Table of Contents for Journal of Cuneiform Studies 71 (2019)

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Pp. 3–9: “A Double Date Formula of the Old Akkadian King Manishtusu,” by Nashat Alkhafaji

This article provides a preliminary edition of an unprovenienced Old Akkadian tablet located in the Iraq Museum that must have originated in Umma or its environs. This account of equids is unique in that it is the first “mu-iti” type that carries a year name; this is also the first known such year name from the reign of Manishtusu, the third ruler of the Sargonic dynasty of the late third millennium BCE.

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Pp. 11–34: “How to “Institutionalize” a Household in Ur III Ĝirsu/Lagaš: The Case of the House of Ur-DUN,” by Palmiro Notizia

Aside from the institutional households, a good number of “private” estates are known from Ur III sources. These private households were usually named after their owners (members of the royal entourage, the military or the local elite, merchants, cultic officials etc.), and controlled extensive resources, but were only rarely mentioned in the administrative documents from the provincial archives. One of the best-documented private estate is the one that belonged to a certain Ur-DUN. His estate was located in the Ĝirsu/Lagaš province and played an important role in the raising of slaughter animals and wool production. The aim of the present paper is to describe the economic activities of the Ur-DUN household according to the available sources and to highlight how this private household interacted with the provincial economy and the crown/military sector.

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Pp. 35–52: “On the Location of Irisaĝrig Once Again,” by Maurizio Viano

The recovery of a few royal inscriptions at Tūlūl al-Baqarat (Iraq) by the archaeological mission of the University of Torino has made it possible to propose the identification of the site with ancient Keš. The present contribution reexamines the location of Irisaĝrig in light of its well-known textual connections with and physical proximity to Keš.

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Pp. 53-76: “The Structure of Prices in the Ur III Economy: Cults and Prices at the Collapse of the Ur III State,” by Eric L. Cripps

The production of a barley surplus by the Ur III economy was vital for the operation of its commodity money system. The standardizing bi-monetary equivalence of a gur measure of barley and a shekel of silver stabilized commodity prices for the thirty-five years before the reign of Ibbi-Suen. In Ibbi-Suen’s early years, the collapse of the barley supply induced an excessive devaluation of the barley to silver ratio leading to a near hyperinflation in the prices of staple commodities and bovids required for cult and other purposes. This article analyzes the inflation in prices of animals and staples correlated with the precipitous fall in the barley to silver price ratio. Data is primarily from the Ur texts dated to the seventh year of Ibbi-Suen’s reign concerned with the purchase and delivery to state institutions of animals. Importantly, an analysis of these events demonstrated the central function of a barley surplus in the Ur III monetary system.

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Pp. 77-83: “A Cylinder Seal with an Amorite Name from Tepe Musiyan, Deh Luran Plain,” by Mohsen Zeynivand

The archeology of the Deh Luran plain was documented by the work of Frank Hole and his associates in 1960s and 1970s. While these investigations were mostly dedicated to the study of the village periods, the presence of early state formations on the plain was also documented by their surface surveys. Tepe Farukhabad was an exception, but because it was only a small settlement in the third and second millennia BCE, the excavations there did not yield fruitful results for this period. Based on their systematic surface study of Tepe Musiyan, Wright and Neely argued that during the third and second millennia BCE, this settlement played a central role in this strategic plain due to its location on the route from Susa to Der (Badra in Iraq). Recently, our team again surveyed the Deh Luran Plain. Our visit to Musiyan provided us with a cylinder seal discovered by one of the locals. The inscription reveals the owner as a person with an Amorite name who may have been present in Musiyan sometime during the early centuries of the second millennium BCE, contemporary with the end of the Šimaški period, which in Mesopotamia extends from late in the Third Dynasty of Ur until the early Old Babylonian period.

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Pp. 85-109: “Unfinished Business: The Relief on the Hammurabi Louvre Stele Revisited,” by Tallay Ornan

A reexamination of the relief on the Hammurabi’s “Law Code” stele reveals that the type of beard worn by Hammurabi and Šamaš does not conform to the Old Babylonian beard type. Moreover, the linear workmanship of the lower part of the king’s beard suggests that the relief was never finished. Considering the troubled history of the stele—made and erected in Babylonia in the late fifties of the eighteenth century BCE and carried away to Susa in the mid twelfth century—it is proposed that the resculpting of the Stele was undertaken by Šutruk-Naḫḫunte or his son Kutir-Naḫḫunte upon the Elamite capture of the monument with the goal of making it their own. An attempt to clarify the circumstances and motivation of this reworking is offered in the article.

