Dingir

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This article is about a Sumerian cuneiform sign. For the Rings of Saturn album, see Dingir (album).
The dingir sign worshiped by two figures on a cylinder seal from Mitanni, 16th–14th century BC

Dingir ⟨𒀭⟩, usually

cuneiform sign is most commonly employed as the determinative for religious names and related concepts, in which case it is not pronounced and is conventionally transliterated as a superscript ⟨d⟩, e.g. dInanna
.

The Sumerian cuneiform sign by itself was originally an

Akkadian cuneiform took over all these uses and added to them a logographic reading for the native ilum and from that a syllabic reading of /il/. In Hittite orthography, the syllabic value of the sign was again only an
.

The concept of divinity in Sumerian is closely associated with the heavens, as is evident from the fact that the cuneiform sign doubles as the ideogram for 'sky', and that its original shape is the picture of a star. The eight-pointed star was a chief symbol for the goddess Inanna. The original association of 'divinity' is thus with 'bright' or 'shining' hierophanies in the sky.

Cuneiform sign

Sumerian

Middle Bronze Age form of the sign

The Sumerian sign DIĜIR ⟨𒀭⟩ originated as a star-shaped ideogram indicating a god in general, or the Sumerian god

emesal
pronunciation was dimer. (The use of m instead of ĝ [ŋ] was a typical phonological feature in emesal dialect.)

The plural of diĝir can be diĝir-diĝir, among others.

Assyrian

Assyrian
sign DIĜIR (ASH ⟨𒀸⟩ and MAŠ ⟨𒈦⟩, see could mean:

  • the Akkadian nominal stem il- meaning 'god' or 'goddess', derived from the Semitic ʾil-
  • the god Anum (An)
  • the Akkadian word šamû, meaning 'sky'
  • the syllables an and il (from the Akkadian word god: An or Il, or from gods with these names)
  • a preposition meaning "at" or "to"
  • a determinative indicating that the following word is the name of a god

According to one interpretation, DINGIR could also refer to a priest or priestess although there are other Akkadian words ēnu and ēntu that are also translated priest and priestess. For example, nin-dingir (lady divine) meant a priestess who received foodstuffs at the temple of Enki in the city of Eridu.[4]

Encoding

The cuneiform sign was encoded in Unicode 5.0 under its name AN at the code point U+1202D 𒀭.

See also

Look up 𒀭 in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Notes

  1. phonemic
    value of a sign in a given context is given in lower case.
  2. ^ Hayes, 2000
  3. ^ Edzard, 2003
  4. ^ Margaret Whitney Green, Eridu in Sumerian Literature, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago (1975), p. 224.

References

  • Edzard, Dietz Otto (2003). Sumerian Grammar. Handbook of Oriental Studies. Vol. 71. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.
    ISBN 1-58983-252-3
    .
  • Hayes, John L. (2000). A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts. Aids and Research Tools in Ancient Near Eastern Studies (Second revised ed.). Malibu: Undena Publications.
    ISBN 0-89003-508-1
    .
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