The hero depicted in the monument is suspected by many—and hinted at by Louvre curators—to be Gilgamesh. Lion-taming spirits are often associated with the hero given his conflicts with such beasts in his namesake epic. Furthermore, the monument stands 5.52 meters in height, which various versions of the epic refer to as the height at which Gilgamesh would stand. For further information, see the following reference. Beyond the identity of the depicted hero, lion-taming spirits in general are thought to be signs of divinity and power; this gives new significance to its location at the heart of power in the Akkadian palace.

Reference: AO 19862

credit: Abdusamad, Rania M.

While the exact context of this relief is unknown, it is most likely a depiction of the conflict between Enkidu, Humbaba, and Gilgamesh described in the Epic of Gilgamesh. This is made most obvious by the illustration of the two allied warriors handling the beast’s horns in a manner similar to that described in the execution of Humbaba in the fifth tablet of the Epic. Carved on basalt, the relief was found ornamenting the wall of the palace of the Neo-Hittite king of Guzana, Kapara. The relief measures to be 62.6 centimeters in height, 42 centimeters in width, and 16 centimeters in thickness. It is tentatively dated to the 10th-9th century BC, which puts it between Neo-Hittite and Hurritic periods.

Reference: 21.18

credit: Abdusamad, Rania M.

Tablet VI is dated to Neo-Assyrian period (700 BC). The Nineveh witness displayed here measures 13 centimeters high by 14 centimeters wide, and 2.54 centimeters thick. It was excavated by Sir Austen Henry Layard in the previously mentioned site of Nineveh. Literarily, it recalls the goddess Ishtar’s marital desires for Gilgamesh, and her subsequent anger at being rebuffed. It furthermore details the series of disastrous events that follow. The most significant result of this fragment of the narrative is the heaven-determined fate of Enkidu pushed forth by these events. A complete translation of the tablet can be found at panel.

CDLI reference: P273202

credit: Abdusamad, Rania M.,

There is conflict in the dating of Tablet V of the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic. Sulaymaniyah Museum dates it to 2000-1500 BC, but dissenting scholars put it closer to the Neo-Babylonian period. Its most significant contribution is in its depiction of the events experienced by Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Cedar Forest. These descriptions include previously unknown characterizations of Humbaba as more man than monster. Furthermore, the tablet offers a more advanced emotional depiction of all the characters involved in the conflict. It also presents a deeper moral conflict within Enkidu and, at another instance, Gilgamesh in their decision to execute Humbaba. A complete translation of the tablet can be found here.

Reference: T.1447

credit: Abdusamad, Rania M.,

The Flood Tablet, like the majority of tablets coming out the neo-Assyrian royal library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh, was inscribed on clay and furthermore kilned, indicating a desire for preservation by the inscriber. It depicts the ordeal of Utuapishtim in constructing a vessel in defense of a great flood being induced by the Gods of the time. The creation of this vessel was advised by a dissenting god, Ea, who later on intervenes once more to save Utuapishtim against the ire of the Gods who had sought complete demise. Within the tablet, the entire tale is told to Gilgamesh by Utuapishtim. A complete translation of the tablet can be found here.

CDLI Reference: P273210

credit: Abdusamad, Rania M.

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

Mesopotamian rulers were assumed to be chosen by the gods to rule on earth; because of this, they actively played a part in the daily life of ancient Mesopotamia. Their main roles were to manage the state in times of war and in times of peace, writing laws, being military leaders, and being heads of the justice system. A ruler would decide when to go on campaigns of war for plunder for new resources. Shulgi’s year names often have to do with military campaigns of plunder. For example, ”24th year: Karhar was destroyed," "25th year: Simurrum was destroyed.” It was also up to the rulers to decide when and what official buildings would be constructed. For example, Ur-Namma built the Ur ziggurat, which was a huge architectural project demonstrating great wealth in the kingdom. One of the most important jobs of the ruler was to provide for social order and justice. One example of this is Hammurapi’s law code written on a monumental stele. This law code was one of the earliest known. It spelled out all of the laws of the states with punishments for those who did not follow them.

