This tablet belongs to a series of mostly bilingual Sumero-Akkadian incantations aimed at warding off several evil demons. The whole series, known in Sumerian as Udug-hul and in Akkadian as Utukkū lemnūtu, encompassed sixteen tablets in total (Geller 2016, 3). Most manuscripts date to the first millennium BC, but Sumerian precursors reach as far back as the third millennium BC (Geller 1985).

The main purpose of the series was to treat a patient who was in physical or psychological distress. Demons were considered one of the main causes of illness, which is why Udug-hul enjoyed great popularity. The ritual healer responsible for reciting the incantations had to make sure that the evil demons would abandon not only the patient’s body but also his house and its wider environment (Geller 2016, 4). In contrast to other incantation series, there is no separate tablet known that would have been devoted to accompanying ritual instructions, although hints about the performance of ritual acts are included in the wording of the incantations themselves.

This tablet represents the twelfth section of the series, which includes a good deal of information on such ritual matters. The text starts with a recurring theme, a conversation between Ea, the god of wisdom, and his son Marduk, who is eventually sent by his father to help the patient. Ea’s speech alludes to many of the ritual acts the healer was supposed to perform. After an offering and an invocation of the patient’s personal deity and the sun god Shamash, the healer apparently had to make use of a scapegoat, described as a black goat, a knobbly horned sheep, or a mountain goat with a multicolored face. The scapegoat was supposed to absorb everything evil from the patient’s body so that the purified patient could regain the protection of his personal deity. The goat
was tied to the sickbed, eventually sacrificed, and its dead body laid on top of the patient. This rather drastic procedure was combined with more common practices such as fumigations, the sounding of a copper bell to frighten off the demons, the tying of colorful cords to the patient’s bed, and the encircling of the sickbed, which was made of pure reeds, with a magical, impenetrable circle of flour and other substances. The patient’s body was massaged with ghee and milk, substances considered pure and protective. In addition, seven figurines were formed, given names, and positioned at the patient’s head to guard him, while another two figurines were placed on the threshold of his house. In the end, it was hoped, all the demons would have been forced to head back to the netherworld, and the patient would have emerged from the ritual purified and protected.

The wide applicability of many of the magical incantations used in Mesopotamia against demons and other evil creatures explains the significant overlap of parts of Udug-hul with other ritual texts. Tablet 12, for example, shares material with the Bīt mēseri ritual series (Wiggermann 1992, 113–114).

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P297207

credit: Koubkova, Evelyne
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Lists of deities were first compiled in the mid third millennium BC, at sites such as Shuruppak (Fara) and Abu Salabikh. Like lists of names and other lexical texts, they played an important role in early Mesopotamian scholarship. Over time, some god lists grew into large compendia and were eventually standardized in tablet series.

This tablet was written in late thirteenth century BC Assur. At this time the Assyrian capital, situated on the western bank of the Tigris, was a bustling political, religious, and cultural center, where not only Assyrians but also scribes and scholars from Babylonia were active, copying scholarly and literary texts for their own or official manuscript collections (see Wiggermann 2008; Wagensonner 2011). Some of the Babylonian tablets found at Assur might have been brought there by Assyrian troops as part of the booty they had taken when conquering Babylonia and its capital Babylon under Tukulti-Ninurta I (reigned 1233–1197 BC).

The Yale god list was copied from “old tablets” that may have come from Babylonia as well. Its scribe, a certain Kidin-Sin, is also known from a famous copy of a bilingual creation myth found at Assur (KAR 4). More notably still, a duplicate of the Yale god list found among the tablets of Assurbanipal’s library at Nineveh likewise mentions Kidin-Sin in its colophon. Apparently, though, this tablet, now in the British Museum, is a much later copy prepared by one of Assurbanipal’s scholars, with the name of the earlier scribe copied as well (Beaulieu 1992, 72, n. 19). Whoever exactly was responsible for it copied it from “a big tablet” (dubgallu), quite possibly the very tablet presented here.

The text is a long inventory of more than two thousand deities, their consorts, and divine personnel. It starts with the sky god An and is divided into various sections (so-called tablets) forming a series. Kidin-Sin included summaries between the sections that numbered them and specified the number of entries for each. The left column often contains a Sumerian divine name, and the right column may provide the corresponding Akkadian name or specify the particular function of the god in question. The way the list organizes the divine realm mirrors closely the structures of large households and royal bureaucracies in ancient Mesopotamia.


See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P507554

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This seal depicts a goddess with an uplifted hand and a headdress, encircled by a nimbus of rays representing her melammu, or awesome radiance. A bearded worshipper faces the goddess, wearing a simple long tunic and presenting an offering, a fish, on a table. Above the male figure’s raised hand is a star, a symbol of Ishtar, and behind it are the “seven dots” representing the Pleiades. Behind the male figure, the symbols of Nabu, a wedge or stylus, and of Sin, a tasseled crescent, are on a raised podium. Behind the goddess are two rhombs. Although the exact significance of this symbol is uncertain, its appearance in art is often associated with Ishtar; but the rhomb seems also to have served as a marker that a deity depicted on a seal was the seal owner’s personal god or goddess (Black and Green 1992, 153; Seidl 2006–2008).


See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

credit: Machado, Rachel
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Four figures are pictured on this seal, one of whom is the goddess Ishtar. She stands at the far right of the scene (remembering that the impression on clay mirrors the depicted seal surface here) wearing a horned cap and a long, open skirt, with quivers strapped to her back. She is pictured with a lion, her animal, on which she rests her foot. She holds a double-headed mace in her right hand and a sword in the other. She is the only one of the four figures depicted facing forward, gazing out at the viewer. Approaching her is a second figure, a king who wears a rounded cap and short tunic and holds a mace across his waist. On the other side of the king, the ascending sun god Shamash is approached by a minor goddess. To the side of the figures is a three-line inscription, following the common composition of seals that place worshippers or deities next to a seal legend. The inscription includes the name of the seal owner, his patronym, and the god of whom he was a “servant.” The deities on the seal, Ishtar and Shamash, are the two most commonly depicted great gods in Old Babylonian glyptic.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

credit: Machado, Rachel
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Love poetry is a well attested and particularly lively genre within Sumerian literature. Much of it has the form of dialogues between the divine couple Inana, the goddess of love and war, and Dumuzi, the youthful shepherd who was her lover. Elaborate metaphors and flowery language abound in these texts. Some of the poems may even have been performed, with the king taking the place of Dumuzi and some priestess that of Inanna. Parts of the compositions are written in a dialect or sociolect of Sumerian primarily used by women.

The tablet presented here contains two so-called balbale-songs in which Inanna praises her fiancé Dumuzi. This song type is closely associated with love lyrics (Shehata 2009, 293–297). The first song, which covers most of the tablet’s obverse, is also known from other Nippur and Ur sources. The song starts off with a group of women comparing “[their] brother” to several authority figures, such as the “captain of a barge,” “the commander of a chariot,” and “our city’s elder and judge.” He is a beloved “son-in-law” who is favored by their fathers and mothers. Eventually, the speech switches to Inanna, who celebrates the impending arrival of Dumuzi to her house and bed: “Your coming hither is life. Your entering the house is abundance” (lines 13–14). As suggested by the number of speakers, the song was probably meant to be performed by several singers. The second song deals with Dumuzi encountering Inanna. A third party asks her: “What did the brother say to you, and speak to you? He of the loving heart and most sweet charms offered you a gift, my holy Inanna. As I looked in that direction, my beloved man met you, he fell in love with you, and he delighted in you alone. The brother brought you into his house and had you lie down on a bed dripping with honey” (lines 4–11). The text then describes the lovemaking between the divine couple.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P286260

credit: Tang, Sergio; Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The first recorded author in world history was a woman by the name of Enḫedu'ana. She was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad (about 2334–2279 BC), a king who unified large parts of western Asia under one rule after defeating several other polities. Sargon installed Enḫedu'ana as en-priestess of the moon god Nanna in Ur, where she apparently composed a significant number of religious texts. The later scribal tradition considers her the author of a collection of hymns addressed to various temples as well as several works praising the goddess of love and war, Inanna. One of these praise songs is inscribed on the three tablets presented here, which were written roughly half a millennium after Enḫedu'ana’s lifetime. Read in sequence, the tablets contain the entire text of a composition today known as the Exaltation of Inanna or Inanna B. Ancient literati, however, referred to it by its incipit as nin-me-šár-ra, “Lady of all divine powers.” Manuscripts of this composition, which was quite popular in the first half of the second millennium BC, originate mainly, but not exclusively, from Nippur, Ur, and Kish. The text refers to Sargon’s daughter several times, highlighting her devotion to the goddess: “Let me, Enḫedu'ana, recite a prayer for you. Let me give to you, holy Inanna, free vent to my tears like sweet beer!” (lines 81–83). Although tablets inscribed with extracts from literary compositions were usually the work of apprentice scribes who had to write down short passages from memory, the three Yale tablets were certainly written by a more advanced scribe. The first tablet contains lines 1–51 of the composition; the second, lines 52–102; and the third, lines 102–122. At the end, the scribe was running out of space and needed to squeeze in the final lines on the left edge. Unfortunately, this scribe did not leave a name on any of the tablets. Tablet “series” such as this are quite rare in the textual record of early Mesopotamia, and are hardly ever in such a pristine state of preservation. Modern editions of ancient literary works often have to rely on many different and fragmentary sources from different places and dating to different periods.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entries: P305859, P308150 & P308149

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Carved from limestone, this votive stone mace head contains one of the earliest references to the legendary king and hero Gilgamesh. The short inscription reads: Nimgir-eshatum dedicated (this object) to Gilgamesh. Judging from the style of the cuneiform script and the name of the benefactor, the mace head can be roughly dated to the mid third millennium BC, probably ED IIIb (Edzard 1959, 24). As indicated by his presence in the ED IIIa god list from Fara (ca. 2600 BC), Gilgamesh was deified quite early (Krebernik 1986, 182). He was soon widely venerated, and there are several other surviving examples of mace heads from the Early Dynastic period dedicated to the divine monarch (Braun-Holzinger 1991, K 16 and K 18; Krebernik 1994). During the ED IIIb period, there is also evidence for a cult of Gilgamesh situated in Lagash. Offerings were made to him at a place called the “Riverbank of Gilgamesh” during a festival for the goddess Baba (Cohen 1993a, 54–55). The festival involved offerings to the deceased rulers and notables of Lagash before a statue of Gilgamesh. The worship of Gilgamesh in this context was probably related to his role in allowing the dead to partake in the offerings, and his association with the proper rites for the deceased (George 2003, 124).


See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P304563

credit: Tang, Sergio
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

These terracotta masks represent the giant Humbaba (or Huwawa). In Mesopotamian mythology, Humbaba was the guardian of the sacred Cedar Forest. He is commonly depicted with a monstrous face with wide, staring eyes, a toothy grimace, and a bushy moustache. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story’s two main characters, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, embark on a quest for glory and fame. Their journey brings them to the Cedar Forest where they fight and ultimately kill Humbaba. When the triumphant duo finally return home, they place Humbaba’s decapitated head at the entrance to the city’s temple as a guardian against evil. Humbaba masks such as these were probably hung on the walls of homes and temples to serve a similar protective function (Moorey 2005, 95). The holes on either side of one of the masks show how the plaque could be suspended by a string. Humbaba was also associated with extispicy, a form of divination that involved reading the future in the internal organs of sacrificed animals. Some of the masks feature inscriptions that associate Humbaba’s terrifying facial features with intestines and other entrails (Moorey 2005, 94).

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

credit: Werwie, Katherine
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Stories about Gilgamesh were first composed in the Sumerian language and copied by scribal trainees in the schools of the Old Babylonian period. The earliest Gilgamesh narratives in Akkadian are likewise from this time. The tablet presented here is one of them. Its story line runs parallel with tablets II and III of the much later Standard Babylonian epic, which is known from more than a hundred sources from first millennium BC Babylonia and Assyria. The Yale tablet was part of a literary composition referred to as “Surpassing All Kings.” It is preceded by a tablet now in Philadelphia that deals with Gilgamesh’s dreams, their interpretation, and the upbringing of Enkidu, who was to become, first, Gilgamesh’s rival, and then his friend. Both tablets have little clay lumps attached to their edges, a unique feature whose purpose is still debated. The Yale tablet describes how Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu prepared for a campaign to the Cedar Forest, that was guarded by a monster called Huwawa (later Humbaba). The text has great poetic power, not least because of its use of many daring metaphors. An example is how it characterizes Huwawa’s terrifying appearance, in lines 110–112: “His voice is the deluge, his speech is fire, and his breath is death.”

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P273176

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This cylinder seal belonged to a royal official whose name is given in the Aramaic inscription on the artifact. It is one of several seals owned by officials that feature the king in combat with human or animal adversaries (Garrison & Root 2001, no. 22; WAS VI, no. 46). The pose featured on this one, where the king grips wild animals and renders them helpless, is known as that of the “master of beasts” or “master of animals” (for other examples, see WAS VI, nos. 17, 25, 26, 30, 40 & 52). It had a long prehistory before the Persian kings used it. Use of this and similar seals by royal officials would convey the king’s authority and power over the natural world in every document on which they were impressed. The inscription in Aramaic on the seal follows a common formula: “Seal of” plus personal name, but the name is difficult to decipher. The Aramaic signs can be understood as ˀDD, ˀDR, ˀRD, or ˀRR, but none of these readings yields a name known from contemporary Aramaic onomastics. The element ˀDR, which means “mighty, great, powerful” (Hoftijzer & Jongeling 1995, 17-19), appears in several Phoenician names (Benz 1972, 59-60), and the name ˀDR appears in an inscription on the lid of an urn from Sousse (ancient Hadrumetum) in Tunisia (Chabot 1914, no. 595), but that does not settle the matter. It is also possible that the name is Persian, as are many of the names attested on these types of seals. In that case, the name might be derived from the Iranian term r.da- (“prosperity”) or adri- (“rock”), but these are otherwise unattested as names in a form matching this text (Tavernier 2007, 562, 547). A similar writing, ˀRDY, appears on a Persian period signet ring and has been tentatively interpreted as the name “Aridai” (Bordreuil 1986, no. 35), but this remains uncertain as well. Aramaic was used by the royal bureaucracy across the vast Persian empire. It is clear from the uniform grammar and script of texts from various locations that a standard dialect and standardized sign forms had been created for this purpose (Stolper 2005, 21).


See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

credit: Beltz, Jonathan; Chirmanova, Irene
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Records of legal proceedings provide glimpses into the lives of a class of people not ordinarily recorded in Mesopotamian texts. This particular clay tablet documents a case in which a group of four men incarcerated in the prison of the Eanna temple in Uruk report a fellow prisoner named Dummuqu for “pronouncing treasonous words against the king (the Persian ruler Cambyses) inside the prison.” The tablet records the names of all of the men involved and specifies that they were temple slaves. One of them served as a laundryman. The text also provides short descriptions, not all preserved, of the crimes for which they were imprisoned— two of the men had been arrested during an attempted escape, while the laundryman had been taken into custody two years after he had fled from his post. In addition to recording widespread dissatisfaction among the lowest strata of Mesopotamian society during the early Persian period, the tablet also helps us understand some aspects of the structure of the legal system in place at this time. After listing the prisoners’ identities and the crimes of which they were accused, the tablet calls for all five prisoners to be delivered in chains to the capital in Babylon, where their case would be heard by the governor. We see here a distinction between types of crimes. Cases involving domestic infractions, labor disputes, and escaped slaves were considered minor enough to be handled locally. Treason, in contrast, was a serious enough offense that it needed to be handled by the central government. Indeed, by this period, offenses against the king were some of the few crimes that were punished physically rather than through the payment of fines (Joannès 2000b, 31). It is interesting to note that Dummuqu’s words were considered to be so threatening that the writer of the tablet chose not to record them.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P305262

credit: Werwie, Katherine
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Yesterday's inscription of King Esarhaddon claims that his rule was universally accepted after he had defeated his faithless brothers in 680 BC. In truth, opposition against the king continued. Letters from the Assyrian “state archives” in Nineveh indicate that several high officials in Nineveh and Harran, major Assyrian cities, were involved in acts of high treason against Esarhaddon. They received ideological support from diviners and female prophets who criticized the regime. This cuneiform letter, written to the king by an internal informer named Nabu-ushallim, talks about yet another conspiracy against Esarhaddon, instigated by Abda, the overseer of the city of Assur, and initially supported by 120 elite soldiers with whom the disloyal official had made a secret pact. This time, the justification for the insurrection came from a dream in which Abda had seen a young child rising from a tomb and handing him a staff, apparently a symbol of power. Nabu-ushallim’s letter begins with remarks identifying him as an “eye and ear” of the king (lines 1-2, 4-9 & 10-12): “To the king my lord, your servant Nabu-ushallim. May (the gods) Assur and Shamash give long days to the king my lord. … (People) are trying to kill me without the king (knowing about it). Because of what I see and hear and betray to the king my lord, because of this, many people hate me and are plotting to kill me. … And now, they have (even) seized me without (the knowledge) of the king my lord. … They have made the whole palace angry with me, saying, ‘No one must receive a letter from him and give it to the king; no one must listen to his words’.” Abda’s attempts to prevent Nabu-ushallim from reporting his treacherous activities to the king failed, however. The conspiracies in Assur, Nineveh, and Harran were smashed, and, according to the Babylonian Chronicle, Esarhaddon had many untrustworthy officials executed early in 670 BC in a massive purge.


See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P311556

credit: Frahm, Eckart
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This fragment of a hexagonal clay prism, inscribed in the name of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon (reigned 680-669 BC), is known from several fully preserved duplicates (Leichty 2011, 9-10). The text describes the king’s military campaigns and building activities, but is most famous for an unusual account of his rise to power. In it, Esarhaddon reports that his father Sennacherib had nominated him crown prince even though he was a younger son, whereupon some of his elder brothers conspired against him, in a way reminiscent of the biblical Joseph story, and drove him into exile in an undisclosed location in the West. After the brothers had done “evil things”—a veiled allusion to the fact that they had murdered Sennacherib—Esarhaddon returned with a small army to the Assyrian capital Nineveh, defeated the regicides, and ascended to the throne with the support of the gods and the Assyrian people, to rule uncontested forever after. The fragment presented here covers Esarhaddon’s attempts to pacify the Arabs (who had become major political actors with the domestication of the camel around 1000 BC) and the Medes (who would later play an instrumental role in the collapse of the Assyrian empire). It also includes portions of the king’s account of his work on a new palace and arsenal on the mound of Nebi Yunus in Nineveh. (After the liberation of Mosul from the Islamic State group in 2017, archaeologists have begun to explore the site of this palace.)


See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P450394

credit: Frahm, Eckart
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

CDLI records nearly 250 stone door sockets inscribed with royal inscriptions that might range from ten to as many as fifty lines. Like this artifact of the Old Akkadian king Naramsin, the inscriptions as a rule praised the king and his military and construction achievements, and concluded with a curse of any subsequent ruler who dares to undo or merely damage the monumental building commemorated in the text.




CDLI entry: P505975

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This hollow clay object has a long inscription by the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II. The object is usually classified as a cylinder, even though its diameter decreases toward the right-hand side. It has been suggested that clay cylinders like this may have been intended to stand on their right sides, which would mean that their inscriptions would have been read vertically. This direction of reading was not uncommon for earlier royal inscriptions and might reflect the archaizing tendencies of the period (see Studevent-Hickman 2007, 500). Although this cylinder is unprovenienced, duplicates found in their original place of deposition suggest that it was buried within a wall or as part of a foundation deposit in the temple of the god Lugal-Marada in Marad. The inscription covers three columns and follows the standard four- part structure of Neo-Babylonian royal inscriptions. The first section identifies and glorifies the king, along with titles, epithets, and the name of his father. The second part provides some background information for the subsequent, main section of the text, which details (as do most Neo-Babylonian royal inscriptions) an extensive building project undertaken by the king, in this case the construction of the Lugal-Marada temple. The report includes an interesting note on the king’s successful search for the temple’s earlier foundations:

As for Lugal-Marada, my lord, whose temple is in Marad and whose ancient foundation platform no former king had seen since the days of old, at that time I looked for and found its ancient foundation platform, and upon the platform of King Naram-Sin, my ancient ancestor, I fixed its (new) foundations. I created an inscription written in my name and put it therein.

It is not impossible that Nebuchadnezzar (or rather his workmen) had encountered in the course of the temple reconstruction a round door socket now in the Yale Babylonian Collection that bears an inscription of Naram-Sin (reigned 2211–2175 BC). Left there some sixteen hundred years earlier, it describes the building of the temple of Lugal-Marada by Naram-Sin’s son Lipit-ili, who was then governor of Marad. The inscription concludes with a blessing, as well as an appeal that the god Lugal-Marada destroy the enemies of the king.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P505975

credit: Scruton, Benjamin; Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This tablet contains a brief message sent by the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II to three administrators of the Eanna temple in Uruk, Ninurta-sharru-usur, Nadin, and Marduk-etir. The first twelve lines of the twenty-one line letter are formulaic greetings: the letter assures the recipients that the king and his troops are doing well, conveys to them the blessings of the main gods of Babylon, Marduk and Nabu, and states that the recipients’ hearts should be happy. The main message of the letter, echoed in a few other Nebuchadnezzar missives, is that the addressees are not to neglect their work. The Akkadian word dullu used to designate “work” refers both to religious rituals and to the manifold economic activities undertaken by Babylonian temples. The king concludes his letter by requesting that the addressees not keep him uninformed but write to him “whatever concerns and ideas you might have.” Nebuchadnezzar II is one of the most famous of Mesopotamian kings, not least because he conquered Jerusalem and was responsible for the “Babylonian exile” of the Judeans, events prominently featured in the Hebrew Bible.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P308408

credit: Scruton, Benjamin
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This minute cylinder seal shows the seal owner in a long robe, with shaved head and hands clasped in front of him. He is accompanied by a goddess in flounced garb and with horned headdress, which shows her to be divine. The seal owner, Azia, whose name is written in front of him in cuneiform, is in audience with a seated king who holds a cup in his hand. Behind the king, a lion and bull-man are wrestling in a contest scene.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

credit: Lassen, Agnete
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Although cuneiform letters from the third millennium BC do exist, the first known letter corpora that are really substantial date to the early second millennium. They originate both from Mesopotamia proper and from Anatolia. The tablet here is one of many letters written by the famous lawgiver Hammurapi (1792–1750 BC according to the conventional Middle Chronology), or rather one of his secretaries. Hammurapi letters came onto the antiquities market in the early twentieth century AD and were dispersed to various museum collections, with the two largest groups eventually ending up at the Louvre in Paris and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (Kraus 1968). Hammurapi’s letters deal with both matters of state and personal affairs, and show him to be a ruler who was deeply involved in daily business. One very substantial dossier within Hammurapi’s letter corpus concerns an official named Shamash-hazir and the land surrounding Larsa that he was charged with administering, an important region in the south conquered by the king in 1763 BC. Many of the letters Hammurapi sent to Shamash-hazir deal with matters of land ownership and agricultural work (Fiette 2018). In this letter the king writes to his official (lines 4-10):

The shepherd Issinabu, a man from Mashkan-shapir, informed me as follows, saying: ‘a field of 18 hectar ... Shamash-hazir, son of Kimannum, gave to the city governor Adi-anniam.’ Thus he informed me. The field of the shepherd, the one who pays the tax, was taken away and given to the city governor. Is what you have done (really) appropriate? Now I have sent said Issinabu to you. Decide his case. Return his field to him. No obligation beyond his tax should arise.

