The Sumerian name profile is absent in Uruk III and fully present by Archaic Ur, as this answer predicts
The share of names carrying the common Sumerian name elements jumps from 12.4% in the Uruk III names (odds ratio 1.35 against the corpus) to 40% in the Early Dynastic I–II names of Ur (odds ratio 5.8), the period in which the first phonetic name spellings appear.
What it means
- Something changes in naming, in the people named or in how names were written, between Uruk III (about 3100 BC) and Archaic Ur (about 2800 BC); this interval is where the language question can be attacked.For the key question: What language, if any, do the proto-cuneiform texts record?
- The Archaic Ur texts are the next corpus to work on: their names should be marked and tested directly in sign-name transliteration.For: When and how did phonetic spelling begin in Mesopotamian writing?
Next steps 14
Details
Compare how the archaic names reuse their elements (type-token curves, share of elements in two or more distinct names, compositional pairs) with Early Dynastic names at matched sample sizes; linguistic names, of any language, reuse a small vocabulary productively, while ad hoc labels should not.
Details
Englund argues that putting the numeral before the noun is un-Sumerian; Dahl notes that account formats may have their own order. In Early Dynastic administrative texts written in Sumerian (Fara and later, from CDLI or Oracc), measure how often the numeral precedes the counted noun. If Sumerian accounts also put it first, the syntax argument drops out and the Sumerian answer loses one objection; if they put it after, the archaic order stays as evidence for the unknown answer.
Details
Identify name-like entries attached to officials and institutions in Uruk III (heads of households, seal owners, officials in the Professions-list vocabulary) and score them against the Early Dynastic benchmark. Sumerian-pattern officials with non-Sumerian dependents point to a foreign workforce; non-Sumerian officials point to non-Sumerian scribes or a labelling notation.
Details
Test name-like entries attached to officials and institutions in Uruk III, to separate the scribes' own naming culture from the listed workers'.
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). The Sumerian name profile is absent in Uruk III and fully present by Archaic Ur, as this answer predicts [Evidence EVD0DFVQBFT6XD1]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DFVQBFT6XD1
@misc{mysteriesdept_evd0dfvqbft6xd1,
title = {The Sumerian name profile is absent in Uruk III and fully present by Archaic Ur, as this answer predicts},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Evidence, catalog key EVD0DFVQBFT6XD1},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DFVQBFT6XD1}
}