User:Egil/Sandbox/rktect/Sos

Sos, Sar, Iku, Gan, Gur
The Sos is originally a field of about 10 acres distributed to men. The Sar is a garden plot distributed to females for their personal maintenance but not implying landholder status. The deposit of the innundation fertilizes the fields and is highly valued but occasionally adds to or subtracts from the metes and bounds of fields. The iku or the land itself generally gets combined into plots of three fields with one plowed, one left fallow and one in hay for the plow animal.

The Mesopotamian concept of sos is essentially feudal in that the estate in land is owned by the lugal and distributed in return for service. The land is not strictly speaking property though it can be sold or made part of an inheritance. Land tenure is at the whim of the community leader whether chief, lugal king or monarch. There is a link between holding the status of ruler and maintaining the control of the land by control of the water that irrigates the fields. Generally the bounds of land removed by flood are resurveyed and taxes are adjusted accordingly.

In order to be owned and treated as property which can be inherited or sold the fields have to be measured and given value. Land which is undeveloped can have the status of park chase or forest with each having different rights of access. Law code of Hammurabi

The size of parcels is important in that it affects taxes. The side of the ordinary iku is 60 ordinary kù or cubits of 500 mm equal to 30 m The side of the great iku is 60 great kù or cubits of 600 mm equal to 36 m The royal land automatically gets a bigger division

The length if the éše, or rope is 10 nindan rods = 20 reeds = 120 cubits = 60 m. The length if the éš[šè] or great rope is 10 great nindan rods 10 great nindan rods = 20 great reeds = 120 great cubits = 72 m.

The side of the ordinary sos is 6 iku of 30 m 360 ganu = 180 m squared The side of the great sos is 6 great iku of 36 m 360 great ganu = 198 m squared


 * The land is made property by dividing it up into measured portions and the king is assigned the right to distribute the land he controls or tends in return for service. When the king makes encroachments on the common man's rights to gather on the chase the common law protects the rights to the degree that the tenure benefits the community.

These laws are from the Law Code of Hammurabbi


 * "44 If any one take over a waste-lying field to make it arable, but is lazy, and does not make it arable, he shall plow the fallow field in the fourth year, harrow it and till it, and give it back to its owner, and for each ten gan (a measure of area) ten gur of grain shall be paid."


 * "If a man let in the water, and the water overflow the plantation of his neighbor, he shall pay ten gur of corn for every ten gan of land."


 * 1 gur = 1 square ninda times 1 kùš = 144 cubic kùš = 18 cubic meters, a cube of side 2.6 m
 * the penalty is roughly 50 bushels per acre or about half the years crop.
 * If any one hire oxen for a year, he shall pay four gur of corn for plow-oxen.
 * The rate of corn to wheat or barley might be 2.5:1


 * 1 bariga = 60 gur PI or UL in Old Sumerian period


 * If a shipbuilder build a boat of sixty gur for a man,
 * he shall pay him a fee of two shekels in money.


 * 1 bariga = 36 sìla in the Old Sumerian period
 * 1 bán-rig-a = 6 bán. 'the bán from picking, gleaning'

The chase is a privledged place protected without regard to ownership of the land, less than a forest but larger than a park reserved by common law to the king or lugal to hunt and the common man to gather. It differs from a park in that it is not enclosed yet it must have certain measured metes and bounds.

Gradually the lugal or king begins to replasce the community as the authority who decides the metes and bounds and what its tax rate is and improved land gets taxed at a higher rate than unimproved land.

Improved land of less than a park which has been cleared and plowed, given measured metes and bounds, enclosed, improved by irrigation, cultivation, and become property, generally is defined in multiples of discrete units of area ranging from the Sar or garden plot to the Sos or field.

The concept of a sacred field reserved to the king to thaumaturgically fertilize as the ideal of all fields is as ancient as agriculture. Its set apart by its larger than normal size, and yield. The Mesopotamian iku is a measured Sos or field of side 100 cubits called by the Egyptians the st3t and by the Greeks the aroura.

nj-swt
As etymological precedent to Egyptian nsw, we can see nsw is from the nisbe "nj-swt" and swt from sos by way of st3t. How far back into antiquity the association of the king with the swt plant goes can be seen on the earliest palettes of Narmer and the Scorpion king.