Hammurapi, so well-known for his laws, in this letter lives up to his image as the “just king.” He emphasizes how poorly the humble shepherd had been treated and requests his official to render the case in his favor.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P293786

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This diplomatic letter was sent by the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II to the Hittite king Hattushili III (about 1267-1237 BC). It belongs to an important body of royal correspondence between Egypt and the land of Hatti, which was uncovered in the Hittite capital Hattusha in central Anatolia. The correspondence is composed in the Babylonian dialect of Akkadian, the diplomatic lingua franca of the ancient Near East during this period. Only the right half of the tablet is preserved, but many portions of the text can be fully restored thanks to the repetitive phraseology of the genre. The letter was written a few years after Egypt and Hatti had concluded a peace treaty, the first international treaty of its kind (Klengel 2002, 75-93).

The path toward this treaty was thorny. The two great empires’ conflicting ambitions to control the Levant had eventually led, in 1274 BC, to the famous battle of Qadesh, which ended for the Egyptians with a stalemate at best. In the aftermath of the battle, Ramesses II was obliged to acknowledge his Hittite colleague as an equal. For Hattushili, who had made his way to the throne by removing his own nephew Urhi-Teshub from that position, the treaty meant an acknowledgment of his legitimacy as king (Klengel 2002, 55-74). It is in this historical framework that we must understand the rhetoric of brotherhood regularly found in the correspondence between Ramesses and Hattushili (Goetze 1947b, 250-251). Although the two probably never met in person, they kept exchanging flattering words, precious gifts, and (even though the Egyptians were more reluctant in this regard) women of royal blood. When Ramesses II, one of the longest reigning pharaohs in Egyptian history, was in his fifties, he actually married one of Hattushili’s daughters (Klengel 2002, 104-107, 121-143). The letter at hand provides, among other things, evidence for the great interest the Hittite kings showed for Egyptian physicians and their healing practices (Edel 1976, 31-53; Klengel 2002, 143-144). Whereas Egyptian medicine reached back as far as the third millennium BC and was renowned far and wide, there is no evidence for a longstanding medical tradition among the Hittites (Edel 1976, 38-41). Hattushili III requested medical help from Egypt on multiple occasions, both for others and to cure his own illness, which had been, according to our letter, caused by a demon. The illness might have been an affliction of the eyes we know Hattushili suffered from (Edel 1976, 44-45). After he had left three previous missives unanswered, Ramesses finally sent a positive response and announced that he had dispatched, along with medicinal plants, a physician, and a second person by the name of Leya, who might have been an incantation priest charged with performing magical rituals to dispel the demon thought to be the cause of the illness (Edel 1976, 46).

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P293778

credit: Koubkova, Evelyne
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

If taxes seem inevitable, so do ways of getting around them. Tax evasion and smuggling are nothing new. In the early second millennium BC, merchants from the city of Assur maintained an elaborate trade network in which they brought tin and textiles to the central regions of modern day Turkey in exchange for gold and silver. They signed trade agreements with local Anatolian rulers in which these rulers collected import taxes and maintained toll roads.

Assyrian traders found two ways around these taxes to maximize their profits: they either bypassed toll routes by taking less traveled (and more dangerous) paths (Barjamovic 2011a, 169-180), or smuggled goods into a city without declaring them at the palace when they entered, so that the ruler would not seize a certain portion of them (Veenhof 1972, 305-306, 309). This text is a letter from a merchant named Buzazu to his associates in another city. He informs them of a lucrative market for tin in the town where he is staying and urges that they quickly send as much tin as they can. The main road between the city where he is staying and their city passes one major town. To cut down on the overhead, he tells them to bypass that town by an obscure route if it is safe or else smuggle the tin through the town. Either they can hire locals to help, or the merchants themselves can hide smaller bundles of tin in their undergarments. In either case, to minimize losses if a shipment is seized en route, they should smuggle no more than one talent of tin (about thirty kilograms) at a time. At the end of the day, however, Buzazu got cold feet. Another letter by him, now in the British Museum (CCT 6, 22a), calls the whole operation off (French translation in Michel 2001, no. 177).

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P290540

credit: Beltz, Jon
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Mesopotamian prisons, although not exactly like their modern counterparts, shared some important features with them (Reid 2016). They served, on the one hand, as places where suspects and convicted criminals were detained, but they were also considered manifestations of the womb of the goddess Nungal, from which prisoners, having completed their sentences, were expected to emerge corrected and “reborn.”

The actual conditions in Mesopotamian prisons, however, were often grimmer than such lofty theological justifications implied. The tablet presented here, from early Persian Uruk, records a failed prison break, undertaken by a certain Nargiya and his companion Shamash-bel-kullati, a temple servant who had been incarcerated for spending most of his time in local bars and failing to show up for work. According to the tablet, the two had incapacitated a prison guard by nearly strangling him to death, and had then tried to escape from their prison cell, located in the Eanna temple, by cutting a hole into the wall with an iron chisel smuggled into the prison by a female servant of Shamash-bel-kullati’s father. Before managing to escape they were both apprehended. The tablet points out that the chisel, brought to the legal assembly in a sealed package, was used by the judges in charge of the case as evidence. A verdict is not recorded.

The tablet is not the only record of a failed prison break from Late Babylonian Uruk. Another document describes a case in which a man, who had been incarcerated in the Eanna temple for stealing a sacred duck from a meal prepared for the goddess Ishtar, had killed the prison warden and tried to flee by jumping from the roof of the temple. Unfortunately for him, he broke his hip and was caught (Kleber & Frahm 2006).

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P307957

credit: Frahm, Eckart
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This Old Akkadian cylinder seal represents the sun god Shamash (Sumerian Utu), who is easily recognizable by the rays of light emanating from his shoulders. As the sun illuminates and shines on everything on earth, Shamash was considered the all-seeing god of justice, able to deliver fair verdicts. For that reason, he is depicted opposite the king on the famous Hammurapi law stela. The people of ancient Mesopotamia believed that the sun god passed through the underworld in his boat every night, carrying a mace and a jagged saw to cut his way through the mountains at the eastern horizon. This seal depicts the sun god already ascending with one foot on a hill and entering the gate of dawn. There are two female attendants opening the gate for him. Both the sun god and the attendants have bovine horns on their headdresses, a typical way of marking them as divine. Significant changes in politics and society during the Old Akkadian period also had an influence on art, triggering, among other things, changes in the style and thematic repertoire of cylinder seals. Seals were now carved in deeper relief, with a better sense of balance and dynamics and an emphasis on detail. Different stones were used, but serpentine was the most common. The detailed depiction of deities was another innovation of the Akkad period (Collon 2005, 32–35). Representations of the sun god rising from the netherworld belong to the most popular motifs on cylinder seals from this time.


See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

credit: Koubkova, Evelyne
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The two small fragments presented here are manuscripts of a collection of Hittite laws. The Hittites were a people speaking an Indo-European language that settled in Anatolia in the first half of the second millennium BC. Their laws were most probably based on precedents, eventually collected and systematically organized. The collection was then divided into two series named by their first words, “If a man” and “If a vine.” The laws are phrased in the third person singular, as so-called case laws (“If a person/someone …”). The earliest known version of the Hittite laws (which refers occasionally to even older legal practices) comes from the Old Hittite period (about 1650–1500 BC).

The laws continued to be copied throughout Hittite history, usually without major changes except for attempts to modernize their language. One of the later manuscripts, however, revises the laws more substantially, with a tendency toward less severe punishments (Roth 1997, 214–216). The two fragments from the Yale Babylonian Collection date to the Hittite New Kingdom period (ca. 1430–1180 BC). Although only parts of a few lines (six and five, respectively) are preserved on each fragment, it is possible to identify the laws recorded. The first fragment contains portions of paragraphs 145 and 146, which concern wages and sales, the second portions of paragraphs 163 and 164, which deal with the improper disposal of ritual materials and the unintentional breaking of sacred objects (Roth 1997, 232–233).

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entries: P286151 & P286163

credit: Beltz, Jon; Frahm, Eckart; Koubkova, Evelyne
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This fragment of a collection of edicts is one of nine such documents known today. These nine documents are extraordinary, as they provide a rare glimpse into the lives and treatment of Mesopotamian royal women or, more specifically, the royal concubines who lived in the palace of the Assyrian king in Assur during the Middle Assyrian period. The edicts, issued by various Assyrian rulers, betray a preoccupation with maintaining the strict inviolability of these women and the “Inner Quarters” where they resided. For example, one regulation requires male palace personnel to maintain a specific distance when in the presence of the women, or they could risk harsh corporal punishment, including the amputation of limbs. The fragment at hand includes stipulations prohibiting palace women from giving gold, silver, or precious stones to palace slaves and regulating the lives of palace personnel and royal women when the king was travelling (Roth 1997, 198–200).


See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P308137

credit: Chirmanova, Irene
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

On this tablet portions of three columns of writing are preserved. They contain various stipulations related to marriage and inheritance from the famous laws of Hammurabi. The law included in the middle column of the fragment, for instance, illuminates the legal status of children female slaves had with their masters (Roth 1997, 113–114, §170): If a man’s first-ranking wife bears him children and his slave woman bears him children, and the father during his lifetime then declares to (or: concerning) the children whom the slave woman bore to him, “(They are) my children,” and he reckons them with the children of the first-ranking wife—after the father goes to his fate (that is, dies), the children of the first-ranking wife and the children of the slave woman shall equally divide the property of the paternal estate; the preferred heir, though, is a son of the first-ranking wife; he shall select and take a share first. Hammurabi (reigned 1792–1750 BC) was the sixth king of the so-called First Dynasty of Babylon. While also a successful politician and military commander, who conquered large portions of Mesopotamia and brought them under the rule of Babylon, he is best known for his efforts to establish a new law collection, which was written on stone stelae as well as clay tablets. The laws provide important insights not only into Mesopotamian ideas of justice, but also into the economic and social life of the people of the Old Babylonian period. Hammurabi’s laws eventually became a “cultural text” that was widely studied throughout Mesopotamian history, both in Assyria and Babylonia. Students would often reproduce sections of the laws as they worked on their writing; the tablet here is an example of this practice. Initially, the fragment would have been larger. It was at some point cut down by a dealer to a smaller but more regular size, to make it look more complete and thus receive a better price.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P291573

credit: Frahm, Eckart; Moreno, Rachel
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

At first thought to be part of an official law code of an unknown ruler of the early second millennium bc, this collection of laws written in the Sumerian language is now believed to be a product of scribal training. According to the colophon at the very end of the tablet, which invokes Nisaba, the goddess of writing, and her consort Haya, the tablet was written by an individual named Belshunu. The substantial number of mistakes in the text suggests a rather inexperienced scribe. The writing space is divided into three columns per side. Beneath each column the scribe specified the respective number of lines. Unfortunately, the obverse of the tablet is very poorly preserved. The extant laws deal with cases of bodily injury resulting in miscarriage, loss of a rented boat, repudiation of adoption, rape, and injury to rented oxen. A few of the laws have actual practical application in contemporary legal documents. An Old Babylonian adoption contract, for example (see No. 80), draws on the following stipulation (Roth 1997, 44, §4'): If he (that is, the adopted son) declares to his father and mother, “You are not my father,” or “You are not my mother,” he shall forfeit house, field, orchard, slaves, and possessions, and they shall sell him for silver (into slavery) for his full value.


See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P467305

credit: De Macedo, Diana; Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Some twenty-four letters from the correspondence of the rulers of the Ur III dynasty (about 2100–2003 BC) are known from copies studied in the Babylonian schools of the early second millennium bc. The tablet presented here contains two examples from this corpus: a letter from a royal official by the name of Sharrum- bani addressed to King Shu-Suen and the king’s reply. In contrast to tablets that include only extracts from the correspondence (see, for instance, the second half of the Sharrum-bani letter [YPM BC 018737, YBC 4672]), the letters here are complete. In the first, Sharrum-bani, the official, begins by repeating the orders the king had given him earlier (Michalowski 2011, 399, lines 3–7): You commissioned me to carry out construction on the great wall (called) “It Keeps the Tidnum-people at a Distance” and presented your views to me as follows: “The Amorites have repeatedly raided the frontier territory.” You commanded me to rebuild the fortifications, to cut off their access, and thus to prevent them from repeatedly overwhelming the fields through a breach (in the defenses) between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Sharrum-bani then asks the king for more manpower, revealing that the Amorites, with support from the east- ern state of Simurrum, have raided his construction workers. He is in dire need of men, both to fight the attackers and continue building. In response, Shu-Suen rebukes his official and announces that he has sent to him the governor of Zimudar with a group of soldiers, and that the high commissioner Babati is to continue working on the wall, while Sharrum-bani is supposed to dig a moat. Worried by the developments, the king asks Sharrum-bani to keep sending him regular updates. As the letters are only known from copies several hundred years after the Ur III dynasty, it is debated how much of the correspondence is genuine and how much is historical fiction (Michalowski 2011, 216–224). Some letters are probably pseudepigraphic, but others may have derived from real letters or, at the very least, contain kernels of historical truth. The letters preserved on this tablet belong in the latter category.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P357304

credit: Frahm, Eckart; Tang, Sergio
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

In ancient Mesopotamia, as today, metrology marks the nexus between science and the real world. This year’s World Metrology Day celebrates significant advances in the standardization of metrological calculations, the most striking of which is the abandonment of adherence to the cylindrical platinum-iridium kilogram artifact, that is safeguarded in a vault of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris, in favor of a kilogram based on the Planck constant.

Weights and measures offer many fascinating points of contact between the modern and ancient worlds, none perhaps so obvious as instruments developed to record lengths, and derivatively surface areas. Surveyors in near modern times carried a tool known as a Gunter chain, named after the 17th century polymath Edmund Gunter (1581-1626 AD), that, extended, was 66 feet long. Ten ‘chains’ are a furlong, and, transferred to surface measurements, a field of one chain by one furlong was an acre (or ten square chains). Similarly, the standard Babylonian length measure known in Sumerian as a ninda, ca. six meters, served as the basis for field surveying, and the surveyor himself was known in Sumerian as the “rope man,” whereby the rope, Sumerian éš, consisted of ten ninda. A surface of ten × ten ninda was called an iku, and with 3,600 square meters this basis of Babylonian field measurements was in size comparable to our acre. Together with a measuring rod of one half ninda (3 meters), known as a (Sumerian) gi, “reed,” the surveyor’s rope, further, was one of two instruments that symbolized legitimate rule, and these were commonly presented to kings by the Mesopotamian god of justice, for instance in the neo-Sumerian Ur-Namma stele (ca. 2100 BC, with braided end of rope!), in the relief of the Old Babylonian Hammurapi stele (ca. 1750) kept in the Louvre, or on the remarkable early neo-Babylonian Sun God Tablet (ca. 850) in the British Museum.

CDLI entries: P249253 & P472680

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Tags were used throughout Mesopotamian history as administrative tools to mark items being transported or stored. This pyramidal clay tag was probably attached to a cord that was tied to a bag holding a group of related administrative tablets. These tablets would have been documents recording the expenditures of an account over a period of a month or so. The inscription on this tag lists the amounts of beer, bread, onions, oil, and vegetables to be distributed as provisions to messengers in Umma. Tags such as this summarized the contents of the grouped tablets, and the figures would have been totals for the amounts on the individual texts. Two officials, Lu-kalla and Ur-Nungal, rolled their cylinder seals over the tag, thus indicating that they were responsible for the transactions. The date of the text written at the end reads: “Month ‘Brick Placed in the Mold,’ 29th day, Year after Shu-Suen, King of Ur, Built the Amorite Wall (Called) ‘It Keeps the Tidnum-people at a Distance’.“ In the Ur III state, the names of the months differed according to local city calendars, but years were everywhere given the same names, which were chosen in reference to an important political or cultic event that had happened in the previous year.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P296868

credit: Tang, Sergio
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This stone door socket was used to support the pole of a monumental door in a temple in Umma. According to its inscription, it was set up by the Ur III king Shu-Suen in the E-shage-pada temple, which was dedicated to Shara, Umma’s patron god. In the text, the king emphasizes his connections to the divine: he claims to be the son of Shara, calls himself a priest, and states that his kingship was divinely chosen. He also proudly records his construction of a wall called “It keeps the Tidnum-people at a distance,” which was built to keep the semi-nomadic Amorites, to whom the Tidnum belonged, out of Babylonia. The inscription is found on the side of the door socket, and it may not have been readily visible to those entering through the doorway. Perhaps, the words were meant for a divine audience or for later generations, rather than for the eyes of Shu-Suen’s contemporaries. The door socket is made out of a piece of hard black stone (possibly diorite). The Yale Babylonian Collection holds yet another door socket from the reign of Shu-Suen, inscribed with the same inscription. In southern Mesopotamia, door sockets were frequently the only parts of a building that were made of stone, and they were often reused several times.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P226897

credit: Tang, Sergio
image credit: Kaufman, Carl

The text on the vase reads in translation as follows:

Enlil, king of the lands, father of the gods, by his authoritative command, demarcated the border between the gods Ningirsu and Shara. Mesilim, king of Kish, at the command of the god Ishtaran stretched the measuring rope on the field and erected a monument there. Ush, ruler of Gisha, acted arrogantly. He ripped out that monument and marched on the Eden district of Lagash. Ningirsu, warrior of Enlil, at his just command, did battle with Gisha. At Enlil’s command, he cast the great battle-net upon it, and set up its burial tumuli in the Eden (district).

E’anatum, ruler of Lagash, uncle of Enmetena, ruler of Lagash, demarcated the border with Enakale, ruler of Gisha. He led off the (boundary) channel from the Nun-canal to the Gu’edena district, leaving a 215 nindan (i.e., 1,290 m) (strip) of Ningirsu’s land under the control of Gisha and establishing a no-man’s land there. He inscribed (and erected) monuments at that (boundary) dike and restored the monument of Mesilim, but did not cross into the Eden (district) of Gisha. On the boundary-levee of the god Ningirsu (called) Namnunkigara, he built a chapel of Enlil, a chapel of goddess Ninhursag, a chapel of Ningirsu, and a chapel of Utu. The leader of Gisha could exploit 1 gur (i.e., 5,184 hl.) of the barley of goddess Nanshe and the barley of god Ningirsu as an (interest-)bearing loan. It bore interest, and 8,640,000 guru (i.e., 44,789,760,000 hl.) accrued.
Since he was unable to repay that barley, Urlumma, ruler of Gisha, diverted water from the boundary dike of Ningirsu and the boundary dike of Nanshe. He set fire to their monuments and ripped them out and destroyed the dedicated chapels of the gods that were built on the (boundary levee called) Namnundakigara. He hired the (people) of the foreign lands (as mercenaries) and transgressed the boundary dike of Ningirsu from above (i.e., from the north).

Enanatum, ruler of Lagash, fought with him in the Ugiga-field, the field of Ningirsu.
Enmetena, beloved son of Enanatum, defeated him. Urlumma escaped, but was killed in Gisha itself. His asses – there were sixty teams(?) of them – he abandoned on the bank of the Lummagirnunta-canal, and left the bones of their personnel strewn over the Edin district.
He heaped up there tumuli (honouring his own casualities) in five places. At that time, Il, who was the temple-estate administrator at Zabalam, marched in retreat from Girsu to Gisha. He took the rulership of Gisha for himself. He diverted water from the boundary dike of Ningirsu and the boundary dike of Nanshe at the boundary levee of Ningirsu in the direction of the bank of the Tigris in the region of Girsu, the Namnunda-kigara of Enlil, Enki, and Ninhursag. He repaid (only) 3,600 guru of Lagash’s barley.

When, because of those (boundary) channels, Enmetena, ruler of Lagash, sent envoys to Il, ruler of Gisha, Il, ruler of Gisha, the field thief, speaking hostilely, said: “The boundary dike of Ningirsu and the boundary dike of Nanshe are mine!” “I will dry them up from (the town of) Antasura (as far as) the temple of Dimgalabzu,” he said. But Enlil and Ninhursag did not allow him (to do) this.

Enmetena, ruler of Lagash, nominee of Ningirsu, at the just command of Enlil, at the just command of Ningirsu, and at the just command of Nanshe, constructed that (boundary) dike from the Tigris River to the Nun-canal. He built the foundations of the Namnundakigara for him out of stone, restoring it for the master who loves him, Ningirsu, and for the mistress who loves him, Nanshe. Enmetena, ruler of Lagash, granted the sceptre by the Enlil, granted wisdom by Enki, chief ruler for Ningirsu, who realizes the commands of the gods – may his personal god, Shulutul, forever stand (interceding) before Ningirsu and Nanshe for the life of Enmetena!

If the leader of Gisha crosses over the boundary dike of Ningirsu and the boundary dike of Nanshe, to take away fields by force, – whether he be the leader of Gisha or any other leader – may Enlil destroy him! May Ningirsu, after casting his great battle-net upon him, bring down upon him his giant hands and feet! May the people of his own city, after rising up against him, kill him there with his (own) city!




