Talk:Mušḫuššu

Incomplete and Assumptive
We don't know that the dragon from the additional book of Daniel was a Mušḫuššu. Also the Mušḫuššu has a history dating back much much further than Marduk, who came late in the evolution of the Mušḫuššu. To say it is connected to Marduk is like saying Native American mythology belongs to European Colonialists! True, the religion of Marduk assimilated the Mušḫuššu as a slave creature, but the religious leaders in Babylon appropriated many other religious icons for their own use with seemingly little understanding of the traditions extending back for centuries. I am busy writing the Ningishzida article right now, since the Mušḫuššu is a proper extension of the transtigridian snake gods, I will try to get to this article after Ningishzida is presentable. I just wanted to put a little "reader beware" here to let you know there is not a lot of reliable information here.

Ningishzidda (talk) 21:43, 20 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Check out Silesaurus. Just sayin'! FunkMonk (talk) 13:05, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

Incomplete, assumptive and with irrelevant sections

 * Mušḫuššu isn't that dragon. It don't have any connection. Again, also is not easy to confirm a connection with Hydrus or with any other dragon: for example Mušmaḫḫu or the seven-head dragon or Lašmu have astrological conection but that doesn't make them Hydra. Also, the start of the article is a joke. And what about Transtigridian Snake Gods? and elamite roots?

Also the entire Cryptocrap section is irrelevant and non-encyclopedic.--Jakeukalane (talk) 01:11, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Mušḫuššu renamed to Mushussu?
Why has this page been renamed? If it was so important to get rid of the special characters, couldn't it at least have been renamed to something approximating to the correct spelling of the name? BigEars42 (talk) 00:57, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I believe such characters are not supposed to be used in titles. FunkMonk (talk) 12:27, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Special characters can be used for titles. there is no rule to prohibit this. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:44, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was:  Mušḫuššu. BigEars42 (talk) 02:28, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Mushussu → Mušḫuššu –A previous editor renamed the page mušḫuššu as mushussu as he was probably unaware that š = sh and that ḫ = kh (Scottish “ch”), thus leaving the name misspelled. I tried to revert this change after discussing it with him (currently fifth item listed) but seem to have been blocked. The page was named mušḫuššu for good reason, as mushkhushshu or mushhushshu is a bit of an eyesore. Mushussu is, however, completely wrong. The naming conventions do not prohibit the use of diacritical marks and I request the original name be reinstated.BigEars42 (talk) 01:35, 14 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Why not just restore it yourself? Mušmaḫḫū is with the academic romanization, this doesn't seem like a move (3 June) that had any prior consensus or discussion on Talk page (6 June above). And user FunkMonk is wrong about titles. I would just restore it, if after restoring title FunkMonk then wants to propose a move then fine. In ictu oculi (talk) 07:30, 14 August 2012 (UTC)
 * I tried reverting (actually twice) but reversion seems to have been blocked, hence the request for restoration here. BigEars42 (talk) 09:00, 14 August 2012 (UTC)
 * It may be because you're not autoconfirmed - I just did it for you and it worked. I suppose we could let the RM run, but since the original mover didn't object and you only came here because of a technical limit, I can't see the point. Unless someone suddenly appears with a burning objection to academic Assyrian romanization. You might want however to contribute to the relevant Ancient Near East MOS page, if there is one. If there isn't perhaps there should be, cheers. In ictu oculi (talk) 17:28, 14 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Curiously my preferences show me as autoconfirmed but perhaps there are gradations of this status? BigEars42 (talk) 02:28, 15 August 2012 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Sirrush is by far the most common English name
Why was this article moved from Sirrush in the first place? Sirrush is by far the most common name for this creature in English; that it is an incorrect transliteration of the original Akkadian word is neither here nor there (plenty of words have entered English as a result of garbling another language). No-one but assyriologists ever use the term 'Mušḫuššu', and all the diacritics are cumbersome and unhelpful to people who don't how to pronounce them (who consist of most people who aren't assyriologists). See 3900 google hits for Mušḫuššu (including many wikipedia clones); 42,300 for sirrush. Google books has 778 for sirrush and 105 for Mušḫuššu. Even google scholar has 72 hits for sirrush and only 16 for Mušḫuššu. Wikipedia policy for naming articles is that the most common English name should be used as the main namespace. The most common name is this case is clearly 'Sirrush', and the article should be moved back there. 92.16.226.51 (talk) 16:17, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Sirrush is wrong so it shouldn't be used. 150.244.131.101 (talk) 11:58, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
 * The article title should be the WP:COMMONNAME, which doesn't necessarily have to be the "correct" name - that can be explained in the text of the article. Looking at mušḫuššu (30,500 results), mushussu (26,300 results), and sirush (41,300 results), sirrush appears to come out on top. With results for "mussushu" subtracted, mušḫuššu only has 9,060 results. Even on Google Ngrams, sirrush is pretty consistently higher than mushussu. --tronvillain (talk) 18:59, 28 June 2018 (UTC)
 * That is not how WP:COMMONNAME is established. Basing the title of the article on whatever happens to give the most results in Google is an objectively horrible way of trying to decide what the title of the article should be. Virtually all recent professionally published books on the subject refer to it as "mušḫuššu"; you only find "sirrush" in either really old, outdated books, on amateur websites on the internet, or in books written by people who just plain do not know better. In Jeremy Black and Anthony Green's Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary (1992), the article is titled "Snake-dragon" and the only actual name used for it in the article is mušḫuššu. ("Sirrush" is never even mentioned at all.) The Open Richly Cuneiform Corpus, which has an online encyclopedia of ancient Mesopotamian deities, does not have an article specifically devoted to the mušḫuššu, but, in its article about Marduk, it talks about the mušḫuššu quite a lot and the only name it ever uses for the creature is mušḫuššu. (Once again, "Sirrush" is never even mentioned.) If you go through scholarly books and journals, they all call it mušḫuššu.
 * The IP user above brings up the number of search results for each term that show up in Google Scholar, but apparently has not checked the quality of those sources, or if they are even about the mythological creature at all. The ones that show up for mušḫuššu are legitimate scholarly publications, but the almost all the ones that turn up for "Sirrush" are either not even about the mythical creature or are bogus cryptozoology works. I will go through the first page of search results. The first result that comes up is from Dragons: A Natural History, obviously cryptozoology. Next comes the book The Polar Voyagers: Explorers of the North, which has nothing to do with ancient Mesopotamia. Third comes The Babylon Game, a fantasy novel. The fourth and fifth results that come up are both talking about a man named "Sir Rush", not the mythological creature. (Apparently, in at least one of them, the "Sir Rush" in question is Benjamin Rush, a Founding Father of the United States.) The sixth and seventh results are The lungfish, the dodo & the unicorn: An excursion into romantic zoology and Paleocryptozoology: a call for collaboration between classicists and cryptozoologists, which are both obviously works on cryptozoology. Eighth is An Instinct for Dragons, an intriguing, but entirely non-specialist and almost completely speculative anthropological work by David E. Jones, which only briefly mentions the so-called "Sirrush" in passing. Ninth we have A Living Dinosaur?: In Search of Mokele-Mbembe, which is, once again, an obvious work of cryptozoological garbage. Only the tenth work Die Drachen von Babylon is an actual work of real scholarship, but it is written entirely in German, so it can hardly be used as evidence for "Sirrush" as the WP:COMMONNAME in English. It is pretty pitiful when, out of the top ten search results on Google Scholar, you cannot find a single scholarly source in English calling the mythological creature "Sirrush." Compare this with mušḫuššu, for which all ten of the top ten search results are eminent scholarly writings on the subject in English.
 * Furthermore, as has been pointed out above, mušḫuššu is the correct name; "Sirrush" is universally regarded by all scholars of ancient Mesopotamia as a misreading. If someone is absolutely determined that the title of the article should not include those awful, annoying diacritics, then it would perhaps be within reason to argue that the article should be moved to "Snake-dragon," since Black and Green do call it by that nickname, but "Sirrush" ought to be completely out of the question. If "Sirrush" were a well-known, household name, then we could perhaps make an exception here, even though it is a well-established fact that that name is incorrect. However, since very few people have heard of either name, using "Sirrush" as the title of the article would simply be propagating a known falsehood. If people do not understand the diacritics in mušḫuššu, that is not our responsibility; we cannot change the name just because scholars have reconstructed it using complicated diacritics, nor can we simplify it, since it is universally written with these diacritics in scholarly writings where it is mentioned. --Katolophyromai (talk) 20:43, 28 June 2018 (UTC)
 * A nice analysis, thanks. Looking at the search results (which can be an important part of establishing a common name) was just the beginning- I wasn't about to suddenly move the page based on them after it's been stable for over seven years. Of course, what name experts use isn't necessarily the common name, but as you point out use of "Sirrush" seems to be mostly fringe based purely on reading Koldeway's The Excavations at Babylon. As early as 1915 (probably earlier) there were people correcting him: "We must also be excused if we demur to the transcription "Sirrush" and the explanation "a walking serpent" (p. 46). The çirrush, or rather, mush-rush, was one of the aqueous monsters created by Tiamat, to help her in warring down the gods of light. It is something to learn what a mush-rush was like; and Dr. Koldeway has enabled us to identify it with a form already familiar to us from other Babylonian monuments." --tronvillain (talk) 21:32, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

