Enrique Jiménez* “As Your Name Indicates”: Philological Arguments in Akkadian Disputations https://doi.org/10.1515/janeh-2018-0007 Abstract: Contenders in Akkadian disputation poems make use of a large array of arguments to build their cases. The most common ones are material argu- ments, which rely on the benefits that they offer to humans. A second type of argument, termed here philological, is predicated on the alleged superiority of a litigant’s name or title over its rival’s. This superiority is demonstrated by means of the same set of hermeneutical techniques that are found in Mesopotamian exegesis and Mesopotamian literature at large. The present paper collects the philological arguments that can be found in debate poetry, discusses their discursive role and studies their parallels in Sumerian and Akkadian literature. Particular attention is given to the phrase mu-ni|bi-gin₇ || kīma šumīšū-ma, “like its name,” which is argued to be a technical term for introducing such philolo- gical discussions. Akkadian debate poems are lighthearted texts, but elucubra- tions of this type are common in serious texts as well. This fact suggests we should take these arguments seriously, however unpalatable from a modern etymological point of view they might be, just like the fanciful etymologies of Plato’s Cratylus. Keywords: etymologies, Akkadian debate poetry, ancient etymology The opening scene of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude presents Coronel Aureliano Buendía facing a firing squad while reminiscing about his youth, a time when “the world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” Like the people of Macondo, a great many cultures, ancient and modern alike, believe that things were assigned names in a remote, but discrete, point in time, and have consequently strived to decode the methods and motivations of their ostensible name-givers. Plato’s dialogue Cratylus is the most celebrated ancient exploration of this idea: according to it, names (onomata) were allotted by ‘legislators’ (nomothetai), early humans fitted with a penetrating intelligence and a *Corresponding author: Enrique Jiménez, Institut für Assyriologie und Hethitologie, Ludwig- Maximilians-Universität München, München, Germany, E-mail: enrique.jimenez@lmu.de Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 2018; 5(1-2): 87–105