Nathan Wasserman

Two inscribed clay cones are the focus of this short paper.  The cones, dedicated to King Abī -sare of Larsa (1897–1887 BCE), were commissioned by a man named Bingattum for the king’s life.Interestingly, the cones mention a temple (e ) for Gilgameš , previously unknown. This, along with some sporadic prosopographical evidence, sheds more light on the cult of Gilgameš in southern Mesopotamia during the Isin-Larsa period.

This paper suggests that the fanciful description of the cheery, raucous monkeys of the Cedar Forest that amaze Gilgameš and Enkidu (SB Gilg. V: 24–25 = Al-Rawi/George 2014) is a literary projection of a very real native of the mountains of Lebanon: the Caucasian squirrel (Sciurus anomalus). This animal would have been unfamiliar to Mesopotamians and its appearance and behavior would have reminded them of small monkeys. Support for artistic representation of the Caucasian squirrel can be found on some Syro-Levantine seals that feature a monkey-like figure, which is most plausibly identified with the squirrel.

In this study, we present newly discovered duplicates of three significant Old Babylonian literary texts. 1) An unpublished Louvre duplicate (AO 6161) of the Papulegara hymns collection, which is currently housed at the British Museum. 2) A recently published Geneva duplicate (MAH 16069 = Cavigneaux and Clevenstine 2020) of the large hymnic ritual commonly referred to as Ištar-Louvre. 3) The Yale prism (YBC 2394 = Foster and George 2020), which contains an almost complete version of the Dialogue Between Father and Son. Previously, only a small fragment of this text was known. The paper provides a philological commentary and a thorough discussion of these duplicates, considering the relatively uncommon phenomenon of duplicate literary texts during the Old Babylonian period.

Close interpretative reading in the last part of Gilg. XI, after Ūtanapišti tells the story of the Flood. Feelings of hospitality and hostility, challenging tests and farewell gifts, and the meaning of eating and sleeping are discussed. An intriguing parallel with the biblical story of Abraham and Sarah is revealed. A suggestion that the text mentions ambergris -- the waxy aromatic substance produced naturally by sperm whales -- ends this paper.

In this paper we point to a strong thematic affinity between a passage from the Epic of Zimrī-līm describing the land of Subartu and the Biblical story of the spies entering the land of Canaan. We further develop this comparison by adducing parallels from Islamic literature.

Some twenty years ago, an inscribed macehead of hard stone appeared in Christie’s 2001 auction catalogue. In March 2022, the macehead re-surfaced in another auction, that of Arte Primitivo New York. In full awareness of the risks of studying such an unprovenanced artifact, especially when it is no longer possible to examine it directly (the present proprietorship of the object is unknown), I had to lean on high resolution photos of the object. Although some doubts as to its authenticity remain (see below), I believe that the macehead is genuine and deserves its own study, for it is interesting and, in some ways, even unique.

We present models which complete missing text given transliterations of ancient Mesopotamian documents, originally written on cuneiform clay tablets (2500 BCE-100 CE). Due to the tablets' deterioration, scholars often rely on contextual cues to manually fill in missing parts in the text in a subjective and time-consuming process. We identify that this challenge can be formulated as a masked language modelling task, used mostly as a pretraining objective for contextualized language models. Following, we develop several architectures focusing on the Akkadian language, the lingua franca of the time. We find that despite data scarcity (1M tokens) we can achieve state of the art performance on missing tokens prediction (89% hit@5) using a greedy decoding scheme and pretraining on data from other languages and different time periods. Finally, we conduct human evaluations showing the applicability of our models in assisting experts to transcribe texts in extinct languages.

BM 120015 is an unpublished interlinear Sumero-Akkadian personal prayer, an Old Babylonian version of the first-millennium prayer known as gi-izi-lá gùr-ru “(I am) carrying a torch”.  In what follows, we refer to BM 120015 as the OB version of the prayer, while the first-millennium manuscripts (all from Nineveh) constitute the FM version. In the Introduction (I), we discuss the orthography and grammar of the Akkadian and the Sumerian text of the prayer and analyze its content. The edition and translation of the OB version, accompanied by a philological commentary, come next (II). In the Discussion (III), we outline the multifarious changes that occurred in the transmission of the prayer from the second millennium to the first millennium – both in the Sumerian and in the Akkadian versions. The function of the imprints of fingernails found on the OB tablet is also examined

In this paper we present for the first time an intriguing Akkadian lament of the mother goddess over her destroyed temples. Remarkably, the lament, almost complete, is known from two exemplars: BM 29624 (ms. A) and BM 109164 (ms. B). Judging by their grammar, orthography, and sign-forms, both tablets date to the early Old Babylonian period. Ms. A preserves a colophon, which identifies the lament as amerakūtum. We propose the historical framework for this unique literary piece, discuss it against the background of other Old Babylonian laments and analyze the musical and architectural components of the temple that are described in the lament.