Narmer

3kr
Things of note include 3kr (acre) the god of the land itself shown as a personified field with Horus opening the ways to irrigation and the Narmer pose used to indicate control of the "enemy" who we can tell from his name is actually a personification of the royal irrigated field known as a st3t

Connections between Mesopotamia and Egypt can be observed in certain sets of glyphs on the early palettes. You can look at and observe as having the same utility in both cultures. The commonality extends to India, Syria, Anatolia and the Mediterranian world.

sa

 * Shaven heads or short tight caps used
 * to indicate a scribe, priest or competent administrator
 * The use of rosettes to indicate royalty
 * Intertwined lions or paired beasts
 * separated either by a tree or a king to indicate unity
 * Symbols of gods used to bind contracts and treaties and
 * to define territorial boundaries
 * The Narmer stance with upraised mace used
 * to indicate control of a people or a land.
 * There are many others.

If there were any significance to this small cluster of borrowed glyphs the test would be with architectural terms and units of weight and measure as might be expected if there were international trade in building materials, agricultural products and manufactured goods.

architectural terms related to the size of fields
A list of comparisons for architectural terms and measures in Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Egyptian, Hittite, Old Persian, Greek, Latin, French, and Ural Altic while not exhaustive doesn't support much in the way of any direct contact or exchange between Mesopotamia and Egypt until about the pyramid age.

By the middle kingdom the exchanges are well known and documented with the Tale of Sinhue documenting a knowledge of places as far north as Lebanon and the Tale of the Shipwrecked sailor documenting a voyage to Punt.

The Epic of Gilgamesh also references long distance explorations by land and sea c 2800 BC

Whether Gilgamesh travels from Lebanon and the forest of Cedar to Egypt or leaves from Uruk with Uta-napishti's ferryman U-shanabi heading for Meluhha or India or both is unclear but it seems that the point of the story is that he travels widely.

Eventually Gilgamesh travels through the hours of the night or the portion of the earth considered the underworld or netherworld and arrives at the trees of the gods which are hung with precious stones of carnelian and lapis lazuli.

These probably originally came from Afganistan and Sri Lanka but appear to have made their way along the trade routes to Egypt fairly early.

References in the Epic of Gilgamesh include Tablet IIX his trip to the netherworld after the death of Enkidu. "to Mashu's twin mountains he came"

the innundation

 * Mashu = t3-mhw ? [Egypt's delta](the land of the inundation)
 * Mashu =Misr?.

British Egyptologist E.A.W. Budge was one of the first to remark that "The name Mizraim may have been given Egypt (by foreigners) in respect of its double wall."

Other possible Egyptian etymoligies for Mashu include


 * Mashu = mr:r*ut det love
 * T3-mri Egypt (the land of love or beloved)
 * Ma shu = Mshtyw? (the constellation of the great bear)


 * Bakhu: Mythical eastern mountain of the sunrise.
 * Manu: Mythical western mountain of the sunset.

"which daily guard the rising sun whose tops support the fabric of heaven whose base reaches down to the netherworld

There were scorpion men guarding its gate whose terror was dread, whose glance was death whose radiance was fearful overwhelming the mountain at sunrise and sunset they guarded the sun"

ra- mes- ses
The phrase "guarded the sun" reminds us of the Egyptian (ra mes ses) (sun - birth - guard, protect or oversee)

The scorpion men question Gilgamesh how he came to be there and then describe the land they guard as consisting of 12 double hours of the night.

The idea that distance might be measured in hours seems to originate with the Egyptians whose schoenus of 700 stadia of (3) 3ht of a st3t of 100 royal cubits eguals 21,000 royal cubits

Its interesting that in Book XI the ship Gilgamesh builds is designed as a cube The cube has faces with an area of 1 acre measured out with edges of 10 rods which is how the Egyptians defined their st3t (Greek aroura).

elsewhere we learn that 300 poles of 5 rods is equivalent to 120 double furlongs of 1200 feet so that each rod is 96 feet.

The distance of 1500 rods or 144000 feet is about 30 milliare or Roman miles and 240 minutes of march of 350 royal cubits.

the minute of march, itrw, atur and schoenus
The minute of march is an Egyptian unit.

