The text with the

incipit The incipit ( ) of a text is the first few words of the text, employed as an identifying label. In a musical composition, an incipit is an initial sequence of Musical note, notes, having the same purpose. The word ''incipit'' comes from Latin an ...

protasis In drama, a protasis is the introductory part of a play, usually its first act. The term was coined by the fourth-century Roman grammarian Aelius Donatus. He defined a play as being made up of three separate parts, the other two being epitasis an ...

Šumma sinništu qaqqada rabât, inscribed in

cuneiform Cuneiform is a Logogram, logo-Syllabary, syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform script ...

: DIŠ MUNUS SAG.DU GAL-''at'', “If a Woman is Large of Head” ( apodosis: ''išarru'', “she will prosper’), is an ancient

Mesopotamia Mesopotamia is a historical region of West Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. Today, Mesopotamia is known as present-day Iraq and forms the eastern geographic boundary of ...

n collection of physiognomic omens, or oracles based on a woman's anatomical features, where the apodosis either predicts the fortune of the individual or makes snap judgements about them based on their physical appearance. It is an Akkadian two-tablet composition dedicated to a woman's prognostication and is often considered a subsection or extension of the greater twenty-seven tablet work, Alamdimmû, concerning physiognomic omens in general.

Synopsis

The text as we now have it extends to around 265 lines based on the collation of four extant fragmentary exemplars. It seems to have been intended to draw a comparison between a woman's physical traits and her later, post-marital, personality, thus enabling a suitor to predict her suitability for betrothal. The ideal characteristics do not necessarily represent beauty, as “a propitious woman can be quite homely or downright ugly.” note 140. The features of the body are arranged, ''ištu muḫḫi adi šēpē'', from head to foot, a characteristic of other works edited by the 11th Century BC ''ummânū'', or chief scholar,

Esagil-kin-apli Esagil-kin-apli, was the ''ummânū'', or chief scholar, of Babylonian king Adad-apla-iddina, 1067–1046 BCE, as he appears on the Uruk ''List of Sages and Scholars'' (165 BCE)W 20030,7 the Seleucid ''List of Sages and Scholars'', obverse line 16 ...

, in whose late Babylonian catalogue it appears listed with three catch-lines, where features on the left are generally auspicious and those on the right are not from the point of view of the observer. The text is divided by horizontal lines into subsections, each with the theme of a body-part, including hands, fingers, chest, breasts, nipples, belly, navel, vaginal labia and toes. A typical sample of the text's contents is given by this series of omens based on the first of these: Towards the end of the work it moves to describe portents concerning the appearance of the whole body:

Primary publication

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Shumma sinnishtu qaqqada rabat Akkadian literature Clay tablets Physiognomy