The level of bookkeeping represented by TCL 2, 5499, MVN 15, 108, SET 130, UET 3, 1215, and other accounts reflects professional relationships among the various actors in the provinces of the Ur III empire ruled from Ur. The cattle recorded in these texts are essentially to be considered property of the state represented in Umma, for instance, by the “governor” (Sumerian ensi₂); although tended by individual herders, the “large cattle manager” (šuš₃) was responsible for overseeing the books of the herds registered in the debits section of the accounts, and for collecting and transferring the dairy products or their silver or other equivalents to the household of the governor. Should the cattle manager have remitted silver or dairy products to such higher officials as Lukalla or Ur-Šulpa’e in Umma province, these transactions are nonetheless to be understood as having gone through the office of the governor, since they are then dealt with in the books of these latter officials as property of his household, of course not of the cattle manager himself. Ultimately, the possession of all such goods was ceded to the king in Ur and formed the basis for taxes imposed on the individual provinces by the royal bookkeepers.

credit: Englund, Robert K.

MVN 15, 108, is a large consolidated account concerning the activities of an official named Atu, supervisor (Sumerian šuš₃) of cattle herders in Umma. The milk cows themselves are never mentioned in the text, but all products and the names of all persons make its identification as a major document of Umma dairy herding certain. The products called i₃-nun (“butter oil”) and ga-UDgunû (“kašk cheese”) are listed in pairs, always divisible by 5 and 7.5, respectively, thus indicating the number of adult cows in the herds supervised by known cattle herders (Sumerian unu₃). The text mirrors the structure known generally of Ur III accounts:

1) DEBITS = sag-nig₂-gur₁₁-ra(k)
a) si-i₃-tum = la₂-ia₃ of the preceding accounting period, expressed in standardized values
b) (ugu₂) state property given over to supervisors as “investment” converted into standardized values
2) CREDITS = ša₃-bi-ta ... zi-ga-am₃, delivered real products and real work and allowances converted into standardized values
3) BALANCE: debits minus credits
If debits are greater than credits, a deficit la₂-ia₃ will appear as si-i₃-tum in the debits section of the following account, or be otherwise dispensed of
If credits are greater than debits, a surplus diri will appear as diri (nig₂-ka₉ aka) in the credits section of the following account, or otherwise be dispensed of
4) COLOPHON: “Account (nig₂-ka₉ aka) concerning ... ,” Date

The account was edited in R. Englund, “Regulating Dairy Productivity in the Ur III Period,” Orientalia 64 (1995) 403-425.

CDLI entry: P118388.

credit: Englund, Robert K.

As in the case of dairy cows, the nanny goats in Ur III accounts formed the basis for calculations of deliveries of butter oil and kašk cheese that were processed from their milk. Where adult cows in the books were equivalent to 5 and 7.5 liters of the two products per year, respectively, nannies should result in the delivery by herders to their owners of 0.5 and 0.75 liters per year, preserving the relationship of 2:3 between oil and cheese. The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum account RC 930 records herds of goats that contained from 6 to 73 nannies and thus herds of upwards of 100-150 animals that accompanied the much larger sheep herds as they were driven from winter (lowland) to summer (highland) pasture. See R. Englund Orientalia 64 (1995) 377-429, for a description of general dairies accounting terminology in the Ur III period (to this text, pp. 398-403):

   i₃-nun = butter oil,
   ga-UDgunû = dry cheese,
   si-i₃-tum = remaining [deficit of the previous accounting year],
   unu₃ = large cattle herder,
   ga-gazi = sumac^? cheese,
   ga še_(x)-a = "yellowed milk,"
   ugu₂ = “debits”,
   la₂-ia₃ = deficit.

CDLI entry: P129539.

credit: Englund, Robert K.

This 13-column tablet, recording the activities of the Umma cattle manager Ur-e’e during the years Amar-Suen 2-4, was published by the eminent University of Minnesota Sumerologist Tom Jones in 1961 (Sumerian Economic Texts no. 130) and was the subject of collations and re-editions by M. Cooper and J. Snyder (ASJ 8 [1986] 318), J. Carnahan and K. Hillard (ASJ 15 [1993] 207-210), and R. Englund (Orientalia 64 [1995] 398-403). The tablet, part of the substantial cuneiform collection of the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California, describes Ur-e’e’s supervision of imposing numbers of sheep and goats and the deliveries of their products, dairy oil and dry cheese on the one hand, and wool and goat hair on the other.

CDLI entry: P129539.

credit: Englund, Robert K.

This illustration offers a glimpse into the developments within a hypothetical Drehem dairy cattle herd over a period of ten years, as recorded in the six-column account AO 5499 in the collection of the Louvre Museum. To the upper left of the full illustration are the four adult cows around which the herd was built. The herd owner requires the addition each year of one calf for each two adult cows, thus giving a total of six animals in year one. The author of this theoretical account followed the unlikely presumption that the first birth was of a bull calf, the second a heifer calf, the third a bull calf and so on throughout the text. In the succeeding year, the calves are weaned and move on to yearlings, in the 3rd year to two-year-olds and so on until, on the left, they join their mothers as adult, bearing cows, or to the right age into full plowing-strength oxen if castrated, breeding bulls if not. Further, the excess milk—milk not fed to unweaned calves—is processed to dairy oil and dry cheese (kašk) and delivered, again according to this theoretical account, at a rate of 5 and 7.5 liters per cow-year, respectively. The ratio of what was called “yellowed milk” (Sumerian ga še_(x)-a) to butter oil was 20:1, so that we may assume that this “yellowed milk” had an oil content of 5% and thus was preprocessed in some way to enrich the oil from an expected average of ca. 3% for healthy cows in antiquity.

CDLI entry: P131589.

credit: Englund, Robert K.

At the conclusion of the ten-year period of this theoretical account, the ideal herd that began with four adult cows and two calves had, based on the Ur III norm of adding to the managed herd one calf for each two adult cows, grown to 32 head. Any additional calves would have been ceded to the herders of this enterprise. During the ten years, these herders were, in addition to the calves added to the herd, to have delivered to the herd owner a total of 275 liters of butter oil and 412.5 liters of kašk cheese. Following the implicit exchange rate of ten liters of butter oil and 150 liters of kašk cheese per shekel of silver, our accountant further registered a silver equivalent of 27.33 and 2.75 shekels of silver, respectively, for the two products. A shekel weighed ca. 8.5 grams.

CDLI entry: P131589.

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The theoretical herd consists in Šulgi’s 45^th regnal year of 20 animals, differentiated by gender and age. Delivery norms for dairy cows were based on a calculation of 5 sila₃ (ca. 5 liters) of butter oil and 7.5 sila₃ of kašk cheese per adult cow. The products listed at the bottom of this section were then the equivalents of 6 milk cows and not 7 as registered here; these products were therefore, naturally enough, calculated based on the count of the previous year that indeed showed 6 adult cows. Bull calves and oxen were eventually culled from dairy herds and put to the plows of the large households in which the dairy herds were situated.

CDLI entry: P131589.

credit: Englund, Robert K.

A full photographic representation of the artifact AO 5499 was created by Klaus Wagensonner using a Reflective Transformation Imaging workstation developed by the Universities of Oxford, and Southampton, UK. To the left is the obverse surface of the account surrounded by images of the tablet’s four edges, to the right the reverse surface with concluding subsections documenting the last three years of the herd’s growth, and in the left-most column totals of cattle and dairy products.

CDLI entry: P131589.

credit: Englund, Robert K.

This artifact with the designation AO 5499 is one of the most remarkable documents in the collection of Louvre’s Department of Near Eastern Antiquities. The six-column tablet from Drehem, the tribute and accounting center of the neo-Sumerian empire, contains a theoretical exercise documenting the potential growth and income, in dairy products, of a herd of cattle over a period of the last ten years of the Ur III king Šulgi (ca. 2050-2040 BC). The account was (re-)edited in R. Englund, “Regulating Dairy Productivity in the Ur III Period,” Orientalia 64 (1995) 377-429.

CDLI entry: P131589.

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Raw milk in ancient Mesopotamia, with very limited availability of refrigeration, was processed into water-free butter oil and a fat-free cheese generally known today as “kašk” in Syria and Lebanon, “baql” in Iraq, and “ekt” on the Arabian peninsula. Both products could be stored, without fear of rancidity or mold, for much longer than modern butter or fatty cheeses. In the following days, we will be presenting a number of accounts of the Ur III period (ca. 2100-2000 BC) that helped to clarify the technology and accounting procedures employed to manage the dairy production of cows and nanny goats, but apparently not of ewes.

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Fables are a prominent part of Sumerian and Akkadian literature, and are often included in copies of the many proverb collections available to the scribal student in the 2nd millennium BC. The fables not only imparted practical advice, they also provided a type of rhetorical training for the students copying them. The fables known to us are “The Wren and the Elephant,” the “Series of the Fox,” and “The Heron and the Turtle.” Certain other fables are embedded in literary tales, and many more are probably lost. Still, the search for the origins of the genre of fable must be extended back to Mesopotamia.

This particular fable, featuring a conversation between a goose caught in a net and a raven, for whom the net was meant, is not entirely understood since its ending is not preserved. However, the two birds seem to be arguing over who is superior, while in the background a fowler’s wife plots to ensnare them, likely for the local market. The final outcome is unknown, but other examples from this genre often applaud cleverness, and the escape of one or both of the birds is probably intended. Though not always well understood, ancient fables demonstrate a variety of views on behavior—good and bad—held by the Mesopotamians. For more on Sumerian fables, see Edmund Gordon, “Sumerian Animal Provers and Fables,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 12 (1958) 1-21 & 43-75.

CDLI entry: P388363

credit: Wolfe, Jared N.

Mesopotamian scribes kept detailed lists of what made up their world, both physical and spiritual. These so–called lexical lists, already attested in the proto-cuneiform record from the 34th century BC, were created and maintained by the scribal schools. Young scribes would copy sections of these lists to practice their signs, as well as to familiarize themselves with various areas of technical vocabulary. The lexical lists cover such areas as deities, anatomy, omens, flora, fauna, and others of more grammatical nature.

Lexical lists such as this tablet from UCLA Library Special Collections provide invaluable lexical material to the modern researcher. They offer information not only on whole words, but also on sign readings and pronunciations. Their internal ordering by signs, spellings, categories, and hierarchies also reveal the many ways that Mesopotamians brought order to their world. The large series, called here Ḫar-ra = ḫubullu (Sumerian and Akkadian for “debt,” "interest loan”; Ḫar-ra is now commonly called Ura by specialists), is named after the first entry of this lexical series containing over 10,000 entries.

CDLI entry: P388265

credit: Wolfe, Jared N.

The student working on this tablet apparently became tired of practicing letter writing. Instead, he drew a fish and a goat on the reverse of his tablet. Examples of doodling from a time and place as remote as ancient Mesopotamia is a poignant reminder of the similarities in students’ attention spans throughout human history. The two animals were regularly eaten by the Mesopotamians, and reflect central parts of their economy. However, here the two animals are probably randomly chosen, and do not reflect a specific story or deities. Tablets depicting student doodles are rare, and provide a unique insight into Mesopotamian daily life.

On the obverse of the tablet the student has practiced his assignment two separate times. Each attempt was written with the tablet being oriented in an opposite manner as to top and bottom. Letter-writing was a common scribal exercise practiced in the schools of the Old Babylonian period.

CDLI entry: P273831

credit: Wolfe, Jared N.

This composition records the experiences of a young scribe describing to his interested father the tribulations of his day at school. In Sumer, scribes were called dub-sar, “tablet writer,” and the school was known as e₂-dub-ba-a, literally “House where tablets are passed out.” The text begins with the student showing to his father his “homework,” a tablet with lines copied out, and asking to be woken early in order to avoid a caning by the headmaster for tardiness. The text then relates the failings of the young scribe, especially in scribal technique, for which he is caned several times (indeed, even this excerpt tablet appears to have found the disfavor of some stern instructor!). The scribe’s father then invites the headmaster to dinner and implores him not to give up on his son. The text ends with the young scribe rejoicing at the completion of scribal school, having become a learned man at this juncture; he thereupon praises Nidaba, the goddess of scribalism, for his success.

The composition is meant to be humorous, and clearly was created by scribes recalling the tedium and intensity of scribal training. It is of interest that Nidaba’s blessing concerns a proper stylus and “good” copying skills. This points to one of the central tasks of the scribal school, the copying and preservation of lexical lists and literary compositions. It was through this method, accompanied by oral instruction, that students learned to write both Akkadian and Sumerian texts.

This fragment contains the first twenty lines of the composition. The first six read

   ‘Schoolboy, (where did you go?)’
   ‘I went to school.’
   ‘What did you do at school?’
   ‘I read my tablet, ate my lunch.
   I made my tablet, wrote it and finished it.’

CDLI entry: P388251

credit: Wolfe, Jared N.

The lexical series titled “ugu-mu” (“O, hy head!”) presents in descending order from head to toe the parts of the body, including bodily afflictions and associations, in Sumerian. The entries themselves are cast from the perspective of the speaker, thus the first few lines read, “my skull …my skull-cap, my head, my forehead,” etc. In this way a scribe would learn the parts of the body, sometimes also in conjunction with the medical maladies that afflicted them.

This particular exemplar is from the Old Babylonian period, and represents a major undertaking on the part of the scribe, evidenced by the size of the tablet (8 columns total). A tablet this size would probably have been kept among instructional materials of the school masters and assigned to less-advanced students to make copies of text subsections.

CDLI entry: P462192

credit: Wolfe, Jared N.

This type of rounded tablet, known as a lentil, was used by the youngest scribes to practice, initially, individual wedges and sign shapes, then complex signs, and finally, short sentences. They are a hallmark of early scribal training. The student then moved on to larger, square tablets. On these the scribe practiced legal and economic writing. Often the scribe copied out sections from the large lexical lists produced by the Mesopotamian scribes to order and enumerate their world. Finally, moving to long, rectangular tablets, the scribes would practice literary compositions, eventually creating full copies of large literary texts and perhaps even composing new pieces. Tablet from UCLA Library Special Collections.

CDLI entry: P388295

credit: Wolfe, Jared N.

This tablet contains a long list of personal names beginning with the Sumerian word UR, which means “dog” and, by extension, “servant, obedient one.” Most of the personal names are of the form, “servant of (divine) so-and-so.” This type of appellative was very common in Sumerian culture, and was employed in all levels of society, from kings to slaves. The founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, Ur-Namma, is a popular example, whose name means, “Servant of Namma.”

Students practiced these types of lists during each stage of scribal school, as evidenced by the range of tablet-types upon which such exercises appear. The reason behind this type of lexical exercise, however, is subject to modern conjecture. The lists may simply have been practice in popular, conventional naming styles in order to provide extensive repetition of a commonplace activity of scribes, that is, recording names in bureaucratic, legal, and commercial contexts. However, it may also have represented an attempt at classification of name types current in society at that time, though for what purpose beyond taxonomic desire remains elusive. Still, it may simply represent a desire to record and retain Sumerian names in an almost exclusively Akkadian society. Regardless, the list provides an interesting glimpse into the variety of exercises that scribes practiced during their training.

CDLI entry: P388290

credit: Wolfe, Jared N.

This exemplar from UCLA Library Special Collections represents a student’s copy of various entries from a bilingual list of human professions that was popular in the Old Babylonian scribal schools, ca. 1900-1600 BC. The list, known by its incipit as lu₂-azlag₂, meaning “fuller,” describes not only professions, but also lists mental qualities, often of opposite meanings (fearful and fearless, truthful and lying, etc.), bodily characteristics (states of hearing, strength, etc.), and human activities (mourning, anointing, etc.). Moreover, artisans and professionals are often described by the tools and implements used in their crafts, rather than by their profession’s name. This is an innovation in the lexical tradition of Mesopotamia, and shows an increased penchant for abstraction, notably by means of metonymy. Scholars have also noted the inclusion of elements from the scholastic literature, namely the school debates between young scribes concerning their prowess in understanding Sumerian, calligraphy, and spelling.

CDLI entry: P388342

credit: Wolfe, Jared N.

The Mesopotamian scribes kept detailed lists of the components that made up their world, both physical and spiritual. These so-called lexical lists, which are already attested in the proto-cuneiform record, were created and maintained by the scribal schools. Young scribes would copy sections of these lists to practice their signs as well as to familiarize themselves with various areas of technical vocabulary. The lexical lists cover such areas as deities, anatomy, omens, flora, fauna, and others of more grammatical nature.

This tablet represents a sizeable collection of terms pertaining to wooden objects, be they trees or bushes, wooden tools such as plows and their constituent parts, or wooden objects such as wheels, rafters, and containers. The Sumerian word for wood is geš, and this term precedes each entry as an (unspoken) semantic indicator of the object type. This is a practice tablet recording various entries from the larger encyclopedia of wooden objects in the lexical list Ḫar-ra = ḫubullu commonly known by current specialists as “Ura”.

CDLI entry: P388265

credit: Wolfe, Jared N.

This four-sided prism contains the Kesh Temple Hymn, a song that reaches back to the earliest exemplars of Sumerian literature, ca. 2500 BC. The hymn progresses in eight stanzas, each praising a different part of the temple. The first stanza depicts the god Enlil, head of the Sumerian pantheon, selecting and praising Kesh among all the other lands. The temple is then described as a representation of the cosmic order of the world itself, and is praised from top to bottom. The fourth stanza describes the interior of the sanctuary and its sacrifices. The fifth praises the divinities associated with Kesh: Ninḫursag, mother Earth, Nintu, the birth goddess, Šulpa’e, Ninḫursag’s consort and god of radiant youth, and Aššir, a young hero-divinity. The sixth and seventh stanzas describe the temple as a whole and its personnel, and finally the eighth stanza exhorts the people to approach and worship the temple. Each stanza ends with the refrain, “One as great as Kesh—has any man been (this) worthy? One as great as its hero, Aššir—has any mother ever borne him? One as great as its lady, Nintu—who has ever seen him?”

A video depicting the cuneiform texts in the UCLA Library Special Collections, created by Erin Flannery, is viewable on YouTube.

CDLI entry: P388262

credit: Wolfe, Jared N.

King Shulgi proclaimed himself a god and boasted that he was one of the few kings who went to school to become a scribe. At the schools that taught this difficult skill, students also learned how to debate in public and practiced the refined art of insulting opponents before refuting their arguments.

CDLI entry: Q000561

credit: Cartmel, Kathryn

King Sulgi of Ur was a wealthy ruler who augmented his fortune through such enactments as the taxing of temple households. Of course, the monarch did not solely focus his attention on gold jewelry; he expended the majority of the palace’s wealth on improving existing, and building new roads, on continuing his father’s policies of erecting monumental buildings, and on the maintenance of an internal policing, tax collecting, and military apparatus.

CDLI entry: P481718

credit: Cartmel, Kathryn

King Shulgi of Ur utilized any opportunity he could get to boast about his achievements. Many of these stories, most of which were certainly court propoganda, can be found on clay tablets similar to this one. Shulgi boasted about his ability to maintain high speeds while running long distances. He claimed in his 7th regal year to have run from Nippur to Ur, a distance of over 100 miles.

CDLI entry: P481723

credit: Cartmel, Kathryn

The mina is an Ancient Near-Eastern unit of weight. Shulgi’s name was was inscribed on the weight, and also inscribed on other artifacts like building walls and clay tablets. Kings often used this as a propaganda tool and a vehicle to spread their name and image across a vast territory. Translation: For (divine) Nanna, his king, by (divine) Shulgi, the strong leader, king of Ur, king of the four corners, (this) one-half mina was verified.

CDLI entry: Q001682.

credit: Cartmel, Kathryn

This object portrays a king carrying a basket of clay or other building material during his ritual participation in the construction of a royal building or temple, which is typical of copper and bronze “canephore” or “basket bearer” pegs. A late third millennium BC text (Cylinder A) of the ruler Gudea of Lagash provides a detailed description of his active role in the construction of the Ningirsu Temple at Girsu, during which he transported material in a sacred basket that he carried “on his head like a crown.”

Although it is not inscribed and its original context is unknown, stylistically this peg is nearly identical to others that are securely dated to the reigns of the Ur III kings Ur-Nammu (2112-2095 BC) and Shulgi (2094-2047 BC). Many of these pegs were found by archaeologists in boxes built into the mudbrick foundations of temples and palaces, often at the corners of buildings and flanking gateways. They were frequently accompanied by the remains of offerings or auspicious material such as beads, stone chips, and date pits, and some pegs were found with remnants of fabric clinging to them. Many boxes also contained remnants of what may have been wooden pegs as well as stone or metal tablets in the form of plano-convex bricks. The inscriptions on the tablets and on a number of pegs record the royal building of the relevant structure for the sake of a deity.