CDLI entry: P222533

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The inscription on this artifact, probably a clay jar with a net design on its lower end, is currently known from five different sources. In 1897, the French Assyriologist François Thureau-Dangin published an inscribed cone, now at the Louvre, which is the only other complete manuscript besides the present exemplar. Both the cone and the jar probably come from the vicinity of Tello (ancient Girsu in the state of Lagash). The three other versions, all damaged, are, like the Yale piece, inscribed on jar fragments. That the artifact is a jar and not, as sometimes assumed, a mace head is suggested by several parallels, even though the matter remains debated. The inscription (almost 220 lines in six columns) deals with the jagged history of the fragile relationship between the neighboring city states of Lagash and Umma. Written in the name of the Lagash ruler Enmetena and carefully impressed onto the outer surface of the jar, the text starts with mythological beginnings: in days of yore the god Enlil, the highest deity in the Sumerian pantheon, drew a boundary and divided the lands on both sides between the patron gods of Lagash and Umma, Ningirsu and Shara. But Umma’s rulers kept violating the boundary, encroaching on a fertile strip of land called “Border of the Steppe” (Gu’edena), which was the source of Lagash’s agricultural richness. According to the text, the god Ningirsu eventually defeated the enemy by casting his great battle net on him. The same net is depicted on the jar’s lower end. The conflicts between the two city states did not cease, however, and later rulers of Lagash needed to reestablish the boundaries. One of the episodes recounted in the inscription is that the Lagash ruler Eanatum had once left a strip of his land for Umma to cultivate. The text reads: “The ruler of Umma could exploit 1 kor (that is, 518,400 l) of the barley of the goddess Nanshe and the barley of the god Ningirsu as a loan. It bore interest, and 8.64 million kor accrued” (column ii, lines 19–26). Eventually, Eanatum’s successor Enmetena demanded that Umma pay back this barley for the whole time up to his reign, including accumulated interest. This meant that Umma had to pay an unaffordable bill: four and a half trillion liters of grain. What led to these unimaginable numbers was that Umma’s debt grew exponentially through time. The inscription thus provides the earliest evidence for compound interest.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P222533

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Kaufman, Carl

This tapered alabaster vase dates to the reign of the Achaemenid king Xerxes and probably originates from Egypt, where vases in this style, and the use of alabaster or calcite, were common. The dark residue on the interior of the vase suggests that it held a substance such as perfume. One can entertain the possibility that vases like these were gifts the Persian king presented to deserving officials or subjects. Slightly larger around the bottom, the vase narrows toward the top where the lip of the vase is minimally chipped. Starting directly below the lip of the vase is an inscription featuring five scripts. The first three lines are written in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian cuneiform, respectively (the Old Persian script had been invented under Xerxes’ predecessor Darius). Beneath them is an inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphs, with the king’s name in a cartouche. Each version translates to “Xerxes, the Great King.” A fifth inscription in Demotic, a script developed for practical purposes around 650 BC in Egypt, is located to the left of the hieroglyphs and describes the capacity of the vase. Xerxes (reigned 486–465 BC) was the fourth king of the Persian Empire, which stretched from central Asia to Egypt and as far as Greece. This vast territory engulfed many peoples, who spoke many languages and used many scripts. Especially during the early Persian period, trilingual inscriptions in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian were common. The inclusion of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Demotic on the vase is notable and points again to its origin in Egypt. The production of multilingual texts enabled the Persian kings to showcase the vast range and multicultural nature of their domain. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ad, comparing the Babylonian, Elamite, and Old Persian versions of such texts played a vital role in the attempts to decipher the different cuneiform scripts.


See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P505970

credit: Moreno, Rachel; Beltz, Jon
image credit: Kaufman, Carl

The first exercise in school was impressing single wedges into the clay. Cuneiform signs, however, usually consist of more than one wedge. Horizontal, vertical, and slanted wedges are clustered to form meaningful signs, some fairly simple, others composed of many wedges. Years and years of training were required to teach a student the “art of writing” and eventually enable the writing of complex literary compositions. The number of individual cuneiform signs used varied in Mesopotamia, depending on language, genre, period, and writing conventions. Whereas logographic writings played a major role in Sumerian, the syllabic spellings preferred in Akkadian texts allowed a more economical use of the writing system. The unpublished tablet presented here dates to a period when scholarship was heavily influenced by Sumerian. With comparatively few exceptions, lexical and literary texts written in Sumerian dominated the scribal education of the time. The unknown scribe who wrote this tablet created a so far unique sign inventory accounting for all cuneiform signs known. Almost 470 individual signs written in a meticulous hand are preserved on the tablet. This number corresponds more or less to the number of signs attested in the contemporary sign syllabary Ea, but our scribe arranged the signs in a completely different order. Whereas Ea, which has come down to us in hundreds of copies, starts with rather simple signs, the beginning of the sign inventory at hand contains more complex characters, each starting with a cluster of slanted wedges. In fact, the scholar responsible for the text attempted to encode the complex writing of the goddess of the scribal art, Nisaba, in the first lines, starting off with the initial parts of the sign combination that was used to write her name. A unique feature of the text is its layout. Sign lists usually work like tables, listing each sign in separate lines, but here the signs are presented continuously, which gives the text, at first glance, the appearance of a literary composition. In their arrangement, the scholar mainly followed graphic considerations, for which another line in the text may serve as example. The line starts with simple sign forms, each consisting of only two wedge impressions (numbers 1–5). The last sign in this subgroup initiates a sequence of much more complex signs incorporating it (numbers 6 and 7). Thereafter, the final sign part is disassembled, and a new group of signs begins (numbers 8–10). We can assume that the “author” of this remarkable text was highly trained and knew the scholarly literature of the time. Even complex sign forms are written in a meticulous, almost paradigmatic hand.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P305842

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Despite the great difference in their size, these two prisms contain nearly identical lists of personal names. Writing personal names was one of the basic steps for apprentice scribes to familiarize themselves with the cuneiform writing system. By the early second millennium BC, lists of names were standardized and copied out in part or in full on tablets and prisms (Peterson 2011). We find in them common personal names, that is, names one would also encounter in contemporary archival documents. The two examples here, however, predate any such lists. They were probably written in the early Ur III period and record personal names that would have been out of use by the time the prisms were inscribed. The template for these names came from the Fara period, some five hundred years earlier. Although largely randomized, some of the names are grouped by shared elements, such as water, or by graphically similar signs. The smaller piece is noteworthy because of its micrographic script. Each sign is just one millimeter in height (in contrast to four millimeters on the large prism). Being able to write in such a small scribal hand indicates a great deal of sophistication, which can only be found with a very advanced apprentice or a professional scribe already established in his trade.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P248574 & P248573

credit: Chirmanova, Irene; Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

A defining feature of seals in the Kassite period was the prominence and diversity of their inscriptions. Whereas seal legends in earlier periods focused on the seal owner and his or her identity, Kassite seals frequently contain prayers, whose many lines may take up most of the available space, leaving little room for seal imagery. An example is the cylinder seal here, which dates to the earlier Kassite period. Its imagery depicts a single bearded figure, clad in a long garment and facing left with his right arm raised in a greeting gesture. The figure wears a round cap with narrow rim. The space before his face is filled with two astral symbols, a star over a crescent moon. The Sumerian inscription of seven lines invokes Marduk, patron god of Babylon, who is praised as “the great lord, the great prince of heaven and earth.” Marduk’s epithets are followed by the seal owner’s name, Sin-sheme. The inscription ends with the seal owner’s wish: “Grant to me, your reverent servant, …, life and happiness.”

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P504762

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Kaufman, Carl; Wagensonner, Klaus

Agate stones like this one, with its dark center and light edges, were prized by Mesopotamians for their resemblance to eyes. This example features a minutely carved inscription that runs across the entire surface of the concave side. The inscription identifies the patron as King Lipit-Eshtar and dedicates the stone to the goddess Ninlil. The king acknowledges the goddess’s associations with life and fertility as “queen of the gods, goddess who created me (and) mother who gave birth to me,” and asks for a long and prosperous life in exchange for his gift. The hole drilled through the eyestone indicates that it might have been set into a necklace presented to a cult statue of the goddess.


See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P289683

credit: Werwie, Katherine
image credit: Kaufman, Carl

Similar to objects in foundation deposits, mud bricks frequently bore short inscriptions commemorating the accomplishments of a king and identifying the building for which the brick was used. Inscribed bricks were often placed inside walls, where future generations would find them and learn who had built the structure, thus securing an earlier ruler’s legacy. Frequently, inscriptions on mud bricks were not applied by hand but with a stamp. Given the enormous number of bricks required in Mesopotamian building projects, this saved considerable time and effort. The artifact presented here is a brick stamp that was used for this very purpose. It bears, in mirror script, the name of the Old Akkadian king Shar-kali-sharri (reigned 2217– 2192 BC) and his principal title, “king of Agade,” but does not refer to any specific building. One of the most notable achievements of Shar-kali-sharri’s reign was the construction of a temple in Nippur dedicated to the god Enlil, yet neither Nippur nor any other Mesopotamian site has so far produced bricks on which the inscription found on the stamp is impressed. Instead of stamps containing an inscription in its entirety, Mesopotamian scribes would later, in fourteenth century Assyria, also use stamps with only one cuneiform sign when producing brick inscriptions—the earliest example of moveable type in history.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P217646

credit: Chirmanova, Irene; Frahm, Eckart
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This foundation peg is both figural sculpture and building material. Its bottom half has the form of a nail or peg, while the top is sculpted into the shape of the upper body of a male figure. This figure, identified by an inscription as King Ur-Ningirsu I, has deep-set, bulging eyes and full lips. The king uses his two hands to balance a round basket filled with mud (which served as building material) atop his head. Despite the peg’s bold artistic merits, it was never meant to be seen (Bahrani 2014, 89–93). Bronze pegs like this one were buried under the foundations of temples as they were being constructed, where they may have functioned to symbolically secure the temple to its site or to appeal to Enki, the god of the sweet underworld waters, for the temple’s protection (Bahrani 2014, 104–108; Asher-Greve, forthcoming). The inscription carved around the peg’s middle served to commemorate Ur-Ningirsu in the event that the figure was uncovered—as, indeed, it was (Ellis 1968, 166–167; Asher-Greve, forthcoming). The text’s primary function, however, was to dedicate the temple to the goddess Ninmarki, whose all-seeing gaze would be able to read the inscription even after the foundation figure’s burial (Asher-Greve, forthcoming). The representation of Ur-Ningirsu hauling mud emphasizes his role in the creation of the temple. The image corresponds to a Mesopotamian tradition in which kings ceremonially shaped a brick to inaugurate the construction of a new temple (Bahrani 2014, 100–104). It also highlighted the king’s humility in the face of the gods by showing him undertaking the lowliest of tasks.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P231800

credit: Werwie, Katherine
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

These two tablets, one made of gold and the other of silver, contain inscriptions of the Assyrian king Assurnasirpal II (reigned 883–859 BC). The inscriptions provide the name of the king and the names of his father and grandfather, plus some royal epithets; they also contain a curse formula directed at a future prince who might remove the tablets or modify their inscriptions. The purpose of the tablets, to be part of a foundation deposit, is explicitly described in the text: “I laid (the palace’s) foundations with tablets of silver and gold.” Besides the materials from which they were made, there are a few additional differences between the two tablets. The silver tablet is somewhat larger and less well preserved than the gold one, with several sizable indentations on the reverse. Though very similar, the inscriptions are also not entirely identical: the silver tablet leaves out one of the king’s epithets in the first line, uses one different (but synonymous) word in line 8, and elsewhere spells a few words using different signs. In one case, this spelling difference results in a grammatical error. Foundation tablets of precious metal were probably fairly common in the Middle and early Neo-Assyrian periods, yet few have been found. Most were probably melted down and re-used in antiquity. The tablets presented here were not uncovered in the course of documented excavations, but the inscriptions identify the city of Apqu (modern Tell Abu Marya in northern Mesopotamia) as the place where they were most likely found. Apparently, they were deposited in the foundations of a palace built at the site by Assurnasirpal II. Earlier Assyrian palaces at Apqu are attested from the reigns of Assur-resh-ishi I (reigned 1132–1115 BC) and Assur-bel-kala (reigned 1073–1056 BC). The tablets may have been buried inside a stone box engraved with another inscription of Assurnasirpal II.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entries: P289807 & P289808

credit: Scruton, Benjamin
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This tablet, made of dark, polished stone, contains ten lines of a Sumerian inscription describing how the Ur III king Ur-Namma (reigned 2110–2093 BC) restored the Eanna temple in Uruk and dedicated it to its patron goddess, Inanna. Although the tablet is unprovenienced, it was probably buried in the foundations of the Eanna. Comparison with similar examples suggests that the artifact was enclosed in a small brick capsule. An excavated example (see UVB 5, pl. 17a-c, with a duplicate inscription) is three bricks long and two and a half wide, with a bitumen-coated cavity in the middle, that was covered with a layer of two bricks and sealed by a third covering the seam. A peg figurine with a matching inscription accompanied the tablet in the cavity, and some of the bricks forming the enclosure may have borne the same inscription. Later rulers attempting to restore buildings often tried to discover the original ground plan. As they excavated previous layers, they would find earlier foundation deposits and learn from the inscriptions they contained about the building work of their predecessors. The neo-Babylonian ruler Nabonidus (reigned 556–539 BC) is particularly known for his “archaeological” digs.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P226887

credit: Scruton, Benjamin
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Written by a scribe of the temple of the goddess Ishtar of Uruk some two thousand five hundred years after yesterday’s text, and likewise dealing with small cattle, the tablet in the middle of this group of related texts illustrates the remarkable continuity that characterizes the administrative and economic structures of Mesopotamian temple cities. The tablet, in ledger format, records for each day of the month of Tebētu (10th month of the Achaemenid calendar), 526 BC, the disbursements of sheep for the regular offerings. On most of the twenty-nine days of the month, nine sheep were sacrificed, the minimum requirement of the gods (in practical terms, the temple household managers), but on others, slightly higher numbers are mentioned, and on the first day, the gods received sixteen sheep. Occasional notes recorded in the right-side column refer to special deliveries to the temple of the sun god in the nearby city of Larsa and mention exceptional sacrifices of young goats. The texts here belong to a group of more than forty consistently formatted tablets, dating from 551 to 523 BC, that, unlike other offering lists from Uruk, do not specify the deities who were the recipients of the sacrifices.


See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P305283

credit: Frahm, Eckart
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Like yesterday’s text artifact, the tablet here was written during the Uruk III period, some one hundred years after the invention of writing. Texts from this period display more complexity than those of the preceding Uruk IV period and contain more detailed information on the recorded transactions. Moreover, many signs become less pictographic and begin to resemble their later forms. On the obverse, this account records the transfer of twenty-five nanny goats and five billy goats from an official, most probably the chief administrator of the city Tiwa (Steinkeller 1999, 116). As with other Uruk III texts, the reverse contains a total of the items recorded on the obverse—in this case, “30 small cattle”—for accounting purposes.


See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P005463

credit: Tang, Sergio
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This tablet describes the transfer of several individuals who have been credibly identified as slaves. On the obverse, in columns divided by a double ruling, the scribe listed a total of twelve slaves, split into two groups of six each. The first “cell” on the tablet contains a sign whose successor in later, third millennium economic texts means “purchase,” indicating that the slaves were apparently sold. The text also seems to provide the names of the slaves, even though the identification of personal names in this early period remains difficult. At the bottom of the two columns, two individuals involved in the transfer are named, one of them apparently a pig herder in the city of Adab. Perhaps they were the owners of the slaves being transferred, or otherwise responsible for them. These two parties are mentioned again on the tablet’s reverse. The left-hand side of the reverse contains a grand total of the number of slaves, plus one or two names or titles, perhaps of the individuals who received them. Both the proto-cuneiform script and the abridged nature of the texts using it continue to pose significant challenges for modern scholars seeking to decode them.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

CDLI entry: P005460

credit: Tang, Sergio
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Although less than half of it is preserved, this cylinder seal is one of the largest of its kind, with an estimated original diameter of about five centimeters (about two inches). The inside of the central drill hole is discolored, perhaps from a corroding, now lost metal insert, similar to other closely related Uruk seals. The preserved seal imagery shows an altar or stylized temple façade atop a striding bull. Ring reed bundles with streamers are placed on top of the altar and behind the bull. As an attribute of the goddess Inanna, the reed bundles became the basis for writing her name in the cuneiform script. A similar altar is shown on the Warka vase.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

credit: Lassen, Agnete
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This crudely cut seal displays five women seated on benches with pots in front of them. It probably captures the act of producing pottery, one of the daily activities commonly depicted on seals in this period and style. The seal is made of red marble, and exhibits proportions very unusual for cylinder seals in general. Low in height, but massive in diameter, it is highly concave, which makes one doubt its usefulness in producing seal impressions. In fact, no impressions made with seals of this type have been discovered on tablets, bullae, or other clay artifacts.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

credit: Koubkova, Evelyne
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This rock crystal cylinder seal is decorated with a schematic design of several identical vessels. Vessels of the type depicted are also attested in the archaeological record.

Seals of this style typically show repetitive patterns including simple motifs, such as spiders or other kinds of insects, consisting of crudely modified drillings. This is despite the considerable effort that must have been expended to cut the seal from the hard material, rock crystal. Hard stones are well attested for Jemdet Nasr seals, in contrast to the contemporaneous Uruk III seals that were carved in a different style.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

credit: Koubkova, Evelyne
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This very thin, anepigraphic cylinder seal bears a geometric pattern typical for the late Jemdet Nasr period “Piedmont style,” best attested in the hilly areas of Susiana and northern Mesopotamia. During the subsequent Early Dynastic period, this style spread along international trade routes throughout the Middle East, reaching from southwestern Iran in the East, across the Diyala region in Upper Mesopotamia, and as far west as Syria. The seal is made of lapis lazuli, a highly valued dark blue stone that was imported all the way from an area in modern Afghanistan.


See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

credit: Koubkova, Evelyne
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This marble cylinder seal depicts two figures feeding a herd of cattle. One of the figures is partially damaged but seems to be an attendant. He wears a smooth kilt and carries a bundle of branches in his arms. The other figure offers the animals a branch in each hand. He wears a brimmed hat and a long, netted skirt, and is distinguished not only by his clothing but also by his prominent nose and full beard. This figure is known from other Uruk IV cylinder seals and the famous Warka vase, excavated at Uruk. He is portrayed as a dominant figure in battle scenes, as a successful hunter, and as the leading worshipper in ritual scenes, often associated with the goddess Inanna. On this basis, he has been called the “Priest King.” On the Warka vase, he is associated with a motif that resembles the cuneiform sign EN (“lord”), indicating again his role as ruler and leader of the Inanna cult in Uruk.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

credit: Moreno, Rachel
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

As much an amulet as a seal, this object is shaped like the head of a lion. The face is shown in profile and the mane is formed as a half ovoid sphere. Details such as the eye lids and brows, nose rim, and whiskers are outlined with incised lines. Gouged into the reverse of the seal is a monkey or bear with an upturned tail and ears or horns extending down the back and holding an oblong object in the outstretched arm. The carving is crude and simple compared with the delicate shape of the lion’s head. The seal is perforated vertically from top to bottom.

In use before and around the time of the invention of writing, these lion head seals form part of a group of zoomorphic objects with gouged and drilled seal imagery on the back, which probably served a dual purpose as amulet and seal. Seal imagery of this type has yet to be found impressed on tablets or bullae.

See it in the exhibition “Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks ... Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection” at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, 6 April 2019 – 30 June 2020

credit: Lassen, Agnete
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

A final example closes our theme of early Babylonian field management with a highly complex field register, again following the standard practice of grand temen and surrounding smaller fields. Kept in a private collection in New Jersey, the tablet was imaged by Laura Johnson-Kelly for the Cornell Sumerologist David I. Owen, now emeritus, using an ammonium chloride misting procedure described in connection with his ongoing, vital work on a very substantial tablet collection once a part of the Jonathan and Jeannette Rosen Ancient Near Eastern Studies Seminar at Cornell (now scheduled for repatriation to Iraq). The text, recently edited by Hagan Brunke (Fs Attinger [2012] 39-63), employs technical terminology to qualify eleven different categories of fields, above all describing the soil and topography qualities of the agricultural area assigned to the household of the governor of Adab by a royal surveyor named Ur-nigar.

CDLI entry: P432384

credit: Englund, Robert K.

As we see in the current entry, Ur III field plans can appear quite involved, yet always follow the basic principal of constructing a central and regular temen surface, then calculating and subtracting from, or adding to the total area the often irregular smaller fields within and outside of the border of this temen—indeed, these small fields themselves usually formed the borders of the large temen. This complicated survey register of a large field measuring approximately 5 × 4 km was drawn by the Heidelberg Assyriologist Stefan Maul when he was active at the Free University of Berlin, where the artifact itself is housed in the Altorientalisches Seminar; and was cited, without a full edition, in Nissen, Damerow & Englund, Frühe Schrift pp. 106-110 = Archaic Bookkeeping (Chicago 1993) pp. 66-69. Quoting from Archaic Bookkeeping p. 69:

The procedure of calculating the surface of such complicated temens is somewhat odd. ... The various sections of the temen were calculated as if the opposite sides were of identical length. The calculation was carried out twice, the first time with the measurements of one side, the second time with the measurements of the other side. In this manner, two values relating to each section of the temen were obtained. Both were entered into the field plan next to their respective field segments, the second value always upside down relative to the first value. The calculation circled—so to speak—around the field, yielding values for each field section. The final step was then to calculate their mean values!

CDLI entry: P124822

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Looking at this text, an unexpected observation may be made about the process of entering the various field measurements in Ur III surveying accounts. Based alone on the orientation of the inscriptions, the author of this text began writing from the upper right, going counterclockwise until case 12, then again from the upper right reading clockwise to case 22. This strange structural format should be considered in future work on similar texts.

CDLI entry: P131748

credit: Englund, Robert K.

   1 bur₃ 1 eše₃ surface, small fields (= 24 iku),
   4 bur₃ 1 eše₃ 2 1/4 iku surface “outside” (= 80 1/4 iku)
   11 bur₃ 3 iku surface, within the temen (= 201 iku);
   total: 17 bur₃ less 3/4 iku surface (= 305 1/4 iku).

As seems clear from the addition of all fields qualified as “ki” (Sumerian “area” and presumably short for ki zi, “area to be ‘torn’ [from the temen]”) and those called “bar” (for ki bar, “area outside” [of the temen]), the first line of the reverse describes the “small” fields drawn within the confines of the text’s regular, large quadrilateral (surface measures adding up to 23 3/4 iku), and the second those drawn outside of the temen (surface measures adding up to 81 iku). The calculation of the temen itself, however, is unclear; it must be composed of the result of the multiplication of the width and length of the large rectangle, less the small “ki” surfaces that it enclosed, thus (W × L [ninda]) - 2400 = 20100 sar. The length measures along the top/bottom and left edges, however, appear to combine to 160 & 155 on the one hand, 155 on the other, where the inscription itself seems to read 160 for the upper edge (10 + 30 + 20 + 30 + 55 + 15) and 130 for the left (apparently from 40 + 40 + 30 + 10, disregarding the final field; the right-edge numbers are very difficult to interpret). A provisional scale drawing of the smaller fields within and outside of the document’s temen is offered here. We welcome corrections to the calculations offered at the CDLI page linked below!

