Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records (SANER)

This book provides an overview of intellectual and academic life in ancient Mesopotamia, bringing together leading experts to survey the education system, history of the scribal industry, key organization and outputs of scholarship, and major areas of intellectual inquiry. It serves as a point of entry to the current research in this field.

This book provides an overview of social life in ancient Mesopotamia, bringing together leading experts to survey key social domains of daily life as well as major non-dominant social groups. It serves as a point of entry to the current research in this field.

This monograph aims to explore the production of political landscapes in Anatolia under the Hittite rule (1650-1200 BCE). The focus of the research is the geopolitical role played within the Hittite domain by three interconnected regions, located in South-Central Anatolia: Tarhuntassa, the Lower Land, and the port city of Ura.

Tarhuntassa, briefly the capital of the Hittite Empire under Muwatalli II, later became the center of an influential appanage kingdom after the restoration of the capital back at Hattusa. Geographically, the kingdom of Tarhuntassa overlapped with the 'Lower Land,' a buffer territory vital for Hittite military engagements in Western Anatolia. Ura served as a crucial Hittite-controlled port on the southern Anatolian coast, that facilitated trade with the Eastern Mediterranean, especially Ugarit.

The research combines material data from archaeological excavations and surveys with textual sources, offering a holistic diachronic perspective on the impact of Hittite power networks in the target region. It also explores pre-Hittite and prehistorical interactions in South-Central Anatolia to provide a broader view of long-term structures and their impact on Hittite imperial dynamics.

"Enki and the World Order," a Sumerian myth from the early second millennium BCE, depicts the god Enki's reconstitution of the Sumerian world after an unspecified catastrophe. The myth ends with a face-off between Enki and the goddess of love and war, Inana, who is dissatisfied with Enki's allotment of functions to the other goddesses.

This volume presents a critical edition of the 472-line Sumerian text, with introduction, translation and commentary, based on 25 published and unpublished manuscripts, mostly from Nippur in what is now southern Iraq. All the manuscripts, with one exception, have been collated, and there are many new fragments and joins to previously known tablets.

The recent years have seen an upswing in studies of women in the ancient Near East and related areas. This volume, which is the result of a Danish-Japanese collaboration, seeks to highlight women as actors within the sphere of the religious. In ancient Mesopotamia and other ancient civilizations, religious beliefs and practices permeated all aspects of society, and for this reason it is not possible to completely dissociate religion from politics, economy, or literature. Thus, the goal is to shift the perspective by highlighting the different ways in which the agency of women can be traced in the historical (and archaeological) record. This perspectival shift can be seen in studies of elite women, who actively contributed to (religious) gift-giving or participated in temple economies, or through showing the limits of elite women’s agency in relation to diplomatic marriages. Additionally, several contributions examine the roles of women as religious officials and the language, worship, or invocation of goddesses. This volume does not aim at completeness but seeks to highlight points for further research and new perspectives.

The starting point of this study is the materiality of texts. It provides information about how cuneiform clay tablets were designed, but also takes into account other writing materials and tools. It takes the example of the Library of Ashurbanipal to discuss how written documents were handled and also addresses the multilingualism of this period.

This book is the first comprehensive study of debts and credit system at Emar. It focuses on the socio-economic aspects of credit access and indebtedness as well as on the motivations behind debts and debt settlement in the city of Emar.

The credit system is analyzed through several factors: the purpose of debts, i.e., productive or consumptive; the procedures for granting loans; the strategies put in place to meet an obligation and to cope with economic difficulties; the consequences of non-fulfillment, which may lead to servitude or slavery; the different types of slavery; slave prices; the mechanisms of enslavement; and termination of slavery. Moneylending practices and the formation of servile conditions at Emar are studied in the context of the Syrian economy aiming to understand whether the Emar evidence conforms with a socio political and economic crisis that is generally acknowledged to have struck Syria, Anatolia and Northern Mesopotamia at the end of the Late Bronze Age.

This work is of sure relevance for scholars interested in socio-economic history, not only of the pertinent historical-geographical area.

This volume honors Ran Zadok's work by focusing on his sustained interest in Mesopotamian social history. It brings together a rich array of scholarship on ancient names, deities, individuals, and institutions, from Persepolis to the Levant. Building on Zadok's intellectual concerns, this book includes contributions that expand our understanding of the diverse tapestry of the peoples who inhabited the Ancient Near East.

