Chinese and Sumerian

INTRODUCTION Xili

Again, the ideas of gong straight, putting (causing to go) straight, being or making right (‘all right’), adzrecting, governing, consulting, judging, determining, deciding, are expressed by the ideogram <|fF, the linear forms of which figure an eye, with the pupil prominent, as if looking hard or straight before it (see Szgn-lst, No. 50). The primary idea would be that of looking at or into things, seeeng to or about them. The symbol might originally have stood for the Eye of the all-seeing Sun-god, the Judge of Heaven and Earth; though this assumption is not necessary to the understanding of the character.

Another symbol which admits of more than one interpretative construction is the ideogram for night (€33), discussed below (pp. 28f.). The oldest form of the character (see Sigu-lest, No. 69) has seven instead of eight short vertical strokes under the shallow arc which seems to figure the arch of the firmament. How could such a combination as this suggest the idea of night or darkness? The scribe who first wrote the symbol thus may have meant that it became dark when the seven divine luminaries (the sun, the moon, and the five planets) were under cover or hidden; or the key to the original significance of the ideogram may rather be found in the possibility that the seven strokes mean the Seven Evil Spirits, whose work it was to quench the light of day and bring darkness over heaven and earth (see C. T. xvi. 19, lines 30ff.). In either case, the character will be an instance of a Suggestive Compound (Class iti. p. 16), in which both elements (/irmament + seven) contribute to the meaning.

The Woman-sign, <>, which was primarily an outline of the characteristic organ, had many applications in the Sumerian script, some of which are noted in the Sigulast (Nos. 56-58). It seems, for instance, to account for the early confusion (due to original identity ?) of the symbols for ZU, ‘to know’, ‘to learn’ (which was also used for ZU, the Pronoun of the Second Person), and SU, ‘skin’, ‘flesh’, ‘body’, ‘to stretch ’, ‘extend’, ‘increase’, ‘add to’ (the last also given as meanings of ZU: Br. 134; 137). The primary idea of ZU, in that case, will have been ¢o know carnally (Gen. iv. 1; xix. 8; Judges xxi. 11 f.); cf the well-known line zsard rifé c/tamad, nasagam itamad (LU = laméddu, ‘to learn’, in each case). The symbol is what the Chinese call an Inverted Character (Chuen chu: Class v; see p. 20); and one to three cross-lines are added in the oldest forms, the significance of which I must leave undetermined for the present (Szgu-list, No. 56; 56a; 89). The use of the same character, or a modification of it, for the word SU, ‘skin’, ‘flesh’, &c., is intelligible enough when we consider the elastic and fleshy nature of the female organ. Hence the same symbol came to be used for the expression of the ideas of extension, increase, addition, and the like (strictly, stretching; which is characteristic of the skin, and associated with it in Chinese: see Chalmers, 174 and 75 a). That

‘ The character peel ‘mother’, is also ‘wide’, ‘broad’, ‘to broaden’, ‘multiply’, &c. (see p. 26 £.).