Source
A strangely omitted source on the sirrush is Koldewey's The Excavations at Babylon. One thing it has on page forty-six: "This 'dragon of Babylon' was the far-famed animal of Babylon, and fits in admirably with the well-known story in the Apocrypha of Bel and the Dragon." --tronvillain (talk) 18:45, 28 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Very interesting find. I was actually unaware of this topic before encountering it by way of pseudoscience circles, but it appears there's the potential for a fascinating article here. &#58;bloodofox: (talk) 18:51, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

Navbox
While I'm not strictly opposed to the bottom navbox, it's worth considering that not everyone's display of Wikipedia isn't the same. The sidebar navbox doesn't create any "ugly whitespace" for me with a 1920x1080 display (which is pretty common these days) and allows more than enough room for the article. It does push down the one image, but it's possible to tweak that (setting left rather than right, for example) and that becomes less relevant once an article expands. Plus, bottom navboxes don't display in the mobile mobile version, and the mobile version now essentially makes up half of all views. Personally I switch the desktop version even on mobile, but vast numbers of people don't. We don't have to cater to that, but it's worth keeping in mind. --tronvillain (talk) 21:45, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
 * The side navbox does not appear in the mobile version either; in fact, there is no kind of navbox that I am aware of that shows up at all on the mobile version, so the part about the bottom one not appearing in the mobile version does not really make a difference here. --Katolophyromai (talk) 22:24, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Really? I could have sworn it did. Neat. Still, the rest of it applies, though as I said I'm not strictly opposed to the bottom navbox. I do find the vertical one more readily accessible, and don't agree that it's inherently aesthetically displeasing. --tronvillain (talk) 22:58, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

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A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion
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Popular Culture section
I've removed the speculation about Mušḫuššu being related to Mulan's Mushu because neither of the sources given (one a baby name website!) support the claim even tangentially. If this was a joke it was a poor one. 2A00:23C6:B326:E901:E138:94FC:6A7F:A98E (talk) 05:38, 25 April 2023 (UTC)