Volume 110, Issue 2

Based on first-millennium cuneiform manuscripts from Aššur, Babylon, and Uruk, this article offers an edition of a ritual against an illness conceptualized as the demon ‘Any Evil’. The text sheds light on how the catch-all figure Any Evil corresponds to the idea of a universal cure for any physical ailment, and how the rhetoric of the incantation articulates this relationship and facilitates the active participation of the patient. The ritual instructions of this and a closely related text show that Any Evil is envisaged as a bull-headed, male demon. This points to an adaptation of motifs that are typically associated with ghosts in ancient Mesopotamian thought and raises questions concerning the pictorial representation of Any Evil and its conceptual foundations.

In his seminal 1989 study, Paul-Alain Beaulieu argued that Nabonidus was brought to power by a conspiracy orchestrated by Belshazzar and servants of Neriglissar and Lâbâši-Marduk, the usurper’s predecessors on the throne. This paper offers a prosopographic investigation into Nabonidus’s social network and reveals that, at the outset of his reign, the new king’s entourage comprised other associates of Neriglissar and other potential conspirators.

King Nabonidus’ (556–539 BCE) military campaigns in the Levant and his long sojourn in Arabia are well known, and evidence of his activities in the area of Udummu (Edom) is found in the impressive cuneiform inscription and relief carved at the site of al-Sila‛ (Sela) in Jordan. The study of the inscription presented here comprises the documentation of the monument, the digital treatment of the data obtained, and the epigraphic, textual and historical analysis of the cuneiform inscription.

In this article, data appearing in recently published Akkadian letters from the House of ʾUrtēnu (Ugarit) are applied to reach solutions to several Ugaritic onomastic and prosopographic problems. The results allow for clearer etymological evaluation of several personal names and a number of plausible prosopographic identifications, including two that are arguably relevant to Hittite prosopography and chronology. They further contribute to ongoing efforts devoted to exploring the relationship between Ḫatti and Ugarit in the final decades of the Late Bronze Age. This study has been completed during the course of a research fellowship at the Collège de France and has been facilitated by the hospitality of Professor Thomas Römer (Chair, Milieux bibliques, Collège de France) and the library of the Institut du Proche-Orient ancien. The many helpful suggestions from Dennis Pardee, Robert Hawley, Petra Goedegebuure, Theo van den Hout, Ilya Yakubovich, Madadh Richey, and the anonymous reviewers of this article are also gratefully acknowledged here, though I bear sole responsibility for any shortcomings.

Among almost 20,000 attestations of place names in Hittite cuneiform texts, only ca. 120 feature the geographic postdeterminative ki (“place”). This present paper explores possible reasons for such a modest number, analysing the data according to various criteria, including the geographical dispersal of toponyms determined by ki, the dating of the texts, their language and their cultural provenance. It is argued that the use of ki in the Hittite corpus is not random and should be viewed in the context of early Hittite scribal tradition. A catalogue of all attestations of the postdeterminative ki is included.

The site of Tulūl al-Baqarāt in the Wasit province, Iraq, consists of a series of tells, the most prominent being TB1. Iraqi and Italian archaeological expeditions have conducted excavations at TB1, revealing a number of exceptional architectural units and a large number of ancient objects. This paper deals with stone statuary and objects with relief decoration from these excavations and presents several fragments of human or animal statues and sculptured votive vessels.

This paper presents the LBA core-formed glass vessels from Aššur which are part of the collection of the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin. Most of these pieces are presented here for the first time. One of the major objectives was to ascribe the vessels and fragments to their original find contexts, to discuss their function, and to make assumptions on their relevance. A detailed typological and chronological discussion of the objects from Aššur is provided; the vessels and fragments are further compared with representatives from other LBA sites in order to provide indications about the duration of the LBA core-formed glass production in general.