Darlugal

Not to be confused with DAR.LUGAL.

Authors: Susanne M Hoffmann, Eric Mamajek, Wayne Horowitz

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Darlugal is a modern IAU-star name in Lepus, derived from Sumerian DAR.LUGAL = Akkadian tarlugallu/tarnugallu, The Rooster, which is the Mesopotamian constellation that covers this area.

Concordance, Etymology, History

Etymology/ Philology

The Sumerian term consists of a noun-adjective pair: the noun DAR (a bird) and LUGAL (king, adj. royal), i.e. the royal dar-bird - this being a loan-word into Sumerian and Akkadian, which both preserved the sound of the name the foreign bird being introduced into the Ancient Near East, as well as providing a nice Sumerian explanation of the bird-name.

The Sumerian term is written syllabically as an Akkadian loan-word tarlugallu/ tarnugallu (from the Sumerian). The identification with roosters is confirmed by the Mesopotamian Bird-Call texts where the bird’s cry is taḫtatâ ana tutu - "You have committed a sin against the god Tutu", this being the Akkadian equivalent of English “cook-a-doodle-doo.”

Astronomical Identification

Astrometrical evidence for the identification of DAR.LUGAL with the area of Lepus is suggested in MUL.APIN (from before 1000 BCE) and confirmed in the so-called GU-text from the middle of the first millennium BCE (~500 BCE).

Cultural Importance of Chicken

Archaeological evidence suggests that chickens were domesticated in southeast Asia, modern-day Thailand in particular, by the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE. They are documented with certainty in the Indus culture and in Egypt from around -1400 on. Chickens appear in the archaeological and iconographic record in Mesopotamia during Iron Age I (∼1150 to 965 BCE; Peters et al. 2022). It is assumed that they were initially kept mainly for amusement by organising cockfights on which bets could be placed (this cultural practice is documented by Homer in the 8th century BCE). Domesticated roosters therefore date to the same period as the oldest known astronomical compendium, MUL.APIN, written in cuneiform.

IAU Working Group on Star Names

The name Darlugal was adopted for the naked eye star Zeta Leporis (HR 1998, HD 38678, HIP 27288, GJ 217.1, GJ 9190) by the IAU WGSN on 22 March 2026 and added to the IAU Catalog of Star Names. The name honours the indigenous Sumerian constellation Darlugal.

The star Darlugal (Zeta Leporis) is a relatively nearby (21.6 parsecs), fast-rotating, young (~300 million year-old) A-type star. The star is famous for hosting a dusty debris disks first detected with the IRAS infrared observatory in the 1980s. The dust disk appears to be replenished by collisions of asteroids, as the survival timescales for micron-sized dust grains are only thousands of years. This star was notable as it was one of the only two field stars (including Beta Pictoris) for which excess emission was detected by IRAS at 12 microns, implying the existent of relatively warm (~320 Kelvin) dust (Chen & Jura 2001). The star and its dust disk was later resolved using the large ground-based Keck telescope at 18 microns, demonstrating that the infrared excess was coming from dust grains orbiting at a few AU (Moerchen et al. 2007).

Reference

• References (general)
• References (early modern)
• Ian Ridpath's website (Star Tales )
• SIMBAD entry for zet Lep: https://simbad.cds.unistra.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=zet+Lep
• Chen & Jura 2001 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001ApJ...560L.171C/abstract
• Moerchen et al. 2007 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007ApJ...655L.109M/abstract