CDLI entry: Q006387

credit: Nickelson, Samantha

Mesopotamian art flourished in daily life. The most abundant natural resource available to them was clay and stone so many reliefs are carved into them. Through trade they would acquire jewels, shells and other resourced in order to adorn their works with. The image to the left is called the, “Victory stele of Naram-Sin.” This image depicts a godlike figure standing above the people that he has beaten in conquest, as well as fellow soldiers. The godlike figure is Naram-Sin, the king. He is depicted much bigger than everyone else, which shows his importance. He is also wearing the horned crown, which represents divinity. This work also shows a hierarchy where the most important figure is at the top and the lesser important people, the soldiers and the enemy, on the bottom. The stone relief would originally be adorned with jewels and lapis but that is lost to the years. In the stele, art was a combination of daily life, like war, and religion, depicting Naram-Sin as a divine figure.

CDLI entry: Q005225

credit: Nickelson, Samantha

Religion for the ancient Babylonians was a part of daily life. They worshipped multiple gods and each god had a specific job to do. Each city had a god who was connected to the city in a special way. To prove their devotion to the gods, huge monumental buildings called ziggurats were constructed. The ziggurats were temples that were places of worship for the people. The temples perched atop the ziggurats held art and cultural goods used to impress the gods. When bad things happened in Mesopotamia, like famine, disease or bad crop yields, the people believed that they were being punished by the gods. To rectify this, they would go to the temples and present offerings in hopes of appeasing the gods. In the image I have provided, there is an example of one of these great edifices. Building a ziggurat shows economic prosperity as well as devotion, as it was a big job to complete. But once done, it was a place for the people to show their love for their gods.

Reference: web resource

credit: Nickelson, Samantha

Once a people have settled in one area, paralleling animal domestication is farming. In ancient Mesopotamia farming was a critical part of daily life. Situated between two rivers, ancient Mesopotamians relied on the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates to cultivate their crops. Water was always an important resource that at times had to be tamed by ditches and canals in order for farmers to water their crops. At times the rivers were unstable. They would flood which could be a blessing or a curse depending on the season. With the flooding they brought up silt that blacked canals and filled ditches. These canals and ditches had to be maintained so water could travel through them and get to the crops. The main crop for large scale Mesopotamians was grain. Wheat and barley were the most important crops due to their ability to make beer out of them, which was a staple in the Mesopotamians lives. Technological advances paralleled the beginning of farming. Mesopotamians used a seed plow with a funnel to drop seeds in. In addition to large scale crops Mesopotamians also farmed a variety of small scale crops probably used as gardens to support a single family. In the provided image there is a statue of a man using an ox or a cow to pull his plow. This shows the combination of animal domestication and the development of widespread farming. Farming was a very important part of life as the ancient Mesopotamians had a diet based heavily on grains.

Reference: web resource

credit: Nickelson, Samantha

Animal domestication meant that humans no longer needed to live a nomadic,hunter-gatherer life. People could settle in one place and grow what they needed to survive. Plant and animal domestication paved the way for civilizations to emerge, and empires to form. No longer are inhabitants constantly on the move. People are creating groups and staying in one place. Animal domestication goes back to around 8,000 BC. By this time goat and sheep had been domesticated—pigs earlier, and dogs probably much earlier. Each animal gives much needed resources to the ancient Mesopotamians. Ancient people got wool from sheep, milk and hair from goats, and meat and lard from pigs. Somewhat later, bovines were domesticated, then donkeys. All animals served multiple purposes, for instance pulling loads, providing wool or hides, dairy products or meat. Because they were used in religious or royalty sacrifice, many pictures of animals, when they are available, are used in representations of offering or gesture. Domestication of animals shows sophistication in human organization. In the iconography, there are many people using different animals in different ways. Some are using the wool from the sheep to make textiles, others are leading their animals who are carrying loads for community members. Without the domestication of animals, the Babylonians would not have had many resources to supplement their diet.