CDLI entry: P131748

credit: Englund, Robert K.

We conclude our survey of early Babylonian management of agricultural fields with several days dedicated to more complex Ur III surveying on clay. The tablet depicted here, again from the Louvre collection, records the measurement results of work done on the Umma field Udu-lu-saga, including on its reverse surface the following lines:

   1 bur₃ 1 eše₃ surface, small fields,
   4 bur₃ 1 eše₃ 2 1/4 iku surface “outside,”
   11 bur₃ 3 iku surface, within the temen;
   total: 17 bur₃ less 3/4 iku surface.

We must therefore expect to find, in the notations of the tablet surface depicted here, the given constituent surfaces of the surveyed fields: small fields, outside fields, and a large temen field.

CDLI entry: P131748

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Cuneiform texts speak, in understated tones, of ecological destruction brought upon the earth and its inhabitants by pre-scientific populations in a region itself only some millennia removed from the end of the last ice age and the natural flooding of the part of the Mesopotamian foreland basin that is now the Persian Gulf. We pause for a moment on this Earth Day to reflect on the Anthropocene then, and with climatology, science, and truth itself under increasingly specious assault by elected Republican officials in Washington, now.

The insult to our sensibilities from this “pre-scientificism” can be felt in an unending litany of suffering, ranging from the droughts and fire storms of the American Southwest, to the collapse of ice shelves at both poles. One such tale, from the AP reporter C. J. Hanley:

For a village society whose dogsledding ice hunters long supplied it with seal and walrus meat and fish in winter, the “dark months” are now a time of enforced idleness, limited travel and emptier larders. On land, the thawing permafrost underfoot is leaving houses askew and broken. Climate change touches the animals, too: Greenlanders find lean polar bears, unable to stalk seals on sea ice, invading their settlements for food.

And the very sound of Greenland is changing. Where villages once echoed to the howl of huskies, that old call of the wild has been muted. Dispirited hunters up and down the west Greenland coast, unable to feed winter game to their sled dogs, have been shooting them.

Image of ice streams draining the ice sheet of Greenland’s southwestern coast, acquired by Landsat-8 satellite’s Operational Land Imager on 12 June 2013 [USGS/ESA]; story: C. J. Hanley, AP, 4 September 2011

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The Louvre text artifact to the left was edited by the Berlin Uruk project colleagues Nissen, Damerow and Englund in 1990 (Frühe Schrift 106-110; English translation in Archaic Bookkeeping [Chicago 1993] pp, 65-69), and in 1996 by the Italian scholar Mario Liverani (JESHO 39, 9). Quoting from Archaic Bookkeeping p. 68:

[the text] gives the measures of the “field of the cattle herdsman of (the deity) Ninara.” The left side of the field, which was probably the side along the main irrigation canal, formed the base line of the surveying procedure. For each segment of the field, the length of the section on the base line, the distance to the outer border line and the calculated area were recorded. In addition, the total length of the base line is given, although this length (260 ninda, approx. 1.5 km) had no relevance for the area calculations. Furthermore, the name of the field as well as the total of its calculated areas rendered in rounded iku are registered in the plan.

The particular areas are only given with an exactness of half an iku. Peculiar is the incorrect calculation of the fifth section from the top, an error for which there are, however, numerous parallels in other field plans. Instead of recording the correct and round figure of 11 iku (= 1 eše₃ 5 iku) the scribe arrived at a value of ten and one half iku. Such irregularities are probably the result of the fact that before the invention of the sexagesimal place value system ... no simple method to perform multiplications was known. The reverse of the tablet bears a preliminary sketch of another field, in which, however, a series of entries was erased.

CDLI entry: P131774

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The topography of some of our Ur III period fields can be difficult to explain. This text from Umma province displays a series of inner-temen triangular surfaces that form jagged steps up one side; done to scale as in the sketch to the right of the tablet, however, we might more generously forgive the work of a surveyor confronted with a strong meandering canal, snaking along and around the irregular surface features of the larger field’s western border. Thirty ninda, after all, represent a stretch of some 180 meters. [Attentive cdli tableteers will notice that one of the surface measures in the sketch was furtively corrected to better fit the ninda measurements—and, we suspect, the intentions of the ancient bookkeeper.]

CDLI entry: P125397

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Still another field plan from Berlin’s Vorderasiatisches Museum displays an ever more detailed description of a central temen, and surrounding “outside” fields. This particular agricultural corridor, called in Sumerian Nin-nudu, is documented in seventy further Umma accounts, covering irrigation, harrowing, sowing, grain harvest, the cutting and bundling of reed, and a number of related activities; they document, moreover, fields associated with Nin-nudu, including three with Šulpae’s “stockyard” field from our previous entry.

CDLI entry: P125396

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Another example of a field plan from Berlin’s Vorderasiatisches Museum, also originating in Umma province, describes the agricultural foundation of the “stockyard” of (the god) Šulpae. A drawing of the fields registered here, drawn to scale, effectively stretches the tablet’s field plan horizontally by a factor of 2 (A. Hanson, a Manchester, UK, research student at the College of Technology, now the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, published a number of short editions of these texts in the series Manchester Cuneiform Studies, this text in volume 2 [1952] p. 1).

CDLI entry: P125395

credit: Englund, Robert K.

A scale drawing based on the actual numbers of the text displays the relative accuracy of the basic temen rectangle, less visual accuracy of its adjoining quadrilateral, and greater differences between the ancient surveyor’s rendition of the ‘outside’ surfaces and those based, here, on his actual length measures. The correct rendering of the smaller field surfaces, moreover, indicates that their outer border was in all likelihood a gently curving waterway!

CDLI entry: P111941

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The second line of this text’s reverse summation reads 1(eše₃) 4(iku) 1/4(iku) GAN₂ bar, “1 eše₃ 4 1/4 iku field ‘outside’.” While this notation bears a striking resemblance to the calculated area of the irregular quadriliteral that was part of the temen, the two are quite distinct, for the accountant has instead totaled the various small surfaces surrounding the rectangular temen field, consisting of a series of quadrilaterals and triangles. As an example of how the small surfaces were recorded, we can look at the first to the lower right: 20 × ((13 1/2 + 8 1/2) ÷ 2) = 220 (sar), written sexagesimally 3.40. Triangles are recorded unremarkably as rectangles cut in half. By one tally, the total is very close to the expected 1025 sar (disregarding the inner-temen triangle of the lower left corner):

   220 (20 × (13 1/2 + 8 1/2) ÷ 2))
   120 (20 × (8 1/2 + 3 1/2) ÷ 2))
   21 7/8 (12 1/2 × 3 1/2 ÷ 2)
      partial total 360 sar (?; expect 361 7/8)
   84 1/2 (13 × 13 ÷ 2)
   200 - 20/60 (?; (15 × (13 + 13 1/2) ÷ 2)) = 198 3/4)
   390 (30 × 13)
      partial total 672 1/2 sar (?; expect 674 1/2 - x)
   GRAND TOTAL: 360 + 672 1/2 = 1032.5

CDLI entry: P111941

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Our temen is not a perfect rectangle, but a composition of rectangle and an additional quadrilateral. Its surface area was computed in the following way: first multiply the rectangle measuring 65 × 70 ninda (that is, a surface of ca. 390 × 420 meters), you get 4550 sar, or 45.5 iku ≈ 2 bur₃ 1 eše₃ 3 1/2 iku (1 bur₃ = 3 eše₃, 1 eše₃ = 6 iku). Add to that the irregular surface to its right, measuring 65 × ((30 + 2) ÷ 2 =) 16, you get 1040 sar, or 10 4/10 iku ≈ 1 eše₃ 4 1/2 iku; then add the two to equal 3 bur₃ 2 iku of the first line of the reverse. We will in the next slide examine the second and third lines of the reverse summations, and will in a third slide offer a drawing of what this field might actually have looked like.

CDLI entry: P111941

credit: Englund, Robert K.

This Girsu record retains a relatively uncomplicated drawing of a modest field, but introduces the concept of the Babylonian temen. A temen is, in normal Sumerian architectural terminology, the regular platform on which a building is constructed; transferred to field management, it refers to an often artificially regular rectangle drawn to encompass the greater surface area of an irregularly shaped field. The first line of the reverse surface of this tablet from Girsu, now found in the cuneiform collection of Harvard's Semitic Museum, states that the field sketch of the obverse surface recorded a total of 3(bur₃) 2(iku) GAN₂ ša₃ temen, “3 bur₃ 2 iku field within the temen.” The term ša₃ temen is, in CDLI records, known almost exclusively in the context of such drawings.

CDLI entry: P111941

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The numbers qualifying side lengths in the field sketch are relatively clear, but the results of their use in surface calculations less so. The bottom side is, in sexagesimally oriented notation, 1.25, or 85 (ninda), its opposing top side is 1.40 + 20 (the width of the box to the upper left) = 120, while the opposing left and right sides are (25 + 1.40) and 3.00, or 125 and 180 ninda, respectively. Thus the favored calculation of irregular quadrilaterals gives ((85 + 120) ÷ 2) × ((180 + 125) ÷ 2) = 15,631.25 sar (remembering that 1 sar = 1 ninda²), or 156.3125 iku (1 iku = 10 × 10 ninda = 100 sar). Subtracting from this calculated surface measure the area of the rectangle to the upper left (20 × 25 = 500 sar = 5 iku) gives 151.3125 iku, or 8 bur₃ 7.3125 iku, a not entirely satisfactory approximation of the given 8 bur₃ 4 3/4 iku (note that the surveyor correctly calculated a rectangle of 1 bur₃ 2 iku = 20 iku in the left-hand surface described by the length of 100 ninda and a width of 20 [that of the upper-left rectangle]). We might suspect that this discrepancy is related to the highly irregular shape of the field, given here in a more credible depiction. The Australian mathematician Daniel F. Mansfield offers at the bottom of a file linked to CDLI’s page dedicated to this artifact an elegant reconstruction of such an irregular field (in an e-mail posted to R. Englund on 24 March 2018, Mansfield wrote the “key assumption is that the surveyor measured the length DG. Note this is 98 exactly.”).

CDLI entry entry: P125393

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Ur III period (ca. 2100-2000 BC) surveyors were known as “rope-men.” In an earlier series of cdli tablet, we have seen the records of urban architects, using brick metrology and a measuring rod (Sumerian ‘gi’) to lay out plans for large estates and monumental buildings. Fields, on the other hand, were measured with ropes, and indeed the Sumerian word for rope, ‘eš₂’, is the same as that for a length measure of 10 ninda, or ca. 60 meters. The two together, early identified incorrectly as rod-and-ring, formed the classical Mesopotamain symbol of royalty: the king was a shepard of his people, but was, more than that, the guarantor of straight measurements in the management of fields, and the construction of important buildings. We might postulate that our surveyors worked with a rope knotted every ninda, and employed native geometrical principals in laying out 90° angles to achieve exact surface measure calculations (simply stake out four equal lengths of rope in a parallelogram, then pull and release to set equal diagonals, and you have a very close approximation of √2 for field use; where these failed, multiply the arithmetical means of opposite sides of quadrilaterals, resulting in relatively close approximations). The example of such a field record depicted here, part of the collection of Berlin’s Vorderasiatisches Museum, is from southern Umma province.

CDLI entry: P125393

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Whoever has left Baghdad in an old Rover with concrete suspension, in search of a southern Iraqi excavation site, manned only with a sketched map done on an envelope the night before, will marvel at the comparable attention to geographic details found on many ancient Babylonian documents. The Louvre owns a number of such clay records from Telloh, ancient Girsu, that date to the Old Akkadian period (ca. 2340-2200 BC). Now combining both textual description of fields with waterways, these accounts lend a new dimension to the dry calculations of earlier periods. We will see that the Ur III period a century later witnessed the innovation of including drawings of fields in its surveying accounts.

CDLI entry: P128413, P216929

credit: Englund, Robert K.

In 2007, the Swedish historian of science Jöran Friberg published an edition of this text as an appendix to his masterful treatment of the mathematical cuneiform texts in the Norwegian Schøyen Collection (MSCT 1, App. 7, CUNES 50-08-001). The line art copy here derives from that publication. As Friberg explained, the tablet contains a fairly common table of progressively larger length and corresponding surface measures. In this case, the first four lines at the upper right of the tablet, reading lines top to bottom and columns from right to left, are to be understood as: 1 ^nindaninda_x(DU) sa₂ / 1 sar / 2 sa₂ / 4 sar, “1 ninda squared: 1 sar; 2 (ninda squared): 4 sar.” The text continues on through ever larger length measures (note that in absolute values, 1 ninda ≈ 6 meters, thus 1 sar ≈ 36 m² and so on) until, in the fifth column, the surface reaches a sexagesimally oriented notation of 3.20.00.00 (decimally 720,000) bur₃, or a field of ca. 4,432,320 Ha—the size of Denmark.

CDLI entry: P274845

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Though less subtle than exercises with unexpected calculations of artificially large fields, many Babylonian texts still make a strong impression on the reader with their almost manic attention to detail. This mathematical table of field measures from the Early Dynastic IIIb period (ca. 2400 BC) is among the many thousands of cuneiform tablets in the cuneiform collection of the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, now being readied for repatriation to Iraq.

CDLI entry: P274845

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Peter Damerow and Bob Englund drove from Berlin to Heidelberg in the spring of 1985 to collate Uruk texts in preparation of the publication of their chapter on proto-cuneiform number sign systems that appeared in Nissen & Green, Archaische Texte aus Uruk 2. Surely the most memorable moment of that trip was Peter’s discovery of the text in the figure here. The room grew quiet when he was calculating, and in this case it was no different. As he explained after some time, the text from the earliest stage of writing contained several varied multiplicands representing field lengths and widths, leading in exercises on obverse and reverse to the same result of an irregularly large, but very rounded surface measure notation of 10 šar₂, or ca. 40 km². This earliest known school text in mathematics demonstrated the playful arrangement scribes of the 34^th century BC had indeed made with their medium of expression.

CDLI entry: P003118

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Of course the inherent mathematical beauty in field calculation was not lost on ancient Babylonians. Already in the first phase of writing development, the Uruk IV period dating to ca. 3350 BC—perhaps some two centuries before the first fields described in this series were mapped out in Jemdet Nasr—apparent masters of the scribal art began in their spare time to play with the numbers of their day jobs. It is not always easy to catch them out in this fine game: we must pay attention to even the most damaged of ancient clay documents, such as this examplar from Uruk (excavation number W 19408,76+) now on permanent loan from the German Arcaheological Institute (Berlin) to Heidelberg University.

CDLI entry: P003118

credit: Englund, Robert K.

A second account from the Fara collection of the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, deals similarly with allotment fields and their required seed grain. Of particular interest in this text is the fact that it records three seed grain deliveries from two different storage facilities, their sum corresponding exactly to the amount of seed grain registered in the text considered in our previous two days’ slides. At 37 1/2 bur₃, the size of the fields calculated for this seed grain very closely corresponds to that totaled in the previous text as well. We may therefore propose that this text records the seed grain for fields registered in detail in our previous Fara account.

CDLI entry: P011012

credit: Englund, Robert K.

VAT 12656 registers altogether 104 allotment fields distributed among active members of the Fara elite community, including merchants, boatmen, smiths, carpenters, brewers, fisheries managers and other professions. The individual fields ranged in size from 2.5 to 10 iku, and, as we have seen in earlier examples, the fields were totaled on the tablet reverse, recording: 3 bur’u 7 bur₃ 1 eše₃ GAN₂, that is, 672 iku or about 220 hectare; and 21 “gur-maḫ” of seed grain, where each ED IIIa gur-maḫ contained 480 sila₃, or perhaps 500 liters of grain. The seeding rate of 15 sila₃ per iku corresponds to 270 sila₃ per bur₃, fully consistent with rates known from later periods, and with rates suspected in a previous entry to this series for the Late Uruk era.

CDLI entry: P011010

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The Early Dynastic IIIa period (ca. 2600 BC) is best known through the clear graphic style of the scribes from Fara, ancient Šuruppak—and as a paleographic transition stage between the pictography of the archaic eras, and the increasing sign abstraction of the latter half of the 3^rd millennium. German and the bedeviling contemporaneous irregular excavations at the site in the early years of the 19-naughts resulted in some 800 cuneiform artifacts moving into a variety of collections, most significant among them those of the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, and the Arkeoloji Müzeleri, Istanbul. The image here is a cut-away from the beautifully preserved Berlin piece VAT 12656 published in 1924 by Anton Deimel (Wirtschaftstexte aus Fara no. 53), with short comment in Nissen, Damerow and Englund, Archaic Bookkeeping pp. 58-64. This account dealt with seed grain reserved for fields surrounding Šuruppak.

CDLI entry: P011010

credit: Englund, Robert K.

2N₄₅ 5N₁₄ in seed grain recorded on the one surface of this tablet, a notation also qualified with the ideogram for barley, corresponds to 150 basic units of grain, or 15 such units per bur₃ of field. Damerow and Englund have made a credible case for the absolute size of ca. 25 liters per basic unit (N₁, equal to 30 day rations of ca. 0.8 liters each) of grain in the Late Uruk capacity system. The resulting 15x25 = 325 liters per bur₃ compares well with standard sowing rates from 3rd millennium accounts of between 240 and 360 liters of seed grain per bur₃.

CDLI entry: P005077

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The issue of ancient bookkeepers making seeding and harvest predictions was not idle speculation. The present text, part of the collection of the Oriental Insitute of the University of Chicago, appears to register on the one surface a rounded field measurement of 10 bur₃, while the opposite surface records a grain measure of a size that suggests it is in fact a model seeding account.

CDLI entry: P005077

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Given the number and measures treated in the previous four entries, we can speculate about the form of these various fields, viewed from above. The fields of the five named Jemdet Nasr officials are sketched below an idealized main canal in our map, each receiving irrigation water from feeder canals diverting flow from the main canal, and each of these certainly further characterized by a network of smaller canals and ditches that watered the crops. We expect that the larger feeder canals led to a second main canal that carried excess water on to the next set of irrigated fields. The relative size of the area controlled by the “priest-king” of Jemdet Nasr is indicated above the central canal. That high priest of Jemdet Nasr had the use of fields corresponding to 155 bur₃, or, as we think, sufficient crop land to support some 4,000 individuals, disregarding for now the income the ruler would have enjoyed from household herds of cattle, and sheep and goats, from his pig and carp farms, and his various imposts, customs and tithes.

CDLI entry: P005069

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The rule of archaic accountants was, eventual summations were reserved for the opposite surface of the clay tablets whose obverse surface carried individual transaction numbers. So also here, as we might already deduct from the structure of the numerical notations themselves. While the largest area notation on the obverse of this text was 1x10 plus some number of bur₃, the three larger notations found at the top and right of this reverse surface all contain larger measures, including multiples of the 10-bur₃ sign as well as, with notations always structured to indicate the largest units at the top of an associated group of signs, large circular impressions without centered smaller impressions. These latter signs are known to represent six of the 10-bur₃ signs, or 60 bur₃.

The case to the lower left contains the apparent total of all small field units qualified on the tablet’s obverse as “BAR”, here further qualified with the KI and a third sign that means wood. Later field accounts demonstrate that these were the smaller border areas of grain fields that were either unusable, or were apparently planted in trees, for instance the widely forested poplar, that would at once act as sources for construction wood, as well as a wind-break for the fields themselves. bar in Sumerian texts means outside. The middle of the three lower cases, on the other hand, contains the apparent total of all five calculated areas of the obverse text, less their outside surfaces. These KI surfaces are qualified with the snake pictogram that, again in later tradition and apparently already here, meant “to measure.” But now something unexpected happens. The lower right case contains exactly 2x the “measured” fields of the five Jemdet Nasr officials, itself qualifed with GAN₂, and the famous “priest-king” sign EN known, among other media, from the offerings brought into a temple household on the Uruk Vase. Thus the priest-king of Jemdet Nasr maintained fields equaling an area, and therefore an income, twice that of his five leading officials combined.

CDLI entry: P005069

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Let’s have a look at the first two of these calculated fields. In the first column (we are reading the text as its ancient scribe would have written it, namely, in lines or columns from top to bottom, and columns right to left), we note, first, four impressions of the butt end of a large round stylus held obliquely to the surface of the clay tablet, followed by five small circular impressions made by a smaller round stylus held upright. These are known to be members of the ancient sexagesimally structured numerical sign system, standing for 60 and 10, respectively. Similarly, the second case contains one obliquely impressed large sign, and four smaller circular impressions. Assuming these represent the length and width of the measured field, we may treat the two as multiplicands: 290 x 100 = 29,000 “square ninda”, later Sumerian “sar” = “garden”, or, converted to the surface area notational system that would remain largely unchanged for 3000 years, 290 iku, = 16 bur₃ 2 iku. We can see a large circular impression, its center further impressed with a smaller circle, followed by 6 such smaller circular impressions—thus representing our 16 bur₃—and the whole is qualified with our field sign GAN₂. The smaller notation at the end, however, would appear to represent not 2 iku, but rather 2 x 6 = 12.

The second column, in like fashion, contains notations—and the first cases always referenced the apparent lords of these fields, officials otherwise well-attested in the Jemdet Nasr accounts—representing the presumed mulitplicands 312 and 90, resulting in 28,080 sar, or 15 bur₃ 10.8 iku. We believe the last units at the very bottom of this column, actually the basic “one iku” units rotated 90° to the right, represented 1/10^th of one iku, but then why not here eight rather that seven of them? This, and the previous seeming error, are but two of several small infidelities in such calculations that keep the proto-cuneiformist from being all too self-satisfied—and, we may note, the ultimate techniques used by archaic bookkeepers to calculate surface from linear measures are not clear to us.

Now—try your hand at solving the calculations of the remaining three fields.

CDLI entry: P005069

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Indeed, after Langdon’s 1928 publication of the tablet in volume 7 of the series Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts—the clumsiest edition of cuneiform documents on record, made worse by the horrendous excavation records kept by the Oxford professor—, the Frenchman Allotte de la Fuÿe offered an improved edition in 1930 (RA 27, pp. 65-71); the Russian Vaiman made further improvements in 1966 (Peredn. sbornik, pp. 13-15); and more recently the text has been re-edited by a group of Berlin specialists (Nissen, Englund & Damerow, Frühe Schrift [1990] pp. 96-99, with English translation in their Archaic Bookkeeping [Chicago 1993] pp. 55-57), by the Swedish mathematician Friberg in 1997/98 (AfO 44/45, 19ff.) and most recently again by Englund in 1998 (OBO 160/1, 206-207 + fig. 83).

