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Amethysts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

Jeremy Black
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Extract

Despite the vast amount of both ancient material remains and ancient written sources from the Mesopotamian world, it is often frustratingly difficult to fuse together the various sources of evidence. Especially the correlation of stones and other naturally occurring materials used in crafts and industries with the names for them in the ancient languages is fraught with notorious difficulties. Contemporary scholars have a “cautious, even pessimistic approach to the possibility of reaching one-to-one equivalence translations”, since popular etymology may deform names, comparative etymology may be unreliable, and ancient principles of nomenclature may be at variance with modern classifications. However, occasionally it is possible to propose a new identification which, notwithstanding the necessary cautions outlined above, seems plausible on a number of grounds.

Amethyst is “a transparent quartz, coloured deep purple or violet by some compound of manganese or iron”, and it is documented in Mesopotamia from Old Babylonian times on (and even before that, although rarely). It may possibly have been imported from Egypt, but Anatolia or Iran are more likely to have been the source. But hitherto its Mesopotamian names have not been identified.

Now the meaning of the Akkadian word ḫašmānu(m) has not been precisely established thus far. It is known to refer both to a coloured stone and to a colouring of wool and leather. Campbell Thompson was unable to make any progress in explaining the word, which he read as tarmānu on the (at that time perfectly reasonable) basis of the possible reading of the first sign as /tar/ or /ḫaš/. But subsequent publication of other texts giving alternative spellings with /ḫa-aš-/ clarified the word as ḫašmānu beyond doubt.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 63 , 2001 , pp. 183 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 2001

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