LB 1002, an Old Babylonian text housed at the Böhl Collection, Leiden, is comprised of an Akkadian magical procedure and a non-Akkadian – most probably Elamite – incantation. The text the talismans and materia magica to be used while walking through dangerous and distressing situations.
In an appendix, I offer hand-copies of LB 1001, LB 2001, LB 1003 and LB 1004, a group of Akkadian and Elamite incantations from the Böhl Collection, which have been known for a long time, but never presented in hand-copy

In this paper, we present an unpublished tablet kept in a private collection, a hybrid text composed of Elamite conjurations followed by short Akkadian magical procedures.
As its rubrics describe, the text is intended to heal a person stung by a scorpion. The tablet measures 9.4 x 6.1 cm and is about two- thirds preserved. Its surface is fragile, as salts have penetrated some areas. The text is 51 lines long, and although only half of these are complete or readable this tablet is an important addition to the growing corpus of 2nd millennium alloglot incantations, as it is the longest specimen known thus far.

A banal scene in countless movies and TV series: a man or a woman standing in front of a house, arriving at the entrance, talking through the intercom and asking to be let in. A prime example in world literature of a hero facing a locked door, through which he is trying to pass, is Ali-Baba in One Thousand and One Nights. Ali-Baba is concise: Sésame, ouvre-toi. This is the password that opens the thieves’ cave while Sésame, ferme-toi closes it.
In ancient Mesopotamia, gates and doors—besides being physical objects with the actual role of controlling human flow and monitoring the circulation of goods into and out of the domestic and urban orbit—were imaginary loci loaded with political, legal, mystical and religious significance. Entrances to monumental buildings—temples, palaces, even cities—had declarative and evocative names aimed at warding off evil or conferring prosperity on those quartered behind them. The architectural, physical, and economic aspects of gates and doors in ancient Mesopotamia will not be treated here, and consequently lexical, historical, and administrative texts are not discussed. The goal of this paper—dedicated to Jack with appreciation, esteem, and friendship— is to present a scant-noted literary motif in Akkadian literature, that of Talking to Doors, and analyzing it in its different literary contexts.

In this paper, we present two unpublished Nippur texts in the collection of the University of Pennsylvania Museum.1 Their fragmentary state of preservation does not allow complete understanding, but even in their poor state, these literary fragments are of much interest, revealing glimmerings of ancient Mesopotamian royal ideology.

