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Vaginas depicted in Sumerian: a database with

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DATASET MAY 2011

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Vaginas depicted in Sumerian:

a database with commentary
by Jennifer Ball May 2, 2011

This is the Sumerian word for woman, rotated 90

clockwise. During the development of their writing,
the Sumerians rotated everything counter-clockwise
by 90 for reasons no one knows. Perhaps it was a
simple form of encoding: the rotation makes it more
difficult to see what the inscriptions resemble.

According to the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary1, the above triangular character
means woman at least 3,079 times, starting in Early Dynasty IIIb, which Wikipedia gives as
2,540-2,350 BCE. This means that more than three thousand times a vagina stood as a representative of femalenot just woman because female lamb has a vagina:

Woman outline from www.essex.ac.uk

female lamb - kir

(rotated 90 cw)

http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd/index.html : The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project is carried

out in the Babylonian Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology. It is
funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and private contributions.

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It turns out that this vagina-looking character is in a lot of Sumerian

words that we wouldnt necessarily associate with vaginas: words like
pure and insulting and vessel. This vagina-looking graphic isnt
the only character that signifies for vagina either. When something
is important, there is not a one-to-one correlation between that thing
and a sound or scrawl. Many sound combinations signify for vagina
because vaginas make things happen.
Archaic Bookkeeping by Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow, Robert K.
Englund, and translated by Paul Larsen (1993) was recommended

vagina

to me by Philip Jones, one of the two contacts listed on the Sumerian dictionarys website. In
Archaic Bookkeeping, the authors describe the types of signs found in Sumerian. On page 89 you
can find the description above of the sound combination SAL, which also stood for vagina.
SAL plus the sign for calf means heifer calf. My son told me that he learned in history that
in Ancient Greek it was a complement for a woman to be called a heifer. In Ancient Egypt,
cow and maid were very close (see Roots of the Word Idiot, www.originofalphabet.com).
According to Kinsey, Among boys raised on farms, about 17 per cent experience orgasm as the
product of animal contacts which occur sometime after the onset of adolescence.1 A male friend
at UC Davis said that he knew of three male students who had claimed to have had sex with
sheep, and they also claimed that a sheeps vagina was the closest of any animals to a womans
(as if theyd tried other species besides sheep). Even Jared Diamond mentions this aberrant behavior on page 196 of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The answer slowly emerged: he had confessed
to repeated intercourse with sheep on a recent visit to the family farm; perhaps that was how he
had contracted the mysterious microbe. This episode, related to me by a physician friend involved in the case... We all hear it from our friends. The doctor friend only heard it after he had
revived the gentleman who had been beaten by his translator who also happened to be his wife.

Perhaps we all should consider that
this behavior is less aberrant than once
suspected. We exist because the drive for
sex is strong. Whos to tell you that you can
only mate with one species when youre
newly human yourself? There is a word in
Hebrew, raba, that means to mate a woman
with an animal. Just because they never
achieved woman-animal admixtures doesnt
mean they didnt try repeatedly (though, if
youve read Geek Love by Katherine Dunn,
you know that prenatal experiments with
toxins could theoretically create all sorts
of outcomes which could appear to be chimeric individuals; early humans conceived
of beings that were animal-human mixes:
the Sphinx, satyrs, Hathor the cow goddess,
Taweret the hippo goddess of pregnancy,
Bastet the cat goddess, and many more).
There wasnt much entertainment in those
days. Raba meant excitement. In Greek thel
is nipple and thea is theater (see bottom right.) Women were theater because that
was the view men wanted to see. And if you
didnt have a woman, youd have a sheep. If
you didnt have a sheep, youd have men in
womens clothing. Men in womens clothing is the underpinning of comedy. That and
people falling down.

Above is the definition for raba from the

Hebrew Lexicon at www.searchgodsword.com.
Below left is page 252 from The Etymologies
of Isidore of Seville, which demonstrates that
in 636 AD they were trying to figure out which
species had to have had sex with another in
order to create new species. They also thought
that a beast could be calmed by a virgin girls
lap, which is why virgins were often trotted out
in front of armies in hopes to avoid battle. Below
is page 101 from Borrors Dictionary of Word
Roots and Combining Forms which defines
Greek and Latin.

1
Kinsey, Alfred Charles and Wardell Baxter Pomeroy, and Clyde Eugene Martin. Sexual behavior in the human male. Page 671.
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But dont believe me. Lets consult the Sumerians. Below is the Sumerian sign list of
animals from page 89 of Archaic Bookkeeping. Think of this as a code for animals because the
Sumerians (or whoever invented cuneiform because theres a debate about that) figured out that
if you breed animals, you get more. This is apparent in the Biblical story of Laban as well, where
he practiced selective breeding in order to short his controlling father-in-law.
Sign
Pronunciation
English meaning
When you reorder this
list into males together
and females together,
and then you put the
complementary sex
of the animal ((ram
to ewe, male lamb to
female lamb, etc.) it
appears that Sumerians
are akin to electricians.
Electricians (and musicians) call the respective electrical plugs
male and female.
The relationship of the
female to male characters below, though not always a perfect fit, still would imply that the Sumerians were depicting
the rear of the animals, the place where breeding was done, which would have mattered to an
early culture.

The authors of Archaic Accounting did not order the animals the way I have because they
are unaware of this relationship, which they make clear on page 116: Abstract or arbitrarily
shaped signs lacking any comprehensible association to the object depicted, for example, the circle and cross denoting small cattle.
Sign comp. sex Pronunciation
English meaning
(They still did an
impressive job with
this book.)

A plus inside
a circle would be a
target. Small cattle
might be a desirable target for some
5,000 years ago. The
gender symbol for
woman is a plus below a circle because
our vaginas are below our heads. With
cattle, the circle is
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level with the plus because a cows vagina Four categories of Sumerian Signs
is level with its head (as with a sheep,
donkey, goat, deer, gazelle, eland, etc.).

Below is an example from page
21 in Archaic Bookkeeping showing
that a circle with a plus means small
cattle (highlighted in pink). To the left
is the gender sign for woman (which
allegedly depicts the goddess Venus
mirror). The only difference between
them is orientation of the two parts of
the sign: circle and plus.

The Chinese had a similar character to the Sumerians small cattle
in the sinograph tian2, which means
field, arable land, cultivated. If you
read my document Meow is just
another name for cat (www.originofalphabet.com), you will see that this
target
char-

acter
meant
more
than field. Some sources include hunt. I think it also stands for vagina in certain contexts,
such as in the word for prostitute:

Prostitute

field, arable land, cultivated

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The Vagina Sumerian database

(Characters which include a vagina or mean vagina. Keep in mind

that, soundwise, = sh, and that = ng)

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I include the snake

(right) in order to
show the relationship
of snake to inlaw.

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Junior wives of kings were often foreigners because princesses were a good bargaining chip
when negotiating with other kingdoms. You can see evidence of this below in the word lukur
which is both (junior) wife of a deified king or stranger, foreigner. Interesting how close this
word is to lucre, which means gain, profit, from Latin lucrum (OED). Namlukur means
concubinage (see previous page, top). The prefix nam makes this an official designation.

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From the UCLA Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative:

http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/tools/SignLists/protocuneiform/archsigns.html

From the depiction above.

Could this signify a shrine or a
wedding?

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