CDLI entry: P226509.

credit: Cartmel, Kathryn

The John Rylands Library, though Ur III accounts form the major part, also keeps a nice bunch of Sumerian literature. Among these texts is a song to the warrior god Ninurta (bal-bal-e ^dnin-urta-kam). The second manuscript belonging to this short composition is housed in the Arkeoloji Müzeleri in Istanbul (P345193).

The text was published by Farouk N. H. Al-Rawi and Jeremy Black (“A balbale of Ninurta, god of fertility,” ZA 90, 2000). The composition uses in its final section (lines 24-31) a stock strophe widely employed in Sumerian literature, interpreted by Ferrara as “topos of plenitude” (A. J. Ferrara, “Topoi and stock-strophes in Sumerian literary traditions: some observations, part I,” JNES 54 [1995] 81ff.). These lines read in translation:

Through him, carp floods are made plentiful in the river.
Through him, fine grains are made to grow in the fields.
Through him, carp are maid plentiful in the lagoons.
Through him, dead and fresh reed are made to grow in the reed thickets.
Through him, fallow deer and wild sheep are made plentiful in the forests.
Through him, mašgurum trees are made to grow in the high desert.
Through him, syrup and wine are made plentiful in the watered gardens.
Through him, long life is made to grow in the palace.

CDLI entry: P355689

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The early Old Babylonian king commemorates on this clay nail the building of the stronghold of Isin (bad₃-gal i₃-si-in^ki-na). The text is inscribed twice: a two-column version is found on top of the nail, and it runs in one column around the nail’s shaft (see Farouk N. H. Al-Rawi, “Cuneiform Inscriptions in the Collections of the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester,” Iraq 62 [2000] 34 no. 76).

CDLI entry: P430893

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Not infrequently, two or more fragments join together that are kept in different collections. In this case, the upper half of a large account dating to the Ur III period (ca. 2100-2000 BC) is part of the collections of the British Museum. The lower half, on the other hand, is nowadays kept in Manchester. Both fragments were imaged separately and joined together in Photoshop.

CDLI entry: P108388

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This large Ur III account is almost completely preserved. The tablet was written in the 3rd year of the Ur III ruler Amar-Suen. It deals with the planning of barley rations to the working personnel at a place called Babaz (probably near Puzrish-Dagan). The text gives important information on young castrated workers (Sumerian amar-KUD) who belonged to a lower social stratum of the Ur III state (ca. 2100-2000 BC). This account has been treated by K. Maekawa ("Animal and Human Castration in Sumer. Part II: Human Castration in the Ur III Period," Zinbun 16 [1980] 37ff.).

CDLI entry: P107777

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Due to the long reign of the Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562 BC) we nowadays have quite a substantial amount of royal/building inscriptions at our disposal. These texts commemorate extensive building projects all over the neo-Babylonian empire, but in particular in the capital city Babylon (for general remarks on his inscriptions now R. Da Riva, The Neo-Babylonian Royal Inscriptions. An Introduction, GMTR 4 [2008] 110ff.).

The well-preserved clay barrel in the John Rylands Library contains three columns of text. The inscription deals with the restoration and rebuilding of the temple of Lugal-Marada (i.e., Ninurta) at the city of Marad. The text was recently published by Farouk N.H. al-Rawi (“Cuneiform Inscriptions in the Collections of the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester,” Iraq 62 [2000] 35-39 no. 78).

CDLI entry: P430895

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The John Rylands Library keeps three of these peculiar labels. 69 such labels from Ur III Umma are known so far (see R. Laurito, A. Mezzasalma and L. Verderame, "Texts and Labels: A Case Study from Neo-Sumerian Umma," SAOC 62 [2008] 99ff.). These labels form a coherent group in particular because of their standardized shape and the mentioned officials. They deal with monthly accounts of regular deliveries (sa₂-du₁₁) and are always sealed. JRL 872 is a well-preserved example of this group. Two officials sealed the surface with their seals (best seen on the uninscribed bottom side). The upper seal belongs to a certain Ur-Nungal, the seal at the bottom to Lu-kalla. Regarding the labels' purpose, it has been argued that they were attached to containers carrying accounts for either a month or a year.

CDLI entry: P108379

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This letter, a part of the cuneiform collection of the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, UK (JRL 929), was written by a certain Etel-pi-Marduk (known as addressee and sender from numerous letters in different collections) to his superior. Letters of this period start with a stereotypical formula (“To [ADDRESSEE] speak, thus [SENDER]”). After this formula we have, in most instances, a blessing. This particular letter is noteworthy since it has a fairly long greeting that reads, in translation, as follows:

May the gods Shamash and Marduk keep you healthy for all time. May the god, your protector, provide you with good things. Regarding your well-being I have written (to you). May your well-being last before Shamash and Marduk.

The body of the letter is, in contrast, quite short. Etel-pi-Marduk asks his superior to give rations to a scribe and his colleague, and to immediately send them off to Kish.

CDLI entry: P430839

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This tablet is one of the few examples of Sumerian literature in the JRL, Manchester. The manuscript originally contained the whole composition of 115 lines, which ends in the doxology “Oh Gilgamesh, lord of Kulaba, praising you is sweet.” Sumerian literature includes quite a few tales about early kings from Uruk, who occur in the ‘Sumerian King List’ as well. Besides several tales about Gilgamesh (that are quite different from the later Akkadian tradition culminating in the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic), we have several compositions dealing with Lugalbanda and Enmerkar and their deeds.

“Gilgamesh and Agga” is the only example of the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh tales that draws on historical figures, for a king Agga of Kish is known from contemporary inscriptions. The composition has been cited by various specialists, most notably Thorkild Jacobsen, as evidence for the early developement of democratic institutions in Mesopotamia, even if clad in often formulaic literature. It should be noted, however, that all known manuscripts of the tale are from the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1900-1600 BC) and therefore much later than the posited reign of Gilgamesh in the early 3rd millennium.

CDLI entry: P430840

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The Uruk III period (ca. 3200-3000 BC) sealed tablet from the former Swiss Erlenmeyer collection, auctioned at Christie’s London in December 1988 for £9,500, contains two entries concerning the distribution of barley; the tablet is one of only two archaic texts from the Erlenmeyer archive with a seal impression. Note the seal’s depiction of the ruler, often called the “priest-king” of Uruk, on the hunt for wild boar with his mastiffs in the reed marshland of southern Mesopotamia, a very dangerous sport in ancient, as in modern times. Bibliography: Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow & Robert K. Englund, Archaic Bookkeeping (Chicago 1993) p. 17 + fig. 17; Joan Aruz, Art of the First Cities (2003) 40. The text also appeared in the 4th and final volume of the series Cuneiform Texts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art edited by Ira Spar (2014; pp. 338-339, no. 179). Photo courtesy of the MMA; seal impression rendering: J. Aruz, Curator in Charge, Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art.

CDLI entry: P005393

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The Uruk III period (ca. 3200-3000 BC) account from the former Swiss Erlenmeyer collection, auctioned at Christie’s London in December 1988 for £9,000, records, on its inscribed surface, two entries to the upper right concerning barley groats and malt (indeed, the latter of the two notations represents the largest amount of malt attested as yet in the archaic texts), probably for beer production, and to the upper left the total of the entries. The signs at the bottom of the text are believed to stand for the brewery official or office called "KU-ŠIM," most often associated with beer production in the Erlenmeyer texts. Bibliography: Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow & Robert K. Englund, Archaic Bookkeeping (Chicago 1993) pp. 39-40 + fig. 36; R. Englund in J. Bauer, R. Englund and M. Krebernik, OBO 160/1 (1998) 187 fig. 73.

CDLI entry: P005363

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The Uruk III period (ca. 3200-3000 BC) account from the former Swiss Erlenmeyer collection, auctioned at Christie’s London in December 1988 for £22,000, records only one entry with a numerical notation representing the largest amount of barley of all archaic texts in the Erlenmeyer collection; extra information is given with the entry, in particular the time notation “37 months,” the largest known month notation in the entire archaic text corpus. Bibliography: Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow & Robert K. Englund, Archaic Bookkeeping (Chicago 1993) pp. 36-37 + fig. 33; R. Englund in J. Bauer, R. Englund and M. Krebernik, OBO 160/1 (1998) 182 fig. 69.

CDLI entry: P005340

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The Uruk III period (ca. 3200-3000 BC) account from the former Swiss Erlenmeyer collection, auctioned at Christie’s London in December 1988 for £15,000, records the distribution of larger amounts of barley to several persons with the total of the entries on the reverse; this total was combined with a further entry for a grand total associated with the office of “KU-ŠIM,” interpreted to be the major brewery of the city. Bibliography: Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow & Robert K. Englund, Frühe Schrift und Techniken der Wirtschaftsverwaltung im alten Vorderen Orient (Berlin 1990, 1991, 2004) no. 4.24.

CDLI entry: P005335

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The Uruk III period (ca. 3200-3000 BC) account from the former Swiss Erlenmeyer collection, auctioned at Christie’s London in December 1988 for £40,000 to M. Stansfeld, Monaco (resold by Christie’s in 2005 to Bolaffi Turin for a £160,000 hammer price, at £187,200 including premium far and away the highest sum every paid for a Babylonian clay tablet), records the distribution of various amounts of differing types of beer to several persons and for certain festivals(?); the types of beer and the barley groats and malt necessary for their production are totaled separately on the reverse. Bibliography: Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow & Robert K. Englund, Archaic Bookkeeping (Chicago 1993) pp. 43-46 + fig. 39; R. Englund in J. Bauer, R. Englund and M. Krebernik, OBO 160/1 (1998) 194 fig. 76.

CDLI entry: P005322

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The two cut-outs from the proto-cuneiform bakery account of the previous day contain notations that are characteristic of a large number of Babylonian administrative records from the latter third of the 4th millennium BC. To the upper right is the first case of the account with the inscription

   2N₅₁ , 1N_30c DU_8c AB_b EZINU_d
   4N₅ 4N_42a.

An approximate translation is: “240 flatbreads for AB-EZINU, each ‘1N_30c’ in size, requiring 4N₅ 4N_42a in flour”, that is, 240 x N_30c = 24N_42a = 4N₅ 4N_42a (where we know that 1N₅ = 5N_42a). Simple numerical substitution results in the conclusion that 1N_30c = 1/10xN_42a, a relationship that was for the first time demonstrated with publication of this text. Our calculations indicate that the numerical sign 1N_30c represented about half a liter of grain. To the lower left is the general qualifier of the account, namely, the sign combination of “head” + “bowl” (a representation of the common Late Uruk beveled-rim bowl) with the later Sumerian reading of gu₇, “to consume.” Bibliography: Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow & Robert K. Englund, Frühe Schrift und Techniken der Wirtschaftsverwaltung im alten Vorderen Orient (Berlin 1990, 1991, 2004) no. 4.3; Damerow, Englund & Nissen, MDOG 121 (1989) 151.

CDLI entry: P005314

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The Uruk III period (ca. 3200-3000 BC) account from the former Swiss Erlenmeyer collection, auctioned at Christie’s London in December 1988 for £36,000, records the cereal required for various amounts of two grain products, probably bread loafs, with the total of the quantities on the reverse. This depiction rotates the tablet 90 degrees clockwise to represent its true orientation in ancient times (following Assyriological conventions, early texts are published and usually displayed in museums in the orientation that mimics the way tablets were written from the mid-2nd to the end of the 1st millennium BC). Bibliography: Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow & Robert K. Englund, Frühe Schrift und Techniken der Wirtschaftsverwaltung im alten Vorderen Orient (Berlin 1990, 1991, 2004) no. 4.3; Damerow, Englund & Nissen, MDOG 121 (1989) 151.

CDLI entry: P005314

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The Uruk III period (ca. 3200-3000 BC) account from the former Swiss Erlenmeyer collection, auctioned at Christie’s London in December 1988 for £30,000, lists various amounts of differing cereal products and the results of the calculation of the cereal (barley groats and malt) required for their production. Bibliography: Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow & Robert K. Englund, Archaic Bookkeeping (Chicago 1993) pp. 42-43; Damerow, Englund & Nissen, Natuur & Techniek 59/9 (1991) 704; R. Englund in J. Bauer, R. Englund and M. Krebernik, OBO 160/1 (1998) 196 fig. 77.

CDLI entry: P005313

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The Uruk III period (ca. 3200-3000 BC) account from the former Swiss Erlenmeyer collection, auctioned at Christie’s London in December 1988 for £18,000, records larger amounts of barley and various sorts of emmer with partial sums and a grand total on the reverse. Note the special designation of emmer “|GISZ.TE|” of unclear meaning. The late Assyriologist Johannes J. A. van Dijk reported to members of the Berlin project Archaische Texte aus Uruk that he was once shown the location of the Uruk mound where the Erlenmeyer collection was unearthed. Bibliography: Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow & Robert K. Englund, Frühe Schrift und Techniken der Wirtschaftsverwaltung im alten Vorderen Orient (Berlin 1990, 1991, 2004) no. 4.1, title page; Damerow, Englund & Nissen, Natuur & Techniek 59/9 (1991) 606-697.

CDLI entry: P005312

credit: Englund, Robert K.

A transcription of the photo on the left is offered to the right. The calculations of the two incised rectangular surfaces are straightforward. Using the values 1 ninda (ca. 6m) = 12 cubits (Sumerian kuš₃) for linear measurements, and 1 ninda x 1 ninda = 1 sar (ca. 36 m²; sar is literally “garden”) = 60 shekels (Sum. gin₂) for areas, the upper surface is 1 x 1 3/12 ninda = 1 15/60 sar (ca. 45 m²), and, using the standard Bablyonion surface calculation rule of multiplying the average length of opposing sides of irregular rectangles, the lower surface is 2 4/12 x (2 9/12 + 2 6/12)/2 = 6 7.5/60 sar (ca. 220.5 m²). These areas would correspond to the expected lot sizes of a substantial estate. (The numerical notations to the right may have something to do with calculations of the two surfaces divided by the interior vertical line in the lower rectangle.) Primary publication: Edzard, Dietz Otto, JCS 16 (1962) 81 HSM 7500.

CDLI entry: P111942

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Gudea’s fascination with the construction of this monumental building (ca. 2100 BC) is very well documented in the excavation record, including the most extensive Sumerian inscription known to date, describing the feat (his Cylinders A-B); a series of inscribed statues such as this one with similar, though smaller inscriptions; and many thousands of clay cones and bricks with short commemorative texts that represent excerpts from the larger inscriptions. A selection of publications of Statue B: Edzard, Dietz Otto, RIME 3/1.1.7, St B (1997); Steible, Horst, FAOS 9/1 (1991) 156-179, and 9/2 (1991) 6-38; Heinrich, Ernst & Seidl, Ursula, MDOG 98 (1967) 31, no. 8. For Mesopotamian temples, see Heinrich, Ernst & Seidl, Ursula, Die Tempel und Heiligtümer im alten Mesopotamien (Berlin 1982).

CDLI entry: P232275

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The plans for this private home from the Ur III period (ca. 2100-2000 BC) call for one exterior door leading to an entry with rooms off to either side, and one interior door leading to the central courtyard, probably without roof to let in daylight and fresh air. From this courtyard the occupants accessed three further rooms. At 7 × 12 cubits = 21 sq m, the courtyard is the largest interior surface of the home; next largest is the room to the left of the entry, with 13 ⅓ × 5 cubits = 16 ⅔ sq m; then that at the top right corner with 13 × 5 cubits = 16 ¼ sq m; the entry with 12 × 5 cubits = 15 sq m; the upper left corner room with 10^! × 5 cubits = 12 ½ sq m; the room to the right off the courtyard with 7 × 5 cubits = 8 ¾ sq m; and finally the room to the right of the entry, with 5 × 5 cubits = 6 ¼ sq m. Based on a wall thickness of 1 cubit, the house in total appears to have been drawn up for an interior area of 24 × 19 cubits = 114 sq m. Primary publication: Schneider, Nikolaus, OrSP 47-49 (1930) 504.

O by the way: Happy New Year to our community of cuneiform enthusiasts!

CDLI entry: P125392

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The left half of a floor plan from the Ur III period (ca. 2100-2000 BC) appears preserved on two fragments in the Ashmolean Museum (see the previous entry). Measurements of the outer walls and the inner rooms are given in “cubits” (Sumerian kuš₃, ca. 50 cm) and fractions of cubits, and ninda = 12 cubits, or about 6m. It appears that the edges of both fragments, said to be from Umma, were evened out to give the appearance of complete texts and therefore add to their purchase price.

Translation:
Room 1
   1 1/2 ninda less 1 “fist” (1/3 cubit), the length;
   11 cubits, the width;
Room 2
   1 ninda 2 cubits 2 “fists”, the length;
   4 cubits 1 “open-hand” (1/2 cubit), the width;
Room 3
   1 ninda 5 cubits 1 “fist” the length;
   4 cubits 1 “open-hand”, the width;
Room 4
   11 cubits the length;
   6 cubits the width;
Room 5
   1 running ninda 2 cubits the length;
   5 cubits the width;
Room 6
   n ... the length;
   n ... the width;
Room 7
   10 cubits ... the length;
   n ... the width;
Room 8
   n ... the length;
   n ... the width;
Room 9
   n ... the length;
   3 cubits the width;
rest broken

CDLI entries: P142749

credit: Englund, Robert K.

This floor plan from the Ur III period (ca. 2100-2000 BC) was drawn in preparation of the construction of a large building. Measurements of the outer walls and the inner rooms are given in “cubits” (Sumerian kuš₃, ca. 50cm) and fractions of cubits, and ninda = 12 cubits, or about 6m. Original publication: Donald, Trevor, JSS 7 (1962) 184; see further Heinrich, Ernst & Seidl, Ursula, MDOG 98 (1967) 32 no. 9, and for Mesopotamian palace architecture generally, Heinrich, Ernst, Die Paläste im alten Mesopotamien (Berlin 1984).

Translation:
Room 1 (upper left)
   1 1/2 ninda less 1 “fist” (1/3 cubit), the length;
   11 cubits, the width;
Room 2a (middle left)
   1 ninda 2 cubits 2 “fists”, the length;
   4 cubits 1 “open-hand” (1/2 cubit), the width;
Room 2b (lower left)
   ... “fist” the length;
   4 cubits 1 “open-hand” (1/2 cubit), the width;
Room 3 (middle right)
   10 cubits ...;

CDLI entry: P142749

credit: Englund, Robert K.

This floor plan from the Ur III period (ca. 2100-2000 BC) was drawn in preparation of the building of a traditional temple consisting of a central nave with aisles along either side. Measurements of the outer walls and the inner rooms are given in “cubits” (Sumerian kuš₃, ca. 50 cm) and ninda = 12 cubits, or about 6 m. Original publication: Donald, Trevor, JSS 7 (1962) 184; see further Heinrich, Ernst & Seidl, Ursula, MDOG 98 (1967) 32 no. 9, and for Mesopotamian temples generally, Heinrich & Seidl, Die Tempel und Heiligtümer im alten Mesopotamien (Berlin 1982).

The side rooms are each 6 cubits (ca. 3m) wide, with varying lengths described in the text, while the rooms of the central nave are 10 cubits wide. To account for the width and length of the entire building, the outer and the central room niche walls must have been 3 cubits thick, while other inner walls were just 2.

CDLI entry: P112404

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The brick here was photographed in situ in the wall of the palace of the neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzer II in Babylon, restored on orders of the former President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, in the mid-1980s. Much in the same tenor as is seen in brick inscriptions from Ur III dynasts four millennia earlier, the inscription reads: “In the era of the victorious Saddam Hussein, President of the Republic—may God preserve him!—Great Protector of Iraq, Restorer of its Renaissance and of its Civilization, took place the third rebuilding of the city of Babel. (In) 1309 AH = 1989 AD took place the rebuilding of this palace built by King Nebuchadnezzar II in 605-630 (sic) BC” (translation courtesy of Michael Fishbein, UCLA). The site of Babylon is now being restored to its original, pre-Saddam state of preservation.

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The brick here with a stamp inscription of the king Amar-Suen (ca. 2050 BC) rests in situ in the wall of a royal building in the neo-Sumerian capital Ur. Such bricks would have been covered over with a protective layer of plaster and consequently the inscriptions themselves hidden from public view; they were thus messages from the kings to the gods, this example to Enlil, the chief executive of the Sumerian pantheon with seat in distant Nippur.

