Volume 101, Issue 1

Little is known about the organisation of the Šamaš temple in Old Babylonian Sippar, the Ebabbar. This is due to the fact that the vast majority of attestations of the temple officials of the Ebabbar are to be found in the witness lists of contracts. In these lists they occur together, as a group. The present article analyzes the formative stages of this group of witnesses, shedding light on institutional hierarchy, succession into temple offices, and the sealing practice of the time.

It is a significant feature of Babylonian mathematics that instead of what we call “the number π ” – needed for the computation of the area and the circumference of a circle – there has always been used the value 3. Usually this is considered an approximation to the “correct” value of π . But it rather seems to be the result of a specific Babylonian way to define the area measure of a circle.

BM 113929 and VAT 13392 provide evidence for the existence of the prebend of temple scribe in seventh-century Babylonia. This article presents editions of these two documents and discusses evidence from texts composed under the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid dynasties that would indicate that this prebend continued to exist in these later periods.