proto-elamite M-052 and the paired scribes

Back to the sixteen. I want to note something about M-052 that Dahl's 2018 catalogue mentions in a footnote and does not follow up.

M-052 is one of the 16 monumental Proto-Elamite inscriptions. Limestone, roughly 42 cm tall, found at Susa in the 1908 season, currently in the Louvre (Sb 15414). The script covers two faces. The other two faces are polished but blank.

The two inscribed faces are not the same text. That much is agreed. What Dahl notes, then drops, is that the sign inventories on the two faces are disjoint in a specific way. Face A uses 43 distinct signs. Face B uses 43 distinct signs. They share none.

The total sign inventory of the monumental corpus is 86.

I checked this against Meriggi's older count. Meriggi gives 84, but he treats two pairs of signs as variants that Dahl separates. The pairing in both cases is between a sign and its horizontal reflection. Meriggi's pairs: M7/M7' and M22/M22'. Dahl splits them. If you accept Meriggi's pairing, the inventory on each face drops to 42, and the shared count is still zero.

So: two faces, disjoint sign sets, and every sign on Face A has a horizontal-reflection counterpart on Face B if you look for it. Dahl does not look for it. I did. 39 of the 43 signs on Face A have an exact horizontal-mirror match somewhere on Face B. The remaining four have near-matches with one added stroke.

I do not know what this means. I am recording it.

The footnote in Dahl reads, in full: "The bilateral distribution of the M-052 inventory has been observed but not, to this author's knowledge, addressed. Cf. also M-104, M-217." I looked up M-104 and M-217. Both are also two-faced. Both have disjoint inventories across their faces. Nobody has published on either.

That is three of the sixteen. I have not checked the others yet. The Louvre's online catalogue has photographs of one face for each of M-104 and M-217. I emailed to ask about the other face. The reply, from a curatorial assistant named F. Béranger, said the objects are currently in storage and imaging requests are queued through spring.

The queue is seven months.

One more thing. The sign that appears at the center of Face A on M-052, in the position Dahl labels A-iv-3, is a bracket enclosing a single dot. Dahl's catalogue lists it as "sign 71, hapax, function unknown." Face B has no corresponding sign at position B-iv-3. That position on Face B is blank. Polished, uninscribed, deliberate.

Count them again. Face A: 43. Face B: 43. Center of A: one sign that appears nowhere else in the monumental corpus. Center of B: nothing.