CDLI entry: P429412

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Based on its form, and registration in the the collection of the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the brick here was manufactured in the mid-first millennium BC, though with the footprint of an individual who, following Giles & Vallandigham, Journal of Forensic Sciences 36 (1991) 1134-1151, may have had a height of some 50 inches and was probably a male, thus perhaps a boy 8 or 9 years old. Our unschooled guess: the son of an indulgent brickmaker.

CDLI entry: P461400

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Always avoiding the disrespectful positioning of dog paw prints directly on the stamp inscription of the city ruler, the brick maker of this example found in the collection of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley, set his best friend’s well-defined paws below and to the right of the text dedicated to the Eshnunna governor Ur-Ningešzida (“Beloved of Tišpak, governor Eshnunna”). Fourteen bricks with this inscription are currently registered through the CDLI.

CDLI entry: P247874

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Fifteen centuries after the reign of the Ur III king Ur-Namma, brickmakers still kept their loyal charges at their sides. The brick here, kept in the collection of the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Philadelphia), was impressed with the stamp of the best known neo-Babylonian sovereign Nebukhadnezzar II (“King of Babylon, provider of Esagila, and Ezida, first seed of Nabupolassar, king of Babylon”) and bears witness to another apparent positioning of the front paws of a proud owner.

CDLI entry: P461401

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The brick here from the capital Ur and today found in the Middle Eastern collection of the British Museum (BM 137495, accessioned 1935-01-12, 116; see Douglas Frayne, RIME 3/2.1.1.2, ex. 18) was impressed with the stamp of the founder of the Ur III dynasty (text: “Ur-Namma, king of Ur, man who built the house of Nanna”) before a dog in the workplace hopped—or was stationed by his proud owner—onto the soft clay with his front paws, leaving well-defined pad and claw marks (a similar brick is known in the University of Pennsylvania collection, and an Old Babylonian Hearst brick from the Diyala region displays similar mischief—or attachment, as seems possible for the foot print of a child on UM 84-26-129, and the signed hand prints in the concrete of our back walk). At 6x7cm in size (width x height), the paw prints correspond to a dog in the middle range of ca. 15-20kg.

CDLI entry: P226876

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The brick here from the capital Ur and today found in the Middle Eastern collection of the British Museum (BM 137419, accessioned 1979-12-18, 54), displays an example of a stamp gone bad. The stone cutter charged with preparing the stamp used on this brick apparently did not realize that the inscription on the stamp surface had to be a negative of the desired brick impression, and thus went about carving what was likely expensive stone, possibly marble, with the a positive inscription that left this negative.

CDLI entry: P226871

credit: Englund, Robert K.

This brick stamp from the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg, France (BNUS 374; see Douglas Frayne, RIME 3/2.1.3.1, ex. 61) was made of clay and contained a mirrored inscription of the king Amar-Suen; against good taste, the inscription was pressed into the clay surface rather than raised to leave the effect of actual impressed characters when stamped on brick surfaces.

CDLI entry: P227172

credit: Englund, Robert K.

This brick stamp from the Norwegian Schøyen Collection (MS 2764; see Piotr Steinkeller, Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology 16 [2011] no. 16) was made of marble, but was unfinished, perhaps after an attentive overseer noticed a mistakes in the first line’s cuneiform characters: the initial wedges of the second character (AMAR) should have mimicked those at its end, and the final character to the upper left should have been more triangular in form, and should have filled the space. What the completed inscription would have looked like can be seen by scrolling down the relevant CDLI pages.

CDLI entry: P251790

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Designers of Old Akkadian stamp seals cared not just for an aesthetically pleasing mirrored inscription, but also for ease of use. The artifact pictured here, found in the Norwegian Schøyen Collection (MS 5106; see Andrew George, Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology 17 [2011] no. 24), was fashioned with a grip to aid in what must have been a monotonous chore of applying the stamp to innumerable bricks. Like the Adab stamp of the previous day, this piece contains a negative inscription of the fourth monarch of the Akkadian empire, reading “Naram-Suen, builder of the house of Inanna,” and is one of currently 60 examples of such stamps catalogued in the CDLI.

CDLI entry: P254174

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The first true “printing presses” were in fact cylinder seals, and, more aptly, stamps widely employed in 3rd millennium Mesopotamia to impress multiple copies of the same text on surfaces of bricks. The artifact pictured here, deriving from Adab and today found in the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (A 457; see Edgar Banks, Bismaya p. 342, no. 2), contains a negative inscription of the fourth monarch of the Akkadian empire, reading “Naram-Suen, builder of the house of Inanna,” and is one of currently 60 examples of such stamps catalogued in the CDLI.

CDLI entry: P333340

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The artifact pictured here, deriving from Eridu south of the capital Ur and today found in the Middle Eastern collection of the British Museum (BM 90767, accessioned 1859-10-14, 338), contains stamp inscriptions of the Ur III king on the upper and side surfaces. Integral to the planning and construction of buildings, bricks, no less than today, had to be of normed measurements. Babylonian bricks were measured in “sar” consisting of 720 bricks, regardless of size, apparently based on an Old Akkadian square brick measuring 1x1 cubits (Sumerian kuš₃, ca. 50 cm) and a thickness of 6 “fingers” (Sumerian šu-si, of which six were equal to 1/5 cubit or ca. 10 cm). Placing 12 by 12 bricks in layers five courses high resulted in a Babylonian “volume sar” of 1 ninda squared x 1 cubit (the ninda was 12 cubits or ca. 6m long, and thus a volume sar 36 x 1/2, or ca. 18 cubic meters). Ur III bricks for monumental buildings were commonly 2/3 cubit squared, with the same thickness of 6 fingers or, as here, less. This particular brick measured ca. 34 cm square (that is, 2/3 cubits) by 7 cm thickness; it may be that some 3 cm were reckoned for layers of mortar or bitumen and reed between the brick courses.

CDLI entry: P226691

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Large buildings in southern Mesopotamia were built of bricks, often fired and weather-resistant in the lower wall courses, with plastered mud-brick above. The artifact pictured here, deriving from the neo-Sumerian capital Ur and today found in the Middle Eastern collection of the British Museum (BM 114266), contains a stamp inscription of the Ur III king, and on its bottom surface the remnants of a layer of bitumen, itself originally resting on a layer of reed matting to protect the wall from moisture that would otherwise rise up from ground level through capillary action. The text reads: “Amar-Suen, named in Nippur by Enlil, ‘headrest’ in the house of Enlil, [strong man, king of Ur, king of the four corners].”

CDLI entry: P226772

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The history of brick making tells a fascinating story of men’s intention to establish reliable separation from the elements—indeed, bricks saved the life of the third of the Three Little Pigs, after houses built of straw and wood by his brothers fell to the wolf’s mighty huffs and puffs. The production of the millions and millions of bricks that formed the foundation of Babylonian architecture was little changed in the millennia until the development of automated brick making machines in mid-19th century Britain. The images here show the production of bricks in molds by Syrian laborers preparing to build a 1982 addition to the excavation house of the German mission to Tell Bi’a near Raqqa (courtesy K. Englund).

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The fifteen pharmaceutical prescriptions documented on the tablet specifies the types of ingredients used and their methods of administration, but lacks context due to absence of the names of the associated diseases or the amounts of each ingredient used. The written records on the tablet indicate physicians utilized a variety faunal, botanic, and mineral materials in their treatments, including snakeskin, turtle shells, thyme, figs, fir tree, potassium nitrate (saltpeter), and sodium chloride (salt). These fundamental components were administered via mediums such as beer and river bitumen as poultices and potions (internal medicine).Below are two translations of prescriptions on the tablet involving beer:

Prescription 4: Pulverize the branches of the thorn plant and seeds of the duashbur; pour diluted beer over it, rub with vegetable oil and fasten the paste over the sick spot as a poultice.
Prescription 9: Pour strong beer over the resin of the plant; heat over a fire; put this liquid in river bitumen (oil), and let the sick person drink.

Other prescriptions utilizing beer describe washing “the diseased part,” which probably refers to a wound, with beer and hot water, and making solutions with beer and certain herbs to be used as a sedative.

Although the use of beer as a remedy has not stood the test of time and medical innovation, the tablet reveals, perhaps most significantly, that the ancient Sumerians were involved in the practice of caring for injured and ill members of the community. Moreover, the records suggest that medical practices and procedures experienced processes of standardization through documentation and distribution of prescriptions like those found on the tablet.

Reference
Teall, Emily K. “Medicine and Doctoring in Ancient Mesopotamia,” Grand Valley Journal of History 3/1 (2014) article 2

CDLI reference: P269190

credit: Quinn, Alexandra N.

In Sumerian mythology, Ninkasi is the daughter of Enki and Queen Ninti, and is one of eight children created in order to heal one of the eight wounds that Enki receives. Along with being considered the goddess of beer, she was made to satisfy desire and sate the heart through the beer-brewing process she performed daily. In accordance with her ties to libations, the poem states Ninkasi was born out of "fresh flowing water" (Civil 1-4). In the poem, Ninkasi is praised for doing things like putting piles of grain in order, and setting up the fermenting vat. Some of the processes and ingredients of the recipe, such as bappir, a twice-baked bread made from barley used to make beer, are included below:

Ninkasi is “the one who handles the dough, with a big shovel, mixing in a pit, the bappir with sweet aromatics… the one who bakes the bappir in the oven, puts in order the piles of hulled grains… you who water the earth-covered malt… you who soak the malt in a jar… you who spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats… you who hold with both hands the great sweetwort, brewing it with honey and wine… the sweetwort to the vessel… you place the fermenting vat, which makes a pleasant sound, appropriately on top of a large collector vat… Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat, it is like the onrush of Tigris and Euphrates.” (Civil Lines 13-48)

The beer produced by the recipe in the hymn is most likely of high quality and used for religious offering or consumed by elite members of the society, as Ninkasi was the brewer for the gods.

Reference
Civil, Miguel, “A Hymn to the Beer Goddess and a Drinking Song,” Fs Oppenheim (1964) 67-89

CDLI reference: P345364

credit: Quinn, Alexandra N.

The laws also reveal the existence of 'beer taverns' in ancient Mesopotamia dating back to at least 1754 BC. The word primarily for tavern was eš2-dam in Sumerian, and aštammu in Akkadian. Beer taverns are also referred to in legal and administrative records during the Old Babylonian period by the Akkadian term bīt sibim, which literally means “house of the beer-seller.” The use of the term exclusively in legal and administrative records suggests an origin based on the familiar pattern “house of [occupation]” so frequently seen in such documents to refer to institutional production centers in Ur III and Old Babylonian Mesopotamia. The use of term bīt sibim is particularly fitting in relationship to taverns, however, especially when coupled with Law 109 in The Code of Hammurapi. From these records, the implication is that the beer-seller’s house, or at least part of it, doubled as a place where one could not only purchase beer but also congregate and consume it.
Some historians argue that Mesopotamian beer taverns represented "the social center of the estate or village . . . a place in which the inhabitants could gather for talk and recreation at the end of work” (Jacobsen and Kramer 185). Indeed, this seems like a rather obvious function for such establishments regardless of time or place. Others argue that a largely illiterate society without newspapers or other forms of mass media, taverns served a greater function and existed as essential hubs of communication that facilitated information exchange. Such news would include community events like births, marriage arrangements, and deaths, as well as business matters like peddling goods or finding employment opportunities.

From Law 108 it is clear that both silver and barley could be exchanged for beer, but such commodities seem unfeasible for small-scale economic transactions. Therefore, it is suggested that people acquired their beer on credit or through more informal bartering. Under this assumption, a person used silver or barley to pay their debt to a tavern keeper only when the size of that debt made it realistically workable to do so.

Reference
Thorkild Jacobsen and Samuel Kramer, “The Myth of Inanna and Bilulu,” JNES 12/3 (1953) 160-188

CDLI entry: Q006387

credit: Quinn, Alexandra N.

The illustration depicts a banquet scene in which figures are drinking beer from straws. Babylonians consumed their beer through a straw to filter out floating dregs in the drink. The brew was thick, and straws filtered out the barley husks and stalks which would float on the surface of the drink, as well as reduced the likelihood of consuming insects (Homan 86). It is believed the straw was invented by the Sumerians or the Babylonians specifically for the purpose of drinking beer. The straws were initially made from reeds; however, excavations have revealed straws were eventually made from other more durable materials. Because beer was consumed by individuals from all levels of society, poorer laborers may have continued to use reeds due to their relative abundance. Wealthier members of society had more elaborate drinking straws, made of metal or stone. Examples include a straw found in the tomb of Queen Pu-Abi, who ruled during the First Dynasty of Ur (ca. 2600 BC). Measuring over 4 feet in length, the straw consists of alternating gold and lapis lazuli cylinders enclosing a long silver tube, and had an angled silver mouthpiece to make drinking from large beer jugs more convenient. It has been largely confirmed that the jugs illustrated in seals such as this contain beer due to the presence of oxalates, found through chemical sampling, in the resins found in excavated jugs. The presence of the compound calcium oxalate, also called beer-stone, is a clear indicator of the use of the vessel for that most ancient alcoholic beverage.

Reference:
Homan, Michael. “Beer and Its Drinkers: An Ancient Near Eastern Love Story.” NEA 7:2 (2004)

CDLI entry: P475539

credit: Quinn, Alexandra N.

The tablet suggests two separate ideas about the quality and function of beer during the Ur III period. First, it reveals that beer was used as a means of compensation for work. Second, it suggests beer brewing had become diversified by that time, as the tablet details two different kinds of beer: ‘dida’ beer and ‘high-quality’ beer.

The Babylonians had multiple words for beer: Sumerian kaš, kurun, kiraši, Akkadian šikaru. In the Ur III period, beer as a means of compensation for work was issued only irregularly, and most often allocated as a form of compensation given to messengers while on special service missions. Foreign affairs and domestic policy required a smoothly operating messenger system. Such a system can be shown to have existed during the greater part of the Ur III period, beginning with king Šulgi’s 32nd regnal year. The people mentioned in the messenger text here (Agu’a, Ikalla, and Dugamu) were directly connected with governmental policy of the Ur III empire, and the amount of the food and drink rations generally corresponded to the rank that the individual occupied within the bureaucracy. Dida beer seems to have served as “a kind of pasteurized beer, indispensable for journeys of long distance in the intense heat of Mesopotamia” and as a rule was “not disbursed for journeys of short distances” (Neumann 331).

During this period, two methods were used to denote the value of a product. The first method was recording the amount of barley corresponding to a given amount of the product, which was represented by the phrase še-bi, meaning “its barley,” in front of the amount of barley representing the value. The second was to record the amount that had to be added in order to convert the given amount of the product into the amount of barley representing its value, which was represented by the phrase še bala-bi, meaning “its barley conversion" (Damerow §5.18.)

References
Damerow, Peter. Sumerian Beer: The Origins of Brewing Technology in Ancient Mesopotamia. CDLJ 2012:2
Neumann, Hans. “Beer as a Means of Compensation for Work in Mesopotamia during the Ur III Period.” Ancient Societies. History and Culture of Drinks in the Ancient Near East. Papers of a Symposium Held in Rome, May 17-19, 1990 (1994)

CDLI entry: P273413.

credit: Quinn, Alexandra N.

This wall relief is divided by two upper and lower sections and has a writing inscription in the middle band, dividing the two. In the upper register there is a city that is shown by three sets of elevations of castle walls that is under attack by Assyrian soldiers. On the top part of the city the elevation has been effaced over time and now only the lower two elevations remain visible. The only female figures present in this panel are the women in the middle section of the city, ready to surrender and the lowest elevation shows archers fighting back. Below the elevations of the city are armed Assyrian soldiers next to dead enemies with a soldier chasing away an ox on the right. The plan (un-elevated part of the relief) on the right of the city shows two large-scaled Assyrian soldiers defending themselves with shields, cutting through the city defenses with their lances. The lower register shows a procession of Assyrian soldiers carrying away their gods or statues of them in triumph. The first deity on the very right has his head completely eroded but along with the second deity on the left have been idenified to be different forms of the god Ishtar and the deity on the far left to be the weather god Adad. The text on the center band suggests that this wall relief may be a depiction of the Assyrian victory over the Chaldaeans. This style of wall panel relief is unusual in Assyrian artifacts due to the complexity of mixing elevation and plan on the same scene.

Reference: BM 118934

credit: Kim, Kirk

The same phenomenon of qualifying Uruk IV period child-slaves with a numerical sign that essentially signifies fractions of whole units (these being adults) is known as well for domesticated animals. Compare the two texts here. To the right is the account from the previous day recording three adult and two infant SAL KUR, and to the left a text with the very same format, but in this instance recording sheep in the upper, and goats in the lower case. The count of six sheep is separated into 3 adult animals, and 3 lambs! Another text from Uruk qualifies calves in the same manner, subsuming a “fraction” cow, recorded in obv. column iii line 1, under a total of four animals in rev. ii 3 designated AMAR, the usual term for juvenile cattle. These accounts then, much like slave auction records throughout our own history, blur the lines between humans and animals—in the eyes of the masters.

CDLI entries: P001282, P001392

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Can we follow Babylonian slavekeeping accounts back to the beginning of writing in the ancient Near East? The answer is yes. For the tablet here can, based on sign forms and account format, be comfortably dated to the Uruk IV period, ca. 3350 BC. Excavated by German teams working in Warka in late January 1931, the artifact is now housed in Berlin’s Vorderasiatisches Museum. The document records 5 female and male slaves in the first section to the upper left, and 1 male slave to the lower left. But there is a striking difference between the count of slaves here and in later proto-cuneiform accounts. Where later texts qualified age differences with an assortment of characters including those representing year counts (nN₅₇+U₄), this account instead employs the numerical sign, signifying a count of one in the sexagesimal system, rotated 90º clockwise for children. Such a derived numerical notation is otherwise known from Late Uruk texts to signify fractions of whole units, for instance tenths of surface measures, or one half of the contents of a vessel or basket.

CDLI entry: P001392

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Another text from the Schøyen collection may point to an accounting mechanism for incoming groups of slaves. Inscribed with a beautifully clear Uruk III period hand (ca. 3200-3000 BC), the account lists in three columns of the tablet’s obverse surface, and a further two of the reverse, numbers of persons who might be male slaves associated with the name or profession of a leader of some sort, and each group of potential males is associated with a count of SAL, “female slaves.” The sign combinations in the first of these double sub-cases bear similarities with several other Schøyen texts and one from Jemdet Nasr, some of which deal with agricultural tasks. The total found at the top of the tablet’s third reverse column, however, does not record the number of persons tallied in the account; rather the number “62” corresponds with the actual line count of the text, implying that these lines might represent groups of males and females, in four cases just one or the other, who were related to one another, perhaps as family members, and the whole lot qualified as SAG, “head” groups of slaves.

CDLI entry: P006054

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The text demonstrates, moreover, a further qualification of slaves that would seem to harken back to the series of entries at the beginning of our presentation of Babylonian slavekeeping. Now rotated to the (original) tablet orientation to facilitate the identification of pictographic referents, you can identify in the two middle cases our common SAL KUR combination, but both with added pictograms. The added sign in the left case is a pictogram of the yoke and the precursor of the 3rd millenium sign erin₂, ‘troop’ (of workers). To the right is a pictogram of a human head with a cord (later Sumerian peš₃, [string of] figs) laid across its neck. In both cases, it is easy to conjure an association with later designations of captured individuals: with the LU₂×EŠ₂, the ‟roped humans” of our ED I-II account from Kish, on the one hand, and with the yoked prisoners of the Old Akkadian stelae, on the other.

CDLI entry: P005279

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Another beautifully preserved Jemdet Nasr tablet in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum retains the same text structure as the previous text, but with many more entries. Indeed, our inspection of this text demonstrated that it in fact was a larger account into which were copied, line for line, the entries of the smaller document. This unexpected early instance of account consolidation, now particularly well documented in the Ur III records of the 21st century BC (for one striking example, see CDLJ 2003/1), was illustrated in Nissen, Damerow & Englund, Archaic Bookkeeping (Chicago 1993) pp. 72-73.

CDLI entry: P005279

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Even more so than in the earlier accounts of this theme recording groups of named slaves, specialists are often reduced to fairly idle description and interpretation of visually complex documents. This piece from Jemdet Nasr in northern Babylonia contains numbers that make sense, as well as our common designations SAL KUR for female and male slaves, however without the clear relationship between single group counts and succeeding sub-cases with the non-numerical signs we expect to represent personal names.

CDLI entry: P005280

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Furthermore: an inspection of the section to the lower left of the account’s obverse exhibits the same accounting structure. The initial case describes 12 apparent ‟three-year olds” (U₄×3N₅₇ TUR), each of whom is named in twelve following subcases. We note that not one of these names can be credibly assigned Sumerian ‟readings” that comport with the millennium of traditional naming practice in that language from the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC, and therefore that, despite all considerations of a benevolent master class allowing slaves to retain their native names, the identification of Sumerian as the language of these earliest Babylonian scribes, seen in so many treatments of the period by cuneiformists, is best taken with a grain of salt. See R. K. Englund, CDLJ 2009/4.

