Mesopotamian Civilizations

This book presents a reassessment of the governmental systems of the Late Babylonian period—specifically those of the Neo-Babylonian and early Persian empires—and provides evidence demonstrating that these are among the first to have developed an early form of administrative law.

The present study revolves around a particular expression that, in its most common form, reads ḫīṭu ša šarri išaddad and can be translated as “he will be guilty (of an offense) against the king.” The authors analyze ninety-six documents, thirty-two of which have not been previously published, discussing each text in detail, including the syntax of this clause and its legal consequences, which involve the delegation of responsibility in an administrative context. Placing these documents in their historical and institutional contexts, and drawing from the theories of Max Weber and S. N. Eisenstadt, the authors aim to show that the administrative bureaucracy underlying these documents was a more complex, systematized, and rational system than has previously been recognized.

Accompanied by extensive indexes, as well as transcriptions and translations of each text analyzed here, this book breaks new ground in the study of ancient legal systems.

Hittite culture of the second millennium B.C.E. was strongly influenced by Mesopotamian culture, in part through the mediation of the peripheral cuneiform civilizations of northern Syria, in part through direct contact with Babylonia and Assyria. The text edited here (CTH 718) presents an extreme example of this cultural impact, featuring incantations in the Akkadian language (Hittite babilili) embedded within a ceremony set forth in the Hittite tongue. This ritual program has therefore become known to scholars as the “babilili-ritual.”

With almost 400 preserved lines, this ceremony is one of the longest religious compositions recovered from the Hittite capital, and there are indications that a significant additional portion has been lost. The divine figure to whom the rite is addressed is Pirinkir, a variety of the well-known Ishtar of Mesopotamia. Its purpose seems to be the elimination of the sins of a member of the royal family.

Many of the ritual activities and offering materials employed here are characteristic of the cult practice of the Classical Cilician region known as Kizzuwatna, which was introduced into the central Hittite realm during the final two centuries of the state’s existence. Nonetheless, the Akkadian of the incantations is neither the Akkadian employed in the Hurrian-influenced area of Syria and eastern Anatolia nor that otherwise known from the Hittite royal archives; rather, it is closer to the language of the later Old Babylonian period, even if no precise Mesopotamian forerunners can yet be identified.

Lamaštu was one of the most important Mesopotamian demons, playing a dominant role in the magico-religious and magico-medical beliefs and practices of ancient Mesopotamia for nearly two millennia. Yet, she has never been the subject of a scholarly monograph dedicated to the textual and visual evidence for her, her activities, and the measures that ancient magical specialists took to counter her. This volume also falls short of this description, because it covers only one part of the material: it is an edition of the textual record only, which is, however, collected here as completely as seems possible today. Walter Farber, who has studied these materials for decades, presents a comprehensive collection of all of the known texts, the texts of the primary incantations in a “score” format, and transliteration and translation of a number of ancillary texts. This much-awaited volume will fill the void in the literature on this aspect of the life and thought of ancient Mesopotamian peoples regarding the character of this malevolent creature and the means of warding off the threat that she posed.

The goal of this book is to present a revised edition of the Sumerian Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur, a lament bewailing the fall of the glorious Ur III kingdom in 2004 B.C.E.

Lamentation is a well-known genre in world literature. Laments of various types are part of the cultural legacy and literary corpus of many societies, from ancient to modern times, and Sumerian literature is no exception. However, Mesopotamian lamentation literature includes a significant body of laments belonging to a unique and almost unparalleled genre—the genre of lamentations over the destruction of cities and temples. This genre has no known ancient parallel outside the ancient Near East; more specifically, it is almost exclusively attested in Sumerian and biblical literature. The Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur is the most famous and important exemplar of the city-laments.

In this updated and revised publication of the Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur, Samet provides an introductory discussion of Sumerian city-laments in general; a full presentation of the text of the Ur Lament, including transliteration, translation, and an extensive philological commentary; and an accounting of the extant textual witness in score format. Plates with color photos of many texts are included.