All of these specialists were struck by the evidence this and several more related texts from Jemdet Nasr offered for mathematical techniques employed by our most ancient bookkeepers to calculate surfaces based on linear measurements of their respective sides. In this record, the lengths of agricultural fields surrounding Jemdet Nasr are qualified with an upright wedge, while the field widths are indicated with horizontal wedges. To these ideographic signs are added sexagesimal notations representing counted length units, known to correspond to a (Sumerian) “ninda(n)” of ca. 6 meters. Thus purely on visual grounds, the upper surface of this tablet could be divided into five columns, each representing apparent fields, and within each column in successive cases the length, width, and corresponding field surface measures—such measures were, after all, critical to archaic farmers since they formed the basis for subsequent calculations of the seed grain needed to sow the fields, as well as of the expected harvest. This third case, counting from the top of each column, contained circular impressions known from later Babylonian records to represent surface measures.

CDLI entry: P005069

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Ernest Mackay, a student of Sir Flinders Petrie, is best known for his excavations of the great Indus civilization at Mohenjo-Daro, but he is most dear to cuneiformists for his 1920s work at the massive mound of Kish in the “waist” of ancient Mesopotamia. The Kish excavators were, in 1925, made aware of random finds of decidedly archaic cuneiform tablets at the nearby mound know as Jemdet Nasr (‘hillock of [Sheikh] Nāṣr’; its ancient name is unknown), so that Mackay helped to organize a 1926 campaign to Jemdet Nasr, led by the Oxford Assyriologist Stephen Langdon. Among the most significant of the discoveries from the work at the small settlement is the text pictured here. With its striking and uniformly deep, round and conical impressions, the text was early on recognized as an account containing calculations of fields. To the upper left of the tablet’s reverse surface (pictured at the bottom), you will find the same GAN₂ sign of our previous text, and below that register, to the lower left, two cases with the same KI. But the number signs are the text’s most captivating elements ...

CDLI entry: P005069

credit: Englund, Robert K.

We warn our students to avoid speculative identifications of the most ancient forms of cuneiform signs based solely on pictographic similarities. However, the two signs highlighted here enjoyed an unbroken history of use in Babylonian documents, remaining essentially unchanged both in their graphic form, as well as in their context within cuneiform texts. Both also, though seemingly abstract, have concrete pictographic referents. The sign to the left, read in Sumerian “ki” and meaning “place or “settlement,” will have been a representation of meandering waterways that fed southern Mesopotamia’s life-sustaining canals. We may imagine that this in turn represented the first, unstructured stage of settlement in the riverine south. The second sign, read in Sumerian “GAN₂” or perhaps “aša₅,” represented straight feeder, and secondary canals prepared and maintained to support the irrigation agriculture that formed the basis for Babylonian economic, political and military strength in the millennia of the pre-Christian age in the Middle East. This sign GAN₂ is qualified in the case indicated with a numerical notation that represented some 162 hectares of arable land.

CDLI entry: P427655

credit: Englund, Robert K.

We have in an earlier series described some of the textual evidence documenting building construction in Mesopotamia. The current slide initiates a number of entries dedicated to the bookkeeping involved in the management of the agricultural fields whose harvests fed the city craftsmen and laborers and therefore ultimately made the construction and maintenance of such buildings possible. This first text is found on a cylindrical stone in the Swiss Bodmer Museum, representing the type of document called kudurrus in later Babylonian tradition. Most of these texts were edited in a two-volume work by the University of Chicago Orientalists Ignace Gelb, Piotr Steinkeller and Robert Whiting (=Oriental Institute Publications vol. 104). Steinkeller particularly has identified a sign combination |SILA_3axDUG_a| found on this text as characteristic of early field sale contracts.

CDLI entry: P427655

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Collections of the size as that of the Museum of the Abbey of Montserrat often include a good number of fragmentary text artifacts. During CDLI’s imaging mission in Montserrat, several of the approximately 90 fragments could be joined. It is likely that further fragments (those are shown with reduced opacity) will result in joins in the future. Since the texts in the collection have been imaged and made accessible online, a preliminary (digital) joining can be achieved from any workstation worldwide.

CDLI entry: Fragments

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

The collection of Montserrat Museum contains several cuneiform forgeries. These include seven clay tablets, five clay barrels, two stone bowls, and a figurine (I. M. Rowe & M. Molina, “Cuneiform forgeries in the Museu Bíblic of Montserrat (Barcelona),” Fs. Sanmartín [2006] pp. 289ff.). Some of these forgeries seem to imitate cuneiform characters quite accurately. MM 441, clearly a forgery, appears not just to draw from neo-Babylonian sign forms, but also from contemporary royal inscriptions.

An intriguing object is a figurine in the collection. This possible fake resembling an amulet is quite unique. At the feet of the figure, a slab is depicted with nine lines of inscription. The sign forms resemble the monumental script of the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1900-1600 BC). Nevertheless, the text itself makes no sense. It is difficult to date such an object. The female figurine wears clothes that seem to date to Late Antiquity. This “fake” could therefore in fact be a work done in Late Antiquity. There are cases when inscriptions, already ancient back then, have been found and re-used. A very good example is MS 2400, a building inscription dating to the Lagash II period (2200-2100 BC), which was evidently re-used as an amulet in early Islamic times; its “excavator” added an Arabic inscription without erasing the original cuneiform text. The figurine in Montserrat, however, represents a different case. It is conceivable that an ancient inscription was found and used as model for the slab at the feet of the figurine.

CDLI entry: P432947

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

Montserrat Museum holds a larger collection of royal inscriptions that commemorate building projects by the ruler Sinkashid. These texts date to the Early Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000-1900 BC).

These short inscriptions are attested in two shapes. A group uses a tablet-shape, another one little cones. Building inscriptions as these were usually deposited in the foundations of temples, but the high amount of manuscripts suggests that these small objects were possibly distributed in order to commemorate Sîn-kāšid's temple building.

CDLI entries: List of tablets
List of cones

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

This cone dating to the Early Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000-1900 BC) commemorates the building of a temple for god Lugalbanda and his spouse Ninsun by Sîn-kāšid, king of Uruk and king of Amnanum.

The inscription contains an interesting reference to the silver equivalencies at that time:

In his period of kingship, according to the market value of his land, 3 kor of barley, 12 minas of wool, 10 minas of copper, 3 ban of vegetable oil cost one shekel of silver.

CDLI entry: P432704
CDLI composite text: P448524

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

The collection of the Montserrat Museum holds several fragments containing Middle Hittite texts. MM 1501 on the left-hand side joins to Bo. 363 (Istanbul Museum) and contains a text known as the "Great Feast of Arinna" (CTH 634). This composition is well attested in the Hittite documentation (see the list of available manuscript in the Konkordanz der hethitischen Texte).

The second fragment was classified as fragment describing rituals for cultic feasts (CTH 670) (see the list of available manuscript in the Konkordanz der hethitischen Texte).



CDLI entry: MM 1501 and MM 1502

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

Scribes of the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1900-1600 BC) composed a scholarly list of human body-parts beginning with Sumerian ugu-mu, “my skull.” The entries of this lexical text follow down systematically from the head to the feet. Most of its witness manuscripts contain only the Sumerian designations of these body parts. Nevertheless, there are already in the Old Babylonian period bilingual versions of the composition providing their Akkadian translations. This fragment in the Montserrat Museum is such an examplar.

CDLI entry: P283788

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

The fragment originates from Babylon and originally belonged most likely to a private "library" in a Neo-Babylonian house (see O. Pedersén, ADOG 25 [2005], 279ff.). This private house was in a well-located area of Babylon, not far off of the famous ziqqurat of Marduk, the Etemenanki. The approximately sixty tablets that can be assigned to this house date to the second half of the first millennium BC and mainly to the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods.

The tablet had two columns on both obverse and reverse. The text contains a list of plants and drugs that were used as sole cure for ailments. Each entry provides (1) the name of the plant or drug categorised with the Sumerian classifier u₂, "plant," (2) the name of the illness and (3) the way of applying the plant for treatment. Such lists are organised either by the plants or by the illnesses. MM 501 follows the latter case.

The tablets BAM 4, 380 and STT 1, 92 are duplicates, which provide the information in three columns instead of two as on MM 501.

Such lists differ from more complex recipes that includes different kinds of plants and ingredients for the treatment of illnesses.

Edition: B. Böck, "Die medizinischen Texte der Tontafelsammlung des Klostermuseums Montserrat," Fs Tragan (2011), 22ff.

CDLI entry: P285452

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

This small tablet in the Montserrat Museum dates to the Neo-Babylonian period (ca. 626-539 BC). It was published by F. Köcher in the fourth volume of Die babylonisch-assyrische Medizin und Untersuchungen as BAM IV, 392. It is the only example of an incomplete recipe containing various designations for drugs. Texts as this example omit the description of the symptoms of an illness.

Edition: B. Böck, "Die medizinischen Texte der Tontafelsammlung des Klostermuseums Montserrat," Fs Tragan (2011), 30ff.

CDLI entry: P285463

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

The institutional archive of the Eanna temple in Uruk consists of approximately 8,000 texts (see the remarks in Jursa, Neo-Babylonian Legal and Administrative Documents, 2005, 138f.). The texts predominately date to the early reign of the Neo-Babylonian king Nabopolassar. The latest texts date to the 29th year of Darius. There is a break in the archive in the second year of Darius, which might be connected to investigations regarding the corrupt official Gimillu. Although many texts belonging to the Eanna archive have been found by the German excavators, many texts came via illicit excavations onto the antiquities market and found their way into major US and European museum collections.

This letter from the Eanna archive in the Museum of the Abbey of Montserrat dates to a time of great tension. The administration of the Eanna temple underwent a major re-arrangement after the Persian conquest of Babylonia. As the text also mentions, we are in the term of the satrap Gobryas (line 11: gu-bar-ru). The letter writer Innin-ahhe-iddin writes to his superior Nadin as follows (edition: Stolper, Achaemenid History 13, 265ff.):

There is no-one who has exact information about my rations except for you. (You,) my lord, should consult your list, whether old or current, (and) [(you,) my lord should] send me my rations. I have seen the document that you sent me. It is satisfactory to me. Until Gobryas has had assignments made(?) for temple-slaves of Bel, Nabû, or Nergal, their rations are paid according to the list from (the time of) Nebuchadnezzar.

CDLI entry: P432824

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

Among the neo-Babylonian texts and fragments kept in the Museum of the Abbey of Montserrat is this well-preserved fragment of a text dealing with land registers (edition: C. Wunsch, AuOr 15, 141ff.). Although not fully preserved, the tablet can be dated to the 13th year of the neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus (543 BC).

The text represents an inventory of various fields and gardens in and around the city of Uruk. For neo-Babylonian Uruk, we have the large institutional archive of the Eanna-temple, to which currently about 9,000 texts can be assigned. The plots mentioned in this text are related to the temple, and in at least two cases private land was transferred to the temple estates.

Another aspect of this text is noteworthy. It provides information about the location and size of temple estates in that area and furthermore allows insights into the administrative procedures related to these lands. The areas mentioned in this text do not seem be adjacent to each other. One plot had already been registered in a previous inventory. It adds the remark akî lē'i labīri šaṭir, “as is written on the old tablet.”

CDLI entry: P432815

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

Old Babylonian legal texts are easy to recognise. They carry many physical features, which make them stand out compared to legal and administrative texts of the Ur III or early Old Babylonian period.

This small document in the collection of the Montserrat Museum (edition: J. A. Belmonte Marín, "Old Babylonian Administrative and Legal Texts from the Montserrat Museum," AuOr 15 [1997], no. 12) is a typical loan of silver, whose content starts with the amount of silver. It states that an individual, whose name is just partially preserved, received silver in order to buy barley. As frequently attested this document contains the following clause:

On the day of [the harvest time] he shall measure out barley (at the current) [mar]ket [rate in effect] to the bearer of [his] do[cument].

This clause is followed by several witnesses and a date, which allows us for dating this document into the 18th year of the Babylonian ruler Samsu-ditana.

The cross-hatching on the reverse is not modern damage. The texts represents a cancelled tablet, which was invalidated by striking text and seal impression on the reverse.

CDLI entry: P432857

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

This tablet in the collection of Montserrat Museum (published as MVN 18, 321) dates to the Ur III period (ca. 2100-2000 BC) and records a court decision following the contestation, by an officer, of a slave purchase by one of his men. The oath taken by the slave himself established the legal rights of the buyer.

Translation:
Aḫīma bought (the slave) Šu-Erra,
son of Ur-Bilgames, for 10 shekels of silver;
Pussunum, his officer-of-sixty, said:
"He did not buy him;"
Šu-Erra, Šukubum (and) Azuli appeared as witnesses;
among them, Šu-Erra was delivered to take the oath;
after Šu-Erra had sworn, Aḫīma took over the slave.
(Act established) in the presence of Lu-amana;
year: “The king Amar-Suen destroyed Urbilum”
(= 2nd year of the reign of Amar-Suen, ca. 2045 BC).

CDLI entry: P101616

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

The Ur III period was witness to many different forms of text artifacts. A rather important, but small group are clay labels. The collection of the Museum of the Abbey of Montserrat includes this round label (a kind of document that archaeologists call bullae). To produce such a label, a lump of clay enclosed either a cord or textile to protect against manipulation of some group of texts, or related commodities.

The outer surface of this label was sealed and inscribed. The economic account written on it deals with four oxen and thirty-two sheep and goats that were slaughtered for sacrifice (ba-uš₂). They were the property of a certain Tahiš-atal, an individual frequently mentioned in Ur III documents.

Our document dates to the 6th year in the reign of Amar-Suen. After the date follows a term that is attested several times on such bullae: e₂-tum for Akkadian bītum, “house” (see the discussion by Wolfgang Heimpel, JAOS 114 [1996] 280, with earlier literature). Following UTI 3, 2105, in the Arkeoloji Müzeleri in Istanbul, which separates im e₂-tum and im didli, “ ‘house’ tablets” and “single tablets,” it seems that e₂-tum designates a kind of container within a tablet box (Sumerian pisan-dub-ba) that was closed and provided with a sealed label.

The technical term e₂-tum is found on JRL 331 as well. Its seal is also the same, although on the example in Montserrat the impression is poorly preserved. The text in the John Rylands Library dates to the accession year of Amar-Suen and concerns 48 oxen and cows, and 775 sheep and goats, evidently offerings for the table of the 1% of the 21st century—BC. It is likely that the container or bag for which such a label was intended contained records of the named month(s). Therefore, the label in Montserrat records documents for the period from the 18th day of the 5th month through the completed 12th month of Amar-Suen 6.

CDLI entries: P107846 & P101388

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

The collection of the Museum of the Abbey of Montserrat keeps a small selection of lexical texts from Mesopotamia, most notably a copy of tablet XXI of the multi-thematic series ur₅-ra : hubullu (edited in MSL 11). This section of the series contains geographical names.

M. Molina published lexical and other school texts in the Montserrat collection (Molina, Fs Cagni, 751ff.; 753 no. 6). In doing so, he could join the small fragment MM 860, which adds important information to the first column and hence to the first entries of the list, whose reconstruction is still rather tentative due to its absence among the texts of the Kuyuncik collection.

Another text dealing with toponyms and also dating to the Neo-Babylonian period is Ashm 1923-277.

CDLI entry: P283789

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

In 1971, Richard Caplice published texts in the Kuyunjik collection of the British Museum that are classified as belonging to the genre of nam-bur₂-bi, or “its resolution” (OrNS 40, 133ff.). In no. 49, he collected manuscripts belonging to tablet 17 of the terrestrial omens, whose first entry is šumma ālu ina mēlê šakin, “When a city is placed on high.” This large series originally contained 120 tablets. Each entry, as is common for omens, starts with a protasis introducing a condition, while a following apodosis provides a result.

Two years later, Caplice published the present neo-Babylonian tablet kept in the collection of the Museum of the Abbey of Montserrat with a hand-copy by Miguel Civil (OrNS 40, 511ff.). The colophon, though preserved, unfortunately does not name the responsible scribe.

Each entry is introduced by the number sign DIŠ, rendered with šumma in Akkadian (meaning “if”). Except for a couple of syllabically written words, most of the text employs Sumerian logograms, as is quite common in late scholarly compositions. Let us give a couple of lines in translation, which are preserved in the Montserrat manuscript:

If a man digs a well in the courtyard of his house, he will have trouble; (variant:) he will grow rich.
If he digs a well in the cattle yard, he will have good luck.
If he digs a well in the back of the house, he will grow poor.
If he digs a well in the woods, he will grow rich.
If he digs a well in garden plots, he will eat thick bread.
If he digs a well at the side of his house, income will flow in for him.
(rule)
If a man, when he digs a well, sees a silvery substance, that house will grow poor.
If he sees a golden substance, that man will live to an old age.
If he sees a tinny substance, his fame will be fair.

The text continues with a rather long list of metals, going on to stones, ants and other appearances. As this passage shows, the compilers tried to exploit as many possibilities as occurred to them. This is a feature well known from the Mesopotamian lexical tradition.

The reverse contains in its lower part (directly above the colophon) a namburbi ritual “for a new well, an old well, the repair of a well or washing place of a man's house.” It gives detailed instructions for someone who wishes to dig a well. These include purification rituals and the recitation of certain incantations (in this case the incantation "The well of Gilgameš").

CDLI entry: P432877

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

The Akkadian poem known as "Išum and Erra" is, as Andrew George put it, "a portrayal of violence (...), how it needs to be recognized and feared as potentially the most powerful of forces. Violence can eliminate even the order ordained by the gods and sweep away in its frenzy all the hopes and accomplishments of civilization" (A. R. George, Before the Muses [2005], 880).

This literary text is one of a few compositions that name its author:

How it came to pass that Erra grew angry and set out to lay waste the lands and destroy their peoples,
But Ishum his counsellor calmed him and left a remnant,
The composer of its text was Kabti-ilani-Marduk, of the family of Dabibi.
He revealed it at night (...),
Nor one line did he add.

MM 837 is one of two manuscripts of this literary text in the collection of Montserrat Museum. The other fragment, MM 841, originally contained a complete copy of Tablet V of the poem.

CDLI entry: P432861

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

The collection of the Museum of the Abbey of Montserrat contains a small number of Akkadian literary fragments. Among these is a fragmentary copy of the first tablet of the famous “Atrahasis Epic,” that is, the Old Babylonian precursor of the flood story related in the 11th tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic. This artifact constitutes the lower fifth of a one-column tablet, whose obverse and reverse surfaces originally contained about 50 lines each, physical characteristics otherwise known in contemporary manuscripts from the “Sippar library” (A. R. George and F. N. H. Al-Rawi, Iraq 58 [1996] 147-190). Since it was acquired in the antiquities markets, just where the Montserrat fragment was unearthed in modern times is unknown. However, the Catalan monk P. Ubach acquired several text artifacts in the 1920s directly from Babylon that were transferred to the Montserrat collection, and this fragment may have come from there.

The surviving text on MM 818 belongs to the opening episodes of the epic, but shows intriguing variations to the manuscripts of the 1st millennium BC. This fragment preserves lines 38-61 of the composition, a crucial passage in the text according to which the Igigi gods, created to undertake hard labor, begin to complain about their fate.

CDLI entry: P432850

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

This fragment in Montserrat Museum is a splinter of the obverse of a tablet dating to the Middle Babylonian period (ca. 1400-1100 BC). It is now assumed that this fragment originally belonged to a six- or eight-column tablet with a total of approximately 320 lines. This tablet would have contained several compositions (for the latest edition see I. Rowe, “The Montserrat Fragment of the Instructions of Ur-Ninurta,” ZA 102 [2012], 179ff.). This is based on the Old Babylonian tablet VS 10, 204. That tablet contained a still unknown composition (A) followed by the Disputation of the Bird and the Fish (B). The third composition or group of compositions is known as Instructions of Ur-Ninurta (C). These precede a fourth group known as Counsels of Wisdom. Some of the latter two compositions might have been independent texts originally.

The Montserrat fragment adds important bilingual information to this Sumerian composition. The text contains several Akkadian glosses, which are written in smaller script slightly above the lines. The Middle Babylonian period represents a transitional phase. Various Sumerian literary compositions were transmitted together with their Akkadian interlinear translations. On this fragment however (partial) translations are still presented as glosses.

Edition: B. Alster, Wisdom of Ancient Sumer, 2005, 221ff.

CDLI entry: P432823

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

The Sumerian literary composition known nowadays as “Instructions of Šuruppag” is one of the few literary texts, whose ancestors can be traced back into the Early Dynastic period. Of these, the version from Tell Abu Salabikh (ca. 2600-2500 BC; OIP 99, 323+) is the most complete. Another, quite fragmentary version comes from Adab.

However, the best documentation dates to the Old Babylonian period with a large amount of Sumerian versions. Among one of those manuscripts is also this tablet in the Montserrat Museum. It contains an extract of the Sumerian text. Its provenience is unfortunately not certain.

The “Instructions of Šuruppag” belong to a sub-genre of Mesopotamian Wisdom Literature. It contains instructions addressed to a son by his father, namely the ruler of the antediluvian city of Šuruppag. Although one expects that the instructions shall prepare his son to the role as ruler, the text is not explicit in that regard. The advices mainly feature proverbial sayings, so, for instance:

At the time of the harvest, at the most precious time,
glean like a slave girl, eat like a queen,
my son, glean like a slave girl, but eat like a queen, that is how it should be indeed!

Edition: B. Alster, Wisdom of Ancient Sumer, 2005, 46ff.

CDLI entry: P432820

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

The Adda seal contains various Gods and Goddesses including a unidentified hunting god on the far left holding a bow and arrow next to the goddess Ishtar who is winged and armed with an axe and mace rising over her shoulders while holding a bush that is presumably a group of dates. Ishtar is standing above the sun God Shamashís head who has rays coming out of him and is holding onto a blade while emerging between two square-shaped mountains. To the right of the sun god is the water god Ea (Enki) who has one foot on a mountain and one arm reaching out to a eagle that is presumed to be the Zu bird who stole the tablets of dynasty. The God Ea (Enki) is usually depicted with water and fish flowing from his body. On the far right is Eaís vizier, a two-faced follower called Usimu on his right with his hand raised towards Ea. It could be noted that all male figures in the Adda seal have growing beards while the females do not. Also everyone in the Adda seal is wearing the multiple-horned head dresses which symbolizes their presence as Gods or deities. These seals were used to mark ownership in various places such as storerooms where the seal would be imprinted on the door or part of the room. The seal is only about 3.9cm in height and were often carried around.

