Documentary Panthea and the Identification of Divine Referents

Differences among Mesopotamian god lists, offering repertoires and theophoric names raise several identification questions whose answers depend on what is being compared. This paper develops a response to Gonzalo Rubio's account of differentiated scholarly, cultic and onomastic panthea at Fara and Abu Salabikh. Theories I–IV of Tauraset provide a comparative distinction between individuation, representation, mediation and attribution. A contextual reconstruction model makes that distinction operational. Complete arguments establish consistency and ambiguity conditions for pairwise identity constraints, conditions for preserving a target under normalization, and matching bounds on the recovery of distinct names from damaged slots. An audit of Rubio's reported figures separates inconsistent exclusive counts from two explicit completion regimes. Selected direct edition checks resolve the IAS 87/88 field-tag crosswalk and distinguish Espak's SF 23 comparison from the principal SF 1 inventory. The preferred interpretation combines shared divine recognition with differentiated institutional representations and permits cultic organization and scribal use to coexist. The resulting protocol identifies which conclusions survive the admitted alternatives, explains why particular positive interpretations are preferable, and specifies the evidence that would revise them. This record contains the English original and its complete Spanish translation as two language versions of the same work. The main title and primary abstract are in English; the translated title and additional abstract are in Spanish.