For much of the last half of the twentieth century, W. G. Lambert devoted much of his research energy and effort to the study of Babylonian texts dealing with Mesopotamian ideas regarding creation, including especially Enuma Elish. This volume, which appears almost exactly 2 years after Lambert’s death, distills a lifetime of learning by the world’s foremost expert on these texts. Lambert provides a full transliteration and translation of the 7 tablets of Enuma Elish, based on the known exemplars, as well as coverage of a number of other texts that bear on, or are thought to bear on, Mesopotamian notions of the origin of the world, mankind, and the gods. New editions of seventeen additional “creation tales” are provided, including “Enmesharra’s Defeat,” “Enki and Ninmah,” “The Slaying of Labbu,” and “The Theogony of Dunnu.”

Lambert pays special attention, of course, to the connection of the main epic, Enuma Elish, with the rise and place of Marduk in the Babylonian pantheon. He traces the development of this deity’s origin and rise to prominence and elaborates the relationship of this text, and the others discussed, to the religious and political climate Babylonia.

The volume includes 70 plates (primarily hand-copies of the various exemplars of Enuma Elish) and extensive indexes.

The corpus of Early Dynastic figurative monuments from ancient Mesopotamia is substantial. For many years, establishing the chronological sequence and development of these artifacts has been a complicated and problematic task. In this volume—first published in Italian in 2006 and here translated, revised, and updated—Gianni Marchesi and Nicolò Marchetti provide a complete relative chronology for these remarkable objects. Having established the chronological sequence through an examination of the archaeological contexts of the excavated pieces and the analysis of their inscriptions, the authors then consider the significance of the changes, over time, in the subject matter of figurative arts, noting a gradual shift from a stage in which the entire officialdom of early polities was celebrated to a stage in which the figure of the king alone becomes the main and then almost the only object of celebration. Near the end of the Early Dynastic period, which was a time of continual political upheaval, new iconographic details were introduced in order to characterize the royal figure, and a distinctive royal iconography began to be developed.

Starting from these observations, the authors proceed to investigate the ideology of early polities in Mesopotamia and the role and functions of the king. Along with a new chronology of Early Dynastic rulers and an outline of Early Dynastic history, discussions of significant monuments and inscriptions are offered. In addition, all known inscriptions on royal statues are edited and provided with detailed commentaries.

First published in 2006 as La statuaria regale nella Mesopotamica Protodinastica (Rome: Bardi Editore).

The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur is a collection of literary letters between the Ur III monarchs and their high officials at the end of the third millennium B.C. The letters cover topics of royal authority and proper governance, defense of frontier regions, and the ultimate disintegration of the empire and represent the largest corpus of Sumerian prose literature we possess. This long-awaited edition, based on extensive collation of almost all extant manuscripts, numbering more than a hundred, includes detailed historical and literary analyses, and copious philological commentary. It entirely supersedes the Michalowski’s oft-cited unpublished Yale dissertation of 1976.

The edition is accompanied by an extensive analysis of the place of the letters in early second-millennium schooling, treating the letters as literature, followed by chapters that contextualize the epistolary material within historical and historiographic contexts, utilizing many Sumerian archival, literary, and historical sources. The main objective here is to try to navigate the complex issues of authenticity, authority, and fiction that arise from the study of these literary artifacts. In addition, Michalowski offers new hypotheses about many aspects of late third-millennium history, including essays on military history and strategy, on frontiers, on the nature and putative character of nomadism at the time, as well as a long chapter on the role of a people designated as Amorites.

The included DVD includes various photographs at high resolution of most of the tablets included in the study.

In this new Mesopotamian Civilizations volume, Professor Heimpel collects the corpus of the Mari correspondence and provides an introduction, a reconstruction of events during Zimri-Lim’s reign, and English translations of these Mari texts (26/1, 26/2, 27, and additional texts). This volume includes indexes of personal names/individuals, group designations/personnel, and places.

