Volume 114, Issue 1

This article presents new tablets and fragments from the British Museum that belong to the collection of Early Dynastic and Sargonic tablets discovered at Ur. Having been overlooked for almost a century, the tablets offer new insights into Early Dynastic and Sargonic archives from Ur. Most significant among the contributions are the names of several months demonstrating that the Early Semitic calendar was in use in Ur during the Early Dynastic IIIa period. Second, the tablets contribute a new month name to the calendar of pre-Sargonic Ur and permit a possible reconstruction of the order of the months of the calendar.

Two tablets from the the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University contain excerpts of literary texts celebrating Šulgi: an excerpt of the praise poem Šulgi A, with two previously unknown lines, and a manuscript from a new hymn to Šulgi, paralleling Ni 13227.

The tablet IM 8790, which comes from Nippur, dates to the 33 rd year of Ḫammurapi of Babylon, and deals with the marriage of a nadītum priestess of the god Nergal, is a perfectly preserved document with both case and tablet.

In this article, we shed new light on the series with the emic title ‘Ancient Sumerian’, previously known from the Late Babylonian ritual texts for the New Year Festival. We first establish a new reading of the title, the key to which lies in a Late Babylonian pseudepigraphic letter. Following that, we present the contents of the series, including the edition of the hitherto unpublished tablet BM 32544+ that according to its colophon belongs to the series. Finally, we discuss the possible purposes of the series in its Late Babylonian context, where ritual in its written form took on an unprecedented role in the temple cult.

In Hittite religious texts, many references to human consumption or, on the contrary, to prohibiting human consumption of sacrificial food are made, but they have not yet been studied as such. This paper will endeavor to fill this gap by gathering the data for the first time. It will also examine them in context in order to better understand the underlying mechanism of human consumption of consecrated food in Hittite Anatolia.

In this review article, Philippe Clancier’s recent monograph on the history of the overlooked Late Bronze and Early Iron-age polity of Sūḫu lying on the Middle Euphrates is examined. It is demonstrated that the central contention of two identically named polities of Sūḫu (“Eastern” and “Western Sūḫu” respectively), ruled by two competing dynasties with differing political relationships to Assyria, is not supported by the textual record. As a corrective, a new comprehensive political history of Sūḫu in the early first millennium BC is presented here, as a basis for future research.

The focus of this study is a recently discovered rock relief in the village of Olin/Elin/Yakınca, 30 km south-southeast of Midyat. This relief aligns with the route of Ashurnasirpal II’s campaign in 879 BC, providing new insights into the Assyrian entry into the Tur Abdin region. The main objectives of the study are to identify and date the Elin relief by analyzing its location, execution, and iconography within the broader context of Ashurnasirpal II’s military campaign.