Reference: wiki entry

credit: Nickelson, Samantha

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

This carved stone slab in the form of a brick attests to the restoration of Ekur, the temple of Enlil in Nippur, the Holy See if ancinet Sumer. Enlil was the chief god of the Sumerian pantheon, and the main deity referenced on clay and stone tablets. Donations to the refurbishment of Ekur were very important to Mesopotamian rulers, insofar as they professed that Enlil could bring great rewards, or great hardships to a kingdom. The donor named on this tablet is Hašmar-galšu. Although he is not a well known Kassite figure, Hašmar-galšu wrote his name with the divine determinative, a marker usually used by deities and seldom embraced by even the most elite of rulers of this period. The inscription reads: “Present of Hašmar-galšu. A stone brick for the Ekur, for Enlil, his lord.” Having been carved into black marble, the message was meant to last for eternity.

CDLI entry: P373779

credit: Deline, Julian

The cylinder commemorates the vast building program carried out by king Nebuchadnezzar II, ruler of Babylon from 605 to 562 B.C. Written in cuneiform, the text reads; “I built a strong wall that cannot be shaken, with bitumen and baked bricks… I laid its foundation on the great of the netherworld, and build its top as high as a mountain.” Through his building program, Nebuchadnezzar II transformed Babylon into an elite imperial capital. Like time capsules of the modern day, baked clay cylinders were buried within the foundations of ancient buildings as they were being built. The cylinders often record the restoration of an already ancient structure, as well as the architectural plans of a newly constructed building. This particular cylinder documents Nebuchadnezzar’s building of a new outer city wall, which he claims “no previous king had done.” Inserting cylinders into building foundations was an attempt of the current king to be honored by future kings going about the further restoration of the structure.

CDLI entry: P498321

credit: Deline, Julian

The mortgage documents an agreement by two men, Abda and Banunu, to another man, Bel-nadin-shumu, about purchasing an orchard and an uncultivated area of land for a large number of date trees. Included are the names of the scribe, Ninib-abu-user, and eleven witnesses, four of whom signed the upper, lower, and right sides with seal impressions. Also included are the thumbnail markings of the two debtors. The tablet was found along with 729 others in a room in the ruins of Nippur during an excavation carried out by the University of Pennsylvania in 1893. The room is located 20 feet below the surface of the northeastern ridge of Nippur, and was used as a business archive for wealthy firms, bankers, and brokers.

CDLI entry: P498088

credit: Deline, Julian

Without the discernable use of involved syntax in early texts, it is difficult to interpret tablets with any certainty. This small tablet likely reports on the grain (barley) distribution of a large temple. A cylinder seal has been rolled over the tablet, illustrating a man walking two dogs on leashes while they hunt boar. Consistent with the southern Mesopotamia region, the man appears to be active in wetlands. The Jemdet Nasr period is particularly known as one of the formative stages in the development of cuneiform. While the Uruk IV period claims the oldest clay tablets, the Jemdet Nasr period made great advancements away from a pictographic style of text.

CDLI entry: P005393

credit: Deline, Julian

This Assyrian relief dates between 883-859 BC of the neo-Assyrian period. The slab depicts the king Assurnasirpal II holding a bow (symbolizing his authority), and a ceremonial drinking bowl. Assurnasirpal II is facing a eunuch (identified by the lack of a beard), who is holding a fly whisk and a ladle used to refill the ceremonial bowl. The king wears the royal crown, a conical cap with a small top and a long diadem, and stands with the eunuch in an almost religious manner. The palace rooms at Nimrud were guarded at the doorway by large sculptures, and it’s walls were decorated with brightly painted walls and huge stone slabs containing carved reliefs. The noted Near Eastern archaeologist Klaudia Englund maintains a detailed online description of the palace rooms within the CDLI domain.

CDLI entry: P426821

credit: Deline, Julian

From the Ishtar Temple of Mari, this stone sculpture of a couple seated on a bench, wearing similar dress, dates from the Early Dynastic period of Sumer (ca. 2500 BC). One way female statues were differentiated from male statues in Sumerian sculpture was in how their hands were clasped: as shown in other images, women generally held one wrist with the opposite hand rather than clasping their hands in front of them with the fingers laced or with both hands folded. Here, the man’s hand grasps the woman’s wrist, demonstrating his dominance over her, while her hand lies limp across their laps. The man can also be differentiated from the woman in that he wears a fringed skirt rather than a dress. The two figures are turned toward each other, the woman overlapping the man, something that would not have been common in reliefs from this period. From an art historical perspective, this image reminds us of the tomb objects of the Etruscans, particularly the Sarcophagus of the Spouses, that shed light on the intimacy of the lives of couples of that early Italian civilization.