The scholarly world first became aware of the myth of Adapa and the South Wind when it was discovered on a tablet from the El-Amarna archive in 1887. We now have at our disposal six fragments of the myth. The largest and most important fragment, from Amarna, is dated to the 14th century B.C.E. This fragment of the Adapa myth has red-tinted points applied on the tablet at specific intervals. Izre’el draws attention to a few of these points that were missed in previous publications by Knudtzon and Schroeder. Five other fragments were part of the Assurbanipal library and are representative of this myth as it was known in Assyria about seven centuries later.

The discovery of the myth of Adapa and the South Wind immediately attracted wide attention. Its ideology and its correspondence to the intellectual heritage of Western religions precipitated flourishing studies of this myth, both philological and substantive. Many translations have appeared during the past century, shedding light on various aspects of the myth and its characters. Izre’el unveils the myth of Adapa and the South Wind as mythos, as story. To do this, he analyzes the underlying concepts through extensive treatment of form. He offers an edition of the extant fragments of the myth, including the transliterated Akkadian text, a translation, and a philological commentary. The analysis of poetic form that follows leads to understanding the myth as a piece of literature and to uncovering its meanings. This study therefore marks a new phase in the long, extensive research into this Mesopotamian myth.

The recent large-scale watershed projects in northern Syria, where the ancient city of Emar was located, have brought this area to light, thanks to salvage operation excavations before the area was submerged. Excavations at Meskeneh-Qadimeh on the great bend of the Euphrates River revealed this large town, which had been built in the late 14th century and then destroyed violently at the beginning of the 12th, at the end of the Bronze Age. In the town of Emar, ritual tablets were discovered in a temple that are demonstrated to have been recorded by the supervisor of the local cult, who was called the “diviner.” This religious leader also operated a significant writing center, which focused on both administering local ritual and fostering competence in Mesopotamian lore. An archaic local calendar can be distinguished from other calendars in use at Emar, both foreign and local. A second, overlapping calendar emanated from the palace and represented a rising political force in some tension with rooted local institutions. The archaic local calendar can be partially reconstructed from one ritual text that outlines the rites performed during a period of six months.

The main public rite of Emar’s religious calendar was the zukru festival. This event was celebrated in a simplified annual ritual and in a more elaborate version of the ritual for seven days during every seventh year, probably serving as a pledge of loyalty to the chief god, Dagan. The Emar ritual calendar was native, in spite of various levels of outside influence, and thus offers important evidence for ancient Syrian culture. These texts are thus important for ancient Near Eastern cultic and ritual studies. Fleming’s comprehensive study lays the basic groundwork for all future study of the ritual and makes a major contribution to the study of ancient Syria.

It is too often forgotten that every Assyrian “historical” inscription functioned in a very specific context. This context influenced its content and the way in which it was perceived by ancient viewers and readers. Russell’s goal is to address the reconstruction of the context of these inscriptions in order to elucidate their original impact.

In the past, the palace inscriptions, including Assyrian palace inscriptions, have been published in composite editions with little or no reference to the provenience of the individual exemplars; in addition, the original excavation reports often were more interested in the content of the inscriptions than in their locations. To achieve the objective of placing these inscriptions in their original contexts and thereby provide a base for further study of them, and stimulated by two seasons of renewed excavations at Nineveh during which he studied many inscriptions in situ, Russell returned to the British Museum and Layard’s original, handwritten notes from the 19th century excavations at Nineveh—the goal being to catalogue fully and as completely as possible the individual inscriptions and their locations.

The results of Russell’s labors are here published, including the first publication of several shorter inscriptions. The book is lavishly illustrated, both with museum photos and with photos by the author of many of the inscriptions in situ. The book will no doubt be the basis of all further study of the relationship between inscription and context in the palaces of the Assyrian kings.

The most impressive legacy of the Dynasty of Akkade (ca. 2310-2160 B.C.E.) was the widespread, popular legends of its kings. Dr. Westenholz offers an annotated edition of all the known legends of the Akkadian kings, with transliteration, translation, and commentary. Of particular interest to biblical scholars is the inclusion of “The Birth Legend of Sargon,” which is often compared to Moses in Exodus.