In contrast to other traditions, cultic laments in Mesopotamia were not performed in response to a tragic event, such as a death or a disaster, but instead as a preemptive ritual to avert possible catastrophes. Mesopotamian laments provide a unique insight into the relationship between humankind and the gods, and their study sheds light on the nature of collective rituals within a crosscultural context.

Cultic laments were performed in Mesopotamia for nearly 3000 years. This book provides a comprehensive overview of this important ritual practice in the early 2nd millennium BCE, the period during which Sumerian laments were first put in writing. It also includes a new translation and critical edition of Uruamairabi (‘That city, which has been plundered’), one of the most widely performed compositions of its genre.

Disputation literature is a type of text in which usually two non-human entities (such as trees, animals, drinks, or seasons) try to establish their superiority over each other by means of a series of speeches written in an elaborate, flowery register. As opposed to other dialogue literature, in disputation texts there is no serious matter at stake only the preeminence of one of the litigants over its rival. These light-hearted texts are known in virtually every culture that flourished in the Middle East from Antiquity to the present day, and they constitute one of the most enduring genres in world literature. The present volume collects over twenty contributions on disputation literature by a diverse group of world-renowned scholars. From ancient Sumer to modern-day Bahrain, from Egyptian to Neo-Aramaic, including Latin, French, Middle English, Armenian, Chinese and Japanese, the chapters of this book study the multiple avatars of this venerable text type.

Babylonia in the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE is one of the most understudied periods of Mesopotamian history. In the last few years, discoveries of new texts and archaeological materials from the Sealand Dynasty have emerged, which expand the possibilities to fill this gap in our knowledge of Mesopotamian history. At the same time, scholars have started to revive Kassite studies using new materials, methods, and questions.

While those works are groundbreaking contributions to the field, many questions about the history and chronology, archaeology, economy, language of Babylonia during this period are still unsolved. This volume brings together eleven contributions by leading scholars in the Sealand and Kassite period, approaching those questions from an archaeological, ethnological, historical, linguistic, and economical point of view. The book opens with an introduction into the history and research on Babylonia under the Sealand Dynasty and the Kassites.

This book explores the reasons for which weights and scales were used to measure goods in Early Mesopotamia (ca. 3,200-2,000 BCE). The vast corpus of cuneiform records from this period sheds light on the various mechanisms behind the development of this cultural innovation. Weighing became the means of articulating the value of both imported and locally-produced goods within a socioeconomic system that had reached an unprecedented level of complexity. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of this cultural and economic phenomenon, which simultaneously reflected and shaped the relationships between individuals and groups in Mesopotamia throughout the third millennium BCE.

In the first half of the 2d millennium BCE, translation occasionally depicted semantically incongruous correspondences. Such cases reflect ancient scribes substantiating their virtuosity with cuneiform writing by capitalizing on phonologic, graphemic, semantic, and other resemblances in the interlingual space. These scholar–scribes employed an essential scribal practice, analogical hermeneutics, an interpretative activity grounded in analogical reasoning and empowered by the potentiality of the cuneiform script. Scribal education systematized such practices, allowing scribes to utilize these habits in copying compositions and creating translations.

In scribal education, analogical hermeneutics is exemplified in the word list "Izi", both in its structure and in its occasional bilingualism. By examining "Izi" as a product of the social field of scribal education, this book argues that scribes used analogical hermeneutics to cultivate their craft and establish themselves as knowledgeable scribes. Within a linguistic epistemology of cuneiform scribal culture, translation is a tool in the hands of a knowledgeable scholar.

There are few studies that deal with an overall treatment of the Hittite administrative system, and various other works on its offices and officials have tended to be limited in scope, focusing only on certain groups or certain time periods. This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the administrative organization of the Hittite state throughout its history (ca. 1650–1180 BCE) with particular emphasis on the state offices and their officials. Bringing together previous works and updating with data recovered in recent years, the study presents a detailed survey of the high offices of the state, a prosopographical study of about 140 high officials, and a theoretical analysis of the Hittite administration in respect to factors such as hierarchy, kinship, and diachronical changes.

The Sealand kingdom arose from the rebellion against Babylonian hegemony in the latter half of the 18th century BCE., forcing it to share power over Sumer and Akkad. Although its kings maintained themselves throughout the turmoil leading to the demise of the Amorite dynasty at Babylon, it remains one of the most poorly documented Mesopotamian polities.

Until recently, it was known to us mainly through its inclusion into later king lists and chronicles, but the recent publication of well over 400 archival texts from a Sealand palace, soon followed by literary and divinatory tablets, finally makes it possible to study this polity from primary sources. This book proposes a history of the Sealand kingdom based on the new evidence and a reevaluation of previously known sources.