CDLI entry: P006268

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Checking MS 3035’s cases that combine numerical notations and non-numerical qualifiers, in particular the lines in the right-hand column of the text’s reverse surface with subtotals of named individuals recorded on the obverse, demonstrates nearly exactly the same designations as those encountered in the simpler, and much smaller Uruk accounts: adult ‘hoes,’ youngsters and infants.

CDLI entry: P006268

credit: Englund, Robert K.

A much larger account in the Norwegian Schøyen collection adds, in terms of numbers, an entirely new dimension to the bookkeeping format witnessed in the previous two Uruk texts (the Schøyen text, MS 3035, derives from the antiquities market and is paralleled by only one other known text, copied by the Belgian Assyriologist Philippe Talon years ago and since gone into the Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Brussels). Here, some 32 apparent slaves with personal names are recorded in a single group of an account that totals 85 such individuals.

CDLI entry: P006268

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Our second example of named indiviuals, also from Uruk (excavation number W 23999,1) may at first glance appear to be substantially more complex, but it is not. Eight individuals are recorded in the left-most column—and here qualified by the sign combination SAL KUR, natural enough given the fact the the right-hand column consists of two ‘lines,’ the first counting 5 SAL and the second 3 KUR. We note precisely the same format consisting of an initial sub-case with numerical notation and slave qualifier, this time gender, followed by subcases that again count individuals, but break SAL and KUR into apparent age categories, in the first line 4 women and 1 infant girl (‘ŠA₃ TUR,’ possibly to be translated ‟new-born”), in the second 1 man and 2 infant boys (also ‘ŠA₃ TUR’). And as in our previous text, these counts and qualifiers are followed by a number of sub-cases with only non-numerical signs, as many sub-cases as the preceding number, and each of these final sub-cases therefore contains the personal names of these individuals. The sign combinations thus isolated as personal names should assume a primary role in any attempt at identifying the linguistic affiliation of our earliest scribes (cf. R. K. Englund, CDLJ 2009/4).

CDLI entry: P004735

credit: Englund, Robert K.

We may understand the structure of this Uruk text in the following way. The column to the left describes a group of (1 + 1 + 2 + 2 + 1 + 1 =) 8 counted individuals qualified by the sign conventionally read ŠAM₂. A pictographic representation of grain and a grain scoop, the sign in later periods described exchanges of goods set in equivalent values, something like prices, early on using barley as a medium of agreed value, later copper and then the precious metal silver so well documented in trader accounts. We suspect a similar function is signaled by the sign in Late Uruk documents, and thus that here the eight individuals were bartered for on informal Babylonian markets.

But the really striking feature of this and a good number of related texts is what follows in the column to the right. Viewed syntactically, the column records 1-2 individuals (though not obvious with small quantities, the count was performed in the sexagesimal system) with the qualifications AL, EN_a TUR, 1N₅₇×U₄ TUR, BULUG₃, U_2a A and ŠU. Several of these designations are terms well known to Sumerologists. TUR (a presumed pictogram of human breasts) representing young children (Sumerian dumu), 1N₅₇×U₄ representing “one year,” and AL (a picture of a type of hoe) representing “adult” (with later Sumerian reading maḫ₂, this sign usually qualifies sexually mature domestic animals, but is also possibly an element of two personal names in the ED IIIa period, and is even a qualifier of the capacity unit gur [WF 76 rev. x 3]). Finally, ŠU will be associated by some with later šu(-gi₄), “old one,” found in many herding accounts and laborer inventories.

Now each ‘line’ reads from left to right, and associates, with the lead cases, sets of sub-cases that always correspond in number to the numerical notation in the initiating case. If we innocently assign English interpretations to the non-numerical signs based solely on their pictographic referents, then the first ‘line’ reads ‟1 ‘hoe’ / long-young-bird”, while the third ‘line’ reads ‟2 one-year old children / big-swaddling / butteroil-6-bird-x.” Infants were designated with a complex sign consisting of the general time marker U₄ (‘sun’ or ‘day[light]’) preceded by a number of strokes, representing a count of 360-day years (see. R. K. Englund, JESHO 31 [1988] 121-185). ‘Hoe’ was likely an archaic homonym—a rebus writing—for ‘adult male,’ while the following ‟words” can only have represented the given names of the numbered individuals.

CDLI entry: P003500

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Our previous text represented an account of apparent Late Uruk individuals laconically described as SAL KUR. But one of the most striking features of the earliest written documents related to slavery is highlighted in this tablet unearthed by German excavators and now in Iraq’s National Museum, Baghdad. The format of this account—how the scribe set case dividing lines and how the cases relate with one another—and particularly sets of sign combinations that our investigations have determined represent different categories of humans otherwise generally qualified as SAL KUR, demonstrate that this text records a group of eight named individuals ranging from full-grown adult to a child of one year. They were, possibly, purchased as chattel slaves by the household of an Uruk grandee.

CDLI entry: P003500

credit: Englund, Robert K.

This sign combination SAL KUR, originally representing female and male slave, respectively, in time came to designate only female slaves, Sumerian geme₂. The KUR component of this sign (Sumerian: ‟mountain”) in texts dating to ca. 2600 BC occupied the triangular space bound by wedges of the sign SAL; two centuries later, KUR exploded to mark the three corners of that triangle, in subsequent periods returning to a space immediately following (or rather, in original orientation, below) the SAL sign. KUR as ‟mountain” has been taken by most specialists to refer to the homeland of the great majority of the non-native slave populations in ancient Mesopotamia, namely the Zagros range and associated highland regions of ancient Iran.

CDLI entry: P001684

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Several centuries before a ruler in Kish commissioned the production of his royal inscription on alabaster described in the first five slides of our present theme of Babylonian slavery, records from the Late Uruk IV-III periods offer still earlier evidence of slave management in cuneiform records. This clay tablet from Uruk, first published in 1936 by the German Sumerologist and Uruk excavations epigraphist Adam Falkenstein (Archaische Texte aus Uruk [1936] no. 577), records, on the poorly preserved upper surface, smaller groups of individuals. On its opposite surface is a sexagesimal notation representing a total minimum of 213 persons designated by the sign combination “SAL KUR” (female and male slave, respectively).

CDLI entry: P001684

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Strikingly similar scenes of bound prisoners, victims of Babylonian raids into the Iranian highlands and surely as well destined for slavery, stretch well into the 4th millennium BC. Hans J. Nissen has offered a succinct description of such scenes incised on the surface of ancient cylinder seals:

A good example of the variability within a single glyptic theme category is presented by the so-called prisoners scene. Three different types of figures are distinguished in this frieze. The first one is a man in a static pose. His beard and the long spear he is holding as an apparent attribution of power signify that he was an important person. He apparently had a higher social rank than all the other figures represented in the scene. The rest of the scene is filled with a confusion of naked individuals which clearly form two separate groups. The first are figures standing in upright position, holding sticks or batons in their hands, some in a position as if prepared to strike. The others are cowering and scattered over the ground, their legs bent up to their stomachs, their arms tied together behind their backs. Only in a few instances do we find a standing figure that does not seem to be holding a weapon, who thus, judging from his cowering posture and the shackles around his wrists, apparently belonged to the latter group. The context is quite clearly one of a victorious group celebrating its conquest of an enemy, the bearded figure manifestly representing the leader of the triumphant party.

(from Nissen, Damerow & Englund, Archaic Bookkeeping [Chicago 1993] pp. 15-16 & 157, with fig. 15).

credit: Englund, Robert K.

In even starker clarity, the famous Nasiriye stele, now in the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, depicts a column of prisoners of war being led away—bound and in long-stocks, and led by helmeted Akkadian troops. Done in the same fine alabaster as our first artifact from Kish, this stele in fact consists of at least three known fragments, two of which are in Baghdad (IM 55639 & 59205), and one in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA 66.893, purchased by the MFA from E. Borowski; cf P. Amiet, L’art d’Agade au Musée du Louvre [Paris 1976] p. 27, fig. 19).

credit: Englund, Robert K.

A fragment of a stele from Susa in the Louvre Museum depicts the driving of apparent prisoners of war to their ultimate destiny; stripped, with hands bound behind them, the men are pushed along by an armed soldier of the armies of Sargon. This and two other stone Louvre fragments were carried off to Susa in the 12th century BC by an Elamite king.

CDLI entry: P498292

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The provenience of this text is indicated in its final lines:

    The stone (monument) created at Kish,
   (whose) protective genius^? is Zababa.

Ancient Kish, modern Tell Uhaimir in Iraq’s Babil Governorate, is a massive mound some 20 km east of Babylon; the target of excavations dating back more than a century, this city stood at the crossroads between a Sumerian south and an Akkadian north in Mesopotamia, and was, judging from later royal inscriptions, the home of a series of rulers whose power extended over much of the region. It is therefore understandable that such a commemorative royal text would have originated in that city. As Steinkeller has underscored (RA 107, 144), Zababa was the tutelary divinity of Kish and, fittingly, a god of war.

CDLI entry: Q004867

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The inscription of this piece is, as was apparently the case with all texts of the 4th and 3rd millennia BC, as well as the first half of the 2nd, written and read in cases from top to bottom, and in “lines” or columns from right to left. The 4th through 11th cases of the text’s first (topmost) column, as posted by Daniel A. Foxvog, director of CDLI’s Mesopotamian Royal Inscriptions initiative, give an idea of the formulaic structure of the prisoner inventory:

   (from) Eb: 2400 prisoners;
   (from) Mar-ašdar: 1800 prisoners;
   (from) Uḫ’a: 3000 prisoners;
   (from) Aša: 1500 prisoners;

and so on through five more columns of text. If interpreted correctly and assuming these are valid numbers, the total of counted prisoners would have exceeded 50,520 individuals and possibly reached as many as a staggering 83,000, without speculating about what stood in the missing third of this inscription.

CDLI entry: Q004867

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Even more striking than the well-modeled bas-relief of the artifact’s flat surface is the fact that it carried on its opposite, convex side an inscription that is the earliest of its kind in ancient Mesopotamia. Most of this inscription is taken up with the formulaic listing of placenames, followed by sexagesimally counted persons represented by the sign LU₂ (Sumerian ‟human,” ‟man”) crossed by the sign EŠ₂ (Sum. ‟rope”), credibly interpreted by Steinkeller to stand for ‟bound men,” or ‟prisoners.” This sign combination is in fact reminiscent of the designation SAG+MA that the Berlin Uruk Project participants Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow and Robert K. Englund understood to be ‟slaves bound by a cord.” We will visit the Late Uruk texts, in which this designation was found, in a set of slides to be presented later in our current series.

CDLI entry: Q004867

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Closer inspection of the artifact, measuring 32 × 31 cm (height × width), and with a thickness of 5.7 cm, reveals the high quality of its translucent green alabaster, and the intricate craftsmanship of the stone artist. The originally hybrid piece will have sported inlay work depicting the beards of the warriors, possibly gold or lapis lazuli. Steinkeller (Revue d’Assyriologie 107 [2013] 131) speculates that one third of the original plaque is missing.

CDLI entry: Q004867

credit: Englund, Robert K.

A spectacular new inscription edited by the Harvard Sumerologist Piotr Steinkeller (Revue d’Assyriologie 107 [2013] 131-157) appears to document an inventory of substantial numbers of humans described as “roped men” and interpreted by the author to represent prisoners of war bound for Babylonian slavery. The beautifully finished stone, part of an anonymous private collection, consists of two surfaces, the one (seen here) flat with a bas-relief depicting two apparent warriors in standard early Sumerian profile, the other a slightly convex surface with an inscription in a paleographic style that supports its ED I-II dating by the author. The artifact joins sixteen other inscriptions from the same period done on stone, and is the first in a series of cdli tablet slides dedicated to the documentation of pre-Christian slavery, or slavery-like relationships between Babylonian elites and the numerous chattel and corporate dependents they abused.

CDLI entry: Q004867

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Lion hunting was a common leisurely activity for kings during ancient times. In ancient Assyria, for example, it was viewed as a masculine sport as it showed the power and virility of the king. It was also symbolic of the king's duty as the protector of his people against harm. Reliefs depicting lion hunts were made to be placed in the king's palace at Nineveh and they were made to appear very realistic and full of tension in order to warn palace guests not to cross the king. This specific relief shows the king driving a sword through the lion’s chest which will eventually kill the lion. Ashurbanipal is therefore the ultimate victor.

Reference: Columbia College page

credit: Shamlyan, Hykouhi

These types of reliefs placed in the North Palace of Ashurbanipal contrast to the more common lion hunt reliefs where the king is seen participating in a leisurely sport—hunting and killing lions. In this specific relief panel, there is a lion and lioness in their natural habitat which is a relatively more calm and harmless environment. This differs from the panels that show a lot of tension and chaos as the king is in the middle of hunting. The relief also represents how lions were sometimes domesticated animals.Scenes of lions in more calm settings were indicative of the king's appreciation and love of nature. The king’s appreciation for nature is stressed through the use of cypress trees and flowers behind the lioness.

References: BM page

credit: Shamlyan, Hykouhi

Sargon II, son of Tiglath-Pileser III, was one of the most important kings of the Assyrian Empire. He usurped the Assyrian throne from his brother Shalmaneser V and adopted the name Sargon which means "true king." He was a very successful ruler as he established the Sargonid Dynasty and found the new capital city of the Assyrian Empire, Dur-Sharrukin (City of Sargon), known today as Khorsabad. He also extended Assyrian rule beyond the boundaries acquired by his predecessors. Sargon II was known for his militaristic abilities, prolific building programs and patronage of the arts and culture. This panel is part of a series of reliefs seen in one of the main courtyards of his palace that show tribute being brought to the king.

Reference: BM page

credit: Shamlyan, Hykouhi

Tiglath-pileser III is known to be one of the most powerful Assyrian rulers. During his reign he accomplished a great deal of work to strengthen the Assyrian Empire. He re-structured the military and created the first professional army known in history. With this new army he expanded his empire and eventually became king of both Assyria and Babylon. This relief panel has two registers: the bottom register shows the king riding in his chariot while the top shows a line of prisoners along with their flock being driven out of a city by the king’s soldiers. Between the two registers is a band of cuneiform that speaks about the king’s military and building campaigns and achievements.

Reference: BM page

credit: Shamlyan, Hykouhi

This relief represents the common practice of ancient Mesopotamians using magic to protect temples, buildings, and palaces. Panels as such were situated along the walls of the official palace rooms, at the entrances or under doorways. Images of winged creatures, such as the eagle-headed creatures from this panel, were thought to have supernatural powers that warded off evil spirits and cleansed the space of demons. The winged demigods, known as Apkallu, were created by the the god Enki to establish civilization for mankind. In this panel, they are seen wearing headdresses that indicate their divinity. They both carry buckets and fir cones in each hand and sprinkle water onto the stylized tree in the center known as the Sacred Tree which symbolizes life. This is a representation of the spirits’ purification of the earth and their promotion of fertility to Assyria.

CDLI reference: P427142

credit: Shamlyan, Hykouhi

These type of prayer statues were placed in temples by local elites in order to pray to the gods all hours of the day. The left statue is of Ebiḫ-Il from ancient Mari, and the right statue is of an unknown man found in the Tell Asmar temple. Notably they are both wearing kaunakes, woolen cloaks or skirts made of sheep skin. Sheep were primarily raised for their wool and skin rather than their meat, which was only eaten occasionally. Wool and sheep skin production was an important and lucrative economy throughout ancient Mesopotamia. On average herders would have anywhere from 50-200 sheep at one time that they would herd and graze throughout the Mesopotamian countryside. The trade of wool and sheepskin was an important aspect to the ancient Mesopotamian economy, and as seen on various prayer statues this type of attire was commonly worn by the elites.

credit: Lestrud, Janna

As was common style during the Late Uruk period, when cities were being developed across southern Mesopotamia during the fourth millennium, the carving of the body of the cow is almost two dimensional and facing to the right while the head of the cow is three dimensional and facing straight out of the bowl. Because these types of bowls were of great significant to the Mesopotamian people, eclipsed only by the cylinder seals, by showing a procession of cows on this bowl, we can discern that the cow was of upmost importance. Cattle were prized possessions for any owner because oxen were excellent for traction such as pulling heavy carts and plowing fields, cows for dairy pruducts, and both as sources of the secondary products leather and meat. As seen in Postgate (1992), cows were so important to the family unit that they were treated somewhatlike household pets and commonly had names.

Met Museum entry: 50.218

credit: Lestrud, Janna

This bronze statue measures 2.75 inches tall and depicts a chariot being pulled by four donkeys. This sculpture is comparable to the "war" side of the standard of Ur where chariots in war are shown being pulled by donkeys. As horses were not introduced into Mesopotamia until about a thousand years later, the donkey played an important part in both labor and war. Their function in labor was pulling carts and and plows for farmers.In war, the donkeys pulled charriots that carried warriors who would then either have spears or bows and arrows. It is also interesting to note that while Mesopotamia had no contact with Egypt, they had very similar vehicles used in war, the chariot and donkey.

Reference: IM 31389

credit: Lestrud, Janna

This wooden box that depicts both war and peace on the four sides is an important artifact found in the Royal Tomb of Ur dating to ca. 2600 BC. The hollow box is 50 cm long and 22 cm wide with a mosaic made of various stones and shells. Side B of the box depicts scenes of peaceful activity: mosaics of inhabitants drinking and gathering for a feast. The importance of the Standard of Ur rests in how it displays the stark differences between war and peace. Animal husbandry is notably seen on the side of peace as a marker for a growing economy and prosperity, based largely on cereal agriculture and animal husbandry for sustenance and thus why it is shown on the peace side of the Standard of Ur.

Reference: Penn Museum page

credit: Lestrud, Janna

This cuneiform clay tablet tracks the management of sheep and goats in ancient Girsu (Telloh in modern day Iraq). During this time, a farmer needed to keep track of his livestock. Many farmers were required to pay a tax to their landlords, providing them with a percentage of the cattle and ovi-caprids they raised, sold, and slaughtered. Having a detailed, written account of all transactions, and knowing specific numbers of livestock, were crucial to farmers in ancient Mesopotamia. This clay tablet recorded in detail the exact number of livestock that this particular farmer has is historically important as it allows us to know the approximate amount of animals each farmer has but also shows us the value of these animals. Agriculture and animal husbandry were the foundation of ancient Mesopotamia, tablets like these allow us to know the value of such animals as they were noted on these tablets.

CDLI entry: P220898

credit: Lestrud, Janna

Another portion of the corpus includes foreign correspondences to Egypt from its vassal states. These letters give an idea of the Egyptian state’s administration of its territories in the Levant. Of the 382 tablets found in the Amarna cache, 64 are thought to have been written to or by Rib-Hadda, mayor of Byblos. One of these letters, EA 77, is named “A rebellious peasantry” by William L. Moran because in it Rib-Hadda expresses his fear of his restive farmers. In his distress, he requests support from the Egyptian king.

Lines 26-37 from the tablet (translation by Bill Moran):
If this year no archers come out, then all lands will be joined to the Apiru. If the king, my lord, is negligent and there are no archers, then let a ship fetch the men of Gubla, your men, and the gods to bring them all the way to you so I can abandon Gubla. Look, I am afraid the peasantry will strike me down.

Sources:
Moran, William L. 1992. The Amarna Letters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Rainey, Anson F, William M. Schniedewind, and Zipora Cochavi-Rainey 2014. The El-Amarna Correspondence (2 Vol. Set): A New Edition of the Cuneiform Letters from the Site of El-Amarna Based on Collations of All Extant Tablets. Leiden: Brill, 2014.

CDLI reference: P271082

credit: Hilliker, Heidi

Tablets EA 33-40 represent the portion of the corpus between Alashiya and Egypt. While the international correspondences of the Amarna Letters are greatly concerned with matters of diplomacy, many also reflect the importance of economic priorities. Letter EA 33 was written from the king of Alashiya to the pharaoh, most likely addressed to Akhenaten but could possibly have been sent to Smenkhkare or Tutankhamen. It highlights the importance of trade in economic alliances. This is why the scholar William L. Moran named this letter “An alliance in the making.” The Cypriot kingdom of Alashiya was a source of copper, and this letter deals with solidifying a mutually beneficial trade relationship: exchanging Egyptian grain and silver for Cypriot cooper.

