Volume 100, Issue 1

Up to the Ur III period the verbal bases r̂e 6 /de 6 „to provide“, „to bring“ or „to carry away“ und túm „to escort“, „to lead towards“ or „to lead away“ belonged to two separate lexemes with completely separate paradigms. While r̂e 6 /de 6 can be combined with the marû base tùm into one paradigm, the regular marû base túm-mu must be assigned to túm, with only the plural base laḫ 4/5 of this lexeme being formed irregularly (r a, ḫamṭu , with animals in the absolutive case in Presargonic Lagaš). In Old Babylonian times tùm and túm are not differentiated in this way any more which leads to a confusion of the paradigms.

Starting from the consideration that Sumerian was still a living language at the end of the Ur III Dynasty, which was sufficiently demonstrated in recent years, some literary texts must be reconsidered which were cited in favor of an earlier date for the end of colloquial Sumerian: „the spell of Nudimmud“ and two passages from the hymns of Sulge.

In recent reconstructions of the Old Babylonian Sumerian scribal curriculum it has been proposed that at the beginning of the second or advanced phase of scribal training pupils learned a group of ten literary compositions called the Decad. These reconstructions are based primarily on the assumption that two OB incipit lists, known as the Nippur and Louvre catalogues, list the content and sequence of the advanced curriculum. In this article this assumption is re-evaluated, and it is argued that the Nippur and Louvre catalogues are inventories and not curricular lists.

Among the scanty evidence concerning war practices in the Early Dynastic period, the Ebla texts provide a rich source of information for the Syrian area. A new reading of some passages from an annual metal account, based on proposed new interpretations of many of the terms employed therein (among others, tuš.lú×til and šu-du 8 ), enables us to reconstruct the sequence of some important moments of the military expedition against Ašdar(um). The king of Ebla himself seems to have taken part in this expedition – an unusual occurrence in Ebla at the time. Even more remarkably, the queen of Harran, who was the daughter of the previous king of Ebla, seems also to have participated; curiously, the king of Harran, rarely mentioned in the texts, has never to date appeared in the same texts as the much better documented queen.

Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian differ over how (i. e. plene vs. non- plene ) they spell contracted u before ventive/allative - nim (and its allomorphs) in III-weak verbal forms. This difference is demonstrated quantitatively, using large assemblages of sources. It emerges that the principles governing the distribution of plene spellings in Neo-Assyrian are not simply ‘watered down’ (i. e. orthographically economical) equivalents of the corresponding principles in Babylonian. This situation argues for a phonological difference or differences between Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian over and above those currently recognised. Several possibilities arise for the nature of the difference(s). There are signs that the difference(s) also apply to earlier periods of Assyrian.

The golden bowl IM 105 697 was found among the large numer of precious objects inside the tomb of Iabâ, queen of Tiglath-pileser III, at Nimrud. Its strongly Egyptian decoration can be compared to silver-bowl ÄM 14 117 from Cyprus and is distinct from other items of Levantine crafts. Iconography and style rather point to a 10 th cent. date and an origin for the two bowls in the southern Levant. Accordingly, the gold-bowl must be considered a more than 200 year-old antiquity at the time when it was deposited in the royal tomb at Nimrud.