There are a number of terms that you could argue were exchanged or borrowed but most likely the exchange went through intermediaries.

Some work pretty well, a few are a real stretch, and most don't work at all. there are also some grammatical similarities and differences as for example with reduplication and plurality.

Sumerian (singular and plural mar=FB stem; plural hamtu, which is sometimes reduplicated; cf., =FAa). n> Egyptian u generally without reduplication

Donald Redford in his "Egypt, Canaan and Israel in Ancient Times" makes a very strong case for a Mesopotamian influence for Egypt's technology boom at the end of the Archaic period. He points out that the motif of smiting enemies, grasping lions and similar images found in the period are all attributable to Mesopotamia at the time, and that this even includes the white crown of Upper Egypt.

All those images can be found as far afield as India as well.

He further posits that it is likely that not only culture, but actual individuals, contributed to this technology boom, inferring that perhaps Mesopotamians came to the Nile valley and established themselves as chieftains over the indigenous populace. Samuel Noah Kramer has written about the Sumerian legends of trade with "Magan", which he identifies as Egypt, to further back up this assertion.

Gan and Gin
Makkan (Oman) Magan (Egypt) might have more of the sense of being bound, to a contract, to go, by boat, to bring forth, bear from the fields of the lands overseas perhaps to visit a distant trading partner located a month and a half's sail away and return with a cargo of grain than the sense of a particular place which would be written in Sumerian uru Magan ki.


 * "ma: to bind (Emesal dialect for =F1=E1l; =F1=E1)MA archaic frequency: 250
 * ma(3); =F1=E1: to go (Akk. alaaku)=F1iam=E1: boat MA2 archaic frequency 6
 * m=E0: (Emesal dialect for =F1=E1-e).
 * ma4: to leave, depart, go out (cf., mud6).
 * ma5: (cf., m=F9)."
 * gana, gan, kan: n., stand, rack, support; pestle, grinding stone circular
 * to raise high [GAN archaic frequency: 125; concatenation of 4 sign variants v.,to bring forth, bear.
 * g=E1na, g=E1n: tract of land, field parcel;
 * (flat) surface, plane; measure of surface;
 * shape, outline; cultivation (cf., iku) (cf., Orel & Stolbova #890,
 * gan- "field") [GAN2 archaic frequency: 209]

The question then becomes: could the word for king, "insi" in the admittedly much later Amarna letters, really be an Egyptianized form of the Sumerian ensi, which was only later "re-etymologized" to make it more Egyptian?

ensi

 * "ensi(3): dream interpreter (en, 'enigmatic background' + sig7,
 * 'to dwell; to complete' ?) ENSI archaic frequency: 8 =E9nsi(-k)
 * city ruler (Old Sumerian); city governor post-Sargonic
 * en, 'lord, manager', + si, 'plowland', + genitive; cf.,
 * n=EDsa=F1, 'governor') ENSI2 archaic frequency: 1"

Sumerian Lexicon Version 3.0 by John A. Halloran

ny sw

 * ny sw (he belongs to)
 * nsw written [swtn]det (Egyptian king)
 * (garden pool) st3t (aroura) irrigated plowland
 * in both cases measured in fields of side 100 cubits

Interestingly the Egyptian cubit and the Mesopotamia cubit are both divided in a similar fashion with feet of the same length. The Mesopotamian cubit is divided sexigesimally into six hands of five fingers

The Egyptian cubit is divided septinarily into seven palms of 4 fingers. Egyptian rulers show a (mh) or foot with the mark occurring across the divisions of 15 and 16 fingers so that it can account for a division into both 3 hands and 4 palms.

The earliest inscriptions may be no more than a transliteration of "ensi"? According to Jacobsen, the ensi was originally "the leader of the seasonal organization of the townspeople for work on the fields irrigation, ploughing and sowing" but with time, they became something of governors who answered only to the king. If Sumerian culture is the source of the earliest kings (as Redford argues), they would properly be "ensi"s and not "en"s or "lugal"s.

Perhapd it has more to do with being the owner or manager of the irrigated fields than king. On the palettes of both Narmer and Scorpion the "king" is portrayed controlling the st3t and opening the mouth of the god 3kr to irrigate the acres of the land itself.

Mesopotamian references

 * John A. Halloran Sumerian Lexicon Version 3.0