Lines 9-18 from the tablet (translation by Bill Moran):
Moreover, I have heard that you are seated on the throne of your father's house. You said, “Let us have transported back and forth gifts of peace.” I have heard the greeting of my brother... You wrote, “Have transported to me 200 talents of copper,” and I herewith have transported to you ...10 talents of fine copper.

Sources:
Moran, William L. 1992. The Amarna Letters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Rainey, Anson F, William M. Schniedewind, and Zipora Cochavi-Rainey 2014. The El-Amarna Correspondence (2 Vol. Set): A New Edition of the Cuneiform Letters from the Site of El-Amarna Based on Collations of All Extant Tablets. Leiden: Brill, 2014.

CDLI reference: P271098

credit: Hilliker, Heidi

Tablets El-Amarna 17 & 19-30 trace the correspondence between Mittani and Egypt. This letter, EA 27, is from Tušratta, the king of Mittani, to the Egyptian king. William L. Moran designated this letter “The missing gold statues again” after a passage in which Tušratta bitterly complains that he had not received the statues of solid gold promised him by Amenhotep III (the father of Akhenaten = Amenhotep IV).

Lines 32-34 from the tablet (translation by Moran):
But my brother has not sent the solid (gold) statues that your father was going to send. You have sent plated ones of wood. Nor have you sent me the goods that your father was going to send me, but you have reduced (them) greatly.

Sources:
Moran, William L., The Amarna Letters, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Rainey, Anson F, Schniedewind, William M. & Cochavi-Rainey,Zipora, The El-Amarna Correspondence: A New Edition of the Cuneiform Letters from the Site of El-Amarna Based on Collations of All Extant Tablets, Leiden: Brill, 2014.

CDLI reference: P271181

credit: Hilliker, Heidi

One portion of the Amarna corpus is composed of correspondence the pharaoh received from neighboring kingdoms in the ancient Near East. Tablets EA 1-14 are letters between Babylon and Egypt. This letter, published as EA 11, is from Burnaburiash II, a Babylonian king of the Kassite Dynasty, to the Egyptian King. The Harvard Assyriologist William L. Moran named this letter “Proper escort for betrothed princesses” after the topic of the letter’s content. In this correspondence, the Babylonian king asks the Egyptian king to arrange for a suitable royal escort for the Babylonian princess betrothed to the Egyptian king. He also asks that a good amount of gold to be sent to him.

Lines 16-28 from the tablet (translation by Bill Moran):
When I presented my daughter to Haamassi, your messenger, and to Miḫuni, the interpreter, they poured oil on the head of my daughter. But as to the one taking her to you, who is going to take her to you? With Ḫaya there are 5 chariots. Are they going to take her to you in 5 chariots? Should I in these circumstances allow her to be brought to you from my house, my neighboring kings would say, “They have transported the daughter of a Great King to Egypt in 5 chariots.” When my father allowed his daughter to be brought to your father, 3000 soldiers were with him.

Sources:
Moran, William L. 1992. The Amarna Letters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Rainey, Anson F, William M. Schniedewind, and Zipora Cochavi-Rainey 2014. The El-Amarna Correspondence (2 Vol. Set): A New Edition of the Cuneiform Letters from the Site of El-Amarna Based on Collations of All Extant Tablets. Leiden: Brill, 2014.

CDLI reference: P271037

credit: Hilliker, Heidi

The Amarna Letters are an archive of 382 clay tablets recovered from the 18th Dynasty site of el-Amarna, a city known in ancient times as Akhetaten. Of the 382 tablets, 349 are letters while the rest are comprised of fragments, myths and epics, educational materials, and even a few unused tablets. Written in Akkadian using the cuneiform writing system, these tablets embody the Egyptian correspondence between Anatolia, Mesopotamia and the Levant in the Late Bronze Age, during the reigns of pharaohs Amenhotep III, Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV), and Tutankhamen.

During his reign, pharaoh Amenhotep IV made many changes. He altered the state religion to Atenism, changed his name to Akhenaten, and moved the capital to Akhetaten. The Egyptian scribes at el-Amarna maintained a collection in the capital. In addition to the documents written in native hieratic on papyrus, duplicates of cuneiform letters that were written in Egypt and sent to foreign leaders were archived. One such archived letter is from Akhenaten to Burnaburiash II, the king of Babylon. The text is a long list of gifts sent from Egypt to Babylon. The hundreds of valuable items listed indicate the wealth of 18th Dynasty Egypt.

Sources:
Moran, William L. 1992. The Amarna Letters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Rainey, Anson F, William M. Schniedewind, and Zipora Cochavi-Rainey 2014. The El-Amarna Correspondence (2 Vol. Set): A New Edition of the Cuneiform Letters from the Site of El-Amarna Based on Collations of All Extant Tablets. Leiden: Brill, 2014.

credit: Hilliker, Heidi

The Tablet of Shamash is encased in clay that leaves the impression of the limestone on the clay while protecting it. This indicates that the tablet was an item of some importance, culturally or traditionally significant. The tablet has its edges patterned in the shape of a saw, that is the symbol of Shamash the Sun God. The Front surface of the tablet shows the Babylonian King Nabu-aplu-iddina to the far left, led by priest Nabu-nadin-shum, who is also led by the goddess Aya towards the sun god. In the center is a solar disc supported by ropes held by deities on top of the roof, and resting on top of an altar. The solar disc is supposed to have been the temporary replacement for the lost statue of the god Shamash until a replacement was made. The sun god Shamash is seated within a shrine and has a lunar disc, a solar disc and an eight-pointed star above him, respectively indications to the gods Sin, Shamash and the goddess Ishtar, also representIng the moon, the sun and the planet Venus. Shamash is seen wearing a horned headdress and carrying a rope and measuring rod in his right hand. The shrine that Shamash is positioned in is suppose to represent the sun god resting on the heavenly ocean. The inscriptions on the tablet are written in prose and poetry, in accordance of the style of Mesopotamian royal texts, and explains how the king Nabu-aplu-iddina restored and re-dedicated the temple of the sun god at Sippar. It also contains information about temple practices, priestly rules, dress codes and regulations.

CDLI reference: P472680

credit: Kim, Kirk

The Kurkh Monolith, also known as the Kurkh Stele is made of inferior limestone and has unfortunately eroded much over time. However, the image of king Shalmaneser III is still clearly apparent and stands in front of and under divine emblems. The four divine emblem the king stands under are the winged disk representing the god Ashur or Shamash, the six-pointed star of the goddess Ishtar, the crown of the sky god Anu, and the disk and crescent of the god Sin. The king is also wearing four amulets that also carries religious significance. The fork represents the weather god Adad, the eight-pointed star in a disk represents the sun god Shamash, and a winged disk of the god Ashur alongside next to a segment of a circle which meaning has yet to be identified. The gesture the king Shalmaneser III is posing has been the subject of controversy as the right hand he is holding up has been placed under various interpretations. The gesture is described on the stele by the phrase 'uban damiqti tarasu' which is translated as 'to stretch out a favorable finger' and has been interpreted as a possible gesture of an act of worship, the end motion of throwing a kiss, an act of religious ritual attributed to the Assyrians by the later Greeks, or simply a secular gesture of authority. The cuneiform writing on the monolith describes the reign of the Shalmaneser III including the battle of Qarqar at the end. The writing on the monolith is significant as it mentions the king Ahab of Israel and has been the only reference of the term ìIsraelî in every Assyrian and Babylonian records that survive today. It is also one of the only four ancient inscriptions that contains the word ìIsraelî and is also the oldest artifact that mentions the Arab people.

Reference: BM 118884

credit: Kim, Kirk

While small fragments of relief scenes can often be placed in their original context, the situation is usually hopeless for fragments of the standard inscriptions, especially since most of those, considered too repetitive to be of interest, were discarded by the excavators. The best that can be hoped for is to place a fragment in the correct spot within the text, as indicated here, merely as an example, with a piece in private collection and the inscription on a relief now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In fact, the sign u₃ inscribed on the relief memento to the left was uncommon in neo-Assyrian royal texts, regularly replaced by the signs u and even u₂. Photos of this fragment were sent to CDLI staff for identification in 2011 by a Long Island artist who had purchased it in a yard sale, and the sign identification was made by Grant Frame of the University of Pennsylvania.

CDLI entries: P423468, P416820

credit: Englund, Klaudia M.

The excavators were not the only ones participating in the distribution of Assurnasirpal’s reliefs. American missionaries, working in Mosul in the 1850s, sent home numerous slabs from the palace in Nimrud, mostly to their alma maters. They also sent to their friends and families small, handy pieces of the inscriptions that had become available when the reliefs were cut down in size for easier transport.

“We knocked off a few specimens of the gypsum containing arrow-headed characters, and suppose they will be interesting to our friends in Beyroot.” (William S. Tyler, Memoir of Rev. Henry Lobdell, M.D. ... [Boston 1859: The American Tract Society] p. 197).

“... Frederic and I have been labelling the inscriptions. ... You must all put your wits together & try to read them. We have spent no little time & strength ... in having them cut into shape. ... The marble saws as easily as wood.” (Dorothea S. Franck, “Missionaries Send Bas-reliefs to the United States,” in V. Crawford, P. Harper & H. Pittman, Assyrian Reliefs and Ivories in the Metropolitan Museum of Art [New York 1980: Metropolitan Museum of Art] p. 46).

This fragment, showing parts of lines 15-17 of the inscription, is now at Tyndale House, Cambridge.

CDLI reference: P448683

credit: Englund, Klaudia M.

The lower part of a sword sheath, adorned with two rampant lions, can be found on several reliefs of the Northwest Palace (for example on slab 13 in room G), making it possible to identify the right placement for the Kalamazoo fragment in relief G-25, but the fact that the cuneiform signs do not come from the first two lines of text indicate that the sheath should reach a little deeper into the inscription than shown in the reconstruction.

CDLI reference: P426866

credit: Englund, Klaudia M.

Layard and other excavators of the 19th century often gave away small pieces of the reliefs as presents. Most of these fragments may be lost or lie unrecognized in some private collection. One exception is this well documented example in the Kalamazoo Valley Museum in Kalamazoo, MI. The beginning of its journey can be found on a piece of paper pasted to the surface. The text reads: “Relic from Nineveh, viz. a fragment from a bas relief in the palace of Nimroud. See Layard’s Nineveh Vol. II pp. sv 298. Presented by Layard to Charles Allison, English Ambassador at Constantinople. By him presented to his brother Capt. K. H. Allison 90th Light Infantry. By this latter presented to me, April 1875.” [illegible signature].

The fragment shows the lower part of the sheath of a sword, with rampant lions as decoration and some cuneiform signs from the beginnings of lines 3 and 4 of the standard inscription.

CDLI reference: P426866

credit: Englund, Klaudia M.

When Layard first uncovered the reliefs of the Northwest Palace, he found remnants of black, red, white and blue paint still covering certain parts of some of the images, while other parts seemed to have always been unpainted, suggesting that the colors were used to define and strengthen the outlines of each figure.

The hair and long beards of divinities and kings were black; their eyes were white with black pupils; often the armlets and bracelets retained some red color and the sandals were black, occasionally having red soles and straps. Only few reliefs still show those colors and apart from very small traces, the blue paint has now completely vanished.

CDLI reference: P427362

credit: Englund, Klaudia M.

Many of the figures of the king, courtiers and genies carry a pair of daggers stuck into their belts, in some cases accompanied by a whetstone – another opportunity to illustrate the use of detail. This example is also from S-20 and shows the decorated dagger handles and the handle of the whetstone in the form of a horse’s head.

CDLI reference: P427360

credit: Englund, Klaudia M.

Remarkable attention to detail is also shown frequently in the depiction of jewelry, as in this example of an earring on relief S-20. The tiny balls running down the length of the earring certainly indicate the use of granulation – a technique that has been found on some of the jewelry from the queens’ graves excavated under the floor of room MM in the palace by the Iraqi Antiquities Service (1988/89).

CDLI reference: P427360

credit: Englund, Klaudia M.

Many figures carved on the reliefs in Assurnasirpal’s Palace wear garments embroidered with figural, floral, and geometric patterns incised in the stone; motifs may also indicate metal or fabric appliqués. Some of the most elaborate embroideries can be found in rooms G, P, and S. This example from relief P-4 shows the border of a garment worn by a winged genie, with alternating rosettes and palmettes–and a deer.

CDLI reference: P427303

credit: Englund, Klaudia M.

This room, situated on the east side of courtyard Y, has been identified as a banquet or audience hall. It is distinguished by the exceptional quality of its reliefs, showing amazing details of embroidered robes, jewelry and other objects. The numbers in the plan indicate the individual slabs. Four of them are still in situ and 12 are in the British Museum, the rest is either lost (4) or scattered over various collections (New York; Hanover, NH; Chicago, IL; Berlin, Germany; Baltimore, MD; Kalamazoo, MI; Edinburgh, Scotland; St. Petersburg, Russia; Istanbul, Turkey)—a good example of the wide distribution of the reliefs from this palace.

credit: Englund, Klaudia M.

Most of the Nimrud reliefs were 2.00 to 2.20 m high, and very heavy. Those removed from the palace were hauled down to the Tigris on wagons pulled by men, placed on rafts made from inflated animal skins, and floated hundreds of miles down the river to Basra, where they were loaded on sailing ships or steamers to be taken to Europe. Some were carried on camel-back to the Mediterranean Sea and sailed from there. To reduce the weight and size of the slabs, their thickness was reduced; many were cut in pieces and, in some cases, only the heads of the figures were taken.

This relief remained in Nimrud while the heads of the king (left) and courtier (right) ended up in London (British Museum) and Chicago (Oriental Institute Museum of the University of Chicago), respectively.

CDLI reference: P426831

credit: Englund, Klaudia M.

Max Mallowan (Agatha Christie's husband) found this stele during the third season of his excavations in Nimrud (1951) in a recess of courtyard E (EA) of the palace, close to the northeast entrance of the throne room. The image shows the king, carrying a ceremonial staff and club. Symbols on both sides of his head represent the gods Sin, Ashur, Shamash, Enlil, Adad and Sibitti – the first five also appear as pendants on the king’s necklace. The text of the inscription starts with an abbreviated version of the Standard Inscription and continues with an account of the erection of the palace and various temples, including also a detailed list of the names of all the different species of trees imported and planted by Assurnasirpal. The final passage is a unique description of the menu of a lavish banquet, lasting 10 days, that celebrated the dedication of the palace, with an extensive list of all the food and drink consumed by the tens of thousands of people attending – many of them probably the workers the king had deported from the areas of his early conquests to help with construction.

CDLI reference: P450159

credit: Englund, Klaudia M.

A closer look at the inscription on relief G-30 shows that it runs across the sculptured figures—leaving some details free but covering others. The inscriptions on slabs in each room have the same length so that they match visually. The text does not continue on the next slab and begins on each slab with line one.

CDLI reference: P426882

credit: Englund, Klaudia M.

Across each of the large relief panels that lined many walls of the Northwest Palace runs a royal text that is now called the Standard Inscription because it is repeated with only minor variants throughout the palace; its normal length is 22 lines, but in some cases the text is distributed over fewer lines or is cut off if the allotted space was too small. The inscription (seen here on slab 30 from room G, 20 lines) describes the reign of king Assurnasirpal II in his role as priest and ruler chosen by the gods, his royal lineage, his successful military campaigns, and his building activities in the city of Kalḫu, including the palace itself.

CDLI reference: P426882

credit: Englund, Klaudia M.

In 2015, fighters for Islamic State devastated Nimrud and other archaeological sites, using bulldozers, sledge hammers and explosives to destroy its sculptures, while filming these acts of vandalism. According to official statements by the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities, following Nimrud's liberation in November 2017, 70% of the city’s antiquities were forever lost—attempts to digitally recreate physical artifacts of the royal Assyrian residence are surely little more than a sad Ersatz.

credit: Englund, Klaudia M.

photo: Alleruzzo, Maya, AP

Plan of the central part of Assurnasirpal’s palace in Nimrud with the state rooms. The palace was at least 230 meters long and 130 meters wide. It consisted of several courtyards with rooms grouped around them. Today, a parking lot covers the area of the original northern courtyard that provided the main access to the palace. The state rooms, including the throne room (B), surround a smaller court (Y) which still retains a large number of its inscribed floor tiles. Most of these rooms were adorned with reliefs that showed the king in his various official functions, accompanied by his courtiers and protective spirits, but also scenes of war and hunting. The rooms south of yard Y were part of the more private area of the palace and included (under the floor of room MM) several rich graves of queens. We have been witnesses, in the recent past, to a sad chapter in the three millennia of existence of this once grand edifice; cultural heritage officials, and international news teams, are now reporting on the cruel damage done to Nimrud by IS extremists.

credit: Englund, Klaudia M.

This Google Earth photo from 2013 shows the citadel of Nimrud seen from the south. The ziqqurrat (temple mound) is in the upper left corner, below it the Northwest Palace of Assurnasirpal II. Barely visible in the bottom right corner is the temple of the god Nabu and above it the “Burnt Palace”. Henry Layard, who originally believed that he had discovered a different Assyrian capital, Nineveh, started excavating the Northwest Palace in 1845, sending most of the reliefs he found there to the British Museum, but also to other museums, friends and family. American missionaries, who worked in Mosul at the time, were responsible for many fragments and entire slabs being sent to their alma maters in the US, and other pieces found their way into museums and collections all over the world, from Europe to Mumbay, Kyoto and even Greenland.

credit: Englund, Klaudia M.

Room G of the Northwest Palace, like several of the other palace rooms, was lined with these reliefs containing depictions, often in stunning detail, of religiously and politically significant scenes in the rule of the Assyrian king. The image here is a detail shot of a winged genie in the act of consecrating a high Assyrian official; visible are the genie’s earring and necklace, including the characteristic rendering of hair and beard. The panel of which this is part is today found in the British Museum and contains a copy of the so-called Standard Inscription describing Assurnasirpal II’s military campaigns.

Special pages are being prepared by CDLI collaborators to illustrate the architectural context of the reliefs within the palace.

CDLI reference: P426805

credit: Englund, Klaudia M. (photo Ellen Rehm)

So-called round tablets of the Old Babylonian period were used in schools to instruct students in proper cuneiform writing style, and to lead them through an ever more demanding curriculum. Short passages from known scholarly compositions were often inscribed by the teacher on one surface of such tablets, and his apprentice scribe was to repeat the same inscription on the reverse surface. The text here contains four lines with names beginning with the sign “ur,” “servant” (of so-and-so).


CDLI entry: P249355

credit: Heinle, Michael

Among the many tablets in the Horn collection one finds a small number of literary texts. This exemplar records a fragment of the epic “Lugalbanda and the Mountain Cave” (lines 384-403). This epic, written during the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1800 BC) in the Sumerian language, records the story Lugalbanda, a mythological hero who is befallen by a mysterious illness while campaigning with his brothers.


CDLI entry: P249270

credit: Heinle, Michael

This tablet records a loan of 2 minas of silver from Kudurri to Saggil. The loan accrues interest at a rate of 2 shekels per month (for an effective annual rate of 20%: 2/120 x 12). The contract was witnessed by Bel-iqiša, Šamaš-uballiṭ, and the scribe Iddinunu. Completed on the 4th day of the 2nd year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzer.

CDLI entry: P249281

credit: Heinle, Michael

This object began its life as a simple ball of clay formed around a length of rope in order to secure or effectively “lock” another object such as a pot, basket, or door. The cylinder seal of some individual exerting ownership or administrative control over the contents would then be applied to the wet clay as seen here. Notice the impressions left by the rope fibers visible on the inside surface of the bulla.

CDLI entry: P104631

credit: Heinle, Michael

While the transactions recorded in these tablets are unremarkable, the colors of the tablets are not. Tablets may occasionally take on colors such as reds, greens, and purples, that are the result of a combination of a number of factors that include their site of original deposition, their baking process, and the clay matrix of which the tablet is made.

CDLI entries: P103221, P104470

credit: Heinle, Michael

The Horn Museum is part of the Institute of Archaeology at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan. Containing altogether 2,949 cuneiform artifacts, its holdings rank among the largest in the United States. In the next series of slides, we will have a look at a sampling of those texts.

Like the majority of Ur III accounts in the collection, this tablet comes from the the site of Drehem (ancient Puzrish-Dagan). It records some 85 sheep (line 1) and 20 “Shimashki” goats (line 2) taken by En-dingir-mu from the herds managed by Abba-saga. An abbreviated total of the animals taken is given on the left edge of the tablet.