Image Credit: Jean M. Evans, The Lives of Sumerian Sculpture: An Archaeology of the Early Dynastic Temple, p. 200, fig. 71.

credit: Burton, Elizabeth M.

This sculpture from the Inanna temple in ancient Mari dates to the Early Dynastic period of Sumer (ca. 2500 BC), and is currently housed in the Louvre Museum (image credit). Unlike many other Sumerian sculptures of this period, this particular statue of the ruler Ebiḫ-Il is extraordinarily realistic, with more texture variation than is generally expected. The statue is bald; the figure's face is well-proportioned, with a beard carved and incised, drilled into to appear realistic and intricate. His eyebrows are bold and laid above lined and certainly originally inlaid eyes that convey expression or feeling, something previously uncommon in Sumerian sculpture. His ears are also quite realistically carved. The skirt worn by the figure features fringe along the bottom. This sculpture, though exceptionally detailed, is still idealized.

CDLI entry: P225850

credit: Burton, Elizabeth M.

This statue of a female figure found in the Inanna Temple of Nippur demonstrates the artistic style of the Early Dynastic period (ca. 2800-2350 BC). The woman’s hair is kinked, her eyes are large and inlaid with a different type of stone than that from which her body was carved, and her body is a large mass with angular arms and clasped hands. The robe or dress she wears is given dimension, and her gender is displayed, through the wrap portion that is incised down the center of the body. Her gender is also betrayed by the remnants of blue beading in her hair and on her shoulders, that may have come from a necklace or headdress she once wore. Many female figures of this time, especially within temples devoted to goddesses like Inanna, were given jewelry (earrings, bracelets, and necklaces), especially if the figures represented a queen or her court.

Image credit: Jean M. Evans, The Lives of Sumerian Sculpture: An Archaeology of the Early Dynastic Temple, p. 142, fig. 46

credit: Burton, Elizabeth M.

This statue was part of the Tell Asmar hoard and echoes other figures from the Early Dynastic period in Sumer (ca. 2800-2350 BC). This image is unique, however, in that it depicts a nude hero rather than a pious ruler or other worshipper. Similar to ruler and worshipper votive statues, however, this statue has clasped hands and is in a position one might interpret as pious. The statue here is interesting because of its function: it does not merely stand as a representation of another man who wished to ensure a presence in the temple ‘solid as stone,’ but it has a utilitarian function too. The kneeling figure wears nothing but a belt and a headdress, the latter of which functions as a vessel for ritual libations. This figure, since it functions as an intermediary between man and the gods (as shown through its headdress intended for ritual use), is not human but a divine hero, a hybrid of man and god. This particular piece has been described to represent one hero in particular: he who masters and domesticates animals.

Image credit: Jean M. Evans, The Lives of Sumerian Sculpture: An Archaeology of the Early Dynastic Temple, p. 162, fig. 54

credit: Burton, Elizabeth M.

This sculpture, taken from Ur and dated to the Early Dynastic IIIb period (ca. 2500-2350 BC), was made on behalf of the ruler Enmetena, of Lagash province. Now housed in the Iraq Museum, the sculpture demonstrates contemporary dress, piety, and the tradition of image-making of this period. This particular statue was represent the ruler in his absence. It is inscribed with the phrase “Enmetena whom Enlil loves” to demonstrate the ruler’s special connection as well as his dedication to the gods. Early Dynastic statues placed in temples can be dated and identified as such because of the traditional clasped hands seen in this statue, and the royal inscriptions many of them carried; because temple construction was considered an important job of rulers, ED officials placed representations of themselves within the temples to remind the gods and citizens who was responsible for the temples’ construction.

Image credit: Jean M. Evans, The Lives of Sumerian Sculpture: An Archaeology of the Early Dynastic Temple, p. 113, fig. 41

credit: Burton, Elizabeth M.

