Volume 110, Issue 1

In 2001–2002, the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage undertook excavations at the site of Shmet in the Umma region, thereby uncovering a large residential quarter. This article presents the first six cuneiform tablets from the first excavation season at the site, dating to the Presargonic and Ur III periods. The god names mentioned support the identification of Shmet with the ancient city of Ki.an ki .

This article presents the earliest documented association between the healing goddess, dogs and physicians in Mesopotamia. This is achieved through mining all relevant administrative texts from the livestock archive at Puzriš-Dagan (modern Drehem) dated to the Ur III period and corroborating the information gathered with the few pertinent iconographic and archaeological attestations.

This study analyses a literary topos concerning the abundance of natural phenomena, including fresh water, reed beds and fish. The standardised sequence listing such abundant natural features occurs in two previously unpublished tablets containing Emesal prayers concerning the god Enki, published in this article. The Old Babylonian tablet, of unknown provenance, attests to a unique composition. The tablet from Late Babylonian Ur, which is partially paralleled by a previously known manuscript, includes performative indications.

This article is the editio princeps of a large Old Babylonian clay prism, now in the Yale Babylonian Collection. The text written on it is a long wisdom composition that is hitherto mostly unknown. It begins with a father and son embroiled in an abusive dialogue, and ends with a monologue in which the father looks forward to death and curses his son. The critical edition is accompanied by cuneiform copies and photographs.

A new duplicate of the hymn dubbed ‹Ishtar-Louvre› is published here. It supplies part of the lost end of the text, and prompts new interpretations of some previously known passages ( uzunšu liškun mummāšipu i 2 and 4; in the play of the loom, Ishtar determines the sex of the baby i 45 sq.) as well as lexical remarks on tūqaru/tūgaru , sissiru .

The Assyrian subordinative morphemes - u /- ni are treated as allomorphs with the same distribution and function. In this paper we will examine the syntax of these morphemes in Assyrian and argue that they are in fact two distinct morphemes with no allomorphic relation. We will further follow a number of significant syntactic developments in the use of the subordinative morphemes in Neo-Assyrian.

In this article we publish and study three Neo-Babylonian cuneiform texts from the Böhl Collection that contain Aramaic inscriptions. Deriving from the same archival context, these tablets bring to life the complex social fabric of Sippar’s entrepreneurial harbour community and its multilinguistic landscape. We argue that the appearance of alphabetic inscriptions in this setting is not a coincidence and tells us more about the role of Aramaic in Babylonian society at the time.

In his edition of Cuneiform Luwian texts, Starke categorizes the rituals of Kuwattalla into three groups. While the existence of the first two in which Šilalluḫi participates is secured, the third one is highly hypothetical. In this paper, new joins of fragments made by the author are presented, which confirm the recent arguments of Hutter against the third ritual of Starke and bear consequences for the rearrangement of the rituals of the Kuwattalla tradition. Furthermore, it is shown that the various redactions of the Great Ritual were not kept in the same archives at the city of Ḫattuša.

Houses with central courtyards, examples of which were uncovered at Tell Arbid, show that standardization in house plans and spatial organization characteristic for EJZ 3 domestic architecture, can be traced back to the late Ninevite 5 period. Houses of this type were built at plots of lands and had a regular internal layout. Also in terms of socio-economic organization houses with central courtyards of late Ninevite 5 date can be regarded as a reference to the EJZ 3 period.