CDLI entry: P102968

credit: Heinle, Michael

The tablet on the left (MAH 16070) probably comes from Šuruppak (modern Fara), a city in southern Mesopotamia so ancient that, according to the Epic of Gilgameš, it had existed before the Flood. There is no date on the legible side nor would we expect one at this early stage of writing (the other surface remains covered with baked-on soil), but the format and sign forms put it in the Early Dynastic IIIa period (ca. 2600-2500 BC). It records valuable objects together with personal names, perhaps confirming an exchange of gifts as part of a contract.

On the right is MAH 16089, a fragment from Uruk (60 km south of Šuruppak) that also seems to be a contract. On the basis of internal evidence it dates to 89 BC, the seventh year of the reign of Philip I, ruler of a Hellenistic kingdom that had not in fact controlled Babylonia for 50 years. It testifies to the continuing vitality of cuneiform writing 2500 years after the tablet on the left was inscribed. Alphabetic writing had been culturally dominant in Mesopotamia for over 400 years by the time this document was drafted—first the Aramaic of the Persian Empire from 539 BC, then Greek after the arrival of Alexander the Great in 331—but the Akkadian and Sumerian languages retained great intellectual prestige. This was particularly true in such important centers as Uruk, the city where writing first appears in the archeological record in the second half of the 4th millennium BC.

CDLI entries: P424011 & P424024

credit: Clevenstine, Emmert

This Old Babylonian tablet (MAH 16055) demonstrates how to divide triangles into three pieces such that the uppermost (triangular) and lowest (trapezoidal) portions are equal in area. It shows ten triangles with upper and lower areas of 5 to 50 units. Regardless of the absolute dimensions of the different triangles, the desired division is obtained when the lengths of the base of a triangle and the two transverse lines dividing it are in the ratio 5:4:3. For example, the sixth triangle (upper and lower areas of 30) has a base of 2x60¹+46x60⁰+40x60^-1, or 166 2/3 in decimal notation. The two transversals are 2x60¹+13x60⁰+20x60^-1 (133 1/3) and 1x60¹+40x60⁰ (100). This is the famous Pythagorean relationship c²=a²+b² over a thousand years before Pythagoras.

Mesopotamian mathematics was based on the number 60, not the 10 that we are familiar with today. The system survives in our division of hours into minutes and seconds, and of a circle into 360 degrees. As the example above shows, 60 has the advantage of being divisible by 3 as well as 2 and 5, so some calculations that produce continuing fractions in base 10 yield round numbers in base 60. Computation was always intimately associated with practical concerns, such as dividing a field among heirs or estimating the materials and labor required for construction projects. Introductions can be found online in English at a site maintained by Duncan Melville at St. Lawrence University (Canton, NY) and in French at CultureMATH, maintained by Eric Vandendriessche of the Université Paris Diderot.

CDLI entry: P254721

credit: Clevenstine, Emmert

This tiny piece of lapis lazuli (10 mm long and 5 mm in diameter) fills the viewer with admiration for the Babylonian jeweler in the first millennium BC who could incise the seven-line votive inscription that covers its surface, and then inlay the cuneiform signs with precious metal. The hole visible in the end view does not go all the way through the piece; this fact and a possible residue of bitumen in the hole suggest that the object (MAH 17877) was the head of a decorative pin.

CDLI entry: P424326

credit: Clevenstine, Emmert

Catalogued by the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire as a vase but considered by some scholars to be a wind chime, this 15 x 9 cm object (MAH 19359) is not part of the Boissier collection. It comes from Susa in the land of Elam, east of Mesopotamia at the foot of the Zagros mountains. Although the Elamites had a language of their own, the inscription here is in Sumerian; it commemorates the construction of a temple by one Atta-ḫušu, who lived in the 19th century BC and was a nephew of the ruler Silḫaḫa (a full catalogue of the MAH collection is available here).


CDLI entry: Q006340

credit: Clevenstine, Emmert

In ancient Mesopotamia, as in ancient Rome, it was believed that gods would “write” clues to the future in the entrails of animals sacrificed to them. Divination was a particular interest of Alfred Boissier, whose collection forms a large part of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire´s holdings. This tablet (MAH 16274), undated but Old Babylonian in script and style, describes the liver and lungs of a sacrificial animal, probably a sheep. To help decode the message, diviners (barû) had clay models of livers with different parts labeled, and lists of associations between anatomical features and events in the world (one example is found in the MAH collection).


CDLI entry: P424126

credit: Clevenstine, Emmert

One of 52 Old Assyrian tablets in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire collection. From around 1970 to about 1720 BC, traders from Assur on the upper Tigris maintained commercial relations with central Anatolia, 1000 kilometers from home. Some time before 1895, one Pušuken son of Sueyya began trading in Kanesh (modern Kültepe), the principal Assyrian colony. He finally settled there permanently, leaving his wife Lamassi and daughter Aḫaḫa in Assur to run the family home and provide textiles for their sons to bring by caravan to Kanesh. In this letter (MAH 16209), Lamassi reports a tax dispute with the authorities, complains of not receiving payment for goods already shipped, and exhorts Pušuken to return to Assur to dedicate their “little girl” to the service of the city´s eponymous god. Letters in other collections tell us that Aḫaḫa did eventually join a religious order, but continued to engage in trade after the deaths of her parents.

The thousands of tablets left by the Old Assyrian traders—contracts, waybills, receipts, court transcripts, and accounts of various kinds, as well as letters—give us a more detailed picture of people's lives and work than we have for many more recent periods of history. See Cécile Michel´s Correspondance des Marchands de Kanesh (Les Editions du Cerf, 2001), with a chapter devoted to the letters of Lamassi, Aḫaḫa, and other women.


CDLI entry: P390566

credit: Clevenstine, Emmert

One day in the eighth year of the Persian king Cyrus’s rule over Babylonia (532 BC), lamentation-priests (kalû) of the Ebabbar temple in the southern city of Larsa employed an expensive and ritually potent bronze drum of their temple to ward off the anticipated evil effects of a lunar eclipse that never occurred. Their superiors at the Eanna temple in Uruk seem to have launched an investigation into this erroneous deployment of resources. The tablet shown here records the testimony of three witnesses a month after the futile ritual. The outcome of the inquiry is unknown. Our tablet was published by Boissier in 1926 (Revue d’Assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale 23, 13-17). A second deposition taken three days later wound up in the collection of Yale University and was published in 1925 as YOS 7, 71. English translations of the tablets and an analysis of the case in both cultic and astronomical terms have been published by Paul-Alain Beaulieu and John P. Britton (Journal of Cuneiform Studies 46 [1994] 73-86). Their calculations suggest that the kalû acted in good faith, but did not fully appreciate the limitations of predictions based on data accumulated in previous centuries.

CDLI entry: P423841

credit: Clevenstine, Emmert

Much of the cuneiform material in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, was originally the personal collection of Genevan Assyriologist Alfred Boissier (1867-1945). He published the text shown here in 1931 in Revue d’Assyriologie e et d’archéologie orientale 28, 91-97. The piece was recognized as coming from the same tablet as three fragments in the British Museum; all are reunited in the CDLI record cited below. This artifact is the last of a three-tablet series that recounts the creation of human beings, the gods’ vain attempts to eliminate the rowdy species by famine, plague, and flood, and their final accommodation after being thwarted by the wise human Atra-hasis and his divine patron Enki. The surviving parts of the three tablets, together with other versions of the story, can be found in W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, Atra-hasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood (Eisenbrauns 1969).

CDLI entry: P285811

credit: Clevenstine, Emmert

The hand-written labels on the front and back of this object show it to be the one mentioned by Edmond Sollberger in his 1951 article "The Cuneiform Collection in Geneva,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 5, 18-20, as the first cuneiform document registered in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire collection, presented to what was then the Musée archéologique by Adolphe Pictet in 1874. Nebuchadnezzar (reigned 604-562 BC) is known today as the military leader who conquered Jerusalem and deported its population, but his royal inscriptions celebrate his activities as a builder or restorer of temples. Stamping bricks with votive or commemorative text was an age-old tradition by Nebuchadnezzar’s day: the MAH collection includes a brick inscribed by Gudea, who ruled the southern Mesopotamian city-state of Lagash around 2120 BC (a full catalogue of the MAH collection is available here).

CDLI entry: P424358

credit: Clevenstine, Emmert

According to the Sumerian King List, Išme-Dagan ruled for a period of twenty years in Isin during the Early Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000-1900 BC). In the preceding Ur III period, inscribed objects such as these cones were placed in dedicated buildings and structures. With the thousands of cones unearthed for these later periods, it is difficult to know whether they were placed in the structures, or whether they served some other function. The text of this artifact refers to the king claims to have canceled the service of the men of Nippur, the city loved by Enlil. It is common among early Mesopotamia kings to make the claim of releasing people from imposed duties, and other acts of justice and magnanimity. By releasing the men of Nippur, Enlil's city, from forced service, Išme-Dagan seeks to garner favor from Enlil and protection for the city of Isin.


CDLI entry: P433185.

credit: Reid, J. Nicholas

During the final month of the reign of Šu-Suen, a number of festivals were held on the occasion of Ibbi-Suen’s ascension to the throne. This Drehem text relates to the 6th day of the 11th month of that year. The text mentions a fattened ox used as an offering when Ibbi-Suen received the crown. The date of the text reads: iti ezem-mah / mu ^dšu-^dsuen lugal uri₅^ki-ma-ke₄ e₂ ^dšara₂ umma^ki-ka mu-du₃: “The month of the high festival; the year Šu-Suen, the king of Ur, built the house of Šara in Umma” (cf. Sollberger JCS 10, 18-20, for more Emory texts dealing with the coronation of Ibbi-Suen).


CDLI entry: P111898.

credit: Reid, J. Nicholas

ASJ 9, 242 19, is an account of male workers employed in the agricultural sphere during the Third Dynasty of Ur. The tablet, housed in the Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, dates to the 47th year (mu us2-sa ki-masz{ki} ba-hul, ‟year after ‟Kimaš was destroyed“ “) of Shugi, second ruler of the period. The large account deals with a total of 9,609 5/6 man-days (u4 1(disz)-sze3) with a deficit of 29 2/3 man-days.

CDLI entry: P102296

credit: Reid, J. Nicholas

This alabastron contains the phrase, "Artaxerxes, the king" in 4 different languages.
1. a-r-t-x-$-c,-a : x-$-a-y-t'-i-y
Artaxerxes, the king.
# Persian
2. {disz}ir#-tak-ik-ša₂-iš-sza₂ ^dišsunki
Artaxerxes, the king.
# Elamite
3. (diš)ar-ta-ak-ša₂-as-su _lugal_
Artaxerxes, the king.
# Akkadian
4. 3-rw-T-xA-S-s-SA pr-aA
Artaxerxes, the king.
# Egyptian

Artaxerxes, the son of Xerxes, was king of Persia from 465-424 BC. Little archaeological remains exist for his rule, leaving scant information except from Greek authors and the Hebrew Bible. The reign of Artaxerxes, in Hebrew אַרְתַּחְשַׁסְתְּא‎, is mentioned in Ezra 7 of the Hebrew Bible. Despite the Hebrew Bible being the place from which most people know of his reign, of the four languages chosen here none of them are Hebrew. Ctesias claims that Artaxerxes ascended to the throne when Xerxes, his father, was killed by Artaban. Artaxerxes killed Darius, his older brother, when Artaban accused Darius of murdering Xerxes. Following a tip from his brother-in-law, Artaxerxes killed Artaban and all of his family.

CDLI entry: P433328.

credit: Reid, J. Nicholas

The text here, published by the University of Oklahoma cuneiformist Daniel Snell in 1987, dates to the reign of the Ur III king Amar-Suen (ca. 2046-2038 BC). It records provisions, including beer, onions, oil, and bread, given to named individuals. While the tablet does not specifically record the tasks assigned to these persons, it falls into the category of similar administrative documents called messenger texts. Some 4,000 years after its composition, this unassuming clay tablet made history by becoming the oldest human artifact to travel to space when in 1989 Emory alumnus Manley L. (“Sonny”) Carter, Jr., as mission specialist of the STS-33 crew, selected the tablet from the Carlos collection to board the space shuttle Discovery in connection with NASA’s Object in Space Program.

CDLI entry: P102288.

credit: Reid, J. Nicholas

The only difference between the two texts is that SACT 2, 73, does not have a date, and does not include any information about the purpose of the enumerated workers. The absence of this information makes it very difficult to imagine any immediate administrative or archival purpose of the tablet. What would be the point of keeping a record of an undated list of workers to be used for an unstated purpose? How would such a record help the scribe drafting the annual account at the end of the year?

The most reasonable interpretation of SACT 2, 73, is to see it as a rare, but important, piece of evidence for the use of temporary clay tablets providing only the necessary details of a transaction drawn up by a scribe so that he would be able to get the numbers and names right when he, at some later stage, was expected to create the proper and dated document.

CDLI entry: P388399 & P129030

credit: Widell, Magnus

If we accept Steinkeller’s proposition that many of these records were prepared post factum in different locations and settings than those of the transactions they actually document, we also have to consider the question of how the relevant information of the transactions and observations was collected and stored until it could be permanently transfered to the written records. How were the Ur III scribes able to remember the complicated and detailed information of every-day transactions during the period between the transactions and the preparation of the texts recording them?

One possibility would be that the scribes produced temporary clay drafts in the field with the relevant details, and later used these abridged memoranda when they drew up the permanent administrative records, similar to how they would rely on those records when they prepared the annual accounts at the end of the year.

More than forty years ago, Shin T. Kang published an unassuming text from Umma that may represent the original clay draft used to prepare our list of foremen and workers. Although the order of some of the entries differs in the texts, the detail information (i.e., the names of the different foremen and their associated numbers of unskilled workers) is identical.

CDLI entry: P129030

credit: Widell, Magnus

It is sometimes possible to cross-reference the information in these short records produced during the year with their summarized entries in the annual accounts drawn up at the end of any given administrative period (month, some months, or one or more years). In 2003, Robert K. Englund published the large annual account Erlenmeyer 152 from Umma, and managed to cross reference entries in the account to no less than fourteen different individual records (CDLJ 2003:1).

Although tens of thousands of such daily Ur III records that formed the basis for the annual accounts have been published to date, the administrative context in which they were created remains unclear. In an article on administrative practices in the Ur III period, Piotr Steinkeller argued that a large proportion of the Ur III records were, in fact, not prepared in the field, but rather drawn up later—often significantly later—in locations and settings that were different from those where the events and transactions in question had occurred (see his “The Function of Written Documentation in the Administrative Praxis of Early Babylonia,” in M. Hudson & C. Wunsch, eds., Creating Economic Order: Recordkeeping, Standardization, and the Development of Accounting in the Ancient Near East [Bethesda, MD: 2004] pp. 65-88).

CDLI entry: P109319

credit: Widell, Magnus

A few years ago I published a small administrative tablet from Umma in CDLJ 2009:6 dated to the reign of Amar-Suen, the third ruler in the Ur III Dynasty (ca. 2100-2000 BC). The text records the number of unskilled workers provided by seven different foremen as a small part of Umma’s annual obligation/contribution to the royal economy of the Ur III state, described by the Sumerian term “bala.” Each of the seven foremen would have received a sealed receipt of these labor expenditures along the pattern: x workers for y days, stationed (to serve) within the bala obligation, foreman: PN1, seal (= received): PN2, date. At the end of the fiscal year, the sum of all labor expenditures listed in this type of records drawn up during the year, together with all work actually carried out during the year, would be deducted from the expected performances of the different foremen and their workers, which depended on the amount of labor they were assigned in the first place.

CDLI entry: P388399

credit: Widell, Magnus

When the French epigraphist at Susa, Vincent Scheil, compared the newly discovered texts to the other early examples of writing then known, a seal with Indus signs, also found at Susa, and an early Sumerian cuneiform text from southern Iraq, he concluded that the oldest one was the seal with the Indus signs, believing the signs were truly hieroglyphic and therefore very ancient; second place went to the early Sumerian tablet, since it was considered only partially hieroglyphic; and third place to the proto-Elamite tablets that were, he said, already cuneiform-shaped and thus more abstract. We know today that the Indus seal is, by far, the youngest of the three objects Scheil compared, and the Sumerian text may well be younger than the proto-Elamite tablets, although this particular one is difficult to date.

CDLI entries: P008179 & P008184

credit: Dahl, Jacob L.

This tablet was featured in a BBC article that became one of the most read educational contributions to the national broadcaster’s website in 2012, attesting to the fascination the public has for the study of ancient texts.

The repetitive nature of the text led one young commenter and his father from central California to correctly suggest that the text deals with the harvesting of cereals.

All proto-Elamite texts appear to have fulfilled administrative needs, with no reflection of the Babylonian penchant for lexical lists and related scholarly tradition; they can be divided into texts concerning agriculture, agricultural products, herded animals and dairy and wool production, rations for laborers, and grain salaries for high-ranking members of society. The only exceptions are two possible metrological-mathematical texts.

CDLI entry: P008020

credit: Dahl, Jacob L.

Only about half of the signs that appear to depict animals were in fact used to represent the same animals in the accounts; the other signs, such as M461 and M332_d, were never used in this way. Rather, they were used to designate households or owners. In the case of the ‘hanging’ animal (M461), the sign is interpreted as representing a household through a one-to-one depiction of a physical emblem, for example a totem-animal; in the case of the animal head (M332_d), the encoding takes a very different form. That sign belongs to a subgroup of the sign repertoire used only to designate owners or households, and usually in groups of 2-4 signs. In contrast, the most important signs for animals, counted in the accounts, are all entirely abstract, and share their basic graphical constituents with signs for the same animals in Mesopotamian texts (see “Proto-Elamite: 2”).

CDLI entry: P008188

credit: Dahl, Jacob L.

This tablet, one of the longest archaic texts produced, was joined based on an understanding of its content rather than on the shape and color of the different fragments. A map of the joins is shown on the right.

CDLI entry: P008105

credit: Dahl, Jacob L.

More than a dozen texts with similar shape, dimensions and content are known from the proto-Elamite corpus (ca. 3100-2900 BC), all apparently dealing with monthly rations for small teams of (field ?) workers. The tablets are sealed with one of the two seals shown. The seal at the top (found on MDP 6, 223, that is also depicted to the left) shows an animal seated in a reed boat, whereas the one at the bottom (on MDP 26S, 4802) displays a parade of mythical animals. All of the texts have a sub-script, and a top-edge inscription, the meaning of which remains unknown, but may represent time notations.

CDLI entries: P008022, P009237

credit: Dahl, Jacob L.

Little is know about the find location of MDP 17, 153, although some early publications speak about clusters of tablets. The tablets found during the later, controlled and stratified excavations, on the other hand, were never found in groups of more than three. It therefore remains difficult to say whether the tablets were originally kept in archives, or whether they were discarded or disbursed shortly after being written.


CDLI entries: P008351, P009411

credit: Dahl, Jacob L.

This text details the rations for ten, perhaps eleven, high-level officials. The first ten officials are each identified with a variant of a sign otherwise used to represent 100 in the decimal numerical sign system used to count, among other things, workers. Each official receives amounts of various cereals and cereal products.

The image is created by overlaying and blending, in Photoshop, several exports from Reflectance Transformation Imaging files created of the tablet in Paris by Klaus Wagensonner. The RTI exports were lit from different angles.

CDLI entry: P008279

credit: Dahl, Jacob L.

MDP 17, 85, lists production from animals of the same herds found in “Proto-Elamite: 2” (MDP 17, 96+). Each herd is identified by a sign either following, or inscribed within the sign for nanny goat. Following a count of nannies, a standardized list of what appears to be eight different products obtained from sheep and goat herding is found. Based on a comparison with similar herding accounts from Uruk, the first of these have been identified as refined dairy products with a the standardized relationship between the amounts of some products and numbers of adult female animals. Bibliography: Jacob L. Dahl, “Animal Husbandry in Susa During the Proto-Elamite Period,” SMEA 47 (2005) 81-134.

CDLI entry: P008283

credit: Dahl, Jacob L.

MDP 17, 96+325+380, originally recorded about fifteen herds of sheep and goats belonging to different institutions or individuals. Each of the owners of the animals is described with one or at most two signs that can, space permitting, be inscribed within the first object designator (signs that here represented the herded animals). Adult animals of both species and both genders are listed before juveniles. The signs for juvenile animals are formed by hatching signs for adults. Perhaps not surprisingly, goats are listed before sheep, since goats produce more milk and have more offspring, and may therefore have been more important for the administration than sheep whose wool-bearing had yet to reach later levels. We may note that as in the contemporary and later Babylonian records, ewe milk was not registered in pro to-Elamite accounts.

