key EVD0DFVQADHXGK8},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DFVQADHXGK8}
}