Manchester Memoirs, Vol. xlviii. (1904), No. ^5. 3 



Semitic words as are certain will suffice to show that the 

 nature of the text, apart from the personages, is in 

 accordance with the title. These, which, by their occur- 

 rence, may be called the ' key-words,' number about 60, 

 and show that, whatever may be the unavoidable defects 

 of the rendering which I have made, the nature of the 

 inscription has been correctly ascertained, as far as is 

 possible with our present knowledge. This, when one 

 considers that the Sumerian language has been practically 

 dead for about three thousand years, and was wholly lost 

 to view and forgotten for from half to two-thirds of that 

 time, may be regarded as thoroughly satisfactory. More- 

 over, whatever defects my translation may contain are 

 in all probability mainly due to the exceedingly difficult 

 nature of the language and the defective nature of the 

 script in which it is written. In addition to this, it may 

 be noted, that the meanings of the words are only attain- 

 able through the medium of Semitic Babylonian, and 

 that the Babylonians themselves, in their translations, are 

 not seldom in doubt as to the way in which the words 

 and phrases ought to be rendered, two, and even three 

 possible renderings being sometimes suggested in the 

 documents which have come down to us. In addition to 

 this, the present inscription is written in a variation of 

 that form of Sumerian which is known as ' the dialect,' 

 and instead of using ideographs, as in the case of most 

 other Sumerian inscriptions, the words are, in this inscrip- 

 tion, generally spelled out. This is naturally very 

 important and interesting, but it does not help the 

 modern translator, partly on account of the large number 

 of homophones which Sumerian contains, but principally 

 because we do not know, in many cases, the pronuncia- 

 tions of the characters when used ideographically. When, 

 therefore, a text is written ideographically, we translate 



