Volume 105, Issue 2

Abstract: The article discusses references to children in cuneiform records from Southern Mesopotamia dating to the Uruk III/Jemdet Nasr period (ca. 3000 B. C.). They confirm the presence of infants and children among the personnel of institutional households. Documents offer two patterns of classifying humans. The first describes individuals as male or female and then distinguishes between adults, children and babies. The second disregards gender but offers six age groups instead, four of which refer to children. The article summarizes and interprets the information these early economic records provide on the gender and age groups of children. It shows how officials of institutional households in ancient Sumer defined the childhood of their dependents.

Abstract: A Middle Assyrian letter from Tell Taban, Tab T05A-134, was written when Ilī-padâ, a well-known figure in the very late 13 th and the early 12th centuries B. C., had become ill while staying in Adališḫu, a town in the Land of Māri located in the Middle Habur region. While the letter focuses primarily on medicine for Ilī-padâ, it also deals with extispicy and hemerology. Furthermore, the letter provides new insights into the Middle Assyrian terms for ‘propitious day’ and ‘extispicy’.

Abstract: The ‘Prostration Hemerology’, with its seemingly random selection of dates and plethora of unparalleled prescriptions – such as the towing of boats upstream, the kissing of ecstatics, and the impregnating of street women –, is one of the most peculiar hemerologies in Alasdair Livingstone’s recent anthology of the genre. This article attempts a new reconstruction of the text which differs from Livingstone’s in several respects. To this end it uses eight previously unpublished manuscripts, identified in the collections of the Ancient Orient Museum of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums, the University Museum (Philadelphia), and the British Museum. Thanks to these and the collation of the other five tablets used by Livingstone, an almost complete reconstruction of the text is now possible. It reveals itself to be an influential hemerology: as well as being widely cited by scholars at the Assyrian court, it was extensively quoted in later hemerological compilations.

Abstract: This paper presents a first edition of a new clay tablet in Neo-Assyrian language and cuneiform script. The fragmentary text was found in 2013 at the site of Qalat-i Dinka in the Peshdar Plain, Sulaymaniyah Province, Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq. It documents the sale of a slave woman in the year 725 BC, when the area was part of the Assyrian Empire and quite possible of the Province of the Palace Herald.

Abstract: This article offers a full edition of a Middle Hittite invocation, CTH 389.2, addressed by the king to the Sun-god and the Storm-god especially, and known from four duplicate tablets in New Script. A recently identified adjoining fragment as well as numerous improved readings from the collation of photos and 3D scans of the tablets allow for significant advances in understanding this text, of which a central theme is the reversal of false accusations against the Hittite king.

Abstract: This article presents a recently found inscription on part of stela belonging to the Urartian king Argišti I (ca. 785/80–756 BC). The findspot of this inscription distinguishes this stela from other Urartian stelae.

Abstract: The present contribution is devoted to the analysis of a fragment of a potter’s wheel, made of baked clay, discovered at Abu Tbeirah during the survey of winter 2012. The focus of the discussion will be the surface treatment of the fragment, specifically the series of regularly-spaced perforations arranged in concentric bands, which offers clues to the actions and choices made by the Sumerian potter.