BM 108868, an unpublished Old Babylonian tablet containing a collection of moral and existential sayings is edited here for the first time, accompanied by a commentary, photos and a hand-copy. With this discovery, the existence of a solid 2 nd millennium tradition of monolingual Akkadian proverbial sayings is established. Introduction Following our publication of the Old Babylonian tablet BM 13928, 1 we present here another Old Babylonian specimen of a collection of Akkadian proverbial sayings. 2 One of these sayings (ll. 6-8, §3 in our translation, below) has an almost verbatim parallel in a 1 st millennium bilingual collection of proverbs: ḫ én[bur s]i-nu-sá ab-[sí]n-e na-an-ni-íb-tu-ud še-numun na-an-ni-íb-dím-ma // ḫ abbūru lā išar[u] šerʾu ay ū[lid] zēra ay i[bni] "May the furrow not give birth to a non-straight shoot, may it not create seed" (BWL p. 244, 30-33). This indicates that there was a 2 nd millennium tradition of collecting monolingual Akkadian proverbial sayings, which led to that of the 1 st millennium, and thus adds to the evidence presented by the publication of BM 13928. The almost intact tablet BM 108868 (=1914-04-07, 34), measuring 6.0 × 8.6 × 2.4 cm, has a landscape format. This format is not common for OB literary texts and may point to a later date in this period. As in BM 13928, no separation lines are found between the different sayings. There is also no colophon, and the tablet's provenance is unknown. As we understand it, the tablet contains nine consecutive observations, or reflections regarding moral and non-moral human behavior, arranged along a thin associative thread. Unlike other proverb collections (and BM 13928), no animals are found. The tablet, in our opinion, may be an extract of a longer, as yet unknown collection, or an ad-hoc compilation of proverbs. In §1, impious behavior-contrary to the natural sense of justice-does not result in economic losses. In §2, wishes for divine favor are expressed. In §3, we find the hope that an unjust deed would have no profitable consequence. §4 advises that one should absolve one's sin, for this is the choicest of things. In §5 comes a warning against challenging one's own fate. In §6, wrongdoing is cursed, and in §7 it is to be judged by a god or a king. In §8 stands a metaphor of warmth vs. cold. Man acknowledges his gratitude to the generosity of others in times of need. In the last paragraph, §9, the person is worried, unable to rest, because of the steady diminution of his goods. The tablet shows a cursive OB hand. The lines sometimes flow from obverse to reverse (ll. 1, 3, 5, 7), suggesting the text was copied from another tablet. The text employs several basic logograms, which may indicate a curricular background. The loss of initial w in ašib (l. 11) may hint to a relatively late date in the OB period, but mimation is used everywhere. The tablet is presented in photos and hand-copy (NW), followed by a transliteration, translation and short commentary.

A group of seven short late Old Babylonian texts, written in Akkadian, found in the early twentieth century in a grave in Susa, form the focus of this paper. The texts, which have attracted much scholarly attention since their publication in 1916 by Jean-Vincent Scheil, have until now not been collated. They are pre- sented here with improved readings, a new translation, and extensive commentary. The mention in two of the texts of an alleged chthonic “weigher” is philologically disproved: psychostasia, the weighing of souls, did not exist in ancient Meso- potamian religion. The suggestion of some scholars that these Old Babylonian Akkadian texts are witnesses to Elamite, or even Iranian, belief in the weighing of souls is methodically refuted. The nature of the seven so-called Susa Funerary Texts (SFT) is discussed, demonstrating their close contacts to two other well- known Mesopotamian genres—personal prayers and reports of oracular or pro- phetic visions. Finally, the question of their unusual  nd spot, viz., in a grave, is discussed and the possibility raised that this peculiar location is a result of the texts’ magical function.

In this paper, three unpublished Old Babylonian incantations from a private collection are presented for the first time in edition, translation and commentary. Two of the texts aim at helping a woman in labor (IncPriv 1, IncPriv 2), the third focus on a sick child, suffering from a severe throat inflammation, trying to save him from the brink of death (IncPriv 3). The incantations have no direct parallels, but one of them contain the well-known Cow motif (IncPriv 2).

The paper is divided into four parts. In the first part (§ 1) I present a short introduction to the scribal tradition of lexical lists in ancient Mesopotamia. Some methodological comments follow (§ 2). The main part of my paper is devoted to lists of different kinds which are embedded in Akkadian literary compositions. I discuss simple lists or CATALOGUES, CHAIN-LIKE lists, and a special kind of enumeration which I call a COMPLEX CHAIN (§§ 3–6). In Classical rhetoric the terms relevant to our discussion are Enumeratio, and Gradatio, and to some extent also Accumulatio. A discussion of the complex relationship between enumeration and oral literature serves as a summary (§ 7). I finish my paper with notes on two modern poets, Jorge Luis Borges (§ 8) and Ted Hughes (§ 9), whose reliance on enumeration to a great extent reflects its usage in ancient literature thus reveal the enduring applicability of enumeration as a literary device.

An edition of a royal hymn to king Gungunum of Larsa celebrating his victory over the Didnu tribes. The text is philologically and historically discussed, showing it is a later copy of a now lost original.  The royal ideology behind the hymn - so it is claimed - is a re-enactment of the fall of Ur (only now, with a happy end).

