Volume 114, Issue 2

Fish was an important natural resource in Lower Mesopotamia. The ancient inhabitants could easily rely on the nutrients and fats derived from fishes abundant in the diverse aquatic biomes of its rivers, lakes, marshes and the gulf. Specifically, fats held significant value in ancient societies, and, besides its nutritional benefit, fish can also provide oil as a useful fatty substance. However, archaeo(zoo)logical data are uninformative as far as fish oil is concerned, while written documents detail its usage and supply but remain silent on its production methods. This contribution aims at presenting, comparing and combining the available evidence from modern data, the archaeological remains and Early Bronze Age written sources on the local ichthyofauna, focusing on the strategies adopted to optimize the exploitation of its fat.

MAH 15995 is an Old Babylonian lamentation, perhaps for a dead person, with excerpts of prayers to Dumuzi and/or Damu. The content of this lamentation contains unusual aspects that are discussed in the commentary. The format and ductus of the tablet is found in other tablets of the British Museum (BM 15793, BM 15821, BM 22741, BM 23104, BM 23584, BM 23696, and BM 29628). Les abréviations des compositions correspondent à celles d’Attinger (2021). Je remercie Walther Sallaberger et mon correcteur anonyme pour leurs remarques, ainsi qu’Emmert Clevestine pour ses scans.

The article discusses a standardised sequence of demons known from multiple incantations and ritual series. While the order of demons included is remarkably stable from attestation to attestation, the number of demons included can vary, leading to some confusion as to how long the standardised sequence was. The article therefore proposes a maximum length of the series and attempts to trace its development from the Old Babylonian period onwards.

K 1452, a previously unpublished tablet from the Kouyunjik Collection in the British Museum, contains pharmaceutical remedies and incantations against nasal haemorrhage. The format of this tablet suggests that it was prepared for practical purposes. Neo-Assyrian medical letters offer the closest parallels in Nineveh, and two of them, SAA 10, 321 and 322, record remedies for a prince suffering from a heavy nosebleed. The former letter also mentions a text ( mašṭaru ) sent by the chief physician. In this paper, it is argued that K 1452 may very well be the text mentioned in SAA 10 321. Work on this paper has benefitted from two text-reading seminars, where I had the opportunity to present my preliminary edition of K 1452. I want to express my sincere thanks to the organisers, Mark Weeden (London Cuneiforum) and Mark Geller (NinMed – Nineveh Medicine), and everyone who participated in these two online reading groups. I want to thank Irving Finkel, who has graciously given his time discussing difficult philological problems and numerous questions at the interpretative level. I am also grateful to Cale Johnson for his many corrections and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and to Jon Taylor for providing me with valuable insights into the handwriting of texts in the Kouyunjik Collection. The research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (AH/T012773/1) as part of the project ‘Reading the Library of Ashurbanipal: A Multi-Sectional Analysis of Assyriology’s Foundational Corpus.’ The abbreviations follow the Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie (RlA).

Fumigation as a healing procedure was a widely used technique in Mesopotamian medicine with textual references to the existence of the medical-magical series ‘Fumigation’ known from the Late Babylonian period. BM 38438 represents a new manuscript of this text. In the first part of this paper, I provide a summary of all manuscripts of this medical-magical series ‘Fumigation’, while in the second part an edition of the new fragment will be presented. I would like to thank the trustees of the British Museum, for permission to publish the tablet. I am very much indebted to M. J. Geller (University College London), J. Fincke (Leiden University) and the participants of an online reading group for cuneiform medicine (NinMed) organized by M. J. Geller for their suggestions and corrections. Needless to say I bear responsibility for any remaining errors. The abbreviations follow the Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie, with the following addition: CCP = Cuneiform commentaries project (https://ccp.yale.edu/). The present paper was developed within the framework of the MTA–ELTE Momentum Assyrian and Babylonian Divine World Research Group.

The seals and seal impressions from the site of Basmaya, a provincial Kassite town close to the Tigris-Diyala river junction, comprise five cylinder seals, a possible ring-seal, a sealed clay lump, and a cuneiform document impressed with a fingernail. All seals were found in domestic contexts, recovered from the floors and fill in the rooms of two large houses. Only two of the seals are contemporary with the context in which they were found. The three others, a Mitanni seal and two Old Babylonian seals, predate the Kassite period. Through a contextual analysis, this paper will propose that the Basmaya seals were conceptualized and used in different ways at the site, including as sealing devices—as expected—but also as collectibles and/or ornaments.