Early Dynastic Sumerian names carry the stock elements at odds ratios of 4.5–5.8; the archaic names at 1.35
Scored by one procedure, the stock Sumerian name elements appear in 40–53% of Early Dynastic Sumerian names (odds ratios 4.5–5.8 against their corpora) and in 12.4% of the archaic Uruk III names (odds ratio 1.35, 95% 1.09–1.60); the intervals do not come near each other.
What it means
- The archaic names are measurably not Sumerian-pattern names; the open part of the question is whose pattern they are.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.
Sources 2
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). Early Dynastic Sumerian names carry the stock elements at odds ratios of 4.5–5.8; the archaic names at 1.35 [Evidence EVD0DFVRB3DMZN0]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DFVRB3DMZN0
@misc{mysteriesdept_evd0dfvrb3dmzn0,
title = {Early Dynastic Sumerian names carry the stock elements at odds ratios of 4.5–5.8; the archaic names at 1.35},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Evidence, catalog key EVD0DFVRB3DMZN0},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DFVRB3DMZN0}
}