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 EA 17 and 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 Bill 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. 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: 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 Akhenaten/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 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.

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 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 (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.

According to the Sumerian King List, Išme-Dagan reigned 20 years in Isin during the early part Old Babylonian Period (ca. 2005-1595 BC). In the Uruk period, inscribed objects such as these cones were placed in the dedicated buildings and structures. With the thousands of hand cones unearthed for these later periods, it is difficult to know if the cones were placed in the structures or if they served some other function. The text refers to the king as a mighty man. He claims to have cancelled the service of the men of Nippur, the city loved by Enlil. It is common in early Mesopotamia for kings to make the claim of releasing people from their duties and other acts of justice and magnanimity. By releasing the men of Nippur, Enlil's city, from forced duties, 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 sixth day of the 11th month. 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 Dan Snell in 1987, dates to the reign of 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 mention the tasks assigned to these persons, it falls into the category of similar administrative documents called messenger texts. Almost 4,000 years after its composition, this unassuming 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 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 politically 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 and 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-bell, 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 Attaḫušu, 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

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

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 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

The same phenomen 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 minimum of 211 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 (Sb 3) 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.

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.

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.

This tablet contains two accounts for offerings to various deities and shrines. The first set of offerings is presented in tabular format and described as offerings of Sippar. Both offerings took place in the 19th year of the Neo-Babylonian king Nabopolassar.

Interesting is the last column, which gives the location where the offerings are being made. We find here various deities and temples or shrines.

The second offering, which was destined for the king himself, is less detailed and only states that seven sheep are offered.

CDLI entry: P469478

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Wisdom texts comprise an important part not just of Sumerian but also Akkadian literature. The Mesopotamian textual heritage attests to a plentitude of proverbs (see B. Alster, Proverbs of Ancient Sumer, 1997). This fragment in the Chester Beatty Library written in a rather minuscule script contains a collection of Sumerian proverbs which deal with a human being.

Translating proverbs and transposing their idiomatic peculiarities into a modern language poses many difficulties.

CDLI entry: P469476

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

Letters dating to the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1900-1600 BC) comprise a dense corpus of official and private communication. The Chester Beatty Library houses three such letters. The document at hand is a letter written the Babylonian king Ammi-saduqa. It is noteworthy, because it is one of the rare instances of a dated later; the date formula containing the year name for the 15th year of king Ammi-saduqa is written on its reverse. There is comparatively good evidence for royal letters in the Old Babylonian period. The most famous case are letters in the Šamaš-hazir archive from Larsa, among which many communications from Hammurabi of Babylon can be found.

The letter deals with a rumor of a certain Etel-pî-Marduk, who mediates a story that troops venture towards Sippar-Jahrurum. Ammi-saduqa himself orders the addressees to enforce the guards on the city wall and:

The city gate must not be opened as long as the sun has not risen. When the sun “stands”, it shall be closed!

But the king is also concerned with the well-being of the people and animals outside the city walls.

CDLI entry: P469474

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

This completely preserved four-column tablet kept in the Chester Beatty Library contains a long list of various kinds of furniture. The first section deals with stools (Sumerian: ^gešgu-za) fashioned of wood and occasionally clad with bronze. This list is followed by footrests, beds, tables and other kinds of furniture.

The tablet’s subscript describes this administrative text as the (inventory of) possessions (nig₂-gur₁₁) of a certain Dadu. The tablet is not dated.

CDLI entry: P105800

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

The CDLI-database currently records 789 letters dating to the Ur III period (ca. 2100-2000 BC). The letter depicted here from the Chester Beatty Library probably originated in ancient Girsu, one of the administrative centers in the core of the Ur III state. It is addressed to a certain Dugamu. The majority of the letters known from the end of the third millennium BC are letter-orders and therefore fulfil an administrative function. In this short letter-order, the addressee is ordered to give 3,000 liters of bitumen to a certain Lugal-nirgal. On the reverse the text indicates that this bitumen will be exchanged for an ox: “Lu-dingira said to me, ‘Let me put Ea’s ox in its place for you’.”

CDLI entry: P105793

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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.

