The canonical register: Adad
Evidence dossier 005 — Adad. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Adad
- Original script: 𒀭𒅎
- Pantheon: Mesopotamian
- Convention: Assyriological transliteration — š, ṣ, ṭ, ḫ as the sign lists require
- False forms on record: 0
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 5 of 542
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The attested form is 𒀭𒅎, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Adad.
Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form adad differs from the canonical Adad only by convention of display — case, not content. It is acceptable everywhere: in legacy systems, in plain-text citation, in the DNS itself. What is not acceptable is what follows in the register: respellings that change the letters, not just their case.
Exhibit 3 — the physical record. Storm-god imagery is widespread across Mesopotamia and the Levant. At Aleppo, the temple of the storm god Addu was a major Bronze Age sanctuary; cylinder seals and stelae show the god brandishing a forked lightning or standing on a bull. In Assyria, Adad appears in royal inscriptions and palace reliefs as a patron of the king's wars. Cuneiform copies of the Enuma Elish and Akkadian hymns from Nineveh, Assur, and Babylon preserve the theological tradition by which Adad's thunder was transferred to Marduk as the name Ramman.
Exhibit 4 — the continuing record. Adad's legacy is the idea that weather is a form of speech. In Mesopotamian thought thunder was not mere noise but the god's voice; rain was not mere hydrology but a divine gift.
The Convention's Own History
Cuneiform writes a consonant inventory English does not have: š, ṣ, ṭ, ḫ mark sibilants and stops that Akkadian and Sumerian distinguished and meaning depends on — the difference between 'sun' and 'son' is exactly one ṣ. Assyriological transliteration (the sign lists of Borger and the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary) settled those marks over the last century and a half, and the register keeps them because dropping them merges gods, cities, and concepts that the tablets keep apart.
The Protocol's Position
Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.
The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.
The Verdict
Case closed on Adad: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form adad is the same name in another register of display — always acceptable. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /adad/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 10 cited sources — ETCSL (Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature), CAD (Chicago Assyrian Dictionary), Black & Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia.
The Register Continues
Entry 5 of 542 in the Canonical Register. Around it: the temple's founding dispatch, the Restoration File on the marks themselves, the Resonance File on the archetype at work, and the Rulebook behind all of it.
Continue the register — previous entry: Achilleús (read it) · next entry: Adámas (read it).
The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.