''Dingir'' ⟨⟩, usually

transliterated Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one writing system, script to another that involves swapping Letter (alphabet), letters (thus ''wikt:trans-#Prefix, trans-'' + ''wikt:littera#Latin, liter-'') in predictable ways, such as ...

DIĜIR, () is a Sumerian word for 'god' or 'goddess'. Its

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 ...

sign is most commonly employed as the

determinative A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts which helps to disambiguate interpretation. They have no direct counterpart in spoken language, though they ...

for religious names and related concepts, in which case it is not pronounced and is conventionally transliterated as a superscript ⟨d⟩, e.g. The Sumerian cuneiform sign by itself was originally an

ideogram An ideogram or ideograph (from Ancient Greek, Greek 'idea' + 'to write') is a symbol that is used within a given writing system to represent an idea or concept in a given language. (Ideograms are contrasted with phonogram (linguistics), phono ...

for the Sumerian word ''an'' ('sky' or 'heaven');Hayes, 2000 its use was then extended to a

logogram In a written language, a logogram (from Ancient Greek 'word', and 'that which is drawn or written'), also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chine ...

for the word ('god' or 'goddess')Edzard, 2003 and the supreme deity of the Sumerian pantheon Anu, and a phonogram for the syllable .

Akkadian cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo- 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 scripts are marked by and ...

took over all these uses and added to them a logographic reading for the native '' ilum'' and from that a syllabic reading of . 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

The Sumerian sign DIĜIR ⟨⟩ originated as a star-shaped ideogram indicating a god in general, or the Sumerian god Anu, the supreme father of the gods. ''Dingir'' also meant 'sky' or 'heaven', in contrast with ''ki'', which meant 'earth'. Its

emesal Sumerian was the language of ancient Sumer. It is one of the oldest attested languages, dating back to at least 2900 BC. It is a local language isolate that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, in the area that is modern-day Iraq. Akkadian, a ...

pronunciation was ''dimer''. (The use of ''m'' instead of ''ĝ'' was a typical phonological feature in emesal dialect.) The plural of can be , among others. Cuneiform sumer dingir

Assyrian

The Assyrian sign DIĜIR (ASH ⟨⟩ and MAŠ ⟨⟩, see could mean: * the Akkadian nominal stem '' il-'' meaning 'god' or 'goddess', derived from the Semitic '' ʾil-'' * the god Anum (An) * the Akkadian word , 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

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 and 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.Margaret Whitney Green, ''Eridu in Sumerian Literature'', PhD dissertation, University of Chicago (1975), p. 224.

Encoding

The cuneiform sign was encoded in

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

5.0 under its name AN at the code point U+1202D .

Notes

References