Reference: BM 89115

credit: Kim, Kirk

Interestingly, this text presents an instance of long-distance trade that was conducted through the e₂-munus, or the ‘household of women’ (= divine Baba). The text mentions 270 še gur saggal in measures equivalent to the value of another measure of wool that is to be sent to Elam. This grain is given to Enudana, merchant (Sumerian dam-gar₃) of the e₂-munus, by Uremuš, the chief merchant under Lugalanda, the governor of Lagash province and husband of Baranamtara. The importance of this text suggests that each household had its own merchants in order to conduct long-distance trade on behalf of the highest administrative officials.

CDLI entry: P221854

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

The wife of the governor partook in the administrative structure by presiding over the ‟household of the woman” (=divine Baba). However, she also conducted her own personal exchanges with members of other ruling families. In this text, Baranamtara (literally “dais-of-fate”), wife of Lugalanda, exchanges amounts of tin and bronze in return for dolls made of boxwood (Sumerian ^geštaškarin) and ivory (zu₂ am-si) delivered by servants of Ningeškimti, wife of the governor of Adab. Their messengers, Malga and Anedanumea, also receive considerable compensation for their services in the form of exquisite garments (tug₂) and scented oil (i₃-ir-a).

CDLI entry: P221416

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

As mentioned in the previous entry, the nu-banda₃ engaged in a wide variety of activities in serving the temple. Interestingly, Eniggal was also involved in securing supplies for cooks (Sumerian muḫaldim). In this text, a total of 1200 fish are delivered to Eniggal by three overseers of fishermen, and then given to Amar-giri, the cook, who will use the fish for fermentation. Other texts describe Amar-giri as a brewer (Sumerian lu₂ lunga_x) associated with the house of the cook (e₂-muḫaldim). It has been suggested the house of the cook is responsible for allocating food to various organizations associated with the temple and aristocracy (see Lance Allred, Cooks and Kitchens: Centralized Food Production in Late Third Millennium Mesopotamia [unpubl. Johns Hopkins dissertation 2007] for further discussions of cooks and their provisional services). This connection between the house of the cook and temple household further accentuates the network of communication and the extent of the administrative structure during the ED IIIb period.

CDLI entry: P220954

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

The text describes the allocation of barley rations to the female slaves and children (geme₂, dumu-dumu-ne), the ‘blind’ workers (igi-nu-du₈), and the oxen and sheep (gu₄, udu) during the month of the malt-eating festival of Nanše. The basis for amounts distributed depends on the accumulated amount of work-time, age, sex, and worker status (specialized vs. unskilled labor). In this text, these designated workers form the lower tier of ration distribution for the unskilled labor they invested into the temple household.

Monthly quotas were set by the temple administration and communicated to the lesser officials who organized the workforce. Most often, deficits were incurred because monthly quotas were not fulfilled. This meant that the expected input did not meet the actual output of the workers, resulting in the owed amount being transferred to the next quota. Nonetheless, large amounts of barley and emmer were set aside for worker rations, especially during the reign of Lugalanda where the expanding household accommodated more workers in addition to temple personnel.

With regards to distribution, the majordomo or nu-banda₃ was responsible for allocating goods to serve various purposes in the temple-related activities. For instance, Eniggal, a well-known nu-banda₃, was not only responsible for supervising barley distribution to dependent laborers, but also responsible for surveying land with the head plowers, clearing trees from orchards to gather wood, or digging canals.

It should be noted that while the nu-banda₃ is more closely associated with supervising agricultural or temple-related activities in the ED IIIb period, this title later became a military rank under Shulgi in Ur III period when he reorganized the administrative structure and included a standing army.

CDLI entry: P020116

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

The text describes the amount of flour, per ban (~6 liters), baked into various types of bread for sacrificial offerings, in addition to various commodities for the temple, including beers, butter oils, dates, apples (or apricots), birds, fish and fish eggs, garlic, roasted barely, and turnips (or crushed grapes). As temple administrator (Sumerian sanga), Dudu is responsible for tracking these goods and, at various points in time, entering this information from smaller records to be collated into larger accounts, such as this tablet. The sum of all goods is usually indicated by the phrase šu-nigin₂, which occurs after a series of listed inventories. These lists are then followed by the name of the official who entered this information and the manner in which he entered it.

In this case, Dudu finalizes the various sets of goods added to the temple’s inventory by different officials which indicated by the verbal chain mu-na-ku_x(DU) (“he entered for him”). The purpose behind these minutiae is to determine goods that are missing or added to the record. Therefore, the role of the temple administrator is both the integration of cult and economic duties that are inherent to maintaining the trajectory of goods necessary for administrative, state, and societal obligations.

By the time this tablet was written, Dudu is already an experienced and honored temple administrator, stemming from the early reigns of Enmetena. This shows that, despite the transition of governors, Dudu remained temple administrator under the rulership of Urukagina. Despite the certainty of his position as temple administrator, it is uncertain as to which household he served after the reign of Enmetena. Several royal inscriptions from Enmetena's reign attest to his role both as the temple administrator and senior temple administrator (sanga-maḫ) of Ningirsu, the household of the governor. Consideration should also be given to the possibility that this may have been a completely different Dudu from Enmetena's reign. In addition, the lack of records from both Enannatum II's and Enentarzi's reigns further complicate issues in Dudu's continuity as a temple administrator.

CDLI entry: P220690

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

Basket labels of the Ur III period show a number of developments that hint at a shift in how they were attached, if at all, to baskets containing groups of administrative texts. This newer form shows two string-holes on its upper edge, suggesting that it may have been formed around a knot instead of having a rope pass completely through its vertical axis. Note the absence of the woven impression on the reverse of the tag, suggesting that labels of this period were no longer pressed onto their baskets. In fact, basing ourselves on the archaeological context of tags and administrative tablets, we are not entirely certain that they hung from their respective baskets and associated texts at all, but this seems the most logical reconstruction of ancient bookkeeping records.

CDLI entry: P330514

credit: Heinle, Michael

current

Despite their rarity and issues of preservation, the Old Akkadian "pisan-dub" tags represent an evolution in form while preserving the function of the preceding period. The spherical shape of the ED IIIb has given way to a rectangular or "tablet" shape, consistent with "pisan-dub-ba" tags of the Ur III period. Other Old Akkadian examples indicate that the method by which the tags were attached to their baskets had also changed. This is hinted at by the disappearance of the woven patterns and a change in the way that the string was incorporated within the tag.

CDLI entry: P217567

credit: Heinle, Michael

current

Tags of this type originate in the Early Dynastic IIIb period and continue to be used through the end of the Ur III period. Basket labels of this period may be identified by their initial text line (pisan-dub), single string-hole running through the vertical axis, and the impression of a reed matting pattern on the tag’s reverse. Tags were formed by placing clay around a piece of rope attached to the lid of the basket. The clay was then pressed onto the lid, shaped into a dome, and inscribed.

This particular basket label identifies the contents of its basket as documents recording the regular offerings of various officials, in the form of emmer flour, beer, and bread, during the festival of the goddess Baba. Furthermore, it identifies the temple household of Baba as the administrative unit to which the accounts belong. Finally, the tag is dated to the first year of the Lagash ruler Lugalanda (ca 2380 BC).

CDLI entry: P020202

credit: Heinle, Michael

current

This proto-cuneiform text artifact is a possible precursor of the well known tablet cataloging system best exemplified by the late 3rd millennium BC “pisan-dub-ba” basket tags widely employed by Ur III period accountants. Like the later tags, it has a well-formed, rectangular shape, and it would have been formed around a piece of twine and hung, presumably from a shelf or basket. The placement of the hole, here running through the longer surface so that, hanging like a pendant, the artifact would have presented its inscription in its natural writing and reading orientation, is like that of later exemplars; Uruk IV tags, though, had just the one hole through, while Ur III “pisan-dub-ba” had two entry holes, with the twine tied to a knot and encased within the tag—but also so that, hanging, the inscription was read in lines from top to bottom. The interpretation and order of reading of the three signs present on the tag are as yet unclear. Pictographically, the sign GIR3 represents the head of a bovine; the sign SANGA, a title designating a temple administrator, is thought to pictographically represent a talleying board with attached token box; and the sign DUB, a Sumerian reading designating a clay tablet in later times, may have represented a type of woven basket. Let us then attempt a translation of this text dating to ca. 3300 BC: “Basket of accountant Bull.”

CDLI entry: P002207

credit: Heinle, Michael

current

How did ancient scribes keep track of the often overwhelming number of administrative documents created by a large and very complex bureaucracy? How did scribal schoolmasters and temple personnel take inventory of the literary and hymnal compositions stored in their archives? The simple answer is they created labels and catalogues. The central image, a “pisan-dub-ba” or basket tag from the Ur III period, would have hung from a basket containing a number of administrative receipts that were grouped based upon varying criteria. Text type, “owner,” and accounting period of the receipts would be noted on the tag, allowing easy identification of the contents when a later review or collation of the account was to be performed. The image on the right is an earlier version of the “pisan-dub-ba,” here originating in the Early Dynastic IIIb period. While it is nearly identical in content, its form may be seen to be quite different. The image on the left is a literary catalog of the Old Babylonian period. Though its archival function is similar to the two administrative texts pictured here, its method of storage and its original archival environment are yet unclear.

CDLI entries: P105394, P222044, P346208

credit: Heinle, Michael

current

Notwithstanding any difference from the previous entries, this mace head presents the standard structure of “a ru” dedicatory inscriptions first seen in the ED IIIb period. First, it begins with the invocation of a specific deity or deities for which the object is dedicated. Immediately following, the person performing the dedication is named, occasionally indicated by the ergative marker, e. Next, the formula includes single or multiple individuals who receive the good will of the deity on behalf of the dedicator. This is usually indicated by the nominal phrase nam-ti-la-ni, meaning “his/her life,” and the terminative post-position marker, še₃, meaning in a non-dimensional sense "to." Finally, the inscription concludes with the verbal phrase a ru, meaning "to dedicate," which at times may or may not include some of the common grammatical prefixes before the verbal root ru.

CDLI entry: P222297

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

Among the many temples that Assurnasirpal II built at Nimrud, the one mentioned on this mace head is Kidmuru, a temple devoted to Ishtar, the queen and great mistress (Akkadian bēlet rabīti). Assurnasirpal II dedicated this mace head to Ishtar for the longevity of his life and the well-being of his people and land. In contrast to dedicatory formulae written in the Early Dynastic III and Old Akkadian periods, the reconstruction of this inscription replaces the standard verbal phrase a mu-ru with ba, rendered as aqīš in Akkadian, meaning “I gave."

CDLI entry: P464619

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

As mentioned in the previous entry, Semitic syncretism not only occurred on a theological level, but also changed the written language and the way in which texts were recited. In this period, tablets were written in either Akkadian and Sumerian, or both. If written mostly in Akkadian, this meant that divine names, in addition to logographic readings of signs, would have been spoken in their Akkadian renderings rather than their Sumerian counterparts. In this mace head’s text, however, the verbal phrase a mu-ru, placed at the end of the inscription, may have been spoken in a sort of liturgical Sumerian. Akkadian personal names, such as Iṣlum and Ilī-šāliq in the inscription, also became more prominent in the written record, especially tablets deriving from northern Mesopotamian sites such as Kish.

CDLI entry: P212432

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

Manishtusu is the third king of the Old Akkadian period, well known for his diorite obelisk found at Susa. The inscription on this mace head describes Manishtusu as the dedicator to the god Aya, who is equivalent to the Sumerian god Sherida, wife of the sun god Utu (Akkadian Shamash). The inclusion of the Semitic goddess in dedicatory formulae attests to the religious syncretism of the Sumerian and Akkadian pantheon that occurred during this period. As a solar deity, she was worshipped alongside Shamash in the E-babbar (“White House”) temples of Sippar and Larsa (see the Oracc entry in their treatment of ancient Mesopotamian gods and goddesses for more information).

CDLI entry: P216553

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

This damaged mace head's inscription has been partially reconstructed from an Old Babylonian copy of Sargon’s royal inscription containing his epithet. Therefore, despite the lack of preservation, the title, “conqueror of Uruk and Ur,” can be attributed to Sargon as the dedicator. Most conspicuously, the use of the Akkadian conjunction u₃, suggests that this mace head is from the Old Akkadian period when certain Semitic influences became more prominent in the writing system. Sargon’s title emphasizes his decisive military expedition against Lugalzagesi in his capital, Uruk. His proclamation as conqueror of the southernmost Mesopotamian city-states, therefore, epitomizes his take-over of Sumer from the former ruler.

CDLI entry: P217324

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

This mace head is possibly from Larsa, a city that shared political relations with Isin and competed for territory before the consolidation of power in Mesopotamia by Hammurapi in Babylon. It is dedicated to the Lord of the Netherworld, Nergal, on behalf of Abi-sare, the Amorite king, and Arad-Utu, the mace head’s engraver. According to the inscription, Abi-sare ruled as “King of Ur and Larsa,” a title preserved from the previous king, Gungunum. Interestingly, Ur is the first city named, despite the king being enthroned in Larsa, suggesting that Ur’s political status from the Ur III period still maintained its significance as the center of southern Mesopotamia.

CDLI entry: P431605

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

This fragmented mace head only preserves part of the original inscription; however, it can be reconstructed based on other mace heads that preserve the text. It is dedicated to the god Ilaba and proclaims Naram-Sin as king, and his servant, Karshum, as governor of Niqqum. Naram-Sin’s name is preceded by the divine determinative “dingir” normally reserved for the names of deities. This self-deification followed numerous successful military campaigns that expanded the Akkadian Empire to its greatest size. He conquered Amarnum to the far northwest, Ebla to the west, and Elam to the east, taking the title “king of the four quarters of the world.” His military success and deification are further exemplified in his famous Victory Stele, which portrays his aggressive campaigns against the Lullubi in the mountains to the northeast.

Considering the vast extent of his empire, Naram-Sin needed to facilitate control over his conquered territories. He did this by installing ensis (governors) in conquered cities. Unlike the ensis of the Early Dynastic IIIb period, these officials were subservient to the king in Agade. Their main roles related to administrative activities, producing frequent reports to Naram-Sin. In this case, the inscription names Karshum as an ensi who controls the messengers in Niqqum, a city presumed to be in northern Mesopotamia. After Naram-Sin’s death, subsequent kings were unable to maintain control over conquered areas and failed to neutralize Gutian attacks, and the Akkadian Empire fell into disarray.

CDLI entry: P216600

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

This mace head is dedicated to the moon god, Sîn, and proclaims Rimush “King of Kish.” This title was once held by Mebaragesi and Mesilim in the Early Dynastic period, and was later revived by Sargon to display his rightful rule over the southern Mesopotamian city-states. Rimush inherited this title, including the expanse of the Akkadian Empire from his successful father, therefore making him the second king to rule. However, the areas that Sargon had conquered regained their autonomy upon Rimush’s ascension to the throne. Within the nine years of his reign, he reconquered southern Mesopotamia and Elam. The inscription suggests that the stone employed in the creation of this mace head derived from the booty extracted from Elam and Parahshum (modern Fars).

In honor of his fundamental contributions to the field of cuneiform studies, I am delighted to dedicate this cdli tablet entry to the Japanese scholar Tohru Ozaki, who today celebrates his 75th birthday.

CDLI entry: P217325

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

This mace head’s inscription describes Enlil, chief executive of the Sumerian pantheon and “king of all lands,” bestowing earthly rule to Lugalzegesi, king of the third dynasty of Uruk. Lugalzegesi was governor of Umma province; however, he rose to power when he overthrew the king of Kish, Ur-Zababa, and subsequently conquered the major Sumerian city-states of southern Mesopotamia. According to the Sumerian King List, he ruled for 25 years before Sargon usurped the throne, thus beginning the Dynasty of Akkad.

CDLI entry: P263413

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

This stone mace head, possibly from Girsu, is decorated with a lion-headed eagle known as the Imdugud or Anzu bird, shown clenching a pair of lions in its talons. Situated at the top of the mace head is an inscription by a high official dedicating it—the mace head—to Ningirsu, the chief god of the Lagash province and its capital Girsu, on behalf of Enannatum, the governor of Lagash.

As sukkal, Bara-ki-sumum was an official of the royal court, closely involved in economic and administrative affairs. He served under the governor Enannatum, who held great political and military jurisdiction during the ED IIIb period. Enannatum's political and military successes are mentioned on a series of clay cones dated to the period of Enmetena—the son of Enannatum and future governor of Lagash—describing a battle with Urlumma, governor of Umma. He successfully defeated the Ummaite to resolve the border dispute between the two city-states and restore crucial water rights.

CDLI entry: P222490

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

VAT 9552 is a well-preserved fragment of the third tablet of the series Ana ittišu. In contrast to tablet VI we have a better preserved manuscript in Kuyuncik collection from Nineveh: P382244. The list starts with terminology regarding the harvest. Noteworthy are expressions regarding adoption.

CDLI entry: P282495

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This detail of VAT 8875 deals with lexical entries regarding the seal (Akkadian kunukku). Sealing practices varied from period to period. The lexical list Ana ittišu to some extent shows features of grammatical texts. In this case some of the entries are repeated with alternating possessive suffixes.

CDLI entry: P282494

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

So far, seven “tablets” are known, which belong to a lexical series which “gives a hodge-podge of words and phrases relevant to business documents mixed with laws” (N. Veldhuis, "The Cuneiform Tablet as an Educational Tool," Dutch Studies on Near Ea­stern Languages and Cultures 2 [1996] 11-26). This series is called after its first entry ana ittišu (Sum. ki-ulutin-bi-še₃), “upon pertinent notice given.”

This text artifact in the Vorderasiatische Museum, Berlin, is a copy of the sixth tablet of this series. There is so far just one other manuscript (K 4317+), dating to the neo-Assyrian period and belonging to Assurbanipal’s royal library in Nineveh. This manuscript has just a small fraction of the list preserved. The Middle Assyrian manuscript, on the other hand, preserves almost the entire text.

As we have seen in earlier posts, the lexical texts from Assur are already bilingual. Each column of this four-column tablet has two sub-columns with a Sumerian version on the left and its Akkadian equivalent on the right. This column-based format of bilingual texts was mainly used for lexical texts. We will come across a different format when discussing copies of literary compositions.

In ana ittišu, each phrase is separated by a ruling from the subsequent one. The tablet’s colophon states that it’s source is Nippur. Forerunners of this lexical list are in fact known from Old Babylonian Nippur (ca. 1900-1600 BC).

CDLI entry: P282494

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Studying the extant colophons in the so-called "reconstructed Iibrary" M2 allows us to a certain extent to reconstruct the scribal sphere of a particular period in Assur's history. It is not known, whether the scribes attested in the colophons worked together or were educated at the same place. Little to nothing is known about these aspects of Middle Assyrian administration. The texts copied by the two brothers Marduk-balassu-eresh and Bel-aha-iddina offer a rather vivid picture. They checked each others copy in several instances. That may suggest that both were educated at the same time. However, we do not look at a full record.

This quite well-preserved tablet contains six columns of text. This list of objects made of wood is part of a large multi-thematic series, known by its first entry as ur₅-ra : hubullu, whose forerunners are known from the Old Babylonian period. By the Middle Assyrian period we already have a more or less standardised text.

As a general feature of lexical texts of this period, this list offers Akkadian equivalents to Sumerian terms. Each column contains two sub-columns with the Sumerian version on the left and the Akkadian on the right. Additionally, each Sumerian term is written with the classifier GIŠ to mark wood and wooden objects.

CDLI entry: P282430

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

It is unfortunate that hardly anything is known about the royal scribe Ninurta-uballissu and his sons. There are no letters, no administrative or legal documents, that may give us any hints about this family. The only testimony thus far are (currently) 23 texts, which can be assigned to one of the three sons of Ninurta-uballissu. There might be even more in the corpus (for an overview see K. Wagensonner, WOO 6 [2011]). Connecting lines in the diagram mark those tablets, where Marduk-balassu-eresh checked the copies of Bel-aha-iddina and vice versa.

(1) Marduk-balassu-eresh
(1.A.) Lexical texts
- Ea, tablet II
- Aa, tablet III/1 (= 16)
- Ura, tablet V
- Ana ittishu, tablet VI
- Ana ittishu, tablet VII
- Kagal, tablet B
- Nabnitu, tablet IV
(1.B.) Literary texts
- Lugal-e I-IV
- Lugal-e IX-XII
- Lugal-e XIII-XVI
- An-gim
- Nin-Isina's Journey to Nippur
(1.C.) Varia
- Astrolabe B

(2) Bel-aha-iddina
(2.A.) Lexical texts
- Ura, tablet III
- Diri, tablet II
- Ana ittishu, tablet III
- Kagal, tablet A
- Kagal, tablet II
[- Diri, tablet III]
(2.B.) Literary texts
- Nin-Isina's Journey to Nippur

(3) Sin-shuma-iddina
(3.A.) Lexical texts
- Ea, tablet I
- Izi, tablet XII
(3.B.) Literary text
- Unidentified

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The colophon of VAT 8875 may serve as good example of the range of information that can be gained from this data. This well-preserved tablet contains the sixth part (lit. "tablet") of the lexical series Ana ittišu, a list that contains judicial terminology and may be interpreted as a kind of phrase book.

The colophon is separated by a double ruling from the main body of the text. As mentioned in an earlier post, remarks may be written over this double ruling. The first line of the colophon contains a catch line, which refers to the first line of the subsequent "tablet" in the series. Such catch lines are used for lexical series that consist of several "tablets" in the series (DUB) or for literary compositions, which are copied on several tablets (e.g., "Ninurta's Exploits" which is copied on four tablets with four sections each; see later posts).

What follows is a technical apparatus containing information on the series, the amount of lines, and the provenance. In most cases the provenance is not rather accurate. In most instances of this "library" it is either Babylon or Nippur, where the sources supposedly originate from. There is just one case in this corpus, two copies of "Nin-Isina's Journey to Nippur," which provides more accurate data on the provenance.

The third main section of the colophon contains information on the scribe and his patronym. In some cases, not in this particular instance, this section also contains information about the individual, who checked the copy (IGI.KAR2). The colophons on the tablets written by two sons of the royal scribe Ninurta-uballissu contain a formula that contains a wish against the erasure of their name on the tablet.

Finally the tablets frequently bear a date.

