Volume 115, Issue 2

In this paper, we report two 14 C-AMS dates obtained from samples of lead-based cosmetics found in two graves of Cemetery A at Shahdad (Kerman, Iran). Combined with ceramic comparisons, these new dates provide strong evidence that this graveyard was in use for most of the 3 rd millennium BCE. The earliest of the two funerary contexts – Grave 30 – dated by radiocarbon analysis to between the 30 th and the 27 th century BCE, also contained a ceramic vessel bearing a Linear Elamite inscription, which can thus be attributed to the early centuries of the 3 rd millennium BCE. This contradicts the traditional view that this writing system was created at the time of Puzur-Sušinak (second half of the 22 nd century BCE) and points instead to a many centuries-long history of Linear Elamite use during the Early Bronze Age on the Iranian Plateau.

The article presents a considerable number of new serial manuscripts, fragments, and joins for the so-called Diagnostic Handbook, which–besides duplicates that verify and concretise existing readings–offer new textual data for previously fragmentary passages, connections between otherwise isolated fragments, and formerly unattested tablets. In addition, some of the fragments on display point to further intertextual connections to other divinatory series, newly identified correspondences with commentary texts, and excerpt texts from the 1 st and the 2 nd millennium B.C.E.

This paper discusses the idiom maldī erši … etēqu “to cross the edge of the bed of …”, primarily known from the incantation ša maldī eršīya ītiqu , which is attested on numerous amulets and in the series Ḫulbazizi from the first millennium BCE. It examines textual evidence found in legal documents and letters from the Middle Babylonian period, where an abbreviated form of the idiom is used, implying an act of illegal sexual transgression ( maldī … etēqu ). It will be argued that the idiom carries the same meaning in the incantation ša maldī eršīya ītiqu , where it denotes the demon as a possible succubus or incubus.

In modern scholarship, Babylonian astral science (astronomy, astrology, celestial divination) is commonly perceived as being oriented towards the future. In this paper, we argue that Babylonian scholars also used astronomical prediction to study, interpret, order, and reconstruct the past. In particular, developments in astronomical and astrological prediction during the first millennium BCE engendered a new approach to historiography. This approach involved retro-calculating phenomena of the ancient sky in order to explain events that had happened in those distant times. By backwardly projecting predictive schemes on historical data found in received texts, these scholars developed a new historiographic method based on archival research and astral science.