The ‘Lying Down Menology’: Instructions for a Year of Auspicious Dreams
-
Aino Hätinen
Abstract
The ‘Lying Down Menology’ is a previously unedited text belonging to the corpus of Mesopotamian hemerological and calendrical texts. It contains a set of ritual instructions about hygiene, clothing, food and drink, sexual relations, and sleeping for each of the twelve months of the year; the goal is to obtain an auspicious dream. This menology was one of the texts used to compile the royal hemerology ‘Inbu bēl arḫi’, and its transmission can be followed to late period Babylonia where it is associated with the micro-zodiac.
Article note
The present article was originally intended to be a collaboration between Enrique Jiménez, who identified the previously unpublished Babylonian manuscripts in the collections of the British Museum (Jiménez 2016, 205 fn. 35), and the present author. It developed into the work of a single author, but Jiménez’s preparatory work and his later insights should be emphasised. I also thank Saki Kikuchi, Walther Sallaberger, Frank Simons, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Several of the fragments published here were identified in the context of the project Electronic Babylonian Library (LMU Munich). The abbreviations used in this article follow those of the RlA.
© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelseiten
- Nachruf
- Johannes Martin Renger
- Abhandlungen
- New Inscribed Bricks of Takil-ilissu, King of Malgûm
- Sealed Bullae and Livestock Management at Irisaĝrig in the Early Old Babylonian Period
- Literary Texts from the Sippar Library IV: A “Macranthropic” Hymn to Ninurta
- The ‘Lying Down Menology’: Instructions for a Year of Auspicious Dreams
- Nabû at the Frontiers of the Assyrian Empire: An Inscribed Bronze Necklet from Yasin Tepe, Iraqi Kurdistan
- A New Interpretation of Two Hittite Verbs with the Stem ark- and its Implications for the Miraculous Birth Legend in the Zalpa-Text
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelseiten
- Nachruf
- Johannes Martin Renger
- Abhandlungen
- New Inscribed Bricks of Takil-ilissu, King of Malgûm
- Sealed Bullae and Livestock Management at Irisaĝrig in the Early Old Babylonian Period
- Literary Texts from the Sippar Library IV: A “Macranthropic” Hymn to Ninurta
- The ‘Lying Down Menology’: Instructions for a Year of Auspicious Dreams
- Nabû at the Frontiers of the Assyrian Empire: An Inscribed Bronze Necklet from Yasin Tepe, Iraqi Kurdistan
- A New Interpretation of Two Hittite Verbs with the Stem ark- and its Implications for the Miraculous Birth Legend in the Zalpa-Text