CDLI entry: P282494

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The Middle Assyrian evidence for the first tablet of the lexical series Ea is quite good. The two texts presented here, VAT 10172 and BM 108862, are the main manuscripts for the reconstruction of the series. Both tablets bear colophons, although on the latter the colophon is unfortunately mostly broken off. The tablet on the left-hand side was written by a certain Sîn-šuma-iddina, son of the royal scribe Ninurta-uballissu. We will later deal in more detail with the textual heritage of this family, whose sons were responsible of copying more than 20 tablets. The colophon of this tablet states that the source for the copy was an "old" tablet. Indeed his copy makes use of archaising sign forms once in a while. This feature is missing on the second tablet, whose palaeography is clearly Middle Assyrian.

CDLI entries: P282497; P453275

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Each entry contains a very specific set of information: (1) A vertical wedge is the general marker for lexical entries; (2) a sign reading for the subsequent logogram (often written in smaller script);
(3) a Sumerian logogram; [(4) an analytical representation of the logogram (mostly part of the 1st millennium tradition]; and (5) an Akkadian equivalent.

CDLI entry: P282497

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Sign syllabaries represent the major source for both the sign values and the Akkadian meanings of Sumerian signs. In the later scribal tradition, there are, in particular, two sign syllabaries of great importance: (1) Ea and (2) Diri, both using a quite similar syntax in representing lexicographical data. The former list, whose first entry is e-a : A : nâqu, in general collects Sumerian logograms that are represented as single signs. Diri, on the other hand, contains logogram groups and their various readings and Akkadian equivalents.

The present tablet belongs to the lexical series Ea and is a copy of its first “tablet.” As a matter of fact, the Middle Assyrian evidence can be seen as the most important source for this series before the 1st millennium texts. This is due to its relative good preservation (together with P453275). The content and sequence of the list’s entries did not change significantly compared to the 1st millennium evidence, and thus the Middle Assyrian manuscripts form the basis for our reconstruction of Ea.

The sequence of the entries of Ea follows in some sense a pattern that presents simple or basic sign forms first and, subsequently, more and more complex sign forms. The first sign, A, is rather simple. Next are combinations of the sign A, A with inscribed characters (for instance, A×IGI [EYE within WATER]= Akkadian bakû, “to cry”), and so on.

CDLI entry: P282497

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The site of Assur, located on the western shore of the Tigris, yielded textual finds from many periods of Mesopotamian history. Very rich are the finds dating to the Middle Assyrian period (ca. 1400-1000 BC). The subsequent posts focus on the so-called "reconstructed library M 2," a collection of texts, whose larger part is considered to belong to an official library. However, their original setting is unknown. Some of these texts found their way to the later Neo-Assyrian capital Nineveh and were included in the "palace library."

The text depicted here is a bilingual copy of the Sumerian literary composition "Ninurta's Exploits." The bilingual sources from Middle Assyrian Assur represent the most important source for the Akkadian translation of Sumerian literature before the 1st millennium BC.

CDLI entry: P282600

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Conditions of tablets vary greatly and change over time. The example shown represents a tablet which had split into many fragments due to salt activity within the fabric. The fragments are brittle and crumble easily making it difficult to reassemble the interior. Since they cannot be reattached easily and in order to protect the remains from further deterioration during handling a removable fill was made. A thin plastic sheet was placed over the tablet before applying Polyfilla (calcium sulphate/cellofas) to the break edge. Once dry the fill and sheet were removed and the fill refined, sealed and painted before attaching it to the object. Polyfilla is lighter weight than plaster and much softer; using it to create as support fill allows the object to be held without putting pressure on the original surface which is delicate.

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

Numerous cuneiform tablets exhibit dark spots and stains on their visible surfaces. The discoloration doesn’t represent damage, but it does diminish the readability of affected texts. This phenomenon was recently studied by C. Gütschow (“Methoden zur Restaurierung von ungebrannten und gebrannten Keilschrifttafeln—Gestern und Heute,” BBVO 22 [2012] 75ff.). Analyses showed that these stains derive from manganese, that is a natural component of clay. After excavated tablets dry out, the manganese reaches the tablet surface and oxidizes.

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

This Hellenistic legal document is shown here being re-assembled using low tension clamps to secure the sections while the adhesive cures. The adhesive was applied in some areas as a liquid and in others as cured sheets which were reactivated with solvent.

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

Here, the tablet Ashm 1974-580 is shown after the treatment. It shows several removable fills used to support fragments where the substrate has been lost. The fills have been painted to a solid colour so that they aren’t distracting to the object but also clearly distinguishable from the original. The fills have not been cast directly onto the object and can be easily removed with a small amount of solvent.

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

Though appearing stable at first, the text Ashm 1974-580 suffered quite a lot. Parts of its surface were flaked off and left a greater number of fragments. To a great extent these fragments bear text and fragments of signs.

Recently most of the fragments could be rejoined to the tablet. Since the inner core is quite unstable as well, parts of the supporting material are gone. In order to re-attach some fragments, it was necessary to add a modern support.

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

This four-sided prism contains a frequently copied Sumerian literary composition, which is nowadays called the "Kesh Temple Hymn." Although the inner clay body appears to be in a relatively good condition, some areas on the surface became unstable. In the course of a recent treatment of the prism a loose fragment (highlighted) could be rejoined to the tablet. Since any supporting material was gone, the fragment needed to be lifted onto a modern fill.

The surface of the prism contains many smaller cracks. In order to stabilise the surface and prevent additional fragments from falling off, a thin adhesive was applied with a micropipette to consolidate the cracks.

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

This large four-sided prism containing several Sumerian literary compositions has received treatment some time ago. In order to stabilise the fragile body of the prism, the losses were filled with plaster. Unfortunately plaster that has been cast directly onto the tablet cannot be removed easily; making it difficult to replace with a more suitable material. A further complication is that plaster has been deposited on the surface adjacent to the fills leaving a fine layer of plaster. This layer is obscuring parts of the inscribed surface of the text.

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

The large tablet Ashm 1923-404 (containing an Old Babylonian version of a profession list) unfortunately represents a rather degraded clay body. It is one of those objects in the Ashmolean Museum, which is at risk of irreparable damage, if it does not receive treatment to secure the surface as far as possible.

Parts of the surface have already been lost; other areas are at risk of flaking off. Two areas are highlighted here. The red area shows a part of the surface, which is extremely worn out. Most of the inscription is gone. Both obverse and reverse have been imaged with the camera dome. Reflectance Transformation Imaging discussed in earlier posts thanks to the raking light can still help to make remains of the inscription visible.

The green area represents earlier treatment of the tablet. This kind of pattern with little round dots can be found on a greater number of tablets. These are not ancient traces, but a shadow of the surface the tablet was dried on during the desalination process. The circles are actually salt drawn to the surface where it could escape more quickly due to holes in the material they were placed on.

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

The majority of cuneiform artefacts were discovered unfired in the soil. In cases such as Palace G in Ebla, which has been destroyed by fire, the tablets were burnt already in antiquity. Furthermore, many so-called "library" texts were fired in antiquity as well. Until quite recently it has been customary to fire tablets in museum collections in order to better preserve them. The firing of a tablet, however, changes the chemical and physical characteristics of the clay. The firing not always led to the desired result and did the artefacts more harm than good. It became necessary to modify the firing process according to the analysis of the clay fabric of each artefact.

Historically firing was followed by desalination in water to remove soluble salts. However this treatment is not always effective and the approach is debated because the salt can be a significant part of the object's structure. Controlling the environment and specifically the humidity that these objects are stored has been shown to be an effective way of preventing salt movement and therefore damage. Cases are shown here of salts remaining in the clay body even after firing and desalination. Depending on the conditions of storage these salts might reach the surface and build smaller or larger encrustations. Examples: two Old Babylonian legal texts P315345 and P315343; and an Early Old Babylonian royal inscription with a larger area covered with thick salt encrustation.

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

Including the collection of cuneiform artefacts of the Bodleian library the Ashmolean Museum holds 4,515 objects, which makes this collection the second-largest in Britain after the British Museum and one of the major European collections of text artefacts from the Ancient Near East. In preparation for the digitisation of the collection by CDLI the greater part of the collection has been surveyed between June and September 2012 (undertaken by the conservator Dana Norris). In the course of the assessment the tablets have been measured in order to start preparation for re-housing each tablet individually in storage boxes.

The assessment revealed that 15 % of the collection is in a very good condition and almost two thirds of the texts are stable. 38 objects of the collection were at risk of irreparable damage, would they not receive treatment. About 140 objects (the afore-mentioned 38 including) had loose or unstable fragments. Some of the largest objects in the collection may have suffered from the firing and subsequent desalination process that took place in the late 1970s due to the physical shape and thickness of the clay.

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

(3) In the next step Image 3 is copied onto the merged Images 1 and 2. On this image the light comes from the right side. Therefore the better lit areas are selected. After feathering this the selection, it is copied onto a new layer and the original Image 3 can be deleted.

(4) It is now necessary to do some adjustments, which involve selecting areas of transition and modifying exposure and other settings. Since captures from light sources are taken, that lie opposite of each other, the transition points between the selected areas frequently appear problematic (especially in the case of tablet with a great curvature on the reverse).

After having all that done, this representation can be included in an already existed (flat-bed scanned) fat cross, in order to increase readability.

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Much work is being done on developing an online RTI-viewer, which allows to adjust the light angles in a web-based environment (see, for instance, the Portable Light Dome). In the meantime captures taken by the camera dome can be used to gain a good 2D-result. It must be stressed that this process cannot be automatised. Each side need to be treated individually. The end result sometimes may seem over-edited, but it is aimed at provided the most readable result.

After processing the raw files to a PTM file, this file is opened in a locally installed RTI-viewer (see earlier posts). Depending on the curvature of the object either three or four images with different light angles need to be exported. On the left-hand side three such exported shots of Ashm 1922-176 are shown with indication of the various light sources (yellow points on green). Image 1 uses light from the upper left corner, Image 2 from the lower left corner and Image 3 from the right side.

(1) In a first step all three shots are opened in Photoshop. First, Image 2 is copied onto Image 1. Since on Image 2 the light comes from the lowerleft corner, we can select the areas of better visibility.

(2) The selection needs to be feathered in order to avoid sharp borders and have a smooth transition between the different images. That being done the selection is copied into a new layer. The original Image 2 can now be removed. In some cases one of the layers needs some adjustments.

Of course, parts of Image 3 still need to be blended over this result. This will be shown in tomorrow's post.

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The script and Photoshop actions discussed in the last couple of days can also be used to automatically process large quantities of raw images. In order to do that a folder containing raw files is taken. The script searches for the first file that contains "be" (standing for bottom edge) and then selects all files that start with the same element (in this case a museum number).

The remaining parts of the process are similar to those described before. The files are merged together into one document. Then the background is removed and the sides are preliminary aligned. This preliminary fat cross is then saved with the museum number as file name.

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

After the sides are aligned to produce a preliminary "fatcross" (see [4] on the left) each side can now be placed.

(5) Since the black background of each layer was removed in an earlier step, the sides can easily be aligned and placed quite close to either obverse or reverse. The obverse is surrounded by all four edges with the top edge above and so forth. Remains of the support (or foams) may now obstruct several sides. In a further step, a script helps reducing the manual labour in removing these problems as far as possible. Both obverse and reverse are cleaned. The remaining areas can be quickly cleaned with the eraser tool.

Last but not least, dust and little scratches need to be removed, but the pollution on scans depends on the frequency of cleaning the glass and of course on the text artefact itself, which might lose dust during the imaging process. Flat-bed scanner need to be renewed after scanning a certain amount of objects, since scratches cannot be avoided completely.

In tomorrow's post the processing of a large batch of raw files using this method will be presented.

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

As we have seen yesterday, the individual sides are copied into one document. The script uses the raw files. There is no need to crop the sides individually, since the subsequent step in the script deals with the background (see upper left corner).

(3) First, the levels (brightness, contrast, etc.) are adjusted. This darkens not just the individual side (making the inscription more visible), but the background as well, which now should be pitch black. Photoshop's Magic Wand selects automatically a specific point in each layer (the upper left corner at position 0,0 is chosen for this purpose). The background is deleted. Since the edges are scanned with the help of a support, remains of this support may still be visible. The remains can easily be removed with the eraser, after all edges are aligned correctly.

(4) In the next step the script preliminarily puts all sides in the right area. Since the script does use the original raw files, final adjustments need to be done manually. However, most of the bakcground is gone now and hence it is possoble to move the edges rather close to obverse and reverse without obstucting them with the respective backgrounds.

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The advantages of flat-bed scans in terms of processing times and efforts have been made clear (see Digitization Guidelines). Most of the manual labour of creating "fatcrosses" can be done by using scripts and actions. On this and the pages that follow in the next couple of days, one way of processing scans is being presented.

Let us have a look on creating a fatcross for one tablet, Ashm 1922-176, a letter from the famous Šamaš-hazir correspondence discussed earlier (CDLI-entry: P450713).

(1) First the individual sides (bottom edge (be), left edge (le), obverse (o), reverse (r), right edge (re), top edge (te)) need to be selected. The script copies these files into one document and into individual layers.

(2) The interim result of this first part is a patch-work of the individual sides. The layers are renamed to fit the sides.

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Once all six sides (or even more in case of a cone or prism) are processed, they can be stitched together to a "fatcross," i.e., a representation of the text artefact making all sides visible.

Since the distance between object and camera lens differs depending on the side taken (unless the distance is adjusted using the respective focus, which is however time-consuming), the size of each side need to be adjusted individually. Furthermore, although specific settings in the afore-mentioned software Photomatix Pro help to reduce the background noise, in many cases the background need to be cleaned carefully.

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Earlier we saw that merging together photos taken with different exposure lengths and hence producing High Dynamic Range photos lead to a better output of shadows and highlights on text artefacts.

In most cases three shots suffice to get good results. Although images can processed manually to get an HDR photo, it is worthwhile to use specific software for doing so. Photomatix Pro, for instance, allows for adjusting various settings in order to gain a balanced photo.

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The camera dome collects 76 images that are processed to a Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM) file. These processed files are opened in a locally installed viewer (called RTIviewer). In this program the light angles can be manipulated. For gathering an interim 2D image, three or four different light positions are saved individually.

In the left upper image the light position is (as indicated within the green circle) in the left upper corner; on the right side there is an extracted image with the light position in the right lower corner.

In Adobe Photoshop, these three (or four) images are merged and areas of good exposure and detail are kept and blended in order to gain an evenly lighted 2D result that can be combined with processed images from a flatbed scanner.

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

After discussing various imaging techniques that are used by CDLI, let us return to Reflectance Transformation Imaging. Whether using a camera dome or just placing a shiny ball in an object's vicinity, it is necessary to process the gathered raw images. The essential key is a file that contains the light positions (x, y, and z axis) of each LED in the camera dome (or positions of light sources that are reflected in the shiny ball).

A so-called PTM-fitter merges the raw images together and calculates the various light angles. The resulting PTM-file can be viewed in a RTIviewer. In this program the various effects of the light sources on the text artefact can be simulated.

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The camera dome at the Ashmolean Museum produces 76 images (as explained earlier each with a different light angle). The individual light positions are saved in a lp-file, which is in fact a text file containing a list of all LEDs and the corresponding x, y, and z axes (see the screenshot below on the right side).

Cultural Heritage Imaging provides a RTI-builder, which allows for easy processing the raw images from the camera dome. In doing so, they program uses the file with the light positions and calculates the different light angles. In case an object is imaged without a dome and using a glossy ball, the individual positions of the light sources need to be extrapolated in each processing by selecting the ball on the shots. The program then detects the highlighting reflections of the light on the glossy ball and thus calculates the light positions.

This program furthermore allows to crop the area. Therefore, valuable storage space is saved.

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

As mentioned in yesterday's post, a steady work-flow guarantees not just a faster imaging, but is also less prone to errors (e.g., forgotten sides). CDLI's digitization guidelines, contain instructions of how to use such a work-flow. In doing so, starting with the right side (obverse or reverse) of a tablet is less crucial and can easily be corrected in the processing afterwards. (For some periods identifying obverse or reverse may pose difficulties. Furthermore, splinters from the surface of larger tablets quite frequently cannot be identified as belonging to either obverse or reverse.)

The work-flow can be used for one tablet at a time, but also for a bunch of tablets. Smallish administrative texts dating to the Ur III period, for instance, can be scanned in groups of up to 24. For edges it is necessary to use a kind of support. CDLI uses a "tablet box," which is a kind of frame with several compartments (see the photo on yesterday's post). In these conpartments the tablets can be inserted and hold in place with foam pieces.

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

For larger collections of cuneiform text artefacts as the Ashmolean Museum the camera dome is used for about 20-25 % of the holdings. This technology is used, in particular, for high impact objects as well as damaged and sealed surfaces. Imaging texts with the camera dome takes a certain amount of time. The camera dome needs about 6-7 minutes per side.

All text artefacts are imaged using a conventional flat-bed scanner (here, the Canon 5600F, which proved to allow for very good results). Flat-bed scanning has several advantages. First, the whole process is faster (especially by employing a certain work-flow; see the next post) compared to other imaging techniques. Since each surface has always the same distance to the scanner, the speed of processing the raw files is significantly faster than processing images produced with other techniques (a nice side-effect is that given the resolution the size of an artefact can be calculated).

In the section "Processing" following soon, the processing techniques of scans will be presented in more detail.

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

High Dynamic Range Photography (short HDR) allows for a better management of the shadowy and light spots of objects and therefore captures a greater dynamic range between the darkest and lightest spots of an image. This method is quite suitable for text artefacts. The camera is mounted on a copy-stand facing down (alternatively a tripod can be used). A light source casts light onto the object from the upper left corner. A reflector (either another light source or a piece of aluminium foil) on the opposite corner reflects the light back to the object.

The camera is set to M(anual mode). A mid-range shutter speed is chosen. Automatic Exposure (AE) bracketing allows for generating three (or up to nine) shots each with a different exposure length (short, middle, long). Single shots often can lead to a loss of detail.

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

In case the object that needs to be imaged with Reflectance Transformation Imaging technology is oversized and does not fit into the dome (the maximum size of the object must not exceed a third of the dome's diameter), it is possible to use this imaging technique also without a dome. The great advantage of a camera dome is that it eliminates any ambient light and offers a completely darkened environment.

A hand-held flash replaces the LEDs attached to the inside of the camera dome. In order to have the light source approximately at the same distance to the object the easiest method is to use a piece of string, whose length is three times as large as the object's height.

At any point (or at several) a shiny ball (most adequate are either a red or black snooker ball) is placed that reflects the light source (from the hand-held flash) at every shot taken.

When processed the computer can calculate the location of the light source in relation to the reflection on the ball. Whereas the number of LEDs within a camera dome is fixed, so-called "Highlight RTI" allows for as many shots with different light positions as possible.

The object imaged here is a Neo-Assyrian relief from the North-West Palace of Ashurnasirpal II.

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

The diameter of the camera dome is approximately 1 m. The schematics on the right show demonstrate how the dome works. On the its inside 76 light sources (LEDs) are attached. One after another they cast light onto the surface of an object, which is placed in the centre. In order to gain the best results, the artefact is on level with the horizon of the hemisphere.

In a couple of days time we are going to have a look into the viewing and processing of images produced by such a camera dome. For further information on this technology and its use for the digitisation of ancient documents see the webpage of Cultural Heritage Imaging.

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The camera dome used by the project "Creating a Sustainable Cuneiform Digital Library" at the University of Oxford uses 76 daylight-LEDs, which are attached to the inside of the plexiglas dome. A high resolution digital camera is mounted on the top of the dome, looking straight down through a hole. The object is placed on a stage in the centre lifted up to the horizon.

This technology named Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) is used to create a Polynomial Texture Map (PTM) of any object whose surface has a texture. The 76 individual raw files each using a different light source and therefore a different light angle, are merged together. In the resulting PTM-file the various light angles can be simulated.

Tomorrow's post will show the inside of the camera dome as well as a cross section.

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This tablet in the Ashmolean Museum collects incantations from a medical ritual that is known as ugu, "scull," the full title being in translation "If a man's head is feverish." This ritual series collects medical conditions and a respective treatment, which includes the preparation of potions and ointments as well as their application.

K 2354+ is a large manuscript from the library of the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurbanipal from Nineveh, which contains the first section of the ritual series. In contrast, the example in the Ashmolean Museum contains specifically incantations that belong to section I-IV of the series.

CDLI entry: P274683

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The cuneiform culture attests to a vast corpus of omina. Divination, the observation of signs on the organs of a sheep, was one of the major tools for predicting the future and come to a decision. While liver omina are well-known from cuneiform texts, omina regarding the sheep's lungs are quite scarce.

This quite large and unfortunately fragmentary tablet in the Ashmolean Museum originates from the excavations in ancient Kish and therefore belongs to the rich finds of scholarly texts from the first millennium BC Babylonia. There are several parallels known for this text (collected by A. R. George, "Review of OECT 11," [1990], ZA 80, 159). Most notable is a fairly well preserved manuscript from Nineveh dating to the Middle Assyrian period and coming originally from Assur (K 205).

Besides liver models in clay there are also a couple of examples of model lungs. The most significant example comes from Nimrud (CTN 4, 60). It is a three-dimensional model of a sheep's lungs and other internal organs. A further example is CBS 470, whose surface is divided into fields by lines. Each field is inscribed with either the cuneiform sign for "left," "right," or both to indicate whether the omen is good ("right") or bad ("left").

Coming back to our text, the following two omens may be cited:

If the lower part of the lung is split on the right, then the totality of my army will disintegrate. My army will collapse in its main body.
If the lower part of the lung is split on the left, then the totality of the enemy army will disintegrate. The enemy army will collapse in its main body.

CDLI entry: P348953

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

About 75 documents in the Ashmolean Museum date to the Hellenistic period (323-63 BC). Outstanding is a larger group of brick-shaped legal documents.

This contract (see T. Doty, Cuneiform Archives from Hellenistic Uruk [1977], 102ff.; P. Corò, Prebende Templari in Età Seleucide [2005], 307ff.) deals with the lease of a butcher's allotment (ṭābihūtu) for a period of 10 years. Compared to other prebends like brewer's prebend or the baker's prebend the individual leasing such an allotment will do the work that is connected with it and enjoys its income. Kidin-Sîn agrees to pay cuts of meat to Anu-mar-ittannu.

Furthermore the document contains clauses in order to prevent the seller (Anu-mar-ittannu) to otherwise sell the allotment, and to prevent Kidin-Sîn from subcontracting the allotment to other parties. Both parties receive a copy of the contract.

In the Hellenistic period the stamp seal came into new fashion. It is a common feature of such documents that the parties and witnesses sealed with their respective seals. The impressions are labeled.

