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.

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

CDLI entry: P274845

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P274845

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P003118

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P003118

credit: Englund, Robert K.

A second account from the Fara collection of the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, deals similarly with allotment fields and their required seed grain. Of particular interest in this text is the fact that it records three seed grain deliveries from two different storage facilities, their sum corresponding exactly to the amount of seed grain registered in the text considered in our previous two days' slides. At 3(bur’u) 7(bur₃) 9(iku), the size of the fields calculated for this seed grain very closely corresponds to that totaled in the previous text as well. We may therefore propose that this text records the seed grain for fields registered in detail in our previous Fara account.

CDLI entry: P011012

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P011010

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P011010

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P005077

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P005077

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P005069

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

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

CDLI entry: P005069

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P005069

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

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

CDLI entry: P005069

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P005069

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P427655

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

CDLI entry: P427655

credit: Englund, Robert K.

Collections of the size as the one of the Museum of the Abbey of Montserrat keep many fragments as well. During the imaging mission in Montserrat several of the approximately 90 fragments could be joined. It is likely that further fragments (those are shown with reduced opacity) lead to further joins in the future.
Since the texts in the collection have been imaged by using a flat-bed scanner, a preliminary (digital) joining can be achieved from any place.

CDLI entry: Fragments

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

The collection of Montserrat Museum contains several cuneiform forgeries. These include 7 clay tablets, 5 clay barrels, 2 stone bowls, and a figurine (I. M. Rowe & M. Molina, "Cuneiform forgeries in the Museu Bíblic of Montserrat (Barcelona)," Fs. Sanmartín [2006], 289ff.). Some of these forgeries seem to imitate cuneiform characters quite accurately. MM 441, which is clearly a forgery, appears not just to draw from Neo-Babylonian sign forms, but also from contemporary royal inscriptions. Others completely deviate from any original sign forms.

An intriguing object is a figurine in the collection. This possible fake resembling an amulet is quite unique. At the feet of the figure a slab is depicted with nine lines of inscription. The sign forms resemble the monumental script of the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1900-1600 BC). Nevertheless, the text itself makes no sense. It is difficult to date such an object. The female figurine wears clothes that seem to date to Late Antiquity. This "fake" could be a work of Late Antiquity. There are cases, when inscriptions, already ancient back then, have been found and re-used. A very good example is MS 2400, a building inscription dating to the Lagash II period (2200-2100 BC), which has been re-used as amulet in early Islamic times; its "excavator" added an Arabic inscription without erasing the cuneiform text. The figurine in Montserrat, however, represents a different case. It is imaginable, but not provable, that an ancient inscription was found and used as model for the slab at the feet of the figurine.

CDLI entry: P432947

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

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

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

CDLI entries: List of tablets
List of cones

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P432704
CDLI composite text: P448524

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

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

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



CDLI entry: MM 1501 and MM 1502

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

In the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1900-1600 BC) we know a list of body-parts, whose first entry is ugu-mu, "my skull." The entries of this lexical text start with the skull and move down to the feet. Most of its manuscripts attest only the Sumerian designations. Nevertheless there are already in the Old Babylonian period bilingual versions, which provide Akkadian translations.

This small fragment in the Montserrat Museum is such an example.

CDLI entry: P283788

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

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

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

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P285452

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

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

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

CDLI entry: P285463

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P432824

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P432815

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

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

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

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P432857

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

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

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

CDLI entry: P101616

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

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

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

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

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

In honor of his fundamental contributions to the field of Ur III studies, we are delighted to dedicate this cdli tablet entry to the Japanese scholar Tohru Ozaki, who today celebrates his 74th birthday.

CDLI entries: P107846 & P101388

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P283789

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

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

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

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

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P432877

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

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

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P432861

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

The collection of the Museum of the Abbey of Montserrat contains a small amount of Akkadian literary fragments. Among these is a fragmentary copy of the first tablet of the famous "Atra-hasis Epic". It is the lower fifth of a one-column tablet, whose obverse and reverse originally contained about 50 lines each. This would coincide with the physical characteristics of contemporary manuscripts from the “Sippar library” (A. R. George and F. N. H. Al-Rawi, Iraq 58 [1996] 147–190). The place of origin for the Montserrat fragment is not known. However, P. Ubach acquired several text artifacts in the 1920s directly from Babylon and this fragment might come from there.

The extant text on MM 818 belongs to the opening episodes of the epic, but shows intriguing variations to the manuscripts in the first millennium BC. This fragment preserves lines 38-61 of the composition. This is a very crucial passage in the text, where the Igigi gods, who were once created to undertake the hard labour, start to complain about their fate.

CDLI entry: P432823

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P432823

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

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

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

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P432820

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus & Lafont, Bertrand

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

CDLI entry: P221854

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

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

CDLI entry: P221416

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

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

CDLI entry: P220954

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

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

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P020116

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P220690

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

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

CDLI entry: P330514

credit: Heinle, Michael

current

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

CDLI entry: P217567

credit: Heinle, Michael

current

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

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

CDLI entry: P020202

credit: Heinle, Michael

current

The tag is presented as a possible precursor to the well known tablet cataloging system best exemplified by the later “pisan-dub-ba” tags. In form, this tag is quite similar to the basket tags of the later Ur III period. It shares the well-formed, rectangular shape of later tags. The tablet would have been formed around a piece of twine and hung, presumably from a shelf or basket. The placement of the holes (here, on the bottom edge) and the number of holes (here, just one) differs from the standard of the later tradition. The interpretation and order of reading of the three signs present on the tag are as yet unclear. Pictographically, the sign GIR3 represents the head of a bovine, the sign SANGA, a title designating a temple administrator, is thought to represent a counting board, and the sign DUB, a reading designating a clay tablet in later times, appears to be a basket. Let us then attempt a translation of this text dating to ca. 3300 BC: “Basket of accountant Bull.”

CDLI entry: P002207

credit: Heinle, Michael

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

CDLI entries: P105394, P222044, P346208

credit: Heinle, Michael

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

CDLI entry: P222297

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

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

CDLI entry: P464619

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

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

CDLI entry: P212432

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

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

CDLI entry: P216553

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

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

CDLI entry: P217324

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

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

CDLI entry: P431605

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

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

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

CDLI entry: P216600

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

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

CDLI entry: P217325

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

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

CDLI entry: P263413

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

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

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

CDLI entry: P222490

credit: Guerra, Dylan M.

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

CDLI entry: P282495

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

CDLI entry: P282494

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P282494

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P282430

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

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

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

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

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

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

Finally the tablets frequently bear a date.

CDLI entry: P282494

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

CDLI entries: P282497; P453275

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

CDLI entry: P282497

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

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

CDLI entry: P282497

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

CDLI entry: P282600

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

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

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

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

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

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

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

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

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

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

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

The Sumerian New Year was known as za₃-mu, “edge of the year,” and, celebrated with the Babylonian Akitu festival, fell on the day of the spring equinox. The term is best known from Ur III period references to a special ration of barley dispensed to dependent laborers. Nonetheless, we offer an example of accounting done in the provincial capital city of Umma five months after the celebration on 1 January 2018 BC—or thereabouts. Most likely, the receipt represents late clean-up of long open accounts.

CDLI entry: P116964

credit: Englund, Robert K.

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

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

credit: Norris, Dana & Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

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

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

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

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

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

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

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

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

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

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

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

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

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

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

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

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

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

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

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus

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

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

credit: Wagensonner, Klaus