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Table of Contents for Journal of Cuneiform Studies 75 (2023)
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Pp. 3–12: “A New Old Babylonian Date List with Year Names of Hammurabi,” by Ardalan Khwshnaw
This article contains the publication of a previously unknown date list of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, kept in the Sulaymaniyah Museum in Iraq. The tablet originally contained the year formulas for forty-two years of Hammurabi’s forty-three-year reign. The obverse is better preserved than the reverse and the beginnings of lines on the reverse are mostly broken.
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Pp. 13-26: “Malgum, A Synthesis,” by Rients de Boer
This article collects the new information recently made available concerning the town of Malgum and provides a synthesis of its political history, with a focus on the Old Babylonian period when it was the seat of a small kingdom between ca. 2025 and 1761 BCE. It was eventually conquered by Hammurabi of Babylon in 1761 BCE and large parts of its population were deported. We can trace the whereabouts of these deportees for another ca. forty years in the military province of Lower Yaḫrūrum. In the subsequent Middle Babylonian period, Malgu was the name of a province, but after this time the site appears to have been abandoned, only used much later as a cemetery in Parthian and Sassanian times.
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Pp. 27-47: “Dur-Abi-ešuh and the Abandonment of Nippur During the Late Old Babylonian Period: A Historical Survey,” by Marine Béranger
This article provides an account of the history of the fortress Dur-Abi-ešuh and offers a survey of the political and military situation of central Babylonia during the Late Old Babylonian period (ca. 1740–1600 BCE). Making use of a long-known but completely overlooked source, it also suggests a date for the complete abandonment of Nippur, the main cult center of the land, between 1631 and 1629 BCE.
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Pp. 49-59: “A Kassite Exercise Tablet with Omens Concerning the “Yoke” of the Liver,” by Nils P. Heeßel and Elyze Zomer
This paper offers an editio princeps of HS 1898, a Kassite exercise tablet containing an extract with ten liver omens followed by numeric tallies with the 10u-sign. The omens duplicate the fragmentary obverse of a Neo-Babylonian nīru-compendium, the reverse of which in turn replicated omens known from the fifteenth tablet of the bārûtu-series Pān tākalti and the unedited fragment from Nineveh. The student used complicated lexical and graphical variations in writing the technical term nīru, “the Yoke.”
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Pp. 61-73: “The Taphonomy of Middle Assyrian Cuneiform Tablet Clusters: Archives or Refuse?,” by Victor Klinkenberg and Bleda S. Düring
In this article we report on the taphonomic analysis of several Middle Assyrian tablet clusters to identify the way these objects ended up in the ground. Rather than in-situ archives that were left behind during some catastrophe, we argue that these tablets were often deliberately discarded. Specifically for the tablet clusters we examined, we propose that they were first temporarily discarded in “office bins.” We claim that the occurrence of clustered, homogenous tablet groups at our sites are the result of the occasional emptying of such bins. The methodology we present could be of value for the analysis of other similar tablet-bearing contexts.
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Pp. 75-92: “The Third Column of Šimâ Milka: A New Attempt,” by Maurizio Viano
Šimâ milka is a wisdom composition known from Late Bronze Age sources found at Hattusa, Emar, and Ugarit. Many studies have been dedicated to this composition, but the fragmentary nature of sources prevented the understanding of several passages, and large portions of the text remain unpreserved or incomplete. The present article attempts a new reconstruction of the third column of the Emar manuscript by placing two fragments at the end of the column, rather than in the middle as in previous editions. This placement results in the restoration of the same line order in the Emar, Ugarit, and Hattusa manuscripts.
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Pp. 93-107: “The Return of the Text: On Self-Reference in Cuneiform Literature,” by Sophus Helle
The article proposes the existence of a recurrent motif in cuneiform literature, the self-referential climax, in which literary works end by describing how they came into being: In the narrative equivalent of a snake biting its own tail, the poems that employ this motif culminate in their own creation. The article argues that the motif can yield a glimpse into the “implicit poetics” of cuneiform literature, that is, the conception of literature that circulated among cuneiform scholars and composers. It examines three case studies—Inana and Shukaletuda, The Cuthean Legend of Naram-Sîn, and Gilgamesh—arguing that they evince in their self-referential climaxes a distinctly bittersweet notion of textuality, since their creation relies on the tragedy of their main character, in a clear counterposing of content and form.
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Pp. 109-122: “The Battle of Til-Tuba (653 BCE) and its Background Revisited,” by Saeideh Sharifi and Kolsoum Ghazanfari
Most of the information on the Battle of Til-Tuba derives from the narratives found in Assurbanipal’s annals, which are both brief and vague. Even though no Elamite documentation of the event is available, this study attempts to provide a clearer picture of this historical episode by comparing the annals with information preserved in a variety of other media. The results indicate that contrary to the report of the annals, Teumman did not initiate the war with Assyria. Rather, internal circumstances in Elam, including unrest and disorder, provided a good opportunity for Assyria to invade that land. Ultimately, the revolts and the betrayal of high-ranking government officials through the surrender of Hidalu laid the grounds for Teumman’s defeat at the Battle of Til-Tuba.
