CLASSIFIERS BETWEEN EUPHRATES AND TIGRIS. ON DEVELOPMENT AND USE OF NOUN CATEGORIZATION IN CUNEIFORM SCRIPT Klaus WAGENSONNER (Yale University) 1. Introduction This chapter highlights the early history of “graphemic classifiers” in Mesopotamian cuneiform script. Admittedly, “early” as used here refers to a rather long stretch of time, namely, the last third of the fourth millennium BC to the beginning of the second millennium BC. This almost one-and-a-half millennia-long period coincides with the emergence of word lists (aka lexical texts) in Uruk around 3300 BC and their subsequent transmission throughout Mesopotamia and beyond. In the course of the third millennium at sites such as Fāra (ancient Šuruppak), Tell Abū Ṣalābīkh, and Ebla in Syria, numerous additional word lists were compiled, some of which were transmitted in the centuries that followed. Traces of this corpus eventually faded in the course of the Old Babylonian period, when the then already ancient texts continued to be studied in the academy 1 . The Old Babylonian period is characterized by a significant increase of lexical texts. For the discussion at hand, we will draw some data from emerging thematic word lists such as Ura. This chapter, however, will not deal with the contents of the aforementioned lexical texts in any detail, but rather, will highlight them to show how classifiers are employed in early cuneiform script. Thanks to interdisciplinary approaches, classifiers have received more attention in recent decades. Comparisons to other ancient scripts, whose sign inventories contain graphemes that flag semantic categories such as the Egyptian hieroglyphic script, have impacted the perception of classifiers in cuneiform writing significantly 2 . It seems plausible that already the earliest stages of what would become cuneiform script in Mesopotamia—usually referred to as proto- cuneiform—employed graphemes to mark semantic categories. George LAKOFF aptly stated that “[t]here is nothing more basic than categorization to our thought, perception, action, and speech” 3 . Indeed, in view of the early word lists, which first appear in Uruk level IV (c. 3350–3200 BC) with the subsequent enrichment and standardization of this corpus in level III (c. 3200–3000 BC), categorization is strongly linked to the compilation of lexical texts. 1 See VELDHUIS 2010; VELDHUIS 2014: 216–218. 2 See, for instance, the recent discussion in SELZ et al. 2017 with previous literature. 3 LAKOFF 1987: 5.