VS 17, 23, a short Old Babylonian incantation dealing with love, first published by J. van Dijk (1971, 11; without translation), stands at the heart of this article. A brief introduction (§ I) is followed by a discussion of the intricate literary construction of the incantation (§ II). The possibility of its containing information about the preparation of cosmetics in Old Babylonian times ends this paper (§ III). 1)

The text contains a learned dialog in the Akkadian language between a certain Mannu-utār-issu and a man named PU-UT-TI. The relation between the two is not made explicit in this text. It is unclear whether the word ebrum, “friend,” in the broken line 12′ on the reverse, refers to them or to another person.

A thematic division of magical texts, from the Old Babylonian/Assyrian period to the Middle Babylonian/Assyrian period, shows the changes – and the constants – which took place in the written tradition of Mesopotamian magic from the third to the mid-second millennium BCE.
Analysis of the shape and structure of magical tablets allows gaining new in- sights into the purpose and use of this corpus which comprises almost 300 different Akkadian texts.
The social framework of magical practice in Ancient Mesopotamia is briefly dis- cussed.

This article examines UET 6/2, 414, the Old Babylonian dialogue between a fuller and a client, commonly referred to as “At the Cleaners”, from the point of view of ancient technology. Drawing upon a wide range of Talmudic and Classical sources mentioning laundry, and based on a careful philological reading of the Akkadian text, this study offers a new understanding of the different stages of washing and treatment of luxury garments in the Old Babylonian period. It is argued that the possible humorous aspect of the text is irrelevant to the fact that UET 6/2, 414 is a unique composition in antiquity, offering a long and accurate sequence of laundry instructions. Washing procedures and ways of treating luxury garments in Mesopotamia are outlined step by step; new Akkadian terms pertaining to garments and clothing are presented; wages of laundry workers in ancient Mesopotamia are briefly discussed. The study concludes with a new edition and translation of UET 6/2, 414.

This article presents an edition of three Old Babylonian literary texts relating to the goddess Nanaya: A new edition of the well-known, but difficult hymn VS 10, 215, and the editio princeps of two fragmentary texts UET 6/2, 404 (hymn) and UET 6/3, 889 (ritual? and hymnic section).

This article presents new editions of three Old Babylonian wisdom texts.1 Text A contains dialogues between different professionals and their customers(?), Text B is a dialogue between a friend and his fellow, and Text C contains several riddles. All three texts are poorly preserved and the interpretation is tentative in many points.

This article examines a small group of Old Babylonian incantations which deal with “worms”, showing that these “worms” are in fact leeches - probably the oldest description of leeches known hitherto. The relation of leeches to the goddess of healing, Gula, is evident, but the question of the exact use of these enigmatic creatures in ancient Mesopotamian medicine remains open.

The story of the primeval cataclysmic flood which wiped out all life
on earth, save for one family, is found in different ancient
Mesopotamian texts whence it reached the Biblical and Classical
literary traditions.

The present book systematically collects the earliest attestations of
the myth of the Flood, namely all the cuneiform-written Akkadian
sources – from the Old Babylonian to the Neo-Assyrian and
Neo-Babylonian periods, including Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh
–, presenting them in a new synoptic edition and English translation
which are accompanied by a detailed philological commentary and an
extensive literary discussion.
The book also includes a complete glossary of the Akkadian sources.

There are few semantic categories as ubiquitous yet elusive as those designating colors. Shiyanthi Thavapalan's The Meaning of Color in Ancient Mesopotamia (based on her 2017 doctoral thesis submitted to the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University) is a major contribution to the study of colors in the ancient Near East, both in terms of philology and material culture. The study is well-conceived and wellwritten, and its insights will enlighten anyone interested in how Akkadian, and language more generally, divides and describes the visible segment of the electromagnetic spectrum.

After his Akkadian Prayers and Hymns: A Reader (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), which, according to Alan Lenzi, was meant to serve as "a pedagogical tool intended to increase reading fluency for second or third semester Akkadian students by way of annotated readings" (ix), Alan Lenzi presents us with a study that renders Akkadian literature accessible to a different readership. In his own words: "students or general readers who wish to obtain an introductory knowledge of Akkadian literature with a relatively small investment of time … [and the] nonspecialist scholar and advanced student in the humanities and historical disciplines, ranging across fields such as Assyriology, Egyptology, biblical studies, comparative literature, and history of religion" (xix). Focusing on this audience, the book presents an overview of Akkadian literature in the broadest sense, including legal and divinatory texts.