Band 113, Heft 1

Several exemplars of a brick inscription of Šulgi were found in the Kuhdasht Plain in the province of Lorestan, Iran. The reference to the destruction of Kimaš and Ḫurti provides strong evidence for the localisation of these two Zagros polities. The Ur III campaigns testify to the key role of the western Pish-e Kuh in overland traffic from the Diyala region or from Khuzestan to the central Zagros. As the source of the “copper from Kimaš,” we propose the ancient mines of Deh Hosein.

Despite being one of the most prominent and best-documented northern client states of the Ur III state, the city of Asimānum/Šimānum remained unlocalized. Here, we demonstrate through both historical-geographical and philological argumentation and archaeological evidence that it must correspond to later Middle and Neo-Assyrian Šibaniba, modern Tell Billa, northern Iraq. Building upon this finding, we propose a new history of Tell Billa during the Early and Middle Bronze Age.

A 191, a Neo-Assyrian tablet from the Haus des Beschwörungspriesters in Aššur, preserves instructions for the performance of an apotropaic ritual called Bīt mēseri (“house of enclosure”). The tablet, which is edited here for the first time, offers a version of the ceremony that is markedly different from the standard Bīt mēseri ritual known from other first-millennium sources found at Nineveh, Aššur, and various Babylonian sites. Whereas the core rites with their apotropaic images (figurines and paintings) are far less complex than their counterparts in the standard ritual, the ceremony attested on A 191 also includes elements that are absent in other Bīt mēseri sources. These elements include a Pazuzu rite, ointments, and the burning of incense, all of which are known from other āšipūtu (exorcistic) text series, such as Muššuʾu, Qutāru, the Zi-pà Compendium, and the Pazuzu Compendium.

The eastward expansion of Assyria, richly narrated in official inscriptions and supported by corollary materials such as letters from the royal correspondence and oracular enquiries, remains in archaeological terms hugely under-explored. Over the past few years, however, this has begun to change and a succession of recent discoveries is starting to give us an increasingly more detailed picture of the imprint of Assyrian rule in this sector of the Empire. The two fragments of a monumental stele of Sargon II published here, excavated at the site of Quwakh Tapeh in the Mahidasht Plain, are an example of just the sort of find that is ushering in a new era in our understanding of the Assyrian presence in western Iran.

This article provides a complete and comprehensive edition, translation and commentary of KBo 1.51 from Hattuša. It identifies the source as an Akkadian-Hittite list of body parts, some of which are clearly of bovidae, and compares it to two tablets of the same nature: BM 29963 and HS 2944. By doing so, it establishes the existence of a hitherto unknown Akkadian scholarly composition. It discusses the nature of this particular list in relationship with the lexical corpora (Ḫḫ and Uguĝu) and its role as a functional or instructional text in the world of the diviner. The reconstruction of KBo 1.51 also allows us to reconsider some Hittite words and attribute new meanings to them that are otherwise unattested.

A water basin in the Al-Pasha Mosque in Mosul is identified as made from two Assyrian column bases.