The canonical register: Pazuzu
Court is in session. In the matter of Pazuzu, the register hears the evidence — the attestation, the marks, and the forms that stand accused.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Pazuzu
- Original script: 𒀭𒉺𒍪𒍪
- 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. 379 of 542
The Charge
That the name Pazuzu is routinely written in forms that move, drop, or invent its marks — and that each such form teaches the reader a different, lesser name. The register's task is to separate the honest fallback from the outright false.
The Defense of the Canonical Form
The attested form is 𒀭𒉺𒍪𒍪, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Pazuzu.
No diacritics are required here: the canonical form is the exactness of the spelling itself, the form Assyriological transliteration — š, ṣ, ṭ, ḫ as the sign lists require demands.
The Character Witness
The plain form pazuzu differs from the canonical Pazuzu 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.
Mitigating Circumstances
No alternate form of this name carries documented scholarly support in the lexicon's record. The convention here — Assyriological transliteration — š, ṣ, ṭ, ḫ as the sign lists require — produces exactly one defensible transliteration: Pazuzu. Forms that differ from it are not contested; they are simply wrong.
The Convention's Own History
The oldest writing system on earth encodes its gods in wedge marks on clay, and its consonant system outruns the Latin alphabet: š is a hushing sibilant, ṣ and ṭ are emphatics produced deep in the mouth, ḫ is a rasp English lost centuries ago. When nineteenth-century decipherers built the transliteration conventions Assyriology still uses, they chose diacritics precisely so that none of those distinctions would be flattened. This register honors the same choice for the same reason: the tablets distinguish; so do we.
Registration, Honestly
Three facts govern every domain this project registers. One: IDNA 2008 welcomes the marks — punycode encodes them legally and browsers show them faithfully. Two: welcome is not availability — registrars hold partial inventory, so the ideal form of a name may exist in the protocol yet not in the shop window today. Three: typeability is a separate virtue — a form no one can type on a phone is a form no one will visit, however canonical.
Hence the hierarchy the rulebook enforces: take the most complete form that is both attested and actually registrable, and never accept a wrong mark for the sake of availability. The wrong accent is not a rung on that ladder; it is off the ladder entirely.
The Verdict
So the register finds: Pazuzu, canonical; pazuzu, equally canonical; the contested forms, recorded with their support; the false forms, ruled against with their violations named. Every line of that finding cites its evidence, and the evidence is open to any reader — the register asks to be checked, not trusted. The temple keeps the canonical form at /pazuzu/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested.
The Register Continues
This is one of 542 entries in the Canonical Register — the authoritative reference for every flagship temple. The temple's founding dispatch tells the name's story; its Restoration File details the marks; its Resonance File reads the archetype into the industries. The blog index holds the whole archive, and the Rulebook states the convention this register enforces.
Continue the register — previous entry: Patroklos (read it) · next entry: Pḗgasos (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.