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

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

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

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 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

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

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 x 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 13.33 x 5 cubits = 16.67 sq m; then that at the top right corner with 13 x 5 cubits = 16.25 sq m; the entry with 12 x 5 cubits = 15 sq m; the upper left corner room with 10^! x 5 cubits = 12.5 sq m; the room to the right off the courtyard with 7 x 5 cubits = 8.75 sq m; and finally the room to the right of the entry, with 5 x 5 cubits = 6.25 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 x 19 cubits = 114 sq m. Primary publication: Schneider, Nikolaus, OrSP 47-49 (1930) 504.

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 mistake in the first line’s final cuneiform character to the upper left, that should have been more triangular in form. 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.

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: “Relief 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.

Most of the Nimrud reliefs were 2.00 to 2.20 m high and very heavy. The ones that were 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), 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.

The royal tablet depicted here contains the inscription of a scribe of the reign of Assurnasirpal II (ca. 880 BC), with her directives to brick makers in ancient Nimrud to produce so-called “head-raising” bricks (Akkadian libitti niš reši) to be set along the ceremonial footpaths of the king. Double levels of these stepping stones would add thirteen fingers, or about eight inches, to his perceived height.

But wait a moment. The whole story is baseless, and this, and many other artifacts that moved, and still move through the antiquities markets are believed to be inauthentic, prepared by usually unpracticed hands for an all-too-receptive pool of enthusiasts. Our tablet is a part of the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology, Toronto, and has been described by the Madrid Sumerologist Manuel Molina as a probable “fake, with lines copied from a real tablet and others incomprehensible”; it has thus joined a not so exclusive group of sales objects whose provenience CDLI enters, in a borrowing from the unparalleled Dilbert comic strip, as “Elbonia” (until proven otherwise!).

CDLI entry: P416892

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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.

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)

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

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

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

credit: Robert K. Englund

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

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.

The content of all proto-Elamite texts is administrative, with no reflection of the Babylonian penchant for lexical lists and related scholarly tradition; they can be divided into texts concerning agriculture, agricultural products, agricultural products, herded animals and dairy and wool production, rations for laborers, and rations 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.

Today’s entry takes us back to the series with which cdli tablet began.

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.

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 drawn up during the year with their summarized entries in the annual accounts drawn up at the end of the administrative years. In 2003, Robert K. Englund (CDLJ 2003:1) published the large annual account Erlenmeyer 152 from Umma, and managed to cross reference entries in the account to no less than 14 different individual records.

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 drawn up 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 (bala) to the royal economy of the Ur III state. 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

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

CDLI entry: P432384

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

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

CDLI entry: P124822

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P131748

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

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

CDLI entry: P131748

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P131748

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P131774

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P125397

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P125396

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P125395

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P111941

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

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

CDLI entry: P111941

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P111941

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P111941

credit: Englund, Robert K.

The numbers qualifying side lengths in the field sketch are relatively clear, but the results of their use in surface calculations less so. The bottom side is, in sexagesimally oriented notation, 1.25, or 85 (ninda), its opposing top side is 1.40 + 20 (the width of the box to the upper left) = 120, while the opposing left and right sides are (25 + 1.40) and 3.00, or 125 and 180 ninda, respectively. Thus the favored calculation of irregular quadrilaterals gives ((85 + 120) ÷ 2) × ((180 + 125) ÷ 2) = 15,631.25 sar (remembering that 1 sar = 1 ninda²), or 156.3125 iku (1 iku = 10 × 10 ninda = 100 sar). Subtracting from this calculated surface measure the area of the rectangle to the upper left (20 × 25 = 500 sar = 5 iku) gives 151.3125 iku, or 8 bur₃ 7.3125 iku, a not entirely satisfactory approximation of the given 8 bur₃ 4 3/4 iku (note that the surveyor correctly calculated a rectangle of 1 bur₃ 2 iku = 20 iku in the left-hand surface described by the length of 100 ninda and a width of 20 [that of the upper-left rectangle]). We might suspect that this discrepancy is related to the highly irregular shape of the field, given here in a more credible depiction.

CDLI entry entry: P125393

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P125393

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P128413, P216929

credit: Englund, Robert K.