Early Dynastic dependent workers carry Sumerian name elements as strongly as everyone else, so class does not explain…
Restricted to the names in ED IIIb ration lists for dependent workers (geme, arad, iginudu), the Sumerian name elements appear in 60% of 6,894 names (odds ratio 4.72, 95% 4.57–4.87), and in 65% of 5,142 after removing officials and names recurring in 30 or more texts (odds ratio 4.60, 4.45–4.77); the Uruk III dependents' names reach 12.4% (odds ratio 1.35).
What it means
- The class caveat on the names result is answered for Early Dynastic Lagash: dependents there have fully Sumerian name profiles, so the archaic gap is not a property of dependent status as such.For: Do the roughly 440 personal names in the archaic texts follow Sumerian, Semitic or some other naming pattern?
- Three readings remain for the archaic names: a foreign population that kept its own names, scribes who did not speak Sumerian, or name entries that were labels rather than spellings of 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
Sumerian dependent workers' names carry the stock name elements as strongly as anyone's; the Uruk III dependents' names do not
Odds ratio of Englund's Sumerian name elements in names against the corpus's other words, 95% bootstrap intervals; Oracc ePSD2 ED IIIb and CDLI Uruk III
Sources 3
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). Early Dynastic dependent workers carry Sumerian name elements as strongly as everyone else, so class does not explain… [Evidence EVD0DG2CQD3YKAF]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DG2CQD3YKAF
@misc{mysteriesdept_evd0dg2cqd3ykaf,
title = {Early Dynastic dependent workers carry Sumerian name elements as strongly as everyone else, so class does not explain…},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Evidence, catalog key EVD0DG2CQD3YKAF},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DG2CQD3YKAF}
}