Darlugal: Difference between revisions

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Darlugal is a modern IAU-star name for the star ζ Lep in [[Lepus]], derived from Sumerian [[DAR.LUGAL]] = Akkadian ''tarlugallu/tarnugallu'', The Rooster, which is the Mesopotamian constellation that covers this area.       
Darlugal is a modern IAU-star name for the star ζ Lep (HR 1998, HIP 27288) in [[Lepus]], derived from Sumerian [[DAR.LUGAL]] = Akkadian ''tarlugallu/tarnugallu'', The Rooster, which is the Mesopotamian constellation that covers this area.       


==Concordance, Etymology, History==
==Concordance, Etymology, History==

Revision as of 15:18, 26 March 2026

Authors: Susanne M Hoffmann, Eric Mamajek, Wayne Horowitz


Darlugal is a modern IAU-star name for the star ζ Lep (HR 1998, HIP 27288) 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). It is an astrometrical text that sorts asterisms by lines of right ascension.

Cultural Importance of Chicken

Successive distribution of domesticated chicken in Eurasia and Northern Africa (Peters et al. 2015, fig. 1).

Archaeological evidence suggests that chickens were domesticated in Southeast Asia, modern-day Thailand in particular, around 7500(±3300y) BCE, which is derived from genome sequencing initiative for domestic chicken: "domestic chickens were derived initially from the wild RJF subspecies G. g. spadiceus that are currently indigenous in southwestern China, Thailand and Myanmar."[1]

By the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, it became culturally present in West Asia (e.g. India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt).[2] 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[3]).

"On the Indian subcontinent, which also constitutes a part of the natural dispersal range of the jungle fowl, chicken remains were recorded at a few second millennium B.C.E. sites, and it is commonly assumed that domestication occurred there independently.[4][5][6][7][8]"[3]

"Historical and iconographic records demonstrate an acquaintance with the chicken from the mid-second millennium B.C.E. in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Levant.[9] All these sources relate to chickens (almost exclusively cocks) as an exotic bird, used inter alia for cockfighting and displayed as exotica in royal zoos."[3]

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.

Mythology/ Religion

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, see SIMBAD) 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[10]). 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[11]).

Reference

  1. Ming-Shan et al. (2020). 863 genomes reveal the origin and domestication of chicken;30(8):693–701. doi: 10.1038/s41422-020-0349-y; online
  2. Perry-Gal L., Erlich A., Gilboa A., Bar-Oz G., Earliest economic exploitation of chicken outside East Asia: Evidence from the Hellenistic Southern Levant. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 112, 9849–9854 (2015).
  3. 3.0 3.1 3.2 Peters et al. (2022). The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens, 119(24):e2121978119. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2121978119 online
  4. West B, Zhou B-X. Did chickens go North? New evidence for domestication. J Archaeol Sci. 1988;15:515–533.
  5. Potts A. Chicken. Reaktion Books; London: 2012.
  6. Badam GL. 1984. Holocene faunal material from India with special reference to domesticated animals in Animals and Archaeology: Early Herders and Their Flocks. BAR International Series 202, eds Clutton-Brock J, Grigson C (Archaeopress, Oxford, UK), pp 339–353.
  7. Pawankar SJ, Thomas PK. Fauna and subsistence pattern in the Chalcolithic culture of Western India, with special reference to Inamgaon: Postpalaeolithic Europe II, Asia, Africa. Anthropozoologica. 1997 25-26:737–746.
  8. Fuller DQ. Agricultural origins and frontiers in South Asia: A working synthesis. J World Prehist. 2006;20(1):1–86.
  9. Eggler J. 2010 Iconography of deities and demons: Electronic pre-publication: Rooster. Available at: www.religionswissenschaft.uzh.ch/idd/.
  10. Chen and Jura (2001). A Possible Massive Asteroid Belt around ζ Leporis, The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 560, Issue 2, pp. L171-L174. online
  11. Moerchen et al. (2007). Mid-Infrared Resolution of a 3 AU Radius Debris Disk around ζ Leporis, The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 655, Issue 2, pp. L109-L112 online