The aspects examined are: the economy — mainly the palatial administration and transformation of agricultural and animal resources; the panthea and the palace-sponsored cult, which show that Sealand I kings may have positioned their rule in a Larsean tradition; the political history, including a discussion of the geography and the relative chronology; the recording and transmission of knowledge on the Sealand I dynasty in Mesopotamian historiography.

This book brings together our present-day knowledge about textile terminology in the Akkadian language of the first-millennium BC. In fact, the progress in the study of the Assyrian dialect and its grammar and lexicon has shown the increasing importance of studying the language as well as cataloging and analysing the terminology of material culture in the documentation of the first world empire. The book analyses the terms for raw materials, textile procedures, and textile end products consumed in first-millennium BC Assyria.
In addition, a new edition of a number of written records from Neo-Assyrian administrative archives completes the work. The book also contains a number of tables, a glossary with all the discussed terms, and a catalogue of illustrations. In light of the recent development of textile research in ancient languages, the book is aimed at providing scholars of Ancient Near Eastern studies and ancient textile studies with a comprehensive work on the Assyrian textiles.

Shulgi-simti is an important example of a woman involved in sponsoring religious activities though having a family life. An Ox of One’s Own will be of interest to Assyriologists, particularly those interested in Early Mesopotamia, and scholars working on women in religion.

An Ox of One’s Own centers on the archive of a woman who died about 2050 B.C., one of King Shulgi’s many wives. Her birth name is unknown, but when she married, she became Shulgi-simti, “Suitable for Shulgi.” Attested for only about 15 years, she existed among a court filled with other wives, who probably outranked her. A religious foundation was run on her behalf whereby courtiers, male and female, donated livestock for sacrifices to an unusual mix of goddesses and gods.
Previous scholarship has declared this a rare example of a queen conducting women’s religion, perhaps unusual because they say she came from abroad. The conclusions of this book are quite different.
An Ox of One’s Own lays out the evidence that another woman was queen at this time in Nippur while Shulgi-simti lived in Ur and was a third-ranking concubine at best, with few economic resources. Shulgi-simti’s religious exercises concentrated on a quartet of north Babylonian goddesses.

Despite siginificant advances in annual chronology, the Old Assyrian trade fundamentally lacked a regime of time at the level of the merchant’s commercial and personal activities. In this book, Stratford sets out to recapture time through narrative, drawing on the relationship between the two described by the philosopher Paul Ricouer. Investigating a possible case of revenge leads to weaving together more than a hundred mostly undated documents to form a narrative within the course of a single year of vengeance, including trade disruptions, illnesses, and commerce. This process demonstrates relationships between document and material context, and time and narrative. Along the way, Old Assyrian commercial time and its tempos become more clear, leading to descriptions of the scale of the trade and the nature of Old Assyrian archives as they have survived. Ultimately, the Assyrians involved appear as the earliest historical individuals in world history. The treatment of Šalim-aḫum’s apparent revenge comprises a practicuum in historical interpretation in the ancient world of interest to practitioners and theoreticians of both the ancient world and world history.

Scholars often assume that the nature of Mesopotamian kingship was such that questioning royal authority was impossible. This volume challenges that general assumption, by presenting an analysis of the motivations,methods, and motifs behind a scholarly discourse about kingship that arose in the final stages of the last Mesopotamian empires. The focus of the volume is the proliferation of a literature that problematizes authority in the Neo-Assyrian period, when texts first begin to specifically explore various modalities for critique of royalty. This development is symptomatic of a larger discourse about the limits of power that emerges after the repatriation of Marduk's statue to Babylon during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I in the 12th century BCE. From this point onwards, public attitudes toward Marduk provide a framework for the definition of proper royal behavior, and become a point of contention between Assyria and Babylonia. It is in this historical and political context that several important Akkadian compositions are placed. The texts are analyzed from a new perspective that sheds light on their original milieux and intended functions.

These essays represent a summation of Piotr Steinkeller's decades-long thinking and writing about the history of third millennium BCE Babylonia and the ways in which it is reflected in ancient historical and literary sources and art, as well as of how these written and visual materials may be used by the modern historian to attain, if not a reliable record of histoire événementielle, a comprehensive picture of how the ancients understood their history.

The book focuses on the history of early Babylonian kingship, as it evolved over a period from Late Uruk down to Old Babylonian times, and the impact of the concepts of kingship on contemporaneous history writing and visual art. Here comparisons are drawn between Babylonia and similar developments in ancient Egypt, China and Mesoamerica.

