291 Extending the Diacritical Feast Extending the Diacritical Feast: Hard Diacrisis in the Late Uruk Cultic Oferings Cale Johnson (Freie Universität Berlin) Abstract The proto-cuneiform signs that were used to refer to the choicest cuts of meat for the gods (ZATU 720 and its abbreviated form TA c ) are not found in the usual lexi- cal lists for foodstufs, but they do involve a form of notation, viz. hard diacrisis, that was particularly relevant for the foodstufs presented to god and king. These orthographies are part of a larger system for labeling and ranking elite foodstufs, a diacritical feasting system that was at the center of political and religious life in early Mesopotamia. Keywords: proto-cuneiform, early writing, ancient Near East, diacrisis, diacri- tical feast, neurobiology of reading Introduction More so than any other domain of de novo early writing, proto-cuneiform (pre- sent-day Iraq, ca. 3300–3000 BCE) lets us see how each step of its development took place. This is certainly true of the ‘origin’ of proto-cuneiform writing, where each step of the developmental process can be localized in specifc text- artefacts, 1 but it is also true of the further development of this new notational technology in the centuries following its invention. 2 Most studies, both archae- ological and assyriological, have focused on the interdependencies between early notation and worker rations 3 or metrology and timekeeping, 4 but my own 1 See generally Englund 1998. 2 See Benati 2018 and Selz 2020. 3 The classic discussion is Nissen 1970, but see as well the recent review in Potts 2009. 4 Englund 1988. Gesamttext_Band_03_Druckerei.indd 291 31.08.2022 10:07:01