Lugal is the Sumerian term for "king, ruler". Literally, the term means "big man." In Sumerian, lu "𒇽" is "man" and gal "𒃲" is "great," or "big."
Simo Kaarlo Antero Parpola is a Finnish Assyriologist specializing in the Neo-Assyrian Empire and Professor emeritus of Assyriology at the University of Helsinki.
Eshnunna was an ancient Sumerian city and city-state in central Mesopotamia. Although situated in the Diyala Valley north-east of Sumer proper, the city nonetheless belonged securely within the Sumerian cultural milieu.
Ephraim Avigdor Speiser was an Jewish Polish-born American Assyriologist. He discovered the ancient site of Tepe Gawra in 1927 and supervised its excavation between 1931 and 1938.
Miguel Civil was an expert on Sumer and Ancient Mesopotamian studies at the University of Chicago Oriental Institute. According to his colleague, Christopher Woods, at the time of his death, Civil knew Sumerian better than anyone since it was last spoken 4000 years ago.
Seton Howard Frederick Lloyd, CBE, was an English archaeologist. He was President of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, Director of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, Professor of Western Asiatic Archaeology in the Institute of Archaeology, University of London (1962–1969).
William Wolfgang Hallo was professor of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature and curator of the Babylonian collection at Yale University. He was born in Kassel, Germany.
Adolf Leo Oppenheim, one of the most distinguished Assyriologists of his generation was editor-in-charge of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute from 1955 to 1974 and John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago.
Andrew R. George is a British academic best known for his edition and translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Andrew George is Professor of Babylonian, Department of the Languages and Cultures of Near and Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Khafajah or Khafaje is an archaeological site in Diyala Province (Iraq). It was part of the city-state of Eshnunna. The site lies 7 miles (11 km) east of Baghdad and 12 miles (19 km) southwest of Eshnunna.
Tell Agrab is a tell or settlement mound 12.6 miles (20.3 km) southeast of Eshnunna in the Diyala region.
Hans Gustav Güterbock was a German-American Hittitologist. Born and trained in Germany, his career was ended with the rise of the Nazis because of his Jewish heritage, and he was forced to resettle in Turkey. After the Second World War, he immigrated to the United States and spent the rest of his career at the University of Chicago.
Gutian is an extinct unclassified language that was spoken by the Gutian people, who briefly ruled over Sumer as the Gutian dynasty in the 22nd century BCE. The Gutians lived in the territory between the Zagros Mountains and the Tigris. Nothing is known about the language except its existence and a list of names of Gutian rulers in the Sumerian King List.
Jack M. Sasson, now retired, taught most recently as Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt Divinity School and before that as a Professor of Classics at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses primarily on Assyriology and Hebrew Scriptures, writing on the archives from eighteenth century BCE found at Mari, Syria, by the Euphrates, near the modern-day Syria-Iraq border as well as on biblical studies.
Hursag is a Sumerian term variously translated as meaning "mountain", "hill", "foothills" or "piedmont". Thorkild Jacobsen extrapolated the translation in his later career to mean literally, "head of the valleys".
Reverend George Aaron Barton, Ph.D. was a Canadian author, Episcopal clergyman, and professor of Semitic languages and the history of religion.
James Kinnier Wilson is a British Assyriologist. He was Eric Yarrow Lecturer, from 1955 until 1989, and is Emeritus Fellow, Wolfson College, Cambridge.
Edin is a placename featured on the Gudea cylinders as a watercourse from which plaster is taken to build a temple for Ningirsu:
Clay plaster, harmoniously blended clay taken from the Edin canal, has been chosen by Lord Ningirsu with his holy heart, and was painted by Gudea with the splendors of heaven, as if kohl were being poured all over it.
The Tell Asmar Hoard are a collection of twelve statues unearthed in 1933 at Eshnunna in the Diyala Governorate of Iraq. Despite subsequent finds at this site and others throughout the greater Mesopotamian area, they remain the definitive example of the abstract style of Early Dynastic temple sculpture.
The ancient Mesopotamian underworld, most often known in Sumerian as Kur, Irkalla, Kukku, Arali, or Kigal and in Akkadian as Erṣetu, although it had many names in both languages, was a dark, dreary cavern located deep below the ground, where inhabitants were believed to continue "a shadowy version of life on earth". The only food or drink was dry dust, but family members of the deceased would pour libations for them to drink. Unlike many other afterlives of the ancient world, in the Sumerian underworld, there was no final judgement of the deceased and the dead were neither punished nor rewarded for their deeds in life. A person's quality of existence in the underworld was determined by his or her conditions of burial.
