Volume 108, Issue 2

This communication studies the Ur III worker-designations ab(-ba)-il 2 , ama-il 2 , and (nu-mu-)su-il 2 , which appear in the economic sources from Umma and Girsu/Lagaš. Expending on the earlier treatments by C. Wilcke and W. Sallaberger, it is argued that these classifications designate workers who were temporarily freed from the performance of corvée duty, in order to be able to care for their elderly (and probably ailing) mothers and fathers. The existence of such regulations has important implications for the status of the Ur III labor.

The reader will find here an extensive addenda et corrigenda to P. Attinger, A propos de ak «faire» (II), ZA 95 (2005) 208–275. Only expressions that were not yet recorded in ZA 95 and relevant additions (new attestations of rare expressions, important discussions) have been taken into account. On the other hand, we have refrained from making additions to well-known expressions and from recording instances which were epigraphically or semantically too uncertain.

One of the common forms of address, in Old Babylonian letters, is ‘to my lord’ ( ana bēlīja ). If letters come from clandestine digs, it is hard to know who is hiding behind this title. In the context of the Ur-Utu archive, there is one unknown variable less. The addressee is the archive’s owner. It occurred to me that in eight ana bēlīja letters from this collection, the senders bore names identical to those of Inanna-mansum’s sons (Ur-Utu, Kubburum, Ilī-iqīšam and Ḫuzālum) and Ur-Utu’s wife Rā’imtum. Can it be confirmed that the sender and the correspondent of these letters are indeed close relatives, and that the ana bēlīja format was used to address a father, brother or spouse? If so, what does this practice tell us about the address ‘my lord’, as a social habit?

The present paper identifies new attestations for, and revises the meanings of, some rare words and expressions that appear mainly in Mari letters: bazi ʔ itum ‘(a kind of) monkey’; bêšum ‘to explain, make clear’; ḫarāqum ‘to breach’; ina šārat waṣûm ‘to escape by a hair’s breadth’; kīsum ‘purse’; pāḫātum ‘responsibility’; rabbum ‘chief’; sagûm ‘to wander’; sakānum ‘to settle’; tabākum ‘to throw out’; tarākum ‘to hold aloft’.

Among the best preserved of the tablets found in the so-called “House of the Incantation Priest” in Assur numbers Tablet VAT 8803, already fired in antiquity, written by the healer Nabû-bēssun(u) in the early 7th century BCE. The accurate, archaising ductus of the script and the many triangular “firing holes” on the obverse, reverse, and side margins furnish this tablet, first published as KAR no. 31, with a striking physical appearance commensurate with its fundamental significance for ancient Near Eastern healing arts. In addition to instructions regarding the preparation and application of a salve which should provide the healer with the necessary sanitary protection when visiting invalids, the tablet also contains the wording of the concomitant exorcistic dicenda. A new edition of this text is here presented.

In 1979, the Directorate General of Antiquities of Iraq in Baghdad ordered the resumption of archaeological excavation in Assur within plan square hC/D/E8I, where Walter Andrae had discovered the so-called “House of the Incantation Priest” in the summer of 1908. More than 150 clay tablets and fragments were unearthed within several rooms, among these tablet IM 148516 which contains a new anti-witchcraft ritual conducted before the moon-god.

This paper provides evidence for the existence of a new inscription of Esarhaddon from Nineveh: A 16926, a piece now in the Oriental Institute (University of Chicago), is not an exemplar of Nineveh B, but rather part of an edition of Esarhaddon’s ‘annals’ from Nineveh that was composed before Esarhaddon’s 5th year (676). The paper will also present evidence for reassigning 83-1-18,601, a small fragment in the British Museum, as an exemplar of Nineveh C or an early copy of Nineveh A.

Ashurbanipal’s Prism F inscription contains numerous variant traditions among its individual exemplars. In an article published in 1977, M. Cogan classified the more significant variants as independent recensions of the inscription. However, a reexamination of his seven recensional classes shows that there is in fact only one major recension of this inscription besides the main version of the text, with a few exemplars preserving two additional variant traditions in one episode. Furthermore, with respect to Prism F’s compositional history, an examination of this major recension suggests that it may have been the first version of the Prism F inscription that was then edited to become the main version of the text.

The ritual KUB 41, 11+ is known especially for its striking treatment of the purification of bestiality. This article challenges the common interpretation that the ritual involved a marriage between the sexual offender and the victimized sheep or goat, showing that no evidence suggests such a marriage. Instead, the ewe-bride motif may be interpreted as an elaborate variation on the scapegoat ritual genre, offering an interesting twist to the adornment of the scapegoat before it was sent away.

In 2016, a cylinder seal with Anatolian hieroglyphs was found in the archaeological excavations at Elbistan-Karahöyük in the province of Kahramanmaraş. The cylinder seal was made of black stone and its inscription mentions three personal names. The hieroglyphic signs identify two names as male and one as female.