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Pp. 111-120: “An Uprising at Karkar: A New Historical-Literary Text,” by Elyze Zomer

This paper offers a new edition of the Middle Babylonian bilingual fragment VS 17, 43 (VAT 1514) together with the duplicate lines found on the obverse of the Kassite period exercise tablet CBS 7884. The text is of historical-literary content and depicts an otherwise unknown uprising at Karkar. A first edition of the text is offered together with a brief introduction regarding its problematic historical setting.

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Pp. 121-132: “Fate Strikes Back: New Evidence for the Identification of the Hittite Fate Deities and Its Implications for Hieroglyphic Writing in Anatolia,” by Willemijn Waal

In 2014, I proposed that the GUL-šeš deities may have to be identified with the Kuwa(n)šeš deities, a suggestion that has met with severe criticisms. Since now new evidence has come to light that confirms the equation of these deities, it seems opportune to re-address this debate, which also has important consequences for the use of hieroglyphic writing in Anatolia. In this article, I will present the new evidence, counter the critiques that have been given, and address the wider implications.

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Pp. 133-152: “War in Anatolia in the Post-Hittite Period: The Anatolian Hieroglyphic Inscription of Topada Revised,” by Lorenzo d’Alfonso

This article presents a new transcription and translation of the TOPADA inscription. According to the new interpretation, the inscription narrates the events of a four-year-long war between a western coalition led by an unnamed Phrygian king and a coalition of post-Hittite rulers from south-central Anatolia, led by Great King Wasusarma. The careful study of paleography, scribal practice, script development, and literary aspects yields a dating of the inscription to the late tenth or early ninth century BCE. In view of the growing archaeological evidence for the central Anatolian Dark Ages, the new interpretation of the inscription has far-reaching implications for the overarching historical picture of the early first millennium BCE in Western Asia. It also provides the earliest attestation for the kingdom of Phrygia, and the sole occurrence of the toponym Phrygia and derivatives outside of the western Greco-Roman sources.

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Pp. 153-157: “Another Exemplar of Esarhaddon’s Uruk B Cylinder (NBC 2511),” by Shana Zaia

The Yale Babylonian Collection contains a partial cylinder, NBC 2511, that preserves a hitherto unknown example of Esarhaddon’s Uruk B inscription. While this exemplar does not deviate in translation from those already published in RINAP 4, there are some orthographic variations. This article presents an edition of NBC 2511 with some comments regarding its differences from the published exemplars and its parallels with other Esarhaddon Uruk cylinders.

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Pp. 159-180: “Aššur and His Friends: A Statistical Analysis of Neo-Assyrian Texts,” by Tero Alstola, Shana Zaia, Aleksi Sahala, Heidi Jauhiainen, Saana Svärd, and Krister Lindén

Large digital datasets of cuneiform sources lend themselves to computational analysis that can complement and improve upon traditional philological work. The present article applies social network analysis to an electronic corpus of 1,532 texts to study the god Aššur and his position in divine networks in the Neo-Assyrian period. Our results show that the performance of social network analysis can be improved by using a small window size and calculating tie strengths with pointwise mutual information. This allows us to study the co-occurrences of gods in semantic contexts. From a network perspective, Aššur is not a very central god in our corpus despite his importance in Assyrian royal theology, but he rather joins the existing networks of gods without altering them.

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Pp. 181–190: “An Early Maššartu-List from the Eanna Temple in Uruk,” by Reinhard Pirngruber

This article presents editions of two maššartu lists from the Eanna-temple in Uruk now housed in the Yale Babylonian Collection and in the Princeton Theological Seminary. Not only are NCBT 660 and PTS 2232 among the very few completely preserved examples of such lists, they also belong to the earliest known specimens of their genre, dating to the third (602/1 BCE) and first (604/3 BCE) year of Nebuchadnezzar II. These texts are valuable additions to the rather sparse dossier containing information on the Eanna cult during the formative phase of the Neo-Babylonian Empire; moreover, they are related to a text that concerns Nabonidus’s cultic reforms in the Eanna.

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Pp. 191-207: “Critical Review,” by Pascal Attinger

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