<ASOR Members with online access: log into ASOR’s Online Portal here. Once logged in, click the JOURNALS tab in the top navigation bar. From here you may select which journal you would like to read. If you have online access, you will see your selected journal’s current issue Table of Contents. Click on the “Current Issue” button and you will then be redirected to the University of Chicago Press’s (UCP) platform to immediately start reading any issue of your choice. Tutorials for how to log in to the Online Portal as well as how to navigate to the Portal Journals page can be found here. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][mk_divider thickness=”1″ margin_top=”10″ margin_bottom=”30″][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner css=”.vc_custom_1651156050549{padding-right: 10px !important;}”][vc_single_image image=”90998″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” img_link_target=”_blank” link=”https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/725222″][mk_padding_divider size=”10″][vc_column_text]
Pp. 123-154: “Age and Masculinities During the Neo-Assyrian Period,” by Ellie Bennett
The age of an individual changes how other elements of identity, like masculinity, are expressed. For example, the modern expectations of “old men” and “young men” are very different. Here, I explore the differences between “young” and “old” men as expressed in the Neo-Assyrian textual corpus on the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc). This corpus offers a unique opportunity to incorporate recently developed word co-occurrence methods alongside a traditional close reading approach in order to explore the differences between old and young men in Neo-Assyrian texts. I demonstrate that young men were conceptually different from old men, and both were key to the construction of Neo-Assyrian hegemonic masculinities.
ASOR Members with online access: log into ASOR’s Online Portal here. Once logged in, click the JOURNALS tab in the top navigation bar. From here you may select which journal you would like to read. If you have online access, you will see your selected journal’s current issue Table of Contents. Click on the “Current Issue” button and you will then be redirected to the University of Chicago Press’s (UCP) platform to immediately start reading any issue of your choice. Tutorials for how to log in to the Online Portal as well as how to navigate to the Portal Journals page can be found here. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][mk_divider thickness=”1″ margin_top=”10″][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner css=”.vc_custom_1651156050549{padding-right: 10px !important;}”][vc_single_image image=”90999″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” img_link_target=”_blank” link=”https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/725223″][mk_padding_divider size=”10″][vc_column_text]
Pp. 155-169: “Therapeutic Prescriptions and Magical-Medical Rituals Against Fever: An Edition of a Late Babylonian Tablet BM 55516 + BM 55577+1882,0704.188,” by András Bácskay
The tablet BM 55516+ contains therapeutic prescriptions (ointments and fumigations) and magical-medical rituals including incantations against fever (ummu) and “persistent fever” (ummu lazzu). I know of no duplicate, but the prescriptions and the incantations have several parallels on medical tablets from Assur, Nineveh, Kalhu, and Babylon. I first provide an edition of the tablet, including all parallels followed by a discussion of the two magical-medical rituals against fever mentioned in the text.
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Pp. 171-188: “Nebuchadnezzar II’s Palace Overseer (Ša Pān Ekalli) and The Canal of Abundance Building Projects,” by Małgorzata Sandowicz and Stefan Zawadzki
A document published in this article documents the involvement of one of Nebuchadnezzar II’s top court officials, the palace overseer (ša pān ekalli), in a building project managed by the authorities of the Ebabbar temple of the city of Sippar. To place the project in its chronological and geographic context, five additional legal and administrative texts from the Ebabbar are published for the first time as well.
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Pp. 189-195: “BM 33878: A Uranology Fragment from Babylon,” by Aino Hätinen
This article presents an edition of a new uranology fragment (BM 33878) from the Babylon Collection of the British Museum. Although small, this fragment offers further information about the social context of the uranology texts in late-period Babylonia.
ASOR Members with online access: log into ASOR’s Online Portal here. Once logged in, click the JOURNALS tab in the top navigation bar. From here you may select which journal you would like to read. If you have online access, you will see your selected journal’s current issue Table of Contents. Click on the “Current Issue” button and you will then be redirected to the University of Chicago Press’s (UCP) platform to immediately start reading any issue of your choice. Tutorials for how to log in to the Online Portal as well as how to navigate to the Portal Journals page can be found here. [/vc_column_text][mk_divider thickness=”1″ margin_top=”10″][vc_single_image image=”91002″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” img_link_target=”_blank” link=”https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/725226″][mk_padding_divider size=”10″][vc_column_text]
Pp. 197-206: “The Reedition of the Persepolis Treasury Tablet Pt 1963-8,” by Jalil Bakhtiari
Twenty tablets or fragments from the Persepolis Treasury Archive were published by George Cameron in 1965. One of them, the fragment PT 1963-8, which belongs to a group of texts concerning sheep rations, is broken at the bottom. A reconsideration of the text leads to proposed restorations of parts of the missing sections, according to mathematical calculations of rations and comparisons with the other PT tablets.
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In the 2000 season another 800 came to light. Impressed pellets such as these were used to witness and seal papyrus documents throughout the Near East in the Hellenistic and Roman eras. Subsequent study proved the sealings found at Kedesh to date to the first ½ of the 2nd c BCE, years in which the Seleucid dynasty controlled the region.Excavation over succeeding years clarified the find spot of the sealings. They and the records they sealed were stored in an archive complex deep within a large administrative building of Achaemenid and Hellenistic date. The archive burned in the mid 2nd c BCE at the end of the Seleucid control of the region or shortly thereafter. The presence of such a relatively large archive at Kedesh indicates significant and unexpected administrative activity at the site in the waning years of the Seleucid Empire. The images chosen for the seal rings impressed on the sealings from Kedesh reflect choices made by individuals living in a mixed Greek and Phoenician environment in times of shifting identities and political affiliations.
But there is another—basically unexplored—avenue that can reveal surprisingly precise information about what the early alphabet’s creators drew on and how they were trained. Because in fact there is ample evidence about what knowledge the earliest alphabetic writers did and did not draw on. First, if the alphabet’s inventors drew on what Egyptian signs looked like, did they know, or care, what they sounded like? That is, is there any evidence that they knew how the Egyptian writing system actually worked? Second is whether anyone was professionally trained in the early alphabet: was it systematized and taught carefully, the way a scribe would, or casually and unevenly transmitted, like a game or informal craft tradition?
The Trustee Nominations Committee announces an open call for (self) nominations for the ASOR Board of Trustees (Class of 2026). There are three primary responsibilities of the members of the Board of Trustees:
