There is no mention of any city in the hymn, as there is in the hymn to Sin, but this hymn probably had its origin in Nippur which was the great religious centre of Babylonia in the pre-dynastic period, when kings ascribed their successes to Bêl and brought their booty to Nippur, calling Bêl “the lord of the lands.”
Obverse
[1.] ù-mu-un na-àm-zu-ka na-àm ..... še-ir-ma-al nì-[te-na]
O lord of wisdom, ........... supreme by thyself!
ù-mu-un means “being lord”, ù equalling “lord” and mu-un equalling “being”. ù-mu-un is a phonetic representation of umun = bêlu, (Br. 9475). umun is sometimes ideographically represented by the sign GIGURÛ, the corner wedge (Br. 8659), which signifies “depress”, “overpower”, “be powerful”, “rule”. umun may be shortened either to u, mun or un, giving to GIGURÛ three values for “lord”, u, un and umun. umun, which is ES, has an EK value, ugun. In [line 17], we shall meet with another word for “lord”; viz., ga-šá-an.
ù: the sign IGI-DIBBU alone means “lord”. It has a well-known Assyrian equivalent, labâru, “be old”, (Br. 9464). Brummer explains the sign correctly as follows: IGI-DIBBU is a compound sign and equals ŠI, “eye”, plus LU, “take away”, hence the meaning “take away the eye”, “become old”, “elderly”, “lord”, (SVA. 2-7).
mu-un contracted to mun is cognate with me-en which equals bašû, “to be”, as in za-e-me-en (Br. 10404). We shall meet the form mu-un as a verbal prefix.
mu here is simply a dialectic form of me (MSL., p. 240). mu as a Sumerian value is attested by the sign-name MU. We shall meet with MU in the name Mu-ul-lil, also as a suffix and in other ways. The MU of our text is old Babylonian. It is the MU of Ur-Gur and Gudea (see brick of Ur-Gur, No. 90009, CT. XXI, and Gudea’s Cylinder A, Col. XVIII, line 27, in Déc. 36).
un is plainly cognate with en which is so commonly represented by the sign ÊNU. The sign UN we shall meet again with the value kalama. The UN of our text is a very ancient sign (see Cone of Eannatum, Col. I, CT. XXI, Tablet 30062).
na-àm-zu-ka consists of noun, na-àm-zu and postposition ka.