Volume 111, Issue 2

Publication and edition of an Ur III document, probably from Umma, recording the punishment of two men for patricide, along with discussion of implications of the document for Ur III legal history and administration.

Recent excavations by the Department of Archaeology of the University of Babylon (Iraq) have brought to light the ruins of a temple at Tell al-Deylam, about 30 km south of Babylon. Thanks to a number of inscribed bricks it can securely be identified as “E-Ibbi-Anum”, the temple of Dilbat’s city god Uraš, which confirms earlier attempts to identify the site with that city. The Sumerian text of the inscriptions allows a secure dating of the building to the Kassite period, more precisely, the reign of a king named Kurigalzu (probably I). 1

This article presents first editions of three large manuscripts of the Epic of Creation from the “Sippar Library,” and eight smaller fragments from the British Museum’s “Babylon” and “Sippar” collections. In addition to restoring several lines of various episodes of the text, they provide an almost complete restoration of the two closing verses of the Babylonian version of the poem.

This article publishes a royal inscription preserved on a clay tablet housed in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums. The inscription, which was intended for display on a stele, commemorates a royal grant of tax exemptions to nine Babylonian cities and presents the royal protagonist as a second Ḫammu-rāpi. The name and titulary of the king in question are not preserved, and the attribution of the inscription is accordingly uncertain. Following Jean-Vincent Scheil’s attribution of the text already in 1902, the study that accompanies an edition of the text argues that it should be attributed to Nabonidus, king of Babylon 556–539 BC, and explores its historical significance in this context.

In this paper a new interpretation of the hatura -clauses in the Hieroglyphic Luwian Assur letters will be presented. First of all, it will be argued that the Hieroglyphic Luwian lexeme hatura -, which is usually connected to the Hittite verb ḫatrae - ‘to send’, ‘to write’ and translated as ‘letter’, is in fact related to the Hittite word ḫattuli - and Cuneiform Luwian ḫattulaḫid- , meaning ‘health’,‘wellbeing’. Secondly, the article will suggest that the Hieroglyphic Luwian word api, which is usually translated as ‘back’, or ‘again’, primarily functions as a discourse marker. Lastly, it will be proposed that the Hieroglyphic Luwian word for ‘letter’ or ‘message’ is (*205) atun ( i ) - . These new interpretations yield a better understanding of the opening lines of the Assur-letters and elucidate some other opaque passages of this intriguing correspondence. 1