Volume 48, Issue 1

In the spring of 2016 a unique stone slab carved in relief was accidentally discovered on Kurey Tepesi near Harput/Elazığ in eastern Turkey. The relief depicts the capture of a heavily fortified city in horizontally arranged registers. At first sight it comes to recognition that the Harput Relief stands in the tradition of Mesopotamian victory steles, starting with the Eannatum Stele (Stele of Vultures) in Early Dynastic Sumer (c. 2900–2350 BC) and continuing with the kings of Akkad (c. 2350–2150 BC). From a stylistic and iconographic point of view, the relief seems closer to the victory stele of Daduša of Ešnunna and the Mardin Stele of the early Old Babylonian period (c. 2000–1600 BC). The subsequently excavated archaeological context, a heavily burned architectural layer, contained Middle Bronze Age I pottery typical of the Elazığ-Malatya region, corroborating a date in the early second millennium BC.

On numerous images from the Early Dynastic to the Neo-Sumerian period men and women are depicted pouring liquids from special vessels. Clearly defined are two spheres: the human banquet, in which men and women are holding drinking vessel offered to them by their servants, and libation scenes showing cult personnel and other persons pouring a libation before their gods. Handwashing, which would have preceded banquets and libations, does not seem to be represented in visual imagery.

In this study, a fragment from the Hilprecht Collection in Jena will be discussed. The tablet was previously identified as Middle Babylonian and published as TMH NF 5, 59. Closer inspection reveals Middle Assyrian palaeography. The fragmentary tablet deals with metals used for precious objects and was part of a larger inventory or letter. Noteworthy is a reference to iron, a metal rarely attested in Kassite Nippur but better known from the archaeological material and philological evidence from the Middle Assyrian Empire. An overview of philological evidence for iron in 2 nd millennium Assyria will be given in this study.

With the aim of improving our understanding of how Hittite practitioners in ancient Anatolia used human speech to achieve a desired efficacy or performativity (and therefore change a current situation), this paper explores the ritual character of Telipinu’s mugawar (CTH 324) and its historiola . Along these lines, it examines what traces of human agency are present in the text, and under which circumstances its performance would have been most valuable. Considered from a broader perspective, this study also aims to link Hittite texts to the lives of Anatolia’s inhabitants and to the many ways they did things with words.

The article publishes an Old Babylonian syllabically written tablet of the Eršema su₈-ba-de₃ ta an- ak , “The shepherd, what has he done?” with duplicates from the first millennium BCE stemming from Nineveh. The composition laments the disappearance of Dumuzi.

This paper analyses the terminology for “present” and “giving a present” in the context of Middle Assyrian documents related to the palace. This terminology is specific to the genres of these texts and to the languages (Babylonian and Assyrian) used in them.

The paper reassesses the evidence for active transitive participles in Hittite and suggests that they are in reality formed from the unergative class of intransitive verbs.

A key find from the 2018 excavations at the settlement mound of Gird-e Rūstam (Gird-i Rostam) in the easternmost part of the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq, directly on the border with Iran, is an inscribed pottery sherd that can be assigned to the Neo-Assyrian period, more specifically the late 8 th or 7 th century BC. Albeit small, the sherd certainly belongs to a “carinated bowl”, which is a typical wine-drinking vessel of that time, and preserves a few signs of a cuneiform inscription in Akkadian language and Neo-Assyrian script. It is suggested that the reconstructed text contains mention of the local toponym Birtu-ša-Adad-remanni “Fortress of Adad-remanni”. This place is located in the border region between the Assyrian Empire and the kingdom of Mannea, which raises the possibility that Gird-e Rūstam could be identified with Birtu-ša-Adad-remanni.

Palatial economic archives from various regions — from the Aegean world to Mesopotamia — and from various periods of the Bronze Age, attest to the use by palatial administrations of procedures in which workers were obliged to perform a task, whether craft or agricultural, on behalf of the palace. This article examines the possibility that such a procedure existed also in Ugarit, since a group of administrative texts relating to metals appear comparable to these systems of work-assignments. The material from Ugarit and the conclusions reached allow, then, a comparison with the system of work-assignment attested in the Mycenaean texts and called ta-ra-si-ja . Mycenaean and Ugaritic documentations present typological, structural and chronological analogies, which add to the interest of the comparison.

This short contribution edits for the first time a small fragment housed in the Horn Archaeological Museum at St Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan. This fragment contains the meagre remains of what once was a letter addressed to the goddess Ištar sent by a woman named Abī-tukultī. Literary letters of the Old Babylonian period are fairly scarce, and the present text is the first known letter to Ištar and hence a welcome addition to the corpus.

This paper presents a study of YOS 17, 360, a collection of 30–33 administrative records from the Eanna temple in Uruk that are dated to Nabû-kudurrī-uṣur (Nebuchadnezzar) II’s 14 th year. The first few columns contain transactions concerning gold, while the rest are largely related to prebendary payments. In addition to providing an edition of YOS 17, 360 and related texts, this study seeks to understand why these particular transactions were collected and what insight it gives us into the historical circumstances. The evidence suggests that Eanna experienced a financial crisis at this time, during which it sold off its assets and had difficulties paying its priests. The cause of the crisis seems to have been royal demands put on the temple to provide money and manpower in support of the king’s building and/or military endeavors, possibly including Babylonian movements into the Levant and resulting clashes with Egypt.