Other issues treated is the intersection between history writing and the scholarly, lexical, and literary traditions in early Babylonia; and the question of how the modern historian should approach the study of ancient sources of "historical" nature.

Such a broad and comprehensive overview is novel in Mesopotamian studies to date. As such, it should contribute to an improved and more nuanced understanding of early Babylonian history.

Despite the interest that has been shown by classicists and assyriologists in the economy of Lower Mesopotamia during the two centuries of Macedonian rule over the region (331-129 B.C.), no synoptic study has previously been published, even though abundant sources are available: several thousand cuneiform tablets survive from this period, as well as more than 25,000 Greek seals, not to mention the testimony of classical sources and rich numismatic and archaeological materials. This book aims to present an accessible synthesis of the topic, in the form of a regional study that takes into account all available sources as well as the weight of Mesopotamia’s heritage. The reader will find not only clear overviews of complex questions (including the impact of Alexander’s reign, the nature of Seleucid policy, the evolution of prices, and the development of banking) but also new research on issues such as the 'Diadochi crisis', the introduction of coinage, the evolution of the prebendary system, and the disappearance of local temples, shedding new light on the economy of one of the most richly documented parts of the Hellenistic World.

Economic history is well documented in Assyriology, thanks to the preservation of dozens of thousands of clay tablets recording administrative operations, contracts and acts dealing with family law. Despite these voluminous sources, the topic of work and the contribution of women have rarely been addressed.
This book examines occupations involving women over the course of three millennia of Near Eastern history. It presents the various aspects of women as economic agents inside and outside of the family structure. Inside the family, women were the main actors in the production of goods necessary for everyday life. In some instances, their activities exceeded the simple needs of the household and were integrated within the production of large organizations or commercial channels. The contributions presented in this volume are representative enough to address issues in various domains: social, economic, religious, etc., from varied points of view: archaeological, historical, sociological, anthropological, and with a gender perspective.
This book will be a useful tool for historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and graduate students interested in the economy of the ancient Near East and in women and gender studies.

This volume is dedicated to Miguel Civil in celebration of his 90th birthday. Civil has been one of the most influential scholars in the field of Sumerian studies over the course of his long career. This anniversary presents a welcome occasion to reflect on some aspects of the field in which he has been such a driving force.

Ever since the archaeological rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, generations of scholars have attempted to reconstruct the "real Babylon,” known to us before from the evocative biblical account of the Tower of Babel. After two centuries of excavations and scholarship, Mario Liverani provides an insightful overview of modern, Western approaches, theories, and accounts of the ancient Near Eastern city.

This volume examines the state ideology of Assyria in the Early Neo-Assyrian period (934-745 BCE) focusing on how power relations between the Mesopotamian deities, the Assyrian king, and foreign lands are described and depicted. It undertakes a close reading of delimited royal inscriptions and iconography making use of postcolonial and gender theory, and addresses such topics as royal deification, “religious imperialism”, ethnicity and empire, and gendered imagery. The important contribution of this study lies especially in its identification of patterns of ideological continuity and variation within the reigns of individual rulers, between various localities, and between the different rulers of this period, and in its discussion of the place of Early Neo-Assyrian state ideology in the overall development of Assyrian propaganda. It includes several indexed appendices, which list all primary sources, present all divine and royal epithets, and provide all of the “royal visual representations,” and incorporates numerous illustrations, such as maps, plans, and royal iconography.

This volume assembles scholars working on cuneiform texts from different periods, genres, and areas to examine the range of social, cultural, and historical contexts in which specific types of texts circulated. Using different methodologies and sources of evidence, these articles reconstruct the contexts in which various cuneiform texts circulated, providing a critical framework to determine how they functioned.

Two topics of current critical interest, agency and materiality, are here explored in the context of their intersection with the divine. Specific case studies, emphasizing the ancient Near East but including treatments also of the European Middle Ages and ancient Greece, elucidate the nature and implications of this intersection: What is the relationship between the divine and the particular matter or physical form in which it is materially represented or mentally visualized? How do sacral or divine "things" act, and what is the source and nature of their agency? How might we productively define and think about anthropomorphism in relation to the divine? What is the relationship between the mental and the material image, and between the categories of object and image, image and likeness, and likeness and representation? Drawing on a broad range of written and pictorial sources, this volume is a novel contribution to the contemporary discourse on the functioning and communicative potential of the material and materialized divine as it is developing in the fields of anthropology, art history, and the history and cognitive science of religion.