Translation of the obverse:
belonging to X1:
3 nanny goats
2 billy goats
4 female sheep
1 female kid
1 female lamb
belonging to X2:
6 nanny goats
4 billy goats
1 female sheep
23 female kids
7 male kids
10 female lambs
3 male lambs

and so on in the same accounting format. Bibliography: Jacob L. Dahl, “Animal Husbandry in Susa During the Proto-Elamite Period,” SMEA 47 (2005) 81-134.

CDLI entry: P008294

credit: Dahl, Jacob L.

With 119 entries in 21 columns, this large clay tablet is the longest complex administrative account of the archaic period that is mostly preserved. Recovered from early excavations at Susa, it is written in the so-called proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC) script and records a large amount of grain divided unequally among approximately 100 entries, some of which may represent the names or titles of high officials. The seal image of lions and bulls in human poses on the reverse, including a proto-Elamite “hairy triangle” sign also found in the text itself, suggests the account belonged to a powerful Susian household.

CDLI entry: P272825

credit: Kelley, Karthryn E.

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.

Modern imaging techniques and the means to share image files with scholars worldwide allow for a much more comprehensive recording of an artifact. While for many objects conventional or high dynamic range photography suffices, others require the use of so-called reflectance transformation imaging, which allows the manipulation of the light angle cast on an object on the computer screen. By using a camera dome, several images (in this case, seventy-six) are taken while changing the light angle between each shot. These raw images are then merged into a dynamic file that allows the user to directly engage with the object (for example, zoom in on certain details or change the light angle).

CDLI entry: P293710 & P217645

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This artifact is a sealed envelope from central Anatolia. Clay envelopes were used to either conceal information (in the case of letters) or protect against any manipulation of the information contained in the enclosed tablet. In the latter case, the content of the tablet was usually duplicated on the outer surface of the envelope, which in this case was sealed multiple times. The present tablet and its envelope are inscribed with a legal text about the invalidity of outstanding debts. On taking a loan a debtor received a debt note, which he would keep until the debt was paid off, with or without interest. This debt note would then be rendered void. The present document ascertains that the debt the named individual owed to the colony of Nahria is void: “The tablet (that is, debt note), wherever it appears, is false” (lines 12–13). There are seal impressions on all sides of the envelope. During the Old Assyrian period, cylinder seals were usually impressed fully onto the clay, which allows for a proper study of their iconography. The envelope also names the seal owners, who are the main debtor and three witnesses. Publications of cuneiform artifacts bearing seal impressions frequently ignore the sealings altogether or record only the seal legends. The images impressed onto the clay are left to be studied by art historians. This tablet is no exception. Although Albert T. Clay published a partial photograph of the sealed envelope (BIN 4, pl. LXXXIII, marked a), its sealings were only properly published decades later by Briggs Buchanan (1981). However, this approach, which separates the text from the actual artifact, creates issues. Research questions related to sealing practices and their economic or social implications cannot be properly addressed under such circumstances.

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: P293710

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

For diachronic studies, digital rollouts help, moreover, to visualize the different preferences for certain materials, such as lapis lazuli in the mid third millennium BC. Traditional catalogues and publications of cylinder seals often neglect or undervalue certain physical features of the seals in putting the focus on the iconography and its development over time. Modern technology can overcome such limitations. Tagging iconographical details, capturing the materiality of the seal, registering any other features such as the presence, absence, and characteristics of drill holes open up new avenues of research into these small artifacts.

credit: Lassen, Agnete; Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This colorful seal shows a seated male deity with a beard and a horned headdress facing left and holding out his right hand. He wears a long robe and sits on an unadorned stool. He is surrounded by two suppliant goddesses in long flounced dresses and horned headdresses holding up both hands. There is a so-called Kassite cross in front of the seated deity and six encased lines of inscription behind the suppliant goddesses.

Although not apparent at first glance, the seal is a reused late Old Babylonian seal with two suppliant goddesses facing an inscription. It was recarved in Kassite times. There are faint traces of vertical and horizontal lines, as well as wedge heads under the cross, by the outstretched hand of the seated deity, and by the stool. The cross, inscription, and seated deity are carved in a different style than the two suppliant goddesses and in markedly lower relief, indicating that the cross and the seated deity occupy the space of a previous, now erased inscription. No traces of older carvings are visible in the inscription field, and it is likely that this part of the cylinder was blank in the seal’s original Old Babylonian manifestation.

Traditionally, cylinder seals have been published as black and white photographs of modern impressions. A carefully produced impression on clay or a polymer like Sculpey smoothed with non-shimmering talcum powder (for example, Caldesene) allows a more detailed and complete view of the iconography of a seal. Multicolored stones, such as the one used here, obscure the carvings on the seal cylinder. However, photographed under raking light, the modern impression revealed the faint traces of the earlier carvings, which are close to invisible on the mottled surface of the seal. Modern and ancient impressions of cylinder seals can also be captured using a photographic method known as Reflectance Transformation Imaging.

Photographic techniques and digital enhancement can aid the examination and interpretation of ancient artifacts. The seal imaged here was captured using High Dynamic Range photography, which is also a valuable tool for the capture of cuneiform tablets. By merging different exposures this method enhances the carvings as well as the texture and coloration of the stone. Each seal is placed in the center of a turntable with a stationary camera. The camera captures sixty angles around the circumference of the seal for each full rotation. These images are then stitched together to create a flattened, two-dimensional digital roll-out. With some stone types, such as hematite, the carvings are easily legible on the seal stone, whereas other materials, such as the stone of this seal, generally obscure the carvings on the seal stone. This is also the case with the digital roll-outs, which cannot stand alone without an impression in clay or polymer. But the digital rollout can emphasize differences in carving depth, such as in the seal here, between the two Old Babylonian suppliant goddesses and the Kassite seated deity. In addition to being an aid in uncovering the carving histories of seals, the digital roll-out provides insights into how the seal carver used colorations and patterning in the stone to emphasize or embellish specific iconographic elements, using the interplay between stone and carving to create and emphasize layers of meaning in the iconography, visible only on the seal stone, but not on an impression (Pitard 2014).


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; Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This is one of the tablets studied by the Yale-based Cuneiform Commentaries Project (CCP), funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which seeks to make the large corpus of Babylonian and Assyrian text commentaries available to the scholarly community and a wider audience. Cuneiform commentaries represent the world’s oldest cohesive group of hermeneutic treatises. The CCP, which is co-directed by Eckart Frahm and Enrique Jiménez and collaborates with many scholars and institutions all over the world, was initiated in the work rooms of the Yale Babylonian Collection in 2013. The tablet chosen here as a typical example deals with lunar omens from the astrological series Enūma Anu Enlil. As the following translations of lines 7, 11, and 12 show, many entries of the commentary seek to explain obscure statements about lunar horns through references to planetary phenomena or eclipses that can actually be observed:

“[If (the moon)] is white and lets its horns hang” (means that) on the first day (of the month), Jupiter will approach it (the moon).

“[If] its horns are bent” (refers to) a (lunar) eclipse, or, alternatively, (the horns) will not be visible. “Dense (horns)” refers to an eclipse, “scattered (horns)” refers to an eclipse, “down-trodden (horns)” refers to an eclipse, and “bright (horns)” (refers to) an eclipse, or (indicates that) Venus will approach it (the moon).

“If its horns are full of blood” refers to a red eclipse. The tablet was owned (and possibly copied) by “Zer-kitti-lišir, nêšakku-priest of Enlil, son of Aplaya, descendant of Gimil-Sin.”

Like the tablet about fumigations (No. 145, which seems to have been copied by Zer-kitti-lišir’s son), it was probably written in Nippur, but later brought to Uruk, where it was most likely found. The tablet ends with a short prayer to Nabu, god of the scribes, but especially in Late Babylonian times also a deity of great political power. The prayer calls him “the one who commands the whole (world) and whose orders the gods of heaven and the netherworld honor.”

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

CCP entry: CCP 3.1.5.E
CDLI entry: P299300

credit: Frahm, Eckart
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This tablet was written in the summer of 1911 by Albert T. Clay, founder of the Babylonian Collection, and is addressed to his friend and Yale colleague, Charles Torrey, an eminent expert in Semitic languages. It is written in the Babylonian language and script, showing that cuneiform can be used even in modern times to communicate all kinds of messages. The text reads in translation:

To Charles (^mḫa-ar-li-is), “descendant (literally, son)” of Torrey (^mtu-ur₂-ri-ya), the exalted teacher of the languages of the West(ern parts of Asia), whose name is firmly established (everywhere) from the rising of the sun to the setting of the sun, and to Miriam (^fmi-ir-ya-am), “descendant (literally, daughter)” of Richards (^mri-iḫ-ar-di-is), his chosen (wife). Thus speak (literally, spoke) Albert (^mal-be-er₄-ti), “descendant (literally, son)” of Clay (^mka-la-ya), and Elizabeth (^fe-li-iz-za-be-et), his beloved wife: Peace be upon you. May Yahweh (^dya-a-ma), the lord of heaven and earth, bless you very, very much in these days. May he give to you, as a present, well-being of the flesh, happiness of the heart, and long-lasting days—these are (our) wishes. New Haven (^ālne-ew-ha-we-en), 6th month, 16th day, (in the) 3rd “eponymate” (i.e., year in office) of (President William Howard) Taft (^mta-ap-ti), (that is) the year 1911. (The senders’) fingernails (have been impressed on the tablet) instead of their seal.

The letter contains a few errors, including Marian Richards Torrey mistakenly addressed as “Miriam.” The remark about the fingernails is written next to several fingernail marks that served, in line with Babylonian practice, as “signatures.” Clay had begun to write clay tablets on his own as a student in Philadelphia, inspired by his teacher, Hermann Hilprecht, who in turn had assumed this habit in his student days at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Several other tablets written by Hilprecht, Clay, and some of their colleagues have survived as well. In one of them, Clay identifies himself as a “son” of Hilprecht, following the German practice of the dissertation advisor serving as a “Doktorvater” (Frahm 2017a, 70-71).

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: Frahm, Eckart
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This is a handwritten draft of a letter written by Albert T. Clay to J. Pierpont Morgan in the fall of 1912. As holder of the Laffan professorship endowed by Morgan only a few years earlier, Clay wanted to update his benefactor on his progress:

In the Spring I finished two works, begun several years ago for the University of Pennsylvania. To-day I sent off the final proof of a book which will form volume one of the Yale Oriental Series. The subject of the work is “Personal Names from Cuneiform Inscriptions of the Cassite Period,” upon which I have worked during the past 3 years. The fund which you so magnanimously founded in connection with the Laffan professorship has enabled me to purchase many originals, and casts of important objects which are found in the British Museum, Louvre, etc. The authorities have offered me nice temporary quarters for an exhibition of the material, and I am planning to make a showing during this year in this matter. I might add that the Authorities seem to manifest considerable interest in the development of the Department.

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

The Yale Babylonian Collection houses more than 40,000 cuneiform texts, seals, terracottas, and other artifacts. The Collection’s holdings of tablets and other inscribed objects are among the most significant in the world. Among its highlights are an early manuscript of the Gilgamesh Epic, the world’s oldest cookbooks, and exquisitely carved seals. From its founding in 1911, the Yale Babylonian Collection has been a center of research for students and faculty at Yale University, and for scholars from all over the world. It aims to preserve, study, and make available for everyone the artifacts it houses.

credit: Frahm, Eckart
image credit: Kaufman, Carl

This tablet contains at least three incantations and prescriptions, separated from each other by double rulings. The first rather short incantation is written in what seems to be Elamite (see Van Dijk 1982, 101). Spells in foreign languages such as Elamite or Subarian, even nonsensical texts (so-called abracadabra spells), are a common feature of Mesopotamian magic and medicine (compare No. 99). The spell is followed by the subscript “incantation against a worm.” As was still believed in the Middle Ages, toothache was considered to be caused by worms. The prescription that follows involves catching, dissecting, and cooking a frog. To heal the patient, the cooked frog is to be placed onto the affected tooth while the aforementioned spell is recited (Stol 2018). Two additional incantations on the tablet, less well preserved, deal with scorpion bites. The first is likewise accompanied by a ritual. The spell ends with the imprecation: “Go away! Let the youth be cured and let the scorpion die!” (lines 17–18).

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: P274695

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

This important tablet, only recently fully edited for the first time, is composed of five fragments, four housed in the Yale Babylonian Collection and one in the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. The tablet comes from Assur and was copied from another manuscript by a “junior-physician” whose father served as high priest of the goddess Gula, the divine patroness of medicine. The original composition date of the text, and the identity of its author, remain unknown. The tablet is inscribed with a catalogue representing one of the earliest attempts to systematically classify medical knowledge. It provides the “titles” (more specifically, the opening words) of a substantial number of therapeutic texts (“tablets,” Akkadian ṭuppu) organized in sub-series (Akkadian sadīru), which, in turn, were divided into two main compendia. The first compendium, arranged from head to toe, included sections on the cranium, the eyes, ears, neck, bronchia, kidney, hamstrings, and other body parts. Many of the texts listed are known from the so-called Nineveh Medical Compendium from Assurbanipal’s library at Nineveh. The second compendium covered afflictions not related to specific body parts. It dealt, among other things, with skin diseases and wounds, mental illness, sexual dysfunction, gynecology, obstetrics, and, finally, veterinary care. The following two excerpts, on the bronchia and obstetrics, respectively, are taken from the first and the second part of the catalogue (lines 24-28, 115-120):

“If a man’s breathing becomes difficult”;
“If a man’s chest is sick”;
“If a man’s chest, epigastrium, or shoulders hurt him”;
“If a man has fever and coughs”;
“If a man is sick with suālu-cough”;
“If a man is sick with suālu-cough, ḫaḫḫu-cough, or constriction (of the lungs)”:
a total of 6 tablets (from the section) “If a man’s breathing becomes difficult,” including (prescriptions) for the case that a man’s bronchial tube (is sick), for šīqu-illness, and for an infant suffering from suālu-cough.

“If a pregnant woman is suffering severely during her delivery, in order to calm (her) down”;
“Incantation: ‘From the fluids of intercourse, the bone was created’”;
“If a woman suffers severely during delivery”;
“If a woman delivers and then a smell ... in her throat”;
“If a fertile woman delivers and …”;
“If a woman’s menstrual discharge is bright-red”;
“If a semen-like discharge flows from a woman’s vagina”;
“... the belly of a woman …”:
a total of 8 tablets (from the section) concerning pregnant women and women in childbirth.

Despite some overlap, the text seems to represent the “medical” counterpart to the so-called Manual of the Exorcist, a first millennium BC catalogue of text series and other lore focused on “magical” practices (Frahm 2018b; Steinert 2018c).

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 (all joined ohne Anschluß): P308112(+)

credit: Frahm, Eckart
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This tablet is one of the most elaborate medical commentaries from ancient Mesopotamia. It was copied by a scribe whose own name is lost, but who was the son of one Zer-kitti-lishir of the Gimil-Sin family and a priest of Enlil, the chief deity of Nippur (Frahm 2011a, 234–236). Even though apparently written in Nippur, the tablet was probably found in Uruk, which makes it a prominent example of the intense intellectual exchange that took place between these two (and other) cities in Late Babylonian times. The tablet explains individual sections of a medical compendium about “fumigations” (Akkadian qutāru) used against epilepsy—Babylonian physicians believed that inhaling the vapor produced by burning certain medicinal plants had curative powers. The comments focus, on one hand, on the meanings of the designations of the various forms of epilepsy mentioned in the text and, on the other, on the nature of the plants and other substances used in the course of the treatment. Several entries include quotations from the Mesopotamian botanical handbooks Uruanna and Šammu šikinšu. The following two excerpts reproduce typical passages of the text (lines 1–2, 11–12): “Epilepsy” means that the patient feels constantly choked and expectorates all the time…. The (affliction caused by) the “Lord-of-the-roof” means that his right eye or his left eye squints…. The (affliction caused by) the “hand-of-the-god” means that (the patient) curses the gods, talks nonsense, and smashes whatever he sees…. The (affliction caused by) the “hand-of-the-goddess” means that (the patient) has constant stomach pains and forgets his words all the time…. The (affliction caused by) the “hand-of-the-ghost” means that his ears ring constantly … and he cannot bring his teeth near food. “Amīlānu-plant” is like the seed of “raven droppings” (a cover name for an unknown plant). “Single plant” is like the seed of “dove droppings” (a cover name for false carob). “Male nikiptu- plant” is like tamarisk bark, (insofar as it is) solid and red. “Female nikiptu- plant” is (also) like tamarisk bark, (but) very thin and yellow-green. “Ruttītu- sulphur” is yellow-green sulphur; “agargarītu-sulphur” is black sulphur.

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: P296515
Edition on CCP: CCP 4.2.M.a

credit: Frahm, Eckart
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This three-column tablet is a short version of a series called Iqqur īpuš, plus some commentary (Frahm 2011a, 216). Iqqur īpuš (“He tore down, he built”) is the title of a Mesopotamian composition, never fully “canonized,” that explores the auspicious or inauspicious character that certain months had for certain types of activities. Its origins lie in the second half of the second millennium bc (Labat 1965). Notably, the tablet is in the form of an amulet and probably had an apotropaic function. Each individual section of the obverse of the tablet begins with a statement about some specific activity (building a house, tearing it down, and so on), followed by a list of months that favor its pursuit, plus some more specific predictions. The commentarial remarks are attached to the initial statements and often seek to establish a concrete background for descriptions that seem imprecise or unclear. For example, the entry “If (a man) enters his house” is explained as “(This refers to someone) covered with leprosy who becomes clean again and (re-)enters his house” (obverse, column ii 26’–27’). Such elaborations may reflect a widespread tradition of specifying omens that were so vague that they were hardly applicable without some far-reaching exegesis. The “(re-)entering of the house” was auspicious in the months of Nisannu (I), when “the man’s depressed state will depart from his body,” in Ayyaru (II), when “he will find favor wherever he goes,” in Simanu (III), when “that house will bring prosperity to its master,” in Tashritu (VII), when “there will be happiness,” and in two additional months not preserved on the tablet. Because the tablet’s subscript and colophon are lost, we do not know its scribe or owner, nor its exact date.


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: P297024

credit: Frahm, Eckart
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The liver was the organ to which Mesopotamian diviners paid more attention than to any other when inspecting a sacrificial lamb to make predictions about the future (Meyer 1987). This liver model, possibly from Old Babylonian Larsa, is inscribed with a short historical account related to King Sin-iddinam of Larsa (reigned 1849-1843 BC) and an event thought to have been predicted by the specific configuration represented by the model. Some earlier translators assumed that the omen was about Sin-iddinam’s death resulting from a staircase having fallen on him in the temple of Shamash (for example, Goetze 1947a, 265), but the actual meaning of the omen may be more prosaic (Winitzer 2017, 46-47):

This (exact appearance of the) liver “fell” to king Sin-iddinam when he (literally, who) offered a sacrifice in the Shamash temple during (the month of) Elul. (As for) the sheep’s owner, he will throw back the enemy and control what is not his.

Mesopotamian liver divination probably influenced similar practices among the Etruscans, later taken over by the Romans. A bronze liver model from about 100 BC was found in 1877 near Piacenza in Italy (Maul 2013, 288-289).


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: P293785

credit: Frahm, Eckart
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

For pedagogical purposes, Mesopotamian diviners used clay models and drawings of the organs of the sacrificial lamb when teaching apprentices how to derive predictions from them. Most of the models represent a liver or a lung, but there are also models, and especially drawings, of the spiral coils of the colon. One of them is found on this square clay tablet. Uninscribed and of uncertain origin, the tablet provides a sketch of many such coils located next to one another, a configuration unlikely to actually occur in nature and therefore apparently a “theoretical construct” created by the diviner. About a dozen similar drawings, five of them inscribed, are known from late Kassite Babylon and seem to have belonged to the library of a family of diviners (Pedersén 2005, 78-82; Böck and Márquez Rowe, forthcoming). Whether this tablet comes from the same find spot remains uncertain; it might be older and originate from southern Mesopotamian.


