martu/rē'û

The gallbladder, usually called martu, literally, the ‘bitter one’, was associated with the king and kingship by force of the organ’s additional name rē’û(m) (written with the logogram sipa), ‘Shepherd’, typical of omens from Mari (Durand 1988; Jeyes 1989: 62–63; cf. Glassner 2005; George 2013: 35). Consider this example: šumma martum qaqqassa u išissa ṣabit šarrum ina ālišu libbašu ula iṭīab, ‘If the gallbladder—its head and its base are stuck, the king will not be satisfied in his own city’ (YOS 10 31 iii 13–19; Jeyes 1989: 63).

But why was the gallbladder ever termed so? We argue that the association is secondary and interpretative: the term rē’u originally meant *‘lung’, but it had migrated to the gallbladder because of the similar shape of the organ to the lung (Cohen 2003). The reason for this association was forgotten for all we know, especially since in Akkadian the word for lung is ḫašû. The homophonic word rē’û(m), ‘shepherd’, however, gave rise to the association, however, with kingship, and caused the subsequent writing of the term for gallbladder with the logogram sipa (‘Shepherd’ in Sumerian) (Jeyes 1989: 62–63). Hence our solution offers an explanation, otherwise far from evident, why the gallbladder was called rē’u, and hence associated with kingship.