Volume 113, Issue 2

In this paper, we publish some remarkable brick inscriptions of Takil-ilissu, king of Malgûm, which were recently found during a survey that led to the identification of Malgûm, the capital of an independent kingdom in the Isin-Larsa period. The bricks come from Tulūl al-Fāj, the site that has been identified as ancient Malgûm. Besides adding new details about Takil-ilissu, a relatively little-known ruler, these inscriptions are noteworthy for containing unusual words, expressions, and clauses.

This article offers a detailed study of the organization of livestock management at Irisaĝrig in post-Ur III times. Three clusters of texts will be discussed, which focus on the activities of a small group of officials who oversaw the collection and disbursement of small cattle for religious and secular purposes. It is argued that the central urban organization on whose behalf these administrators operated was the local palace. The analysis of the archival records reveals a strong royal presence in the city and suggests that Irisaĝrig was an important center of the newly established kingdom of Malgûm Text abbreviations follow those of BDTNS = Database of Neo-Sumerian Texts (http://bdtns.filol.csic.es) and/or CDLI = Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (http://cdli.ucla.edu); other abbreviations after RlA. .

The article contains an edition of a hymn to Ninurta in which the god is represented as a man of cosmic proportions, a “macranthrope,” and the major gods of the Mesopotamian pantheon are presented as parts of his body, his garment, and his weaponry. It seems likely that the hymn, which contains many creative images, was composed in Kassite Nippur, and that the image of Ninurta it portrays was a cult statue of the god. A new manuscript from the Sippar Library enables the almost complete restoration of the text.

The ‘Lying Down Menology’ is a previously unedited text belonging to the corpus of Mesopotamian hemerological and calendrical texts. It contains a set of ritual instructions about hygiene, clothing, food and drink, sexual relations, and sleeping for each of the twelve months of the year; the goal is to obtain an auspicious dream. This menology was one of the texts used to compile the royal hemerology ‘Inbu bēl arḫi’, and its transmission can be followed to late period Babylonia where it is associated with the micro-zodiac.

This paper presents an inscribed bronze necklet discovered at Yasin Tepe, one of the largest tell -type sites in the Sulaymaniyah Governorate in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. The necklet was found on the floor of a large building complex of the Neo-Assyrian period that probably belonged to an elite family living at the site. The two-line inscription dates to around the eighth to seventh centuries BCE, and mentions the dedication of a son by his father to the god Nabû, implying the diffusion of his worship to the frontier of the Assyrian empire. Nishiyama wrote Sections 1–4, and Yamada Section 5, respectively; both share the responsibility for Section 6. Abbreviations follow M. P. Streck et al. (eds.), Reallexikon der Assyriologie, vol. 15. Berlin/Boston, except for RINAP 2 = Frame 2020; RIMA 2 = Grayson 1991, RIMA 3 = Grayson 1996.

Currently, two Hittite verbs with the stem ark- are distinguished; one which is taken to mean ‘to cut off’, ‘to divide’, and one which is usually translated as ‘to mount’ or ‘to climb’. In this article, two different interpretations will be proposed, which fit the available evidence better and elucidate some problematic or enigmatic attestations of these verbs, including a much-debated scene at the beginning of the Zalpa-text.