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: Frahm, Eckart
image credit: Kaufman, Carl

This perfectly preserved tablet from Seleucid Uruk is inscribed with the third subsection of the second chapter of Bārûtu, a one-hundred-tablet-long series of predictions derived by professional diviners from the inspection of body parts and organs of the sacrificial lamb. The diviners were charged with answering specific questions for their clients (for example, whether a business venture or a military campaign would succeed) by adding up the positive and negative features they believed the gods had left in the slaughtered animal. The second chapter of Bārûtu deals with spiral coils (Akkadian tīrānu) of the colon of the sacrificial lamb (Temple 1982; Maul 2013, 61-63). The diviner would take the entrails of the lamb out in the early stages of his inspection, place them in a bowl, and examine the coils of the colon once the fat surrounding them had somewhat subsided. Of particular importance was how many coils there were (lambs usually had ten or twelve, while older sheep could have more). In the text presented here, however, the focus is not on the number of coils but rather on their overall shape, as described in the following examples (lines 3, 6-7, 33, 65):

If the coils (of the colon) are like the crescent of the moon, the army of the ruler will have no rival. If the coils (of the colon) are on the(ir) right (side) like a bow, the forces of the ruler will rebel against him and overthrow him. If the coils (of the colon) are on the(ir) left (side) like a bow, the forces of the enemy will rebel against him and overthrow him. If the coils (of the colon) are like an eagle, it is an omen of Etana, the king who went up to heaven. If the coils (of the colon) are like the face of the god Humhum (var.: the face of Humbaba), it is an omen of a usurper who ruled (or: will rule) the entire land.

The outcome of the first two omens is based on the fact that in Mesopotamian divination, the right side represented the king (or the person for whom the inspection of the entrails was conducted) and the left side represented the enemy. The comparison of the coils of the colon with the face of Humbaba, the guardian of the Cedar Forest and opponent of Gilgamesh in the Epic of Gilgamesh, is also found elsewhere. According to the tablet’s subscript, it was owned by Nidinti-Anu, a son of Anu-belshunu of the Ekur-zakir family and a ritual healer and priest of the god Anu. The tablet was written by Anu-ahu-ushabshi, another member of the family.


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: P296524

credit: Frahm, Eckart
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The people of ancient Mesopotamia believed that the movements of celestial bodies, the grooves and lesions found on the liver and other organs of the sacrificial lamb, the wrinkles on a man’s forehead, the behavior of wild and domestic animals, the growth of plants, and many other observable phenomena could all be interpreted as signs sent by the gods to help people cope with the future (Maul 2013). They collected pertinent omens in large compendia and illustrated ominous features with the help of drawings and clay models. There was also a widespread belief that certain days and months were particularly suited or unsuited for specific activities.

image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

These small, semi-precious gemstones are carved with the symbols of the zodiac: a scorpion for Scorpio, a hybrid goat-fish for Capricorn, a set of scales for Libra, a lion for Leo, and a bull for Taurus. They each would have been used as a stamp-seal. The two larger, amber-colored stones are free-standing dome seals, while the smaller gems would have been mounted into rings. Clay tablets from the Seleucid period often have impressions made by similar seals, identifying the parties who witnessed, authorized, ortook part in the writing of a document (Wallenfels 1994, 4). The Babylonians were the first civilization to identify the zodiac, a band of constellations in the night sky that traces the path of the sun and moon. By the fifth century BC they had divided the band into twelve equal segments, or “signs,” each corresponding to a constellation and a sign of the zodiac as we know them today (Rochberg 1998, 29–30; Steele 2016, 54). This system allowed people to measure the location of celestial bodies based on their position along the band. The signs of the zodiac also played an important role in the earliest horoscopes, allowing scribes trained in astronomy to predict the future from the particular alignment of planets at the moment of a person’s birth (Rochberg 1998, 5; Hunger and Pingree 1999, 26). Although it is tempting to imagine that the stamp seals reflected their owners’ astrological signs, there is no evidence to prove this (Wallenfels 1994, 157).

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; Beltz, Jon
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The upper field in this seal shows three of the most common astral symbols in Mesopotamian art: the crescent, the star, and the seven dots or stars. The crescent occurs abundantly in every period of Mesopotamian history and represents the moon and the moon god Sin. The rayed star, a popular motif especially in the first millennium bc, may represent Venus and the goddess Ishtar. Disregarding possible antecedents in prehistoric times, the “seven dots” are first attested in Syrian-style seals of the Old Assyrian period. They represent the star cluster of the Pleiades, located in the constellation of Taurus and closely linked in Mesopotamia to the Sebettu, a group of seven warrior gods. Two human worshippers flank the seven dots, with a kneeling sheep or goat between them. Another human worshipper faces a statue placed on a low pedestal. The statue, which represents the god Ninurta, has hands holding thunderbolts and a headdress topped by a disk. The heads of a gazelle and a bull are on either side of the statue, apparently representing offerings. Finally, the tasseled spade of the god Marduk, positioned on a stand, and the stylus of the god Nabu, are also on the seal. Altogether, more than a handful of gods are evoked on the seal by symbols and the depiction of a statue. Notably, none is directly represented.


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 tablet gives daily records of the velocity of the moon over 248 days. This is measured in degrees per day, relative to the earth and sun—essentially, the tablet tracks how far the moon has moved across the sky from a given time one day to the same time the following day. Because the cultic calendar was based on months beginning with a new moon, and the moon was sometimes hidden by clouds, astronomers needed to be able to calculate lunar positions and movements precisely. Lunar velocity increases and decreases cyclically, and the Mesopotamians had two different systems of approximating these cycles. This tablet uses System B, which approximates lunar velocity as a “linear zigzag.” In this model, the moon’s velocity has defined upper and lower bounds: a minimum below which it never falls and a maximum that it never exceeds. Each day, its velocity increases by a constant amount d until it hits the maximum, then begins to decrease by the same amount d until it hits the minimum, and so on. If the lunar velocity does not hit the bound exactly, the difference between the most recent daily velocity and the bound is subtracted from d, and that number is added to or subtracted from the bound. This can be illustrated by an example from the tablet, where d = 0,18,0 and the minimum velocity is 11,6,35. The tablet uses sexagesimal numbers (for instance, 0,0,60 = 0.1). Column ii, line 8 reads “11,16.” The next entry is reached by subtracting (minimum velocity) 11,6,35 from (previous entry) 11,16, giving 0,9,25; 0,9,25 is then subtracted from d to give 0,8,35. Finally, 0,8,35 is added to the minimum velocity 11,6,35, resulting in a final value for the next entry of 0,15,10. Indeed, line 9 contains 0,15,10. Throughout the tablet, a single ruling indicates that the lunar velocity reached a minimum, and a double ruling that it reached a maximum. There is a diagonal wedge in each line after single rulings, which may have been a checkmark to confirm the calculations were error free.

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: P363208

credit: Scruton, Benjamin
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This well-preserved and surprisingly thin tablet in landscape format dates to the Achaemenid or Seleucid period. It includes a list of the twelve months of the year, each linked to a plant wrapped in a certain kind of animal hide meant to be hung around a patient’s neck. Once the patient had, in addition, received an ointment, he was supposed to recover. The text’s first entry reads:

(In) the month of Nisannu, you (that is, the healer) shall place cypress wood (in a bag made of) cat skin on his (the patient’s) neck, you shall anoint him with oil, and he will get well again.

The text does not specify which kinds of illnesses the treatments were meant to cure, but two other treatises housed in the British Museum (BM 47755, BM 56605; Heeßel 2000, 112–124; Geller 2014, 85–87) do provide such information. Both texts offer exact parallels to the list of plants and animal hides in the Yale text, but indicate, in addition, which specific body parts were to profit from the application of the bags. Moreover, instead of linking the treatments to a month, the texts provide information on the celestial bodies and constellations that were deemed responsible for the respective afflictions. The first entry of one of these texts (BM 56605), for example, is modified in the following way:

If … the “Great Star” (Aquarius) touches the patient and his pelvis/ upper thigh hurts him on the right side, you shall place cypress wood (in a bag made of) cat skin on his (the patient’s) neck, you shall anoint him with oil, and he will get well again.

The assumption that stellar constellations influenced the well-being of the human body and soul, later developed by the Greeks of the Hellenistic age into the concept of “melothesia,” is also behind the zodiacal references found in the list of rituals in a previously presented tablet.

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: P310382

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

In the first millennium BC, Mesopotamian watchers of the sky began to search for ways to predict the periodic motions of heavenly bodies (Hunger and Pingree 1999, 139-141). This resulted in regular observations of the night sky lasting more than seven hundred years, producing the texts we call the “astronomical diaries.” Several other types of texts grew out of this early long-term research project, including those known as “almanacs” and “normal star almanacs.” These texts contain predictions of the motions of the planets, eclipses, and lunar phenomena over the course of a year (Hunger 2014, xi-xii). Normal star almanacs are so named because they include notes on the times when a planet should pass by certain stars used as reference points, called “normal stars.” This particular text contains predictions for the year 179 BC. While most texts related to astronomical observation in this period come from Babylon (Hunger and Pingree 1999, 141–142), this one is from the city of Uruk (Sachs 1948, 281; Hunger 2014, xv–xvi). The preserved portions of the text cover months iii-x and include, among other things, data on the motions of Venus, Mercury, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter. The text also predicts a lunar eclipse in the fourth month.

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: P507391

credit: Beltz, Jonathan
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Although astronomy and astrology played a pivotal role in ancient Mesopotamia, especially in the first millennium BC, only thirty-two Babylonian horoscope tablets are known so far (Rochberg 1998). They are all comparatively late, with the earliest dating to the late fifth, and the latest to the mid first century BC, but Mesopotamian horoscope writing still precedes by a few centuries the earliest horoscopes from anywhere else in the world. The emergence of horoscopes in Achaemenid Babylonia signaled a new focus on the individual and was part of a larger set of innovations in the celestial sciences during this time, among them, most importantly, the introduction of the zodiac. Each Babylonian horoscope tablet describes the positions that the sun, the moon, and the planets had held at the moment of the birth of a particular individual, sometimes specifying their auspicious or inauspicious implications. The tablet presented here records the horoscope of a certain Aristocrates (^ma-ri-is-tu-ug^?-gi-ra-te-e), a man with a Greek name but probably not of Greek ethnicity. In Seleucid Uruk, members of the local elite often added Greek personal names to their Babylonian birth names, an act of Hellenization that facilitated their interactions with the Greek kings, and their Greek entourage, who ruled Mesopotamia during this time. If the Aristocrates of this horoscope is identical with an individual by that name who is mentioned in the quitclaim BiMes 24, 47 (Corò 2005, 218), which concerns the prebend of a lamentation priest, he was the son of a Babylonian called Nanaya-iddin. The first lines of the horoscope tablet indicate that Aristocrates was born on 2 or 3 June 235 BC, but the tablet was probably written somewhat later. A partial translation of the text reads:

Year 77 (of the Seleucid Era), month of Simanu, fourth day, in the morning(?) of the fifth(?), Aristocrates was born. That day, the moon was in Leo, the sun was in 12;30° Gemini … Venus was in 4° Taurus. The place of Venus (means): he will find favor wherever he goes; he will have sons and daughters. Mercury was in Gemini, with the sun. The place of Mercury (means): the brave one will be first in rank; he will be more important than his brothers; he will take over his father’s house.

Notable is how similar the predictions provided here are to those known from traditional Mesopotamian omen texts. The exact spot where the horoscope was found is unknown, but a duplicate of it (now in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad [W 20030/143]) was excavated in the area of the Bit-resh temple in Uruk (Rochberg 1998, 86).


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: P507395

credit: Frahm, Eckart
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Over the long period of their history, the people of Mesopotamia used various dating systems. One was simply to count the years of a ruler’s reign, a practice already known from the mid third millennium BC that resurfaced in mid second millennium Babylonia. Another system, used in Assyria and Anatolia, was based on so-called eponyms, officials whose names designated specific years. During the Ur III and Old Babylonian periods, Babylonians used yet another method: they labeled years with so-called year names, which featured a central event that had happened in the preceding year, such as a military campaign or the consecration of a temple. Both eponyms and year names required documentation to keep track of, and it is therefore not surprising that many lists of them have been found. This tablet contains the last fourteen year names of the reign of Hammurapi (reigned 1792-1750 BC), followed by the first seven years of his successor Samsu-iluna (reigned 1749-1712 BC). Each name is introduced by the Sumerian word for year (mu) and followed by an abbreviated version of the year name. Entry ten, for instance, reads “Year: all the enemies.” A large four-sided prism in the Louvre, often referred to as the “Larsa Dynastic List,” is dated to the same year, but provides a much more elaborate version of its name: “The year when Hammurapi, through the mighty power given to him by An and Enlil, slaughtered all the enemies of the Subartu mountains.” This particular year corresponds to year thirty-nine in the reign of Hammurapi (Horsnell 1999, 159-162). Administrative documents hardly ever use the long version of a year name. A small administrative document dealing with a delivery of onions (YPM BC 018434, YBC 4369), for example, refers to Hammurapi 39 as “year, through the mighty power given to him by Enlil.” Lists of year names, in contrast, often provide full versions of the names. This is illustrated by a tablet in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford that also starts with Hammurapi’s thirtieth year, but provides full year names extending up to fifteen lines (OECT 2, pl. 5–6, Ashm 1923-373).

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: P409476

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This fragment, written in an unusually slanted and clearly late hand, is another manuscript of the composition on the constellations. Its reverse(?) provides descriptions of the “Old Man” constellation (Perseus) and the “Stars” (the Pleiades). What makes the piece particularly interesting is that its obverse(?) is inscribed with a different text: a description of the cultic topography and the hydraulic landscape of Late Babylonian Uruk. Apparently, the author sought to juxtapose these terrestrial features with the celestial sphere explored on the other side of the tablet. After notes on the dimensions of several temples in Uruk and a reference to the “Exalted River” and smaller canals deriving from it, the text continues: The area from the terrain of the atappu-canal up to the Bit-resh temple (of Anu), its name is “atappu-canal.” (The area that) approaches the Eanna temple (of Ishtar), its name is “palgu- canal.” (The area that) reaches the kerhu-enclosure wall, its name is “ikuditch (or: dyke).” (The area that) […] the river, its name is kisurrû-territory.” (The area where the canal (?)) exits from […] …, its name is “urashu-plot.” This description confirms what is also suggested by archaeological research: that the city of Uruk was crisscrossed in antiquity by several watercourses, like an Amsterdam of southern 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: P506977

credit: Frahm, Eckart
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This large fragment of a three-column tablet from Seleucid period Uruk includes a long description of celestial constellations. The name of its scribe and owner is lost, but it is clear that he was a son of Anu-ahu-ushabshi of the prominent Ekurzakir family, and a high priest of the celestial god Anu in the newly restored and expanded Bit-resh temple. The people of Mesopotamia believed from early on that the gods had organized the fixed stars in such a way that they became part of celestial constellations representing deities, human beings, animals, vehicles, and other objects. Because of the major influence Babylonian astronomy and astrology had on the celestial sciences in ancient Greece, many of these constellations—such as Cancer, Leo, Taurus, Gemini, and Scorpio— are still recognized by us today. This tablet is one in a group of five cuneiform manuscripts from first millennium bc Assyria and Babylonia that explain how the body parts, clothes, paraphernalia, and other elements of the constellations were “drawn.” A typical section, on Orion (called by the Babylonians “The True Shepherd of Anu” and one of the most conspicuous constellations in the sky) and Gemini, is given here in translation; it includes some theological comments (column ii 10–17):

The True Shepherd of Anu (i.e., Orion)—(can be identified with) Papsukkal, the vizier of Anu and (his wife) Antu (a theological elaboration). He is a human figure, clothed, bearded, supplied with a kurkurru- container(?), grasping a lock and key. The Twins (i.e., Gemini), who stand in front of the True Shepherd of Anu, (can be identified with) Lulal and Latarak (two demonic demigods) of the gates. (They are) two human figures, clothed. The front figure is bearded, the back figure has the face of Latarak; they carry a large jug in their right hands. The celestial body that stands below the True Shepherd of Anu is the Rooster (Lepus). The tablet also explains, through speculative philology, how the constellation originally known as the “Hired Man” eventually morphed into a ram (Aries).

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: P296517

credit: Frahm, Eckart
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Bearing the impression of a cylinder seal in the lower part of the reverse and along the edges, YBC 4702, is the hitherto only example of a sealed mathematical tablet. The text itself belongs to the category of multiplication tables, in this case using the principal number 50 (Nemet-Nejat and Wallenfels, N.A.B.U. 1994/91). According to the tablet's subscript it is an im-gid2-da-tablet. The seal, whose legend is recognizable in the various instances of its impression, belonged to a different individual. Did the tablet's scribe, an apprentice, practice how to impress seals on tablets? In what relation does the seal owner stand to the apprentice?

CDLI entry: P255012

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus
image credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This tablet describes a method for approximating the area of a non-right isosceles triangle. The procedure is illustrated with a drawing of the triangle that has two equal sides of length 1,40 and a base of 2,20. The procedure begins by “tearing out” a small triangle with a base of 0,20 from the middle of the original triangle’s base. This breaks the original triangle into three smaller triangles: one has a base of 0,20, and the others have a base of 1 and a diagonal of 1,40 (equivalent to the original triangle’s sides). The two outer triangles then approximate right triangles with short sides of 1 and hypotenuses of 1,40. Knowing about right triangles with side length ratios of 3:4:5, the Babylonian mathematician established that the third side had to be approximately 1,20. Once these triangles were separated, their areas could be calculated and added together. According to the tablet, the total area comes to 1,33,20. However, modern mathematics calculates the original isosceles triangle’s true area as 1,23,19. There are two ways of understanding this discrepancy: Høyrup (2002) believes that the entire calculation is simply an approximation method that does not give an exact area, only an estimate; Neugebauer and Sachs (1945), on the other hand, assume that the calculation is supposed to be exact, but that the figure was not described with full clarity at the beginning of the problem. According to their view, the 2,20-length base of the original figure is actually bent slightly, meaning that the whole figure is not a triangle at all, but the two outer triangles are proper right triangles. The last lines of the text mention “trapezoid[s] of the diagonal” of the triangle; this apparently refers to a figure auxiliary to the original one, but no parallels are known, and the precise nature of these trapezoids eludes a full understanding.

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: P255067

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

This tablet contains a student exercise for finding the area of a circle. The reverse has an unlabeled drawing of a circle, while the obverse contains another circle labeled with three numbers. The 3 above the circle represents the known circumference of the circle, and the goal is to find its area. The procedure used by the Babylonians for finding the area of a circle differed from ours. Instead of seeing the circle in terms of how wide it is—that is, calculating its area by its radius or diameter— they expressed the size through the length of its circumference (Robson 2008a, 65–66). To calculate the area of a circle, the circumference was squared, then multiplied by the rough coefficient of 0;05 (A = πr2 = C2/4π ≈ C2/12). So, in this exercise, the circumference is first squared, and the result, 9, is written to the right of the circle. Next, 9 is multiplied by the coefficient, yielding 0;45, and, to be sure, this answer is written in the center of the circle. Despite being a little inaccurate, this method of using the coefficient of 0;05 for finding the area of a circle was favored in Old Babylonian mathematical problems probably because of its computational ease (Robson 1999, 34–38).

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: P255051

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

This mathematical tablet contains a calculation for the area of a trapezoid. The reverse (bottom) shows a small unlabeled drawing of a trapezoid, while the obverse (top) contains a trapezoid with three of the sides labeled with numbers, and the area of the trapezoid written in the middle. The left and upper sides are labeled “2,20,” and the shorter right side is labeled “2.” The area of a trapezoid is calculated by adding the two bases together, multiplying by the height, and dividing by two. This means that although the labels on the left and right refer to side lengths, the label on the upper side must be understood to refer to the height of the entire figure, rather than the length of that side. So to calculate the area, 2 + 2,20 is multiplied by 2,20, then divided by two. This multiplies out to five and one-eighteenth, or 5,03,20 in sexagesimal notation, which is the number written inside the trapezoid.


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: P255049

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

This mathematical tablet shows on both the obverse and the reverse drawings of a small square within a larger square, along with several numerical labels. The numbers and labels relate to the calculation of the area between the two squares, for which two different methods can be used. The first is simply to subtract the area of the small square from the large square. The area of the small square is nine, indicated with a label inside that square. The area of the large square is one hundred, which is shown at the top (and can also be calculated by squaring the side length, ten, labeled on the far left). Subtracting nine from one hundred gives ninety-one, which is the number given in the area between the two squares, referring to the area of this space. The second method cuts the area between the two squares into four equivalent rectangles. The area of each of these rectangles can be calculated by multiplying their lengths by their widths, which comes out to twenty-two and three-fourths. This is the number found to the right of the entire figure. Because there are four such rectangles, the total area can be calculated by multiplying twenty-two and three-fourths by four, which again equals ninety-one. Friberg (2007a, 2007b) suggests that the problem may have provided the student with the area in between the two squares (91) and the distance between them (3,30), then asked the student to compute the side lengths of the two squares. He also compares this problem with various other figure-within-figure tablets known from Babylonian mathematics. These tablets illustrate rectangle-within-rectangle, circle-within-circle, equilateral-triangle-within-equilateral-triangle, and even “concave square within a rectangle” problems (Friberg and Al-Rawi 2016, 393-394).

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: P308302

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