The cuneiform tablets from Ebla (3rd millenium BC) attest to the most ancient Semitic language and provide insight into a period in the history and religion of Syria that was previously unknown. The restoration, interpretation, and classification of these tablets has taken more than thirty years. This volume presents a collection of 49 essays from one of the foremost experts on Ebla and its broader ancient context and includes important studies on the language, society, political relations, and religion of this ancient Near Eastern city-state.

Addressing the relationship between religion and ideology, and drawing on a range of literary, ritual, and visual sources, this book reconstructs the cultural discourse of Assyria from the third through the first millennium BCE. Ideology is delineated here as a subdiscourse of religion rather than as an independent category, anchoring it firmly within the religious world view.

Tracing Assur's cultural interaction with the south on the one hand, and with the Syro-Anatolian horizon on the other, this volume articulates a "northern" cultural discourse that, even while interacting with southern Mesopotamian tradition, managed to maintain its own identity. It also follows the development of tropes and iconic images from the first city state of Uruk and their mouvance between myth, image, and royal inscription, historiography and myth, and myth and ritual, suggesting that, with the help of scholars, key royal figures were responsible for introducing new directions for the ideological discourse and for promoting new forms of historiography.

This book investigates the issue of the singularity versus the multiplicity of ancient Near Eastern deities who are known by a common first name but differentiated by their last names, or geographic epithets. It focuses primarily on the Ištar divine names in Mesopotamia, Baal names in the Levant, and Yahweh names in Israel, and it is structured around four key questions: How did the ancients define what it meant to be a god - or more pragmatically, what kind of treatment did a personality or object need to receive in order to be considered a god by the ancients? Upon what bases and according to which texts do modern scholars determine when a personality or object is a god in an ancient culture? In what ways are deities with both first and last names treated the same and differently from deities with only first names? Under what circumstances are deities with common first names and different last names recognizable as distinct independent deities, and under what circumstances are they merely local manifestations of an overarching deity? The conclusions drawn about the singularity of local manifestations versus the multiplicity of independent deities are specific to each individual first name examined in accordance with the data and texts available for each divine first name.

Ugaritic literary and ritual studies have often neglected or even ignored the Akkadian material from the same archives, which can be used as a frame of reference for the Ugaritic texts. The aim of this work is to offer a comprehensive study of the consonantal (Ugaritic) as well as the syllabic (Akkadian) incantation and anti-witchcraft texts from Ras Shamra as a unified corpus. These texts, dealing with impending dangers (mainly snakebites) and witchcraft attacks, are placed in the context of Ancient Near Eastern magic literature. A discussion of general topics, including magic and religion, the Ugaritic gods of magic, and the definition of incantation, is followed by a new collation and translation of the Akkadian texts, as well as new photographic material for both series. The main focus of this book is the close reading of the consonantal texts in the context of the much larger and better analyzed corpus of Akkadian magic literature.

This volume will include critical and collated editions of all the inscriptions of the 1st-millennium Babylonian kings Nabopolassar (626–605), Amel-Marduk (biblical Evil-Merodach, 561–560), and Neriglissar (559–556). The editions will be preceded by an in-depth study and followed by a glossary and concordance of the inscriptions as well as complete indexes of toponyms, anthroponyms, and theonyms. The volume includes a CD-ROM with high-definition full-color digital images of the inscriptions.

This book deals with the house of prisoners (bit asiri ) at the city of Uruk during the revolt against king Samsu-iluna of Babylon, Hammurabi’s son. The political history of this brief period (ca. 1741–1739 BC) is not widely known and until now there has been no comprehensive treatment of the bit asiri. This book includes autograph copies, transliterations, and translations of 42 unpublished cuneiform tablets from various collections, collations, and detailed tables and catalogues. The analysis comprises some 410 documents dated or attributable to king Rim-Anum, one of the insurgents who attained relative independence as the ruler of Uruk. The study of this corpus reveals details about diplomatic dealings between the central power and rebel rulers, about the functioning of the house of prisoners of war, and about the individuals who participated in different echelons of the local administration. This monograph investigates what kind of organization “the house of prisoners” was, how it worked, how it interacted with other institutions, the composition of its labor force, and state management of captive and enslaved individuals.

Errors of many kinds abound in Akkadian writings, but this fact’s far-reaching implications have never been unraveled and systematized. To attempt this is the aim of this book. Drawing on scholarship from other fields, it outlines a framework for the critical evaluation of extant text and the formulation of conjectural emendations. Along the way, it explores issues at the interface of orthography, textual transmission, scribal education, grammar, literacy, and literary interpretation.