CDLI entry: P342373

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Tabular accounts, which present information on horizontal and vertical axes are known, in particular, starting with the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1900-1600 BC). This tablet in the Ashmolean Museum is such a tabular account. The information is organised and presented into columns and rows. It records the lengths, widths and depths of earth works. The table presents the volumes of canals dug and not yet dug and assigns these works to workmen or overseers. Additionally the document gives subtotals and totals of lengths and volumes at various points. The text groups the information into headed columns. Although the tablet bears no date, the names mentioned as well as the palaeography makes the area of Larsa in the time of the Babylonian kings Hammurapi or Samsu-iluna plausible.

The tabular complexity of this text is astonishing, for its organisation follows each, a horizontal and vertical axis. Furthermore, it has three levels of calculation: (1) entries marked with "that PN did" in the right-most column; (2) the descriptive phrase running the whole width of the tablet; (3) the grand total at the end. (edition: E. Robson, "Accounting for Change: The Development of Tabular Book-keeping in Early Mesopotamia," in: M. Hudson & C. Wunsch (eds) Creating Economic Order [2004], 112ff.).

CDLI entry: P347361

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This tablet in the collection of cuneiform artifacts of the Bodleian library, which is now part of the Ashmolean Museum, contains a mathematical problem, whose goal is to find the length and area of a triangle (edition: E. Robson, SCIAMVS 5 [2004], 24ff., no. 14). The area is described as a furrowed field, on which "furrows descrease on furrows by 6 rods." Therefore, the text provides information on the hypotenuse of the triangular area. Furthermore, it gives us the width of the field and the amount of furrows. On top of the obverse the text gives a diagram that shows the pertinent triangle.

The first problem is to calculate the length (line 4: UŠ EN.NAM). In lines 5-13 the calculations are described step by step. Since the width was already provided, the next problem is to find out the area of the triangle. The calculation of the latter is less complicated. It is simply needed to multiply half of the width with the length.

CDLI entry: P368255

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Mathematical texts come in many guises. This large multi-column tablet in the Ashmolean Museum contains a metrological list of capacities, weights, and areas. Metrological lists, such as this example, occur early in the Old Babylonian curriculum of apprentice scribes. A good grasp of numbers and the various ways of measuring were essential for a future administrative scribe.

Metrological lists are hence quite common in our documentation. Christine Proust mentions 187 tablets that can be assigned to this type of mathematical text (see C. Proust, CDLJ 2009:1). Thanks to their organisation in various sections and a clear structure of the metrology these texts provide valuable data on the different notations and the systems behind these notations. For a similar example see HS 249+1805 in the Hilprecht collection in Jena.

CDLI entry: P368260

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The Sumerian New Year was known as za₃-mu, “edge of the year,” and, celebrated with the Babylonian Akitu festival, fell on the day of the spring equinox. The term is best known from Ur III period references to a special ration of barley dispensed to dependent laborers. Nonetheless, we offer an example of accounting done in the provincial capital city of Umma five months after the celebration on 1 January 2019 BC—or thereabouts. Most likely, the receipt represents late clean-up of long open accounts.

CDLI entry: P116964

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The Ashmolean Museum houses a text dating to the Old Akkadian period (ca. 2340-2200 BC), which was interpreted as mathematical exercise text. Parallels are known. So is ZA 74, 60 a tablet in the Oriental Institute Museum in Chicago (edition: R.M. Whiting, "More Evidence for Sexagesimal Calculations in the Third Millennium B.C." ZA 74 [1984], 59ff.). Exercises such as these show that sexagesimal place notation, which is known in Old Babylonian mathematical texts and served to express fractions, was already used in the 3rd millennium. Both texts end with the Sumerian phrase ba-pa₃. An even closer parallel to this small tablet in the Ashmolean Museum is ZA 74, 65. Both, this tablet and our text mention an individual named Ur-Ištaran.

CDLI entry: P215434

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This tablet in the Ashmolean Museum belongs to the Old Babylonian archive of Mannum-mešu-lissur in Nippur and was published by G. R. Hunter in the eighth volume of the Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts. Texts such as this one deal with agreements for adoption. Besides documents that deal with the adoption of children in order to fulfil the social need to provide parents to orphans or heirs for childless couples other texts attest to the economic aspects of adoption. They may declare properties to be shared by the inheritors or assignments of custodianships for specific gates and so forth.

This particular document is dated to the reign of Sin-iqišam. It contains the shares of two sons. The individual shares contain properties (houses and fields) including their various locations (in relation to adjacent plots) as well as temple offices (or prebends), which are given for specific periods.

The document ends with the phrase:

Together they have agreed to the division. In future each will not make a claim against the other. Thus have they sworn in the name of the king.

A parallel of this document is provided by OECT 8, 17.

Edition: E. C. Stone and D. I. Owen, Adoption in Old Babylonian Nippur and the Archive of Mannum-mešu-lissur (= Mesopotamian Civilizations vol. 3) no. 53.

CDLI entry: P283645

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This administrative document records very large amounts of reeds revceived by Shulgi-ili from three named “scribes of the brewery” and from the important imperial administrator known as the Sukkal-maḫ. The first two scribes are said to come from Drehem (ancient Puzriš-Dagan), the administrative and quite possibly redistributive center established close to Nippur by Shulgi; the third scribe is said to be from Nippur itself. The delivery from the Sukkal-maḫ is ascribed to the work of the conscripts of Girsu.

A simple search using CDLI’s new seals catalogue results in five almost identical documents recording the same transaction from the years Ibbi-Suen 1 and 2.

On the four other artifacts, the seal of Shulgi-ili is found directly on the tablet, whereas our Ashmolean tablet, itself unsealed, was placed in a sealed envelope. Shulgi-ili is otherwise mostly known in Drehem records as a deliverer of fattened animals; thus, the reeds in these accounts, whose qualification zi demonstrates that they were used as fodder, were destined for these same animals.

CDLI entry: P142785

credit: Dahl, Jacob L.

Thanks to the excavations at the ancient site of Kish, the Ashmolean Museum houses a substantial collection of late lexical material from Mesopotamia. These texts are generally dated to the neo-Babylonian period. They reach from elementary lists of signs to complex compendia of lexical items.

This relatively well-preserved tablet appears to be as yet unpublished. It furthermore cannot be found in Oliver R. Gurney’s index of the lexical texts of the museum published in MSL SS 1. The content clearly relates this text to the geography sections of the thematic lexical series ur₅-ra : hubullu (edited in MSL 11). This series in its canonical version consists of 24 “tablets” covering a wide range of topics. The geography sections are preserved on tablets 20-22 of the series. Our text is important for the reconstruction of tablets 21-22, starting with important place names like Nippur and Isin. The reverse contains, among others sections on temple names, gate names and, finally, stars.

CDLI entry: P450731

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This lexical text in the Ashmolean Museum dates to the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1900-1600 BC). This period marks a time, when a new repertory of lexical texts has been compiled. Among the vast corpus of lexical texts dating already to the early second millennium, it is multi-thematic series ur₅-ra : hubullu that represents a complex inventory of words.

This multi-column tablet deals with topographical terms, among others a long list of rivers and canals. The list starts with the "ditch" (Sum. e.g.₂). The second entry is pa₅, "small canal." The list then goes on and proceeds with a long enumeration of river names marked by the classifier ID₂. All three designations are central to agriculture. Water for irrigation came from a river or major canal either to smaller canals (pa₅, Akk. atappu) or ditches (e.g.₂, Akk. īku).

The remaining text, as far preserved, contains other topographical designations and food stuff (e.g., designations of barley).

Quite a few designations are also attested in the later tradition of this lexical series, most notably in on the 22nd tablet (the series ur₅-ra : hubullu in its canonical version frm the late 2nd and 1st millennia BC consists of 24 tablets). In tomorrow's post a much later version of this list dating to the first millennium BC will be presented.

Edition: E. Reiner (with the collaboration of M. Civil), The Series HAR-ra = hubullu, Tablets XX - XXIV (MSL XI), 1974, pp. 144ff.

CDLI entry: P452252

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This lexical text was compiled in the late Uruk period (ca. 3200-3000 BC). It contains a list of metals and metal objects, following a sophisticated sequence based on semantic and graphical characteristics. This word list belongs to a group of archaic thematic word lists that, at the beginning of the third millennium, spread from Uruk to other cities in the ancient Near East. The best evidence for this particular list originates from the northern Babylonian sites of Fara and Tell Abu Salabikh, both dating to the ED IIIa period (ca. 2600-2500 BC). The list even reached the Syrian site of Ebla, attested there in an almost perfectly preserved manuscript.

While some archaic word lists, at least so far as we know, cease to be transmitted after the end of the Early Dynastic period, other lists continued in use until the early 2nd millennium, alongside the emergence of many new (genres of) lexical texts in the late Early Dynastic period. Still, the evidence for these texts in the second half of the third millennium is quite scarce.

The quite well-preserved seven-sided prism in the Ashmolean museum (originally published by O. R. Gurney in 1969 Iraq 31, pp. 3ff.) contains a version of the Metals list that dates to the Old Akkadian period. An important peculiarity about this version is the addition of a semantic classifier to each of the entries. This classifier ‛uruda’ precedes designations of objects made of copper. Otherwise, the text itself does not differ substantially from the Early Dynastic versions. Besides this modification, one should note the alternation of entries with and without the sign AN in a large section of the text. This feature is already present in the archaic versions. Patterns like this one are not uncommon in the early lexical corpus. The qualifier AN has been interpreted in several ways. Besides being a divine marker, it has also been argued that it might be an early form of the Sumerian designation for tin, an-na, or, since AN is also the Sumerian designation of the heavens, for “meteoric” iron.

CDLI entry: P213492

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

To all those who have contributed to, or just enjoyed our little app in the past year, our warmest wishes on this Christmas Day—two to go.

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The cultic calendar was of immense importance in Mesopotamia. This tablet in the Ashmolean Museum is a type of composition that was known to the ancient scribes as kakku sakku, "sealed, stopped up". A. Livingstone describes such texts as "expository works in which events from rituals are detailed and then explained by equating them with mythological events" (Livingstone, Mystical and Mythological Explanatory Works [1986], 115). As was noted by O. R. Gurney in his edition of the text in OECT 11, the only close parallel to the text in the Ashmolean Museum is VAT 9947 (see Livingstone 1986, 126ff.).

Other compositions that loosely relate to such a text are the series Iqqur ippuš or the so-called Astrolabes (see, for instance, Astrolabe B). Most information regarding our text can be gained from the first column, which is better preserved. This column deals with days of the second month in the Babylonian calendar (iti-gu₄, Ayyaru). Astrolabe B relates to the gu₄-si-su festival in Nippur, which preceded the preparations of the coming plowing and sowing. That text states: "The month Ayyaru, the Pleiades, the Seven Gods. The Opening up of the ground; the oxen are yoked, the land becomes arable. The plows are washed; the month of heroic Ningirsu, the great ensi of Enlil." The tablet in the Ashmolean Museum deals with rituals performed on various days during specific months.

Edition: Gurney, O. R. 1989. Literary and miscellaneous texts in the Ashmolean Museum. OECT 11, Oxford, pp. 26ff.

CDLI entry: P348949

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This intriguing work of Akkadian religious poetry sings the praises of Amurru, a god of the steppe. According to one plausible interpretation, our text dates to the reign of Rim-Sin (1822-1763 BC), who ruled for sixty years over the southern Mesopotamian city of Larsa until his defeat at the hands of king Hammurabi of Babylon in 1763 (following the so-called middle chronology).

If the attribution to Rim-Sin is correct, then “Amurru and his crook” is currently one of the oldest extant works of Akkadian literature. The technical skill evinced in our poem’s carefully balanced verse, which is designed to be heard rather than read, suggests that Akkadian compositions such as these had a longer history than our limited sources allow us to see. In previous centuries, according to our evidence, Sumerian had been the literary language of choice. One of the most popular Sumerian genres was the hymn: a brief song of praise addressed to a god, at the end of which a king would request divine favor or thank the god for having granted his favor previously.

There is some evidence to suggest that under the kings of Larsa, among whom Rim-Sin was prominent, Sumerian literature in general began to decline, and that hymns in particular began to be composed in Akkadian. This development was to produce some of the early masterpieces of Akkadian literature under the dynasty of king Hammurabi of Babylon. While our text is no such masterpiece, it is nevertheless artfully composed and exhibits many phrases and grammatical features that are characteristic of high literary Akkadian. The religious outlook of “Amurru and his crook” is typically Mesopotamian: the singer praises Amurru both for his importance among the other gods of the pantheon and for the generosity and clemency he shows to mankind. The crook—the symbol of Amurru, who seems to be a pastoral god of the western steppe—has the power to “give life to the people,” as the hymn says. This may involve a pun on the word meaning “crook” (Akkadian: gamlum) and a similar-sounding word meaning “to be kind” (Akkadian: gamālum).

Edition: Gurney, O. R. 1989. Literary and miscellaneous texts in the Ashmolean Museum. OECT 11, Oxford, pp. 15-19

CDLI entry: P348900

credit: Metcalf, Christopher

The "Kesh temple hymn" is one of the few Old Sumerian literary texts, which is preserved not just through manuscripts from the ED IIIa period (ca. 2600-2500 BC), but also through a high amount of manuscripts dating to the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1900-1600 BC). This composition belonged to the corpus of ten literary texts, which were copied by apprentice scribes in the Old Babylonian "school". This collection is nowadays known as "Decad".

This manuscript in the Ashmolean Museum is one of the few copies of this composition, which were inscribed on a prism. The inner structure of the text is maintained by the repetition of a refrain that was already extant in the earliest versions from Tell Abu Salabikh dating to the ED IIIa period (ca. 2600-2500 BC). In the Old Babylonian version this refrain reads in translation as follows:

Will anyone else bring forth something as great as Keš?
Will any other mother ever give birth to someone as great as its hero Ašgi?
Who has ever seen anyone as great as its lady Nintur?

This refrain is followed by the remark e₂-n-kam-ma-am₃, "it is the nth house." The "Standard version" in the Old Babylonian period contains either 8 or 10 of such stanzas.

The content of this temple hymn can be summarised as follows (after C. Wilcke, "Die Hymne auf das Heiligtum Keš," Fs. Vanstiphout [2006], 201ff.):
(1) Enlil praises Kesh and the goddess Nisaba writes down the song
(2) (Enlil approaching the temple), characteristics of the temple seen from the distance
(3) Visual and acoustic impressions of the temple
(4) Dimensions, architecture, colours, and shape of the temple
(5) Purpose of the temple for the gods and humankind
(6) The temple on its inside
(7) The temple on its outside
(8) Continuation of the description of the temple
(9) Cultic personnel and ceremonies
(10) Invitation to come to Kesh and participate at the feast

CDLI entry: P452248
ETCSL translation: 4.80.2

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Within the Old Babylonian scribal education collections of literary letters were used to instruct apprentice scribes. Besides a collection known as Sumerian Epistolary Miscellany (SEpM), of which this prism may serve as example, the school curriculum also knew further collections as, for instance, the Correspondence of the Kings of Ur (CKU) and the Correspondence of the Kings of Larsa (CKL).

This prism in the former Weld-Blundell collection and now part of the Ashmolean Museum is associated with the Sumerian Epistolary Miscellany (SEpM; see A. Kleinerman, Education in Early 2nd Millennium BC Babylonia. The Sumerian Epistolary Miscellany, 2011).

SEpM contains eighteen literary letters and four miscellaneous compositions. These compositions are linked through their epistolary nature and their close relation to the city of Nippur. The prism in the Ashmolean Museum is just linked via SEpM 22 to the afore-mentioned collection. The remaining compositions collected on it, belong to the correspondence of the Kings of Larsa. The prism contains the following compositions:

(1) Inim-Inana to Lugal-ibila (= SEpM 22; ETCSL 3.3.12)
(2) Sin-iddinam to Utu (ETCSL 3.2.05)
(3) Ninszatapada to Rim-Sin
(4) Nanna-mansum to Ninisina
(5) Sin-iddinam to Ninisina

The first literary letter is a quite short composition. Its content is appropriate for a pupil in the Old Babylonian school, whose curriculum mainly consists of Sumerian texts. It contains some instructions for how to treat children at school. The teacher is responsible for them and must not let them go, even if the pupil says so. Intriguing is the first part:

Do not neglect Sumerian! For the second time, I am sending you a message in the proper language.

In the Old Babylonian period, Akkadian was the vernacular. The curriculum of young scribes often betrays that fact. Though pupils had to copy bilingual lists as well, the major part of the curriculum was centred around Sumerian scribal lore.

CDLI entry: P345806

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Excavations in the area of ancient Kish yielded a substantial number of Old Akkadian texts. This tablet in the Ashmolean Museum was found in the eastern part of the city complex of Kish, called Tell Ingharra. Unfortunately the lack of any precise archaeological record does not allow any further judgements regarding the original location of the tablet. The tablet is written in a fine Old Akkadian ductus.

This tablet is one of the rare examples of incantations that can be dated to the Old Akkadian period (ca. 2340-2200 BC). It is certain that the contents of this tablet are to be interpreted as an incantation "designed to overcome the resistance of a recalcitrant girl against the love of a young man" (Westenholz, A. & J. G. Westenholz. 1977. “Help for rejected suitors. The Old Akkadian Love Incantation MAD V 8,” Orientalia NS 46, 198-219). The composition plays with the topos of the fertile garden, an oft-found feature of love-songs. Many of his motifs and figurative expressions occur in other, later literary compositions as well.

CDLI entry: P285640

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The Old Akkadian period (ca. 2340-2200 BC) witnesses the first significant corpus of letters in Mesopotamia.

This letter in the Ashmolean Museum has been published by Ignace J. Gelb (MAD 5, 2; edition in B. Kienast & K. Volk, Die sumerischen und akkadischen Briefe [1995], 141f.; siglum Ki 1). It is a letter of a certain Abbaja to a person named Dudua. Many letters like this one start with the particle en-ma, "thus," a precursor of later umma. In contrast to letters of later periods, which normally start with the addressee's (and therefore are introduced by the preposition ana), Old Akkadian letters generally mention the sender first. There are no blessings involved, even not in longer examples as P213212, a letter in the British Museum.

The body of this letter starts with the intriguing sentence "Why are you not my father?" (mi-num2 u3-la a-bi2 ad-da). The reason for this enigmatic question becomes clear in what follows. It must be noted in any case that kinship terms are frequently used to indicate ranks. Hence "father" refers to an individual higher in rank. The letter-writer goes on: "You not even trust me with 3000 liter barley."

The subsequent sentence bītum eri, lit. "the house is empty," was interpreted in a sense that the letter-writer still makes reproaches: "Is the firm broke?" He assures that he will be able to pay the requested amount of silver. He finally requests a message and Dudua's son to be sent.

CDLI entry: P213213

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This is one of the few letters addressed to Zinû, who was the wife of Šamaš-hazir. He instructs his wife not to hold back barley and dates, which are destined to be given to the hired workers by Igmil-Sîn. The matter is pressing, because - as Šamaš-hazir mentions - he wrote to Igmil-Sîn regarding the building of ships. In what follows, it seems that Šamaš-hazir entrusts to his wife the endeavor to manage the logistical tasks around the construction:

According to the salary that is given the task shall be fulfilled. Barley and dates may be given out in my absence (lit. without me). They must not be negligent at the construction of the ships. They must not be idle.

Besides Igmil-Sîn Šamaš-hazir instructed also another individual to build a ship. He orders his wife to give out a certain amount of barley and dates for the hired workers.

CDLI entry: P384859

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In this letter in the Ashmolean Museum the ruler Hammurapi of the first dynasty of Babylon (ca. 1792-1750 BC) writes to Šamaš-hāzir, the head of the cadastre office in Larsa. This high official was responsible for the distribution and administration of royal land in the hinterlands of Larsa. Letters such as this example frequently deal with problems of ownership. In this letter a shepherd brought to the king's attention that four years earlier a certain Etel-pî-Marduk took away a field from him and enjoys the outcome ever since. Despite the fact that the shepherd informed Sîn-iddinam, the highest official in the province of Yamutbal, nothing happened.

The king wants this matter investigated and settled, since the shepherd has a sealed document issued in the palace. If his claim is just, he shall be returned the respective field in addition to the amount of barley Etel-pî-Marduk took from it in the previous years. Furthermore the king wants a full report on the matter.

This letter shows quite vividly that the king was directly involved in legal matters as well. Our letter mentions a "divine weapon," which gave divine authority to the judgements the royal official carrying it made. The plots of land were comparatively small. Due to the great amount of complexity registers needed to be kept in order to indicate who had the legal right to receive the usufruct of a field. Šamaš-hāzir's task was to watch over these assignments, which were confirmed by inserting a stake into the respective plots. In order to reclaim a field, when it was unjustly took over, a tenant needed to safeguard the document that asserted his rights.


CDLI entry: P384863

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The tablet shown here entered the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in 1926 and was published by G. R. Hunter four years later in the series Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts, volume 8, no. 9, republished by E. C. Stone and D. I. Owen, Adoption in Old Babylonian Nippur and the Archive of Mannum-mešu-lissur (= Mesopotamian Civilizations vol. 3) no. 41. It belongs to a group of particularly well-preserved Old Babylonian legal documents in the collection. Most of these texts had envelopes.

This text from Nippur describes the terms of an adoption. It states that Mannum-mešu-lissur purchased the guardianship (nam-en-nu-un) of a statue for 15 days annually, as well as for the same amount of time the custodianship of a gate. These two tasks used to be the prebend of a certain Sin-lidiš. As purchase price for these prebends, Mannum-mešu-lissur paid two shekels of silver “as its full purchase price” (Sumerian sa₁₀-til-la-bi-še₃).

Being a legal document, it of course also contains clauses in order to prevent that the seller or his family may lay any claims against this purchase and the prebend-ownership:

In future Sin-lidiš and his heirs, however many there are, are to raise no claim against the guardianship of the statue of the Ekur-igigal (and the custodianship of the) Asala Ubšu-ukkina gate. Thus has he sworn in the name of the king.

This royal oath formula mu lugal-bi in-pa₃ is followed by a list of witnesses (including the scribe of the document). The document is dated to the 12th year of the ruler Samsu-iluna, or ca. 1740 BC. Both enclosed document and envelope are sealed. The sealing concentrates on the seal legend and not on the pictorial depiction of the seal cylinder. The text is repeated on the envelope. Following any suspicion of fraud or manipulation of the agreement between the two parties, the envelope could have been opened and the contents of the enclosed tablet inspected.

CDLI entry: P283655

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus