KUTHAThe name
Four languages, one name.
Kutha was a city in ancient Mesopotamia. Its ruins lie at Tell Ibrahim, in today’s Babil Governorate, about forty kilometres northeast of Babylon. The studio is named after it.
The city
Kutha appears in written records from the reign of Naram-Sin of Akkad, around 2200 BCE, and was lived in until the Hellenistic period. Its temple, E-meslam, belonged to the city’s god, Meslamtaea, a form of Nergal.
How the name travelled
- SumerianGu-du₈-a
Written in cuneiform. The last sign, KI, is not read aloud: it marks the word as a place.
- AkkadianKūtu
The same signs, read in Akkadian as Kūtu.
- AramaicKūth
In Aramaic, a t after a vowel softened into th, as in the English ‘thin’.
- Arabicكوثا
Arabic kept that soft sound and wrote it with ث.
Why we chose it
We chose the name for two reasons close to who we are. Kutha was a city and a district of ancient Babylonia. And it is the place from which the family line of the studio’s founder descends.
The name has crossed four languages and stayed itself. We hope our work keeps something of that: true to where it comes from, and made for today, in Arabic and in English.