Volume 7, Issue 2

Tuṭṭanabšum, daughter of Naram-Suen, was one of the most powerful women of the Akkadian dynasty. The princess was installed as the high priestess of Enlil at Nippur; she held one of the highest cultic positions for the head of the Sumerian pantheon, in a city whose temple served as the religious capital of Sumer. Now, an administrative tablet from the Iraq Museum shows that Tuṭṭanabšum, like her father, was also elevated to the realm of the divine. Never before has there been evidence that a member of the Akkadian royal family other than the king was given divine status. The tablet demonstrates that the divinity adopted by Naram-Suen after his victory in the Great Rebellion applied not only to the king, but to other members of the royal family. Tuṭṭanabšum, therefore, was not only a member of the royal house and one of the highest cultic officials in the empire, but was also elevated to the divine realm.

Based on an analysis of marriage contracts, this paper argues that at the time of the Persian conquest (539 BCE) Babylonians practiced two types of marriage depending on their social status. Non-elite families negotiated different terms of marriage than elite families, in three areas: bridal wealth, household creation, and regulations about adultery and divorce. However, these divergent marriage practices became less pronounced and eventually obsolete in the course of the Persian period. This article first presents the evidence for the two marriage types and then seeks to find an answer, albeit a partial one, to the question why these traditions changed from c. 490 BCE onwards.

The present paper offers an analysis of certain Northern Mesopotamian demons attested on an Aramaic incantation bowl in square script. This object displays at its centre a list of evil entities drawn from a Mandaic forerunner, some of which are paralleled in the epigraphic corpus of Hatra and nearby sites. The analysis explores whether this may provide new evidence regarding the fate of Hatra’s inhabitants and cults in the aftermath of the fall of the city in 240/1 AD; the suggested scenario is that some Hatrenes could have been deported to Babylonia, where they encountered the Mandaean